Amnesty International on Peru

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I welcome Leo's challenge. I had considered directing my previous
post towards him in fact. These issues are too important not to
pursue.

One step I have already taken since Leo's post is this. I have
written to Amnesty International to find our where I can forward
my concerns about the inadequacy of the report I criticised. If
I get a reply and they do not object, I undertake to forward
their comments in turn to the l*st.

Leo may have missed some exchanges as a result of the digest being
down as he re-joined the regular list sometime after I did.

I had posted questioning posts to both Carlos and to Luis.
Because of l*st problems I reposted these on 14th February
as Carlos on Peru 1/2 and 2/2 and New Flag on Amnesty International
1/2 and 2/2 with a brief introduction called Peru Thread.

We obviously differ substantially but so our difference can be
an informed one I would really like you to let me know
if you have not seen these posts, because I would like to forward
them to you.

I think you really cannot have seen them. I made clear I did
consider AI as mainly positive. I also said

"It is clearly agreed by all sides that the PCP killed a number of people
publically identified as leftists, on the allegation that they
collaborated with the regime."

These posts were intended to be even handed and clarify things beyond
the name calling. Carlos did not reply (or the internet gremlins swept if
away). Luis did. Frankly now IMO Luis is getting the better case of it.

You are right I have some ex-Maoist sympathies with national liberation
struggles. But I would like to stress that at the beginning of this year
I knew virtually nothing about Peru and still less about the PCP.

I seriously wonder if they are some afterthought to the great decades of
the national liberation struggles of the 60's and 70's.
I think it is highly likely they have made ultra-leftist sectarian errors
towards middle elements to whom they have not given the benefit of the
doubt in a situation of armed conflict, when they have probably been
trying to control local village and small town administrations and to
deprive the government of control. I have yet to read an analysis of why
the balance of forces was ripe for People's War in Peru in the 1980's,
and I think any PCP government coming to power will have very serious economic
problems which will make it extremely hard not to compromise with the IMF
and the World Bank, which is what some of the reformist left have been
doing anyway.

What I do know a lot about is the situation in South Africa. I was a member of
the National Committee of the UK Anti-Apartheid Movement for
many years, a member of its London committee and I was for a time on its
Executive Committee.

I do not think there is an equivalence of the sort that Leo suggests I am
suggesting between the ANC and the PCP. Politically the PCP is vulnerable
to charges of ultra-left sectarian deviations. The ANC has been accused in
effect of rightist deviations. But I have to be plain to Leo that we cannot
approach the question as his mind set seems to imply about a "good" ANC and
a "bad" PCP.

That is the only context in which he can find the logic of my post
incredible when I ask quietly, what political gain would the PCP be likely to
get from killing women and children, as AI appears to allege?

But violence and errors I know to be a fact of life in an armed situation.
It is not something we emphasised but the ANC never denied that some of its
comrades may have gone over the top. We have to assume that there was
some substance at times to reports that ANC members killed PAC members as well
as vice versa. In Natal some ANC groups almost certainly argued officially that
Inkatha members should be killed. There is a lot of killing still going on
in Natal. I have no doubt that Inkatha is overwhelmingly responsible for it, but
I do not doubt there will be times when ANC members also commit some atrocities.

On the first free solidarity visit to South Africa, in 1993 when the apartheid
regime was still in power, we were shown round the offices of the regional
ANC and met people who with 2 pagers between them were out and about in
Johannesburg all the time, and at risk of being killed. In the last room of
our tour we were unexpectedly presented to Robert McBride, who had been on death
row for killing civilians in a supermarket in a bomb blast that went wrong.
It would have been unthinkable not to shake hands with him.

But in some peoples eyes I have shaken hands with a murderer.

When you really get down to concrete details it is not so easy.

I have considerable knowledge of trying to battle public media manipulation
of the news at a time when we now know for sure that the apartheid regime was
engaged in a dirty war of promoting "Black on Black" violence.

We are not in a
position to know how many of the atrocities that you are sure were perpetrated
by the PCP, really were. Some I am sure were. Some I suspect were not. The
regime will of course have also committed atrocities against the PCP in the name
of leftist groups, just to provoke ill judged retaliation by
inexperienced comrades.

Leo appears to have taken no account of this.

On 31st January I posted the entire archives on Peru from AI's "general"
conferenece from 1991. This included the following passage from a letter
to Fujimori reported on 25 May 1993. Please note especially the
last sentence of the quote:

<<<Amnesty International has learned with grave concern of the serious
allegations made by General Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, former division general
and head of the Instruction and Doctrine Command of the Peruvian army, of the
existence of a military detachment linked to the intelligence services which
has been responsible for carrying out unlawful killings.

As you know, General Robles issued a signed statement on 5 May 1993 in which
he accuses the military detachment of at least three killings: the massacre of
a professor and ten students from La Cantuta University, near Lima, in July
1992; the massacre of some 15 men, women and children in the Barrios Altos
neighbourhood of Lima, in November 1991; and of the murder of "the engineers
in Huaral". This last allegation could be a reference to three Japanese
agricultural engineers killed on 12 July 1991 at an agricultural centre in
Huaral, department of Lima. At the time the killings were attributed by the
press to "hooded" members of an annihilation squad attached to the armed
opposition group Partido Comunista del Per# (Sendero Luminoso), PCP, Communist
Party of Peru (Shining Path). >>>>


How many other atrocities were similarly and cynically brought about?

Where you and I differ Leo, is on an interpretation of international
solidarity. I think actually it is highly likely that the PCP has
in the past made some serious mistakes, and may be still doing so, but what
concerns me much more, living a comfortable life in one of the world centres
of finance capital, is the crimes that system is doing to the people of Peru.

I do not normally think it is very productive to argue morals but in my opinion
you too would have much more credibility in my eyes if, living in an imperialist
country too, one probably even more responsible than mine for a situation
in which the excess infant mortality rate in Peru alone probably accounts for
an unnecessary 5,000 child deaths a year, you were mainly concerned with
finding out and criticising the actions of your government than people fighting
the allies of your government.

It is for the people of Peru to take to account
everything that the PCP has done. It is not for you and me.

Someone from Latin America themselves is in a somewhat different position,
and I have asked Carlos to make his criticisms more explicit.


Chris
London.




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