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Book Review
The Heart of Darkness
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| SYBIL KATHIGASU WAS TORTURED by
the Japanese military when in 1941 they kicked the British out and seized
their prized possession, Malaya. She was beaten unconscious, burnt, and
pins were inserted into her fingers below the finger nails. The Kempeitai
(Gestapo) accused her and her husband, both doctors, of secretly listening
to the radio and treating wounded guerrillas of the Malayan Peoples Anti
Japanese Army in their Papan clinic. She describes the unspeakable tortures
and the deprivation of food and water in detail in "No Dram of Mercy" which
is a must read, if only because it is a testament to an indomitable spirit
which stubbornly refused to betray the guerrillas and dominated her torturers
like a fearless giant. If the Japanese tortured their prisoners beyond the limits of sanity, to quote Amy Tan, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the inevitable descent into the bottomless pit of humanity. If Chile shocked us when we learnt that the monster, Pinochet, encouraged by his master, Kissinger, had trained dogs to rape women detainees, Abu Ghraib was an even more frightening horror story. There, America joined sadism to torture, cruelty combined with sexual sneers. The sickening list is set out in official papers: Naked prisoners forced into a pile then photographed, ordered to 
masturbate in front of other prisoners and guards, simulate oral sex while
being photographed, sodomised with a chemical light and perhaps a broom
stick, forced to simulate sex with each other and adopt various sexually
explicit positions for photographingWhat is frightening is that the violation of US law and international conventions is sanctioned, if not encouraged, by the highest authority. The US vice-president, Cheney, told Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side ... a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies ... it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective." Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that methods such as sleep deprivation, dietary changes and making prisoners assume stress positions had been approved by Pentagon lawyers. |
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then there is the memorandum of January 25, 2002, from White House
Counsel Gonzales to the president, in which some provisions of the
Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war were described as "quaint"
and "obsolete." And we should not forget the racial element in the American style torture. US troops have talked of the fun of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the "rat's nest" that needs cleaning out. That same language used by both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz who have spoken of "snakes" and "draining the swamps" in the "uncivilised parts of the world". The Vietnamese were mere gooks. Calley did not feel he was killing human beings at My Lai, but "rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason," an Army psychiatrist wrote. Racism describes Arabs and Muslims as "Raghead," "camel jockeys" and "sand niggers. And Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq: "Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know," "It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling." And it does not astonish that when three prisoners at Guantanamo (one of whom was about to be released but had not yet been told) committed suicide, the admiral camp commandant's first words were: "They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,"... "They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Chilling words of a heartless monster. The Japanese torturer of Sybil Karthigasu was hanged by the British Military Administration. Who will punish the monsters in today's heart of darkness? # Lim Kean Chye Book reviewed No Dram of Mercy by Sybil Kathigasu Prometheus Enterprise |
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| _____________________ The Penang File Issue 47 |