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The Times, London

Obituaries

February 28, 2005

Peter Benenson

Lawyer who founded Amnesty International to further his unswerving belief in the rights of man

PETER BENENSON was the founder of Amnesty International, the largest and most influential independent human-rights organisation, and a nagging thorn of conscience in the side of dictators — and dictatorial governments — all over the world.

Since 1961 the organisation has grown from an office staffed by a handful of volunteers to become a hugely influential network with 1.8 million members and subscribers in more than 160 countries. It has campaigned to publicise the plights of more than 45,000 victims of torture and prisoners of conscience. In 1977 Amnesty was awarded the Nobel prize for peace.

Benenson’s legacy is no less than a worldwide movement of citizen activism against the misuse of power. Amnesty’s logo of a candle surrounded by barbed wire has become a beacon of hope for the oppressed and downtrodden of the world.

As Benenson said when he lit the first Amnesty candle in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1961: “I am reminded of the words of a 16th-century man sentenced to death by burning: ‘We have today lit such a candle as shall never be put out’.”

The story of the organisation’s beginnings is one of conviction and timing, a simple but powerful idea falling upon the ears of a receptive world. In 1960 Benenson, a lawyer in London, read a newspaper report of two students in Portugal, then under the harsh military dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Each had been jailed for seven years — their crime was to have raised their glasses in a Lisbon restaurant in a toast to liberty.

Benenson was outraged. He sat in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields for nearly an hour and thought hard how to mobilise public opinion. “It was necessary,” he later wrote, “to think of a larger group which would harness the enthusiasm of people all over the world who were anxious to see a wider respect for human rights.”

In practical terms, this meant encouraging individuals to bombard governments with letters on behalf of individual victims of torture or prisoners of conscience.

Within months Benenson had put his ideas into as an article, an “Appeal for Amnesty”, which appeared in The Observer’s Weekend Review in May 1961, under the headline “The Forgotten Prisoners”.

The article began: “Open your newspaper — any day of the week — and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or his religion are unacceptable to his government. There are several million such people in prison . . . The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done.”

The epoch-making article concluded: “Governments are prepared to follow only where public opinion leads. Pressure of opinion 100 years ago brought about the emancipation of the slaves. It is now for man to insist upon the same freedom for his mind as he has won for his body.”

The response was astonishing and instantaneous. Other newspapers around the world picked up the story, letters flooded in, and Amnesty International was born.

Benenson’s great initiative was not a sudden Damascene conversion to the cause of human rights. Born in 1921, Peter Benenson was the grandson of a Jewish Russian banker, Grigori Benenson. His mother Flora brought him up alone after the early death of his father, Colonel John Solomon.

After a period of private tutoring by the poet W. H. Auden, Benenson went to Eton and then on to study history at Oxford. At Eton his complaints about the poor food prompted the headmaster to write to his mother warning of his “revolutionary tendencies”. Alas for authority, Benenson soon converted his tendencies into practical action. It was at Eton that he, aged 16, launched his first campaign, in aid of the Spanish Relief Committee, which was working to look after the orphan children of Republicans killed in the Spanish Civil War. He then turned his attention to raising money from his fellow pupils to help Jews who had fled to Britain from Nazi Germany. He joined the Labour Party in 1939.

Benenson’s study of history at Balliol College, Oxford, was interrupted by the war. He joined the Army and served first in the Ministry of Information press office before moving to Military Intelligence. He started to study law while still in the Army and was demobilised in 1947. After taking his Bar exams he was a founder member of the Society of Labour Lawyers. Apart from serving as an alderman on Bethnal Green borough council (1949-53), and standing unsuccessfully for Parliament three times as a Socialist, Benenson spent the 1950s earning himself a growing reputation as a legal champion of human rights in a succession of causes. He was sent by the Trades Union Congress as an official observer to the trials of Basque trade unionists in Franco’s Spain in 1954. In Cyprus he advised Greek Cypriot lawyers defending clients in trouble with British officialdom; he pressured the British Government to send observers to Hungary during the 1956 uprising and later to monitor a treason trial in South Africa. He was involved in the founding in 1957 of Justice, the independent legal human-rights organisation.

Amnesty International (AI) spread with astonishing speed. Before the end of 1961 groups had been formed in the UK, the Netherlands, West Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy. In 1962 Amnesty sent an observer to the trial of Nelson Mandela. Benenson was appointed its president in 1964. In 1966, after an internal crisis sparked by an AI report alleging the torture of Adeni suspects by British troops and Benenson’s suggestion that AI should move to a neutral country since its UK operation had been infiltrated by British intelligence agents, he stood down from day-to-day administration to devote himself to writing and — he had converted to Catholicism in 1960 — to prayer.

He did not stop campaigning for a better world, however. In the 1980s he returned to an active role as a speaker and campaigner. He also found time to serve as chairman of the new Association of Christians against Torture, and in the early 1990s he organised help for the numerous orphans of Romania under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. He also founded an association for those with coeliac disease, a condition which he himself suffered.

He was awarded the “Pride of Britain” lifetime achievement award in 2001 by the Daily Mirror, otherwise he accepted no honours.

He was offered a knighthood by almost every British Government. According to Kate Gilmore, the deputy secretary general of Amnesty, he replied to each with the suggestion that “if they truly wished to honour his work, they should clean up their own backyard first, and then he would set out a litany of human-rights violations which the British Government was complicit in.”

Much more important than honours to Benenson was his unswerving dedication to upholding the International Declaration of Human Rights. As he said in a statement on the 40th anniversary of Amnesty International, “Once the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world were in darkness. Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty candle; the candle in the barbed wire. When I first lit the Amnesty candle, I had in mind the old Chinese proverb: ‘Better light a candle than curse the darkness’.”

Benenson was divorced from his first wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. He is survived by their two daughters, and by his second wife, Susan, and their son and daughter.

Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, was born on July 31, 1921. He died on February 25, 2005, aged 83.

China has replaced the United States as the world's top consumer, eclipsing the world's richest economy in consumption of four of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities, a global environmental think tank said.

Growing at a rapid rate, China has taken the lion's share in the consumption of grain, meat, coal and steel, and loses out to the United States only in oil among the five basic commodities, according to the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.


In another key area, fertiliser, China's use is double that of the United States while among television sets, refrigerators and cellular phones the world's most populous nation is way ahead.

Among leading consumer products, China trails the United States only in automobiles, the institute said in a report.

It will only be a matter of time before China, the world's most populous nation, overtakes the United States in the use of personal computers.

The number of PCs in China are doubling every 28 months, the report said.

"China's eclipse of the United States as a consumer nation should be seen as another milestone along the path of its evolution as a world economic leader," Lester Brown, the institute's president, told reporters.

"China is no longer just a developing country," he said. "It is an emerging economic superpower, one that is writing economic history," said Brown, a respected environmental analyst.

Among the big three grains, China leads in the consumption of both wheat and rice, and trails the United States only in corn use.

China's 2004 intake of 64 million tonnes of meat has climbed far above the 38 million tonnes consumed in the United States, where the hamburger-eating habit is a defining element of the country's lifestyle.

China's steel usage - a barometer of industrial development - is now more than twice that of the United States: 258 million tonnes to 104 million tonnes in 2003.

Although US oil consumption is triple that of China's - 20.4 million barrels per day to 6.5 million barrels in 2004, use in China has more than doubled, Brown said.

But Brown hastened to add that there was a downside to China's insatiable appetite for raw materials to fuel its unstoppable economy, saying it was driving up not only commodity prices but ocean shipping rates as well.

The Chinese consuming prowess also would deal yet another blow to the United States, which suffers a massive trade deficit with the Asian giant and is heavily dependent on Chinese capital to underwrite its fast-growing debt.

"If China ever decides to divert this capital surplus elsewhere, either to internal investment or to the development of oil, gas, and mineral resources elsewhere in the world, the US economy will be in trouble," Brown said

He warned that global dependence on the Chinese economy, with 1.3 billion people, for absorption of both raw materials and finished products could backfire if economic growth in China plunged.

"As Chinese incomes rise at a world record pace, use of foodstuffs, energy, raw materials, and sales of consumer goods are continuing to climb," he noted.

China's per capita annual income of 5,300 dollars last year is one seventh the 38,000 dollars in the United States.

Brown, who this month launched his groundbreaking book "Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures," said one of the bigger concerns was that China's rapid growth took a toll on the environment.

For example, he said, China's grain production had fallen sharply, including due to expansion of deserts and the loss of irrigation water.

Brown said in his book that China was "putting enormous pressure on its own natural resource base.

"In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem, China is unfortunately on the cutting edge." - AFP

The Guardian, London, Saturday February 5, 2005
Martin Jacques

In President Bush's inauguration speech, he pledged to support "the expansion of freedom in all the world", deploying the words free or freedom no less than 25 times in 20 short minutes. The neoconservative strategy is quite explicit: to bend the world to America's will; to reshape it according to the interests of a born-again superpower. There is something more than a little chilling about this. Even though the Iraqi occupation has gone seriously awry, the United States still does not recognise the constraints on its own power and ambition.

This was something that Europe learned the hard way: two world wars, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the anti-colonial struggle have taught our continent the limitations of its own power. That is why Europe today, with the partial exception of Britain and France, and exemplified by Germany, is so reluctant to use military force. The United States, of course, is the opposite. It measures its power not by its relative economic and technological prowess, which would suggest restraint, but its military unassailability, which implies the opposite.

Nor is this attitude simply a product of the neoconservatives. It also draws on something deeper within the American psyche. The birth of the United States and its expansion across the American continent - the frontier mentality - was an imperial enterprise, involving, most importantly, the subjugation and destruction of the Amerindians. This is lodged in the national genes, it is part of the American story, and it helps to inform and shape its global strategy and aspirations.

It is not difficult, of course, for the United States to throw its weight around in the Middle East, a poor and defeated region, one of the big-time losers from globalisation. The world's superpower versus a failed region is a hopelessly unequal contest, especially when the former can rely on the support of its regional policeman Israel, to do its bidding. But this is not the dominant story of our time, even though the Bush regime, in its desire to exploit the country's status as sole superpower, has chosen to define this conflict as the central narrative. History will judge differently. The rise of China and India will have a far more profound effect on the world than a small band of Islamist terrorists.

Indeed, there is something faintly bizarre about the psychotic worship of American values, the incantation of its applicability to each and every country, at a historical moment when, for the first time since its emergence half a millennium ago, the modern world will, in the not too distant future, no longer be monopolised by the west. It is not difficult to imagine that, by the middle of this century, both China and India will rank among the top five largest economies in the world, with China perhaps the biggest. Nor is this just an economic story, which is how it is generally told. With economic strength comes, in due course, political, cultural and military influence: such has been the case with the emergence of all great powers.

The fact and significance of this, of course, has been hugely underestimated. The dominant view of globalisation is that it is overwhelmingly a process of westernisation: indeed, the neoliberal form of globalisation espoused by the Washington consensus has deliberately sought to define it as such. The prevalent western view is well-articulated by Chris Patten in his book East and West, where the differences between western and east Asian countries, like China, are explained simply in terms of historical timing. The closer they get to western levels of development, the more they will come to resemble the west. Or, to put it another way, there is a singular modernity, and that is western.

Given that modernity is not simply a snapshot of the present, but a product of history, not only a function of markets and technology, but the creation of a culture, then this is utterly mistaken. One cannot make sense of American modernity - and how it diverges from European modernity - without understanding its history, in particular that it was a settler society, without any prior experience of feudalism.

If Europe and the United States differ because of their diverse pasts, even though they palpably share a great deal in terms of history, culture and race, then how much more true it will be of countries like China and India, whose civilisational roots - from religion and ethnicity to history and geo-location - are completely different to those of the west. The main historical form of intimacy with the west, in the case of India, was colonialism, which for China was only a marginal experience.

China and India, of course, will take on board a great deal from the west in their modernisation. But that can only be part of the picture. They will also draw from their own history and culture. The outcome in each case will be a complex hybrid, its character varying from country to country. In future, international discourse - the word "international" is now invariably shorthand for the west - will no longer be overwhelmingly western. As these societies grow in economic strength and cultural self-confidence, so the global political and intellectual language will change. That language, involving concepts like democracy, civil society, freedom, a free press and an independent judiciary, is now almost exclusively western. But it will not always be the case.

So which Chinese and Indian concepts might make the transition from national to global discourse and debate? In time, one would guess many, some positive, some regressive - just as has been the case with western values. But, for two reasons, it is still very difficult to predict what they might be. Firstly, because China is ruled by a communist party, the debate about it has been overwhelmingly conducted in terms of politics rather than culture: a profoundly rich and complex culture has been reduced to the colour of its government. Secondly, the relative backwardness of these societies has hitherto deprived them of self-confidence in the face of western hegemony. Their indigenous traditions and ideas tend to be viewed, even from within, as symptoms of backwardness and therefore as essentially parochial rather than cosmopolitan. That will change as these societies become increasingly self-confident. As a result, the west will be forced to engage with these societies and their cultures in a very different kind of way. There will be global competition between the different claims for universality. The cultural traffic will no longer be one-way.

The pastoral concept of the Chinese state, for example, its obligation to take care of the people, that dates back to the responsibilities of the emperor, and is also related to the concept of the extended family, is likely to become an increasingly familiar idea. There is the Chinese concept of min jian, not easily translatable - either linguistically or culturally - but which might be described in shorthand as the expression of Chinese tradition, from superstition to folklore, in everyday life, which remains a potent force in all Chinese societies to this day. More obviously, the very different notions of the family in Indian and Chinese culture are likely to become globally familiar; indeed, in a limited way, they already are.

The contrast between China and the United States could hardly be more striking. The former dates back thousands of years, the latter not much more than 200; the former is a product of an ancient civilisation, the latter an invented nation whose citizens bear allegiance to a political document, the constitution. It is little wonder that Americans constantly need to reinvent themselves: the Chinese, unsurprisingly, have no such problem, they know exactly who they are. The profound cultural differences are already being played out in a cinema near you: Hollywood versus the new breed of popular Chinese films. This is just a taster for the future, the beginning of what will later come to dominate the 21st century. American - and western values - will find themselves contested like never before.