'The truth will set you free': The making of amnesty international

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 575-597

  Buchanan, Tom ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 28244452469     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/00220094020370040501     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (39)

1. The literature on Amnesty's early history is not vast, and none of the following are scholarly works: Egon Larsen, A Flame in Barbed Wire: The Story of Amnesty International (London 1978), chap. 1;
2. Jonathan Power, Against Oblivion: Amnesty International's Fight for Human Rights (Glasgow 1981), chap. 1.
3. In Power's recent book Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International (Harmondsworth 2001), the section on Amnesty's early history is essentially unchanged, 119-32;
4. David Winner, Peter Benenson: The Lawyer who Campaigned for Prisoners of Conscience and Created Amnesty International (Watford 1991), 5-28.
5. See also 'Amnesty International', Amnesty International, 1961-1976. A Chronology (London 1976);
6. Martin Ennals, 'Amnesty International and Human Rights' in Peter Willetts (ed.), Pressure Groups in the Global System: The Transnational Relations of Issue-oriented Non-governmental Organisations (London 1982). For an important recent contribution, not dealing specifically with Amnesty's early years
7. see Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton, NJ and Oxford 2001).
8. Power, Against Oblivion, op. cit., 218.
9. See, for example, 'Amnesty International - A Brief History' on the organization's website.
10. I have been unable to locate the news item about the Portuguese students in The Daily Telegraph for 19 November 1960, or indeed for the whole of November and December. The first documented references to this episode come in 1962, and do not mention the infamous toast to liberty. In a radio broadcast for the BBC on 4 March 1962 (entitled 'Liberty to the captives'), Peter Benenson gave the date of his tube journey as 19 December 1960 and commented that: 'The only evidence against them was that over the dinner table they'd conspired to overthrow the government. I thought then, what a crazy world this is, when two friends can't have dinner together without being arrested' (text in AIA, B11, 9). In the organization's first annual report, for 1961-2, Chairman Lionel Elvin wrote that Benenson had 'recalled how one morning, travelling in the tube to work, he read about two Portuguese friends dining in a restaurant in Lisbon. A remark that they passed that was critical of the Portuguese government was overheard, and the next thing wasthat they were arrested and imprisoned for treason against the Government.' It is also worth noting that at no point were these students' names - nor their eventual fate - publicized by Amnesty, and they were not amongst the prisoners chosen for publicity when the appeal was launched. Unlike The Daily Telegraph, The Times for this period is full of items concerning political imprisonment in Portugal: reports concern the jailing of eight printers (11 November 1960), nine alleged members of an illegal secret society (17 November 1960), a glassworker jailed for promoting meetings and contacts with members of an alleged illegal secret society (19 November 1960), six artisans (25 November 1960), a glassworker (28 November 1960), and a man and a woman jailed for engaging in subversive activities and crimes against the security of the state between 1953 and 1956 (19 December 1960). Thus, there was a great deal of repression in Portugal in this period, primarily directed against alleged communists who, if convicted, were automatically assumed to be guilty of subversion (see Peter Archer and Lord Reay, Freedom at Stake: A Background Book, London 1966, 99-106).
11. Observer, 25 May 1986.
12. On the family's history see Flora Solomon and Barnet Litvinoff, Baku to Baker Street. The Memoirs of Flora Solomon (London 1984).
13. Solomon (Benenson's mother) had known Kim Philby in the 1930s, and subsequently denounced him to British intelligence; see Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York 1987), 172, 173.
14. See, for example, Daily Worker, 27 February, 20 March and 20 April 1953;
15. see also Benenson's 'Report on a journey to Spain, 27th-31st December 1958', Marx Memorial Library, London, International Brigade Memorial Archive, Box D-3, File B/5.
16. For Benenson's role in this organization see Tom Buchanan, 'Receding Triumph: British Opposition to the Franco Regime, 1945-59', Twentieth-Century British History, 12, 2 (2001), 180-3.
17. With a touch that would become familiar in his work for Amnesty, Benenson devised JUSTICE as an acronym for 'Joint Union of Societies to Insure Civil Liberties in England and Elsewhere'. On JUSTICE see Helen Roberts, 'Witness: The Origins of Justice', Paragon Review (Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull), 6 (November 1997), 20-4.
18. The Times, 23 July 1976.
19. See, for example, the substantial articles on Portugal in the New Statesman by Kingsley Martin (2 March 1957)
20. AIA, A1, letter to The Guardian, 13 September 1961.
21. On the 'Appeal for Amnesty in Spain' see Bill Alexander, No to Franco. The Struggle Never Stopped, 1939-1975 (London 1992), 71-4. For an analysis of the broader communist strategy concerning these campaigns, see the unattributed document of May 1963 in the TUC archives, University of Warwick Modern Records Centre (MRC), Mss 292B/863/4.
22. AIA, Benenson memoir, 1983, 7.
23. AIA, B6, Benenson to Albert Carthy (Socialist International), 10 June 1961.
24. AIA, A1, Benenson to Baker (from Sicily), 4 March 1960. Moral Re-Armament was founded in 1938 by the American evangelist Frank Buchman, growing out of his earlier work with the 'Oxford Group'. It attained considerable influence in postwar Europe, not least due to its anticommunism. By the late 1950s MRA was closely involved with the conciliation of ethnic and religious conflicts such as that in Cyprus. Buchman died in August 1961, soon after the launch of the Amnesty appeal. For an informative account by one of Buchman's adherents see Garth Lean, Frank Buchman: A Life (London 1985).
25. See pp. 593-4. These letters also show that Benenson had been closely re-reading the works of Iulia de Beausobre (1893-1977), a Russian exile who came to Britain in 1934 and published an autobiographical account of her experiences in Soviet labour camps (The Woman Who Could Not Die, London 1938).
26. She later returned to the Russian Orthodox faith, and married the historian Sir Lewis Namier (see Constance Babington Smith, Iulia de Beausobre: A Russian Christian in the West (London 1983).
27. Dolci was originally considered for inclusion as one of the studies in Benenson's Persecution 1961, and was one of the distinguished contributors of a message to the 1962 Amnesty publication A Time to Keep Silence.. and a Time to Speak. For a good summary of Dolci's career and ideas see Michael Bess, Realism, Utopia and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and their Struggles for Peace, 1945-1989 (Chicago and London 1993).
28. See note 6 about the difficulty of establishing the exact nature of that experience in November 1960. It is worth noting that with hindsight Benenson chose to describe this as above all a religious experience. In an interview (12 November 1983) he said: 'I was going through a very active religious period in my life', and that it was a natural impulse to go to a church (AIA, transcript, 49). He also said that he attached considerable importance to the half hour that he spent reflecting in St Martin-in-the-Fields: 'It was then and there that what I have always envisaged to be a collective concern with the suffering of those who strive for change in the world was dedicated to our Lady, Mater Mundi' ('Dedication', 28 February 1989, bound with 1983/4 interview transcripts).
29. AIA, B4, Baker to Benenson, 15 January 1961. On the choice of name for the campaign see AIA, Benenson memoir, 63-71.
30. This was subsequently taken to extremes by Benenson, with allusions to the centenaries of Gladstone's 1861 budget, the death of the Dominican Fr Lacordaire, and the overthrow of King 'Bomba' of Naples: Observer, 28 May 1961.
31. Amnesty, 3 January 1962.
32. Persecution 1961, op. cit., 152.
33. See, for example, the obituary of Clarinda Peto, The Guardian, 19 July 1997.
34. The crisis, the details of which lie beyond the scope of this article, is covered in Power, Against Oblivion, op. cit., 25-39
35. and Larsen, Flame in Barbed Wire, op. cit., 32-5.
36. AIA, transcript of interview with Sean MacBride, 8 June 1984, 21. Similarly, Maurice Cranston described Amnesty as a 'Red Cross of the Cold War' in Human Rights Today (London 1962), 104, fn.
37. AIA, Benenson to Peggy Crane, December 1961. The idea of fundamental change continued to appeal to Benenson, and in the 1980s he established the organization 'Nevermore' committed to the abolition of war (Power, Like Water on Stone, op. cit., 131).
38. Larsen, A Flame in Barbed Wire, op. cit., 25-6.
39. On CND's social composition see Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945-1980 (Cambridge 1994), 127, fn 23.