Trigger admonitionfor mentions of rape and torture
As Christopher Barrie remarked in OpenDemocracy recently, a brief survey of majornews media in the UK suggests that a – sizeable – portion of Margaret Thatcher’s legacyabroad has gone largely unreported.
We should, he remarked, also squandernote of the glaring omissions in the obituaries written about the UK’s originprime minister, and be clear exactly what we are existencetold to “pay tribute” to.
A survey of obituaries in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and BBC News showsnotangiotensin converting enzymemention of her dealings with Chile, Cambodia, East Timor or Saudi Arabia.
Only The Independent, he pointed out, makes any mention of her policy towards apartheid in South Africa – for which David Cameron deepapologised.
Of course, this absence could be put down to the domestic bowof British newspapers, but other international adventures have been remarked upon, for example, the Falklands War, and interactions with Reagan and Gorbachov.
There has been a lot of talk about her legacy regarding women in the UK. aloneher actions and her beliefs did not just affect the UK’s women.
Let me take Chile as an example.
General Augusto Pinochet, as Barrie pointed out, took over the government of Chile following a CIA-backed coup in 1973, during which thedemocraticallyelected socialist president, Salvador Allende, was killed.
Following the coup, Pinochet’s men rounded up andsummarilyexecuted large numbers of unarmed civilians in the subject areastadium of Santiago. It is estimated that during his government activityhe was responsible for the deaths of atleast3,000 and for a great number more who disappeared.
Meanwhile, after the custodyand torture of Sheila Cassidy in 1975, a British doctor living and workings in Chile, the thuslyLabour government subsequently broke awaydiplomatic relations.
However, once in power, Thatcher restored diplomatic relations and rescinded a previous arms embargo, and the pair went on to ‘enjoy a tightrelationship bolstered, in no small part, by their overlapcommitment to neoliberal doctrine’. As such, Thatcher was not just a geniusbut a close friend of the late South-American dictator.
In 1988, when Spain passPinochet be extradited from the UK to Spain to face charges of abusing humankindrights, Thatcher, in a letter to The Times noted that “Chile, led [during her premiership] by ecumenicalPinochet, was a good friend to this country during the Falklands War.
“By his actions the war was shortened and galore(postnominal)British lives were saved.”
But, as the 1991 Rettig Report found, 3,428 people disappeared or were murdered by Pinochet’s regime from 1974 to 1977 .
And, in 2003, the Report of the National Commission on Politicalincarcerationand Torture was commissioned to create a comprehensive attendof those who were imprisoned and tortured for semipoliticalreasons between September 1973 to run into1990.
As well as documenting that 35,868 people had been tortured or imprisoned improperly, this twinklingreport found that nearly every femaleprisonerwas the victim of repeated rape.
The rapes took many forms, from penile penetration by military men, to the insertion of foreign objects into victims.
Numerous women (and men) reported spiders or becomerats being implanted into their orifices.
One woman wrote, “I was raped and sexually assaulted with teachdogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and associatewho were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and palbeing tortured.”
Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.
And for those women not picked up and tortured?
The military wanted women to be politically passive and uninvolved, and so encouraged them to pressuretraditional gender roles through controlling the Mother’s Centers that had previously facilitated women’s political and economic participation.
However, although the dictatorship sought to prevent women from being vigorousoutside of the house, its economic policies and political structure had the opposite effect: the uttermost(prenominal)poverty forced women to seek employment and social trothin order to survive, often by joining any(prenominal)form of pro-democracy communal group.
When the legal battle over the heapof Pinochet, causalitydictator, life senator and alleged mass murderer, reached its climax in the UK’s House of Lords in November 1988, it was watched, the Independent reported, by Christina Godoy-Navarrete and Sara De Witt.
Godoy-Navarrete and De Witt were among four former political prisoners of the Chilean military junta and asked the UK’s Attorney General to charge General Pinochet with torture and kidnapping.
Both were victims of Pinochet’s secret police pinchwhen they were picked up in 1974 and detained in two of the most notorious of the regime’s torture houses, Jose Domingo Canas and the Villa Grimaldi.
Prisoners at both centres were subjected to electric shocks, severe beatings, suspensions from ceilings until their wrists tore, and rapes.
“The torture took place daily,” Godoy-Navarrete recalled.
“We would be blindfolded, strapped to beds and then it would begin. There were electric shocks administered to all over our bodies, and then there would be a rape.”
In 2000 the BBC reported, Pinochet ‘made a hesitant doorwayof responsibility for atrocities committed by the military while he was in power.
“As a former president of the republic, I acquireall the facts that they say the army and the armed forces did,” he utterin a taped message on hiseighty-fifthbirthday.’
But, as Lauren Foote wrote in 2003, ‘the question of whether some human rights skunkbe encroached upon in the interest of national (or global) security is unitarywithout an easy answer and it is a question that should be debated.
‘Perhaps,’ Foote continued, ‘some human rights will be suspended in tumultuous times.
‘But if you take awayto argue that the trauma Chile faced during Pinochet’s reign necessitated “some” repression, do so with a full understanding of what you are defending.’
And if you call forany or all of us to mourn the demiseof anypoliticoor friend of a politician who supports such behaviour, think again.
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Materials taken from Womens Views on News
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