If You Don't Mind Me Asking What Got You Into Educating Yourself And Others On Torture?

If you don't mind me asking what got you into educating yourself and others on torture?

I don’t mind. Some readers may have heard this story before.

Basically it’s because of where I’m from and the life I had growing up. My mother is English, my father is Greek-Cypriot, I was raised in Saudi Arabia near Bahrain. This mix of backgrounds (and this holds true for a lot of people globally) means that human rights abuses and torture are tied up in my personal history.

One of my earliest memories is being evacuated because Bush Sr decided to invade Iraq. I grew up surrounded by people from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, working as drivers, maids, construction workers, porters, shop attendants, guards- and some of them will have been slaves.

If ethnic tensions in Cyprus had not been allowed to grow into violent clashes that ultimately divided the island I would not exist. Because there’s a good chance my father’s family just wouldn’t have left.

There’s a rusted, husk of a pistol in my Yiayia’s house used by a relative in her mountain village to fight the English.

The English tortured people throughout the period Cyprus was a colony. Some of the records were recently ‘re-discovered’ in a former MOD facility.

I occasionally wonder if my great-grandfathers shot at each other.

And all of this means that torture was part of the background radiation of my life growing up.

It was not something ‘exciting’ that happened in cartoons. It was not something from the movies. It was a very real function of the police and the government.

In essence I grew up knowing the police existed to make people disappear.

I was shielded to a large degree. Because I’m white, because my family is rich and to some degree because I was a child. But I was a precocious child and I very quickly realised that not everyone had the same shield around them I did.

And I began to get very angry.

I’ve never been tortured. I’ve never seen anyone tortured and as far as I know no one I know has been tortured. But I knew growing up that it was something that could happen. To me and the people around me. And there was really nothing anyone could do about it.

I’ve spent decades reading about violence, human rights abuses and torture because I wanted to understand my countries, my roots, myself. I feel like I am at least closer to that understanding now and honestly it makes me even angrier.

It is such a pointless, awful waste. Of life, of time and, to borrow from Rushdie, of the promises of independence.

I read about these things because I feel deeply obligated to. Because despite my relative safety and power I couldn’t do anything to help the people around me. I can’t re-make my country and I can’t undo the past. And I also have a realistic idea of my own strengths. I think trying to re-train, to do the research, to treat people would have a terrible effect on my health.

But I could not look away when I was seven. I can not do it now. Because I can’t- swoop in and protect protesters in Kashmir but I can listen. I feel that I owe it to them, all of them, the 44% of the global population who think they’d be tortured if they were arrested-

Doesn’t that make you seethe? Almost half of the world, three billion human beings, judge themselves at risk from the people who are supposed to protect them.

And it is preventable.

I do this because I am really very very passionate about this global goddamned disaster.

I also do it because I like stories of real, everyday heroism and stories about the world getting better. There are more of those here then in any other subject I can think of.

It’s Fela Kuti, just out of jail, marching his murdered mother’s funeral procession up to the military barracks to face her killers. Dr Hawa Abdi facing down the terrorists who tried to take over her hospital. The White Helmets running towards the bombs to pull people out of the rubble.

The story of Bacha Khan trying to convert his English prison guards to pacifism and when they asked him what he’d be doing if he wasn’t a pacifist he stood up and bent the bars.

It seems to me a very dirty trick, that we have somehow been convinced that these people’s lives are unrealistic.

And- it seems, from my admittedly odd perspective, that other people’s lives are poorer for not knowing these things. That the world is narrower, more pessimistic without the assurance that people do not break.

The world is unfair and yes, you should be angry about it.

There’s a wonderful little piece of philosophy in the Yoruban traditional religion (which I hope I’m interpreting/explaining correctly here).

In this religion after the perfect High God created the world they withdrew from their imperfect creation. This is because the purpose of humanity is to make the world perfect. The heaven we create has more meaning then a perfect thing we are given.

The process of trying to improve life has meaning. Is our meaning.

And this is the way in which I am most suited to help.

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