War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights: Western actions assessed

War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights

Author: Peadar King

ISBN-13: 978-1916099821

Publisher: The Liffey Press

Guideline Price: €19.95

Peadar King is known to Irish audiences as the producer and presenter of RTÉ’s What in the World? documentary series. This book is based on his reports for RTÉ.

King starts in Afghanistan and continues, in the order of the chapters, to Brazil, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Palestine/Israel, Russia, Somalia, South Korea, South Sudan, Syria, Uruguay and the Western Sahara.

The cruel consequences of US foreign policy, the persistence of history and man’s inhumanity to man are the book’s main themes. King believes that war is never justified. Either directly or indirectly, he finds western powers responsible for most of the suffering in the world.

For example: “Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs, dropped by British planes, flown by British-trained pilots, maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors.”

Operation Enduring Freedom, the US-led war in Afghanistan, has killed an estimated 147,000 Afghans since 2001, King reports. And 3,458 coalition troops have lost their lives in the same conflict. Atrocities committed by the Taliban include slicing off the breasts of women accused of transgressions.

A negotiated peace deal floundered earlier this year, but it appears likely that after the loss of inestimable amounts of blood and treasure, the US is preparing to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban. That is the only way Washington can extricate itself from the longest war in US history.

King quotes the US linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky giving reasons that would justify putting every post-second World War US president on trial for war crimes. One cannot help wincing when he compares George W Bush and Tony Blair’s destruction of Iraq to the rule of Isis over much of Iraq and Syria from 2014 through 2017.

King describes such punishments as lashing, stoning, beheading, crucifixion and the severing of limbs as “methods very much within the Judeo-Christian tradition”. Is beheading really more barbaric than hanging, the electric chair or lethal injection? King asks.

“George W Bush signed the death penalty for 152 people while governor of Texas, at the time the highest execution rate in the western world,” King notes. Bush advocated lowering the age for the death penalty to include 14-year-olds.

The war which Bush and Blair inflicted on Iraq killed far more people than did Isis, King continues. Furthermore, “The Isis fighters did the killing in all its brutal, bloody and macabre execution themselves. They heard the pitiful cries of the imminently executed...”

By contrast, Bush, Blair and their associates “ordered the killing from the comfort of a well-ventilated office, far from the anguished cries of those whose killing they had sanctioned”.

The former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in 2005, almost certainly on orders from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Hariri once told me that “one day of anarchy is worse than a century of dictatorship”. King does not say this, but citizens of Aleppo refer to their “liberation” from rebels by Assad’s forces, and express nostalgia for Syria as it was before the civil war.

When the uprisings known as the Arab Spring engulfed the Middle East from the end of 2010, naive westerners briefly believed that Arabs would at last attain the sunlit uplands of democracy. But the implicit conclusion of King’s book, in his descriptions of the hell that resulted in Iraq, Syria and Libya, is that Arabs may have been better off under torturing, murderous and corrupt dictators.

That is an uncomfortable proposition for western intellectuals, but it is tacitly confirmed by the western political leaders who support Egypt’s new dictator, field marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Familiar figures keep popping up through King’s narrative. Fr Peter McVerry, the advocate for the homeless, tells him that anger can be a positive force. Denis Halliday, the Irish former assistant secretary general of the UN, who resigned over the iniquity of sanctions against Iraq, guides King through that country.

In a chilling chapter about violent deaths in Mexico, King cites artist Brian Maguire, who has painted bodies dismembered by the drug cartels. The British journalist Robert Fisk talks to King about the dispossession of the Palestinians. Jim Fitzpatrick recalls his chance meeting with Che Guevara in King’s home town of Kilkee, which led to Fitzpatrick’s iconic poster.

King laments the world’s indifference to forgotten conflicts in Somalia, South Sudan and the Western Sahara. President Michael D Higgins has been an exception, by befriending the Sahrawi Polisario Front.

King’s book went to print as the coronavirus epidemic was getting underway. Western indifference to suffering in other parts of the world may now become total. But King’s concluding lines, borrowed from WB Yeats, are more apt than ever: “Come away, O human child!... For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”