Steven Miles: As old torturer exits, healers unite in song

Those who help treat victims of torture know there is much left to do.


BERLIN - Wounded healers sang on the night that the despot Augusto Pinochet died. It started at one table in a Berlin hotel bar with a somber version of "Vinceramos," a Spanish "We Shall Overcome." People at other tables joined in and added their own songs including the chorus from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in German and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Turks, Palestinians, Israelis, Armenians, Greeks, Chadians, Sudanese, Russians, Georgians, Somalis, Liberians, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Cambodians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Pakistanis, South Africans and others contributed dozens of tunes. People rose to Argentine tangos and an a capella Guatemalan aria, and danced in Kurdish line dances as clapping hands across the room kept time.

Gen. Augusto Pinochet killed more than 3,000 of his own people, tortured thousands more, and drove 30,000 into exile. He ordered a car bomb assassination that killed its target and an innocent bystander in Washington, D.C., that U.S. officials knew about in advance and forgave him for. We did not sing in joy or mourning at his death; these were songs of solidarity in the struggle to end torture.

The hotel bar was filled with health professionals, lawyers and directors from a just adjourned conference of 400 people the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, a Danish-based network of 130 programs for treating torture survivors.
One hundred thirty countries practice torture; there are hundreds of millions of victims and survivors.

Such healers garnish little money or glory. Governments do not support those who document and treat the injuries inflicted by their own police or soldiers. There is little help for refugees and asylum seekers. Many of these healers or their relatives had suffered torture. Some had been driven into exile for speaking truth, calling for justice, or practicing compassion. All had been abraded by the brutal stories they'd drawn from others in the course of their healing work.

Ironically, Pinochet died on Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the United Nations' ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document asserted, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."

Pinochet's brutal rule served a purpose. He was the first living head of state to be subpoenaed and indicted for crimes against humanity. Those legal actions set the stage for legal action against other leaders of torturing nations. Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor had every reason to believe that they would never be held accountable for their crimes. Even former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is dodging subpoenas and the risk of extradition for supporting the Pinochet regime.

Although Pinochet avoided trial, the pursuit of justice against him marked the end of executive impunity for crimes against humanity. Dr. José Quiroga, physician to the democratically elected president who died when Pinochet seized power in 1973, watched the singing nearly too moved to speak. Eventually he, too, danced before retiring to his own thoughts in his room. Exiled by Pinochet's junta's death threats, Quiroga runs a treatment program for torture survivors in California.

The conference had closed with words from the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, professor of law in three countries and former judge at the Bosnian war crimes trials. He reviewed the difficulty of enforcing laws against torture around the world. Then, declaring that there must be "no double standard" in the campaign to eradicate torture, he asserted that senior U.S. officials who oversaw the policies that led to the abuse of prisoners in the war on terror must also be called to account.

Six hours later Pinochet was dead, and in a Berlin bar, a block from the Gestapo's former torture center, wounded healers sang songs in solidarity.

Steven Miles is a professor of medicine and geriatrics at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics, and author of "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror."