Some
troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent
defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization
during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and
more concerned with the dignity of the US and UK’s image in the
world.
by
Alexander Rubinstein
Part
4 - A tangled web
As all
of this was unfolding, a similar funding scandal was developing that
would rock Amnesty to its core. Polly Toynbee, a 20-year-old Amnesty
volunteer, was in Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia, the British colony
in Zimbabwe, which was at the time ruled by the white settler
minority. There, Toynbee delivered funds to prisoner families with a
seemingly endless supply of cash. Toynbee said that Benenson met with
her there and admitted that the money was coming from the British
government.
Toynbee
and others were forced to leave Rhodesia in March 1966. On her way
out, she grabbed documents from an abandoned safe including letters
from Benenson to senior Amnesty officials working in the country that
detailed Benenson’s request to Prime Minister Wilson for money,
which had been received months prior.
In
1967 it was revealed that the CIA had established and was covertly
funding another human rights organization founded in the early 1960s,
the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) through an
American affiliate, the American Fund for Free Jurists Inc.
Benenson
had founded, alongside Amnesty, the U.K. branch of the ICJ, called
Justice. Amnesty international secretariat, Sean MacBride, was
also the secretary-general of ICJ.
Then,
the “Harry letters” hit the press. Officially, Amnesty denied
knowledge of the payments from Wilson’s government. But Benenson
admitted that their work in Rhodesia had been funded by the
government, and returned the funds out of his own pocket. He wrote to
Lord Chancellor Gardiner that he did it so as not to “jeopardize
the political reputation” of those involved. Benenson then
returned unspent funds from his two other human-rights organizations,
Justice (the U.K. branch of the CIA-founded ICJ) and the Human Rights
Advisory Service.
Benenson’s
behavior in the wake of the revelations about the “Harry letters”
infuriated his Amnesty colleagues. Some of them would go on to claim
that he suffered from mental illness. One staffer wrote: “Peter
Benenson has been levelling accusations, which can only have the
result of discrediting the organisation which he has founded and to
which he dedicated himself. …All this began after soon after he
came back from Aden, and it seems likely that the nervous shock which
he felt at the brutality shown by some elements of the British army
there had some unbalancing effect on his judgment.”
Later
that year, Benenson stepped down as president of Amnesty in protest
of its London office being surveilled and infiltrated by British
intelligence — at least according to him. Later that month, Sean
MacBride, the Amnesty official and ICJ operative, submitted a report
to an Amnesty conference that denounced Benenson’s “erratic
actions.” Benenson boycotted the conference, opting to submit a
resolution demanding MacBride’s resignation over the CIA funding of
ICJ.
Amnesty
and the British government then suspended ties. The rights group then
promised to “not only be independent and impartial but must not
be put into a position where anything else could even be alleged”
about its collusion with governments in 1967.
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