Feb-Mar-97

THROUGH FOREIGN EYES

Arkansas' Happy Hours

On this 6th of January I am reading these execution alerts. As usual I feel disgusted to have to read this list of men waiting for years to see their death, and now facing their scheduled date to be killed. I know what it is to be waiting the last days. I spent one "last day" with a death row prisoner until the stay arrived. I feel as bad as usual but, to be honest, today I feel even worse-if there are degrees of horror-to read that again Arkansas, already world-famous for its reelected Democratic President, has scheduled a triple execution after tomorrow ! One was not enough?

In 1994 such a lottery occurred: who was going to be first? When the executions were scheduled, the third became the second because the gurney was ready and # 2 had a possible stay. When the stay was overturned, the second went third!

Is this lottery going to happen again? What is all that about? I don't think that it is to minimize the stress on the staff. The executioners and staff who are trained for that purpose will do it whenever they are ordered to! So one execution on the 8th and one on another day-where is the difference? I don't think that the economical explanation makes sense unless the people performing that sort of job are paid a "package" price instead of per capita! Is it because human beings after 8 years-or even 20 years for two of them-are nothing else than flesh?

For me they are not! Will Kirt Wainright see Paul Ruiz go first? Or will Earl Van Denton have to endure the departure of the two others before him? Will the order be the youngest first, or maybe the oldest? Will it be played heads or tails? But there are only two faces on a coin!

I wrote once about chain gangs and said that this shameful practice "reminded me of sinister concentration camps! Those were also inhabited by nonhuman beings, destined for death." Is Germany such a model -acting as they did during WW II? Is Arkansas seeking efficiency for the final solution? What sort of a record is sought here? I don't think it is any honor to be in the Guinness book of records, but for 5 years Arkansas is trying to get into it! Why not make it a mass murder once a year- establish a new day off work, "Execution Day"? To be more efficient, just bring all the men and women in the USA who have exhausted all their appeals to some Arkansas field, make them dig out their own graves, then shoot them. It's swift, economical, easy, and what a wonderful show it would be on TV! In every Arkansas bar, or even in all the USA, it would be the Happy Hour! I'm quite sure that this would be popular with the media!

But for me, life has another value! So I just hope that Kirt Wainright, Paul Ruiz, and Earl Van Denton will not be executed at all, and-in case such an horror happens-will not be remembered as the second "three of Arkansas" as Joseph Paul Jernigan is now remembered as the "Visible Human Project."

Human beings deserve to be treated differently.

Another Pain-Humiliation

To associate the pain in the back or the muscular cramp or the pain in the jaw joint of the patient in front of you with the fact that that patient is a victim of repression, mistreatment, or even torture requires time, attentive listening, and patience. A simple clinical examination may even cause unbearable memories of undressing, of interrogations, of hands laid on his body in torture participated in by other doctors!

To introduce confidence, it is necessary that the one who is facing you perceives that you are able to understand that his pain is not only physical, but the very same moral pain you feel, which is always present. Why do some martyred human beings need years before they are able to talk? Maybe because most of them haven't found some one able to listen, to understand. Often, during conversations they let us know that previous medical discussions were limited to traumatizing examinations: "Go and have a coloscopy," (when they have endured a few months ago a rectal chili injection) or "Take these tranquilizers and antidepressants and go to sleep and forget all about it" (when this "all about it" comes back in front of their eyes like a TV screen far too often)!

Not to be heard, not to be understood often makes the man in front of you refuse to communicate. Many of those who are labeled with "psycho-behavioral troubles" may only be victims who try to express, in their own way, the severe discomfort and alienation they feel in reaction to the horror they lived and to others' lack of understanding.

To listen and to usefully understand, it is necessary to accept the patient with his cultural differences and to make sure those cultural differences don't become cultural barriers. Our model of society is not a model for everyone. Also, considering Africa as an entity and believing that an Algerian citizen reacts like a man living in Zaire or Angola is as absurd as thinking that an Englishman will react like a Russian, or that a Lapp lives the same way, with the same sensibility, as an inhabitant from a Greek island! Africa is obviously one continent, but Africa is not homogeneous. For example, the Maghreb are always detached from it and associate with the Middle East.

To digest the unspeakable

In AVRE (Association des Victimes de la Répression en Exil - 125 rue dAvron 75020 Paris - 01 43 72 07 77), my meeting with Mauritanians, more particularly a majority of Haal Pulaar, made me face the bestial horror and inhumanity of torturers there and see the courage and resistance of those who went through the torturers' hands and survived. It also showed me another culture.

In our European civilization, we think nothing of seeing magazine ads in which men are wearing briefs and women wearing bras, or movies in which they appear naked, but for these Mauritanians more unspeakable than the physical pain was the humiliation of being naked or just wearing underwear (which is about the same as being naked for them). To describe sexual tortures is certainly not easy, even impossible for some, but to express the humiliation of wearing only briefs and being dragged inside the prison for all to see-"It was as if I was dragged naked"-is nearly an unspeakable and insurmountable barrier. And how difficult it is to remember the torturer pulling down your briefs while you are blindfolded. These experiences bring such shame, such humiliation, that it becomes painful to face one's own naked image in the bathroom mirror and to accept one's tears at remembering one's father totally undressed before having to cross the river Senegal to be deported and to know that he had to get out of the water in the same nakedness in reaching this foreign country. To understand these martyred Black men you have to understand and accept these differences, and make them understand that you have understood.

What is a torture?

Is there a definition for torture? In my opinion there is not. Tortures performed by the Mauritanian police-burning; beatings; rape; tobacco under the eyelids; tying up the penis to prevent urination; sodomizing by sticks, by men, or even by trained dogs (a humiliation much more degrading considering the place given to dogs by Muslims), etc., are unfortunately part of state horror. You keep the physical scars and the pain comes back mentally with your screams and your tears, but this type of pain can be survived. You can recover. However, to have to face culpability, shame, is something totally different!

You have to understand that these men can't digest the idea of being so brutally martyred just for the mistake of having a black skin. They also feel guilty to have survived and sometimes be the only one to survive out of a group of six persons arrested together. There is the anguish of having heard no news from their wives for years; to know that they have left them over there to face dishonor; to be unable to be a real father, a family chief, a husband, able to provide for the needs of all the family; to remember the nudity in front of others, the nightmare of not being able to wash their body for weeks (and so not be able to pray), the shame of knowing that others have seen them in this shameful and dirty state.

With time

Sometimes the memory of physical pain dies down; scars heal, close, sometimes don't even leave a mark. But the mental pain, the shame, the humiliation always comes back, always sticks, like an endless anguish. The difficulty of life in France for a foreigner; the often long time to wait for the decision of OFPRA (French Office for Refugees and Stateless Persons Protection), which is also a sort of recognition as a victim; the fact that your family (or what is left of it) tries to survive in one of those refugee camps in Senegal or Mali, forgotten by nearly every one; the fact that you have to accept jobs so different from those held in your own country when you were a doctor, engineer (your diploma having no equivalent in France), or even a secretary-all that represents a sum of misfortune, but can also be a reason to fight, to carry on resisting, to show others and oneself that you stayed human.

But when, in justifying your application for political refugee status, you have to face the additional humiliation of pouring out all that again, the humiliation of explaining your humiliation to a stranger, a foreigner-when this shame is added to the shame you already feel, there is only one solution-to be silent-even if the consequence is to ruin this administrative formality. That's why, to recover your place, to recover this new life, you must always have in front of you someone who understands how this destructive machine called torture works, some one who also accepts, respects, your very legitimate secrets.

Dr. Pierre Duterte works in a French association taking care of refugees, victims of torture or repression in their homeland. He writes to death-row prisoners and prisoners in general population in a number of states in the U.S. He has been to the Texas death row twice.

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