The true Genesis of amnesty international.(History)

THE HIGH TIDE of the Cold War concealed vastly more than fanciful antics by KGB agents, and it is unlikely that we will ever know how many quiet initiatives originally designed to divide, influence, distract or, ultimately, to overcome resistance to the communist onslaught escaped detection at the time and will remain hidden forever. Some probably failed ingloriously, and most of those that succeeded at first were later crushed under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, but a few survived the Soviet debacle and went on to prosper in its aftermath, and of these, Amnesty International must be counted among those that most convincingly went on to flourish after managing the difficult transition with suitable adroitness. Only three years have passed since 2004 when the fiftieth birthday of its governing idea should have been celebrated and it is meet and just, albeit belatedly, to throw light on its true origins and rescue from obscurity the name of its real begetter.

Three centuries ago Giambattista Vico pointed out that the controlling methodological postulate of his Scienza nuova was that:

 
   The nature of institutions is nothing but their 
   coming into being [nascimento] at certain times 
   and in certain guises. Whenever the time and guise 
   are thus and so, such and not otherwise are the 
   institutions that come into being ... The inseparable 
   properties of institutions must be due to the 
   modifications or guise with which they are born ... 
   By these properties we may therefore verify that the 
   nature or birth [natura or nascimento] was thus and 
   not otherwise. 

Three centuries later, Isaiah Berlin remarked on the importance of Vico's understanding that "The nature of men, as of everything, can be discovered by asking the question, 'What comes into being, at what time, in what fashion?'" (1) This may or may not be applicable as a constituent sine qua non of all created things, but it does appear to obtain in self-governing entities such as Amnesty International, distant from external scrutiny and possibly disinclined to stray far from an original intent consistent with the urgencies of the Cold War.

It is gently amusing to note that when marking what purported to be its fortieth anniversary in 2001, there was no reluctance to describe the official version of the inception of Amnesty, included even in Peter Benenson's obituary, as a "creation myth". (2) "According to Amnesty International's 'creation myth'", it reads:

 
   one day in late 1960, a British lawyer named Peter 
   Benenson was reading the Daily Telegraph in the 
   London tube, when he saw a brief article about two 
   Portuguese students who had been arrested for 
   making a toast to freedom in a Lisbon bar. He 
   decided to start an organization to rescue political 
   prisoners and other victims of government 
   repression around the world. (3) 

To call this a myth was as apposite and truthful in 2001 as it is now timely and appropriate to place it reverently on the same shelf with Athena, Romulus and Remus, and proceed to describe the individuals and circumstances really responsible for creating this very visible and influential organisation.

THIS STORY BEGINS not in 1960 or 1954, but in the early hours of September 3, 1939, when almost simultaneously with the declaration of war in Europe, and only a few days after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Winnipeg, an old, rusty and scarcely seaworthy French freighter carrying over two thousand republican Spanish refugees from the Civil War, docked in Valparaiso. This vessel had been chartered by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who later became the country's second Nobel laureate, then in France as a special Consul for Spanish Immigration. Neruda had earlier served as Consul in Barcelona and Madrid until 1937 when his robust republican partisanship earned him a swift dismissal. Back in Chile in time to help in the 1938 election that brought the Popular Front to power, he returned to France with the blessing of the newly elected President Pedro Aguirre Cerda with instructions to select from among the republican refugees detained in concentration camps in the south of France a suitable number of skilled workers and their families for resettlement in Chile. (4)

The voyage of the Winnipeg received ample local publicity detailing the skills that the refugees were bringing to their new country, and among these my father's eye picked up "experienced mechanics". At the time he owned the Expreso Universal, a transport company that used heavy Mack and Henschel lorries requiring skilled mechanical attention. Within a fortnight, he had secured the services of half a dozen refugees as drivers and mechanics, including two who had helped General Pavlov's Russian T-26 tanks rout the Italians in the battle of Guadalajara.

An impressionable nine-year-old vastly more interested in skiing than in politics, I knew nothing about the Spanish Civil War, but this was soon remedied through endless entertaining conversations with the battle-scarred veterans who made themselves memorably useful performing all manner of tasks both as mechanics in the firm and handymen in the household. Their version of the conflict accorded with that of the Chilean Popular Front government and its Radical Party hegemony sequel that continued without interruption for another decade. It was reinforced, at least until the onset of the Cold War, by the notable achievements of a number of exceptionally talented Winnipeg refugees who exerted a definitive influence on Chilean intellectual life ranging widely and brilliantly from choral and symphonic music to architecture, book design, politics, the theatre, history and the visual arts.

A dozen years later, in 1952, I reached the London School of Economics and Political Science in search of a doctorate and bearing such clear and distinct ideas about the civil war that no vacillation was possible when invited by fellow students to lend a hand with translations on behalf of the International Brigade Association. Since the republican collapse in 1939, this organisation had been engaged in supplying relief to republican refugees held in camps in Spain, France and North Africa. After 1945, it moved on to persuade the Spanish authorities to bring to trial political prisoners, especially some who had been in Spanish jails since the end of the civil war. (5) This seemed to me then, and now, an eminently decent, worthwhile and spiritually rewarding extra-curricular activity, and I took to it with the kind of enthusiasm readily at hand at twenty-two.

The task was made additionally attractive by the character of the man in charge. Alec Digges was then the only taciturn Irishman on earth, tenacious, clever, good-humoured and a delight to work with. He was born in London in 1914, but grew up in Ireland, a fully-fledged member of both the British Labour Party and the Communist Party of Ireland, he volunteered to fight for the republic, arrived in Spain in 1938, was posted to the 57th Battalion of the XV International Brigade, pushed through a machine-gunners crash course and sent to the front just in time to experience the ferocity of the battle of the Ebro. Sick and wounded, he was sent to a field hospital and repatriated with other members of the British battalion. Made of stern stuff, on the outbreak of the Second World War he volunteered for the army, joined the Grenadiers, landed on a Normandy beachhead, fought his way into Holland and was again repatriated, this time minus a leg. In England, Alec became an indefatigable prime mover of the International Brigade Association, especially of its campaign on behalf of the political prisoners in Spanish jails.

AT FIRST, my chores were decidedly secretarial, and I spent much time translating appeals to diplomats and politicians on behalf of lengthening lists of men kept in prison without trial, until Alec made me an offer that I did not want to refuse. Offer is the wrong word; invitation is better. Holding a Chilean passport, speaking Spanish with a Chilean accent and much too young to be a civil war veteran, I was ideally suited to do what neither Alec nor any of his comrades or friendly members of parliament could possibly do, which was to enter Spain inconspicuously, a pioneer backpacker, well-worn lederhosen and all, conveying the instructions and funds required to retain the services of lawyers, pay fees, bribe officials and generally expedite the complicated bureaucratic and legal procedures necessary to get the prisoners to court and, with more than a bit of luck, out of the country.

At the time I was also earning a few pounds on the side by penning odd pieces for Kingsley Martin's New Statesman and Nation, a weekly that in the early 1950s was adorned by more than a sufficiency of intellectual and political heavyweights whose journalistic proximity filled me with pride and, more important, provided a continuing excuse for what turned out to be unusually frequent visits to Spain. To be fair to the profession, I did write a couple or perhaps three articles, one for the then Manchester Guardian, on hitch-hiking in Spain, and others for the old Reynolds News and for the New Statesman on Latin American politics, and one at …