Like water on stone: the story of Amnesty International

Abstract

Founded forty years ago and almost immediately dubbed of the larger lunacies of our time, International is now the most influential non-governmental organization in the world. With a membership of over one million, its power to influence political debate has become almost legendary and its press releases receive front-page treatment. Scolded and prodded by Amnesty, democratic governments have made human rights a central tenet, if not always the practice, of policy. Even totalitarian governments are wary of its influence. Like Water on Stone tells the story of the organization from day one to the present. In its early days nearly tore itself apart over suspicions that it had been penetrated by the British intelligence agencies; its founder, Peter Benenson, resigned and many predicted its quick demise. Beginning with the personal story of his long-time friendship with one of Amnesty's best-known adopted political prisoners, Olusegun Obasanjo, now the democratically elected president of Nigeria, Jonathan Power looks at Amnesty's work worldwide, including Guatemala, where their personnel risked life and limb to help those facing the death squads, and in the Central African Republic, where they highlighted the horrific massacre of defenceless children. Other chapters examine the attempt to bring General Pinochet to justice, Britain's dirty war in Northern Ireland and one of the black marks in Amnesty's own history, their mistaken support of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Finally, Power focuses on the USA and its failure to address its own widespread human-rights violations. Forty years on, continues to question orthodoxies -even liberal ones. Under Secretary-General Pierre Sane, it has radically reassessed its objectives. The struggle to free political prisoners around the globe goes on, but it also recognizes the need to fight for human rights in whatever form they are denied or abused. Its successes often bring no more reward than that which comes from the constant dripping of water on stone. But as Jonathan Power asserts, Amnesty may not yet have changed the world, but it hasn't left it as it found it either.