Religion, Torture and the Liberation of God

Mario I Aguilar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781844658350
• eBook ISBN: 9781317503088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

If God can be used by the powerful to justify violence in the name of order, he can also be used by the weak to illuminate the position of the victims of political conflict. Religion, Torture and the Liberation of God explores the theological possibilities of a God who is a prisoner and a victim of torture. The book relocates God to the horrors of the military abuse of human rights in Chile and the systematic rape of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Aguilar argues that this theological exercise offers us new ways of understanding the abuse of power, whether it be the clerical abuse of children, violence against women, or homophobia. This examination of torture and rape becomes, through a theology of praxis and compliance, an examination of solidarity, love and affection. The book concludes with an exploration of the possibilities of a tortured God who liberates.

1 The Act of Torture and the Praxis of Theology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315715131-2

The act of torture seems to be associated with a turbulent 20th century where two world wars, the Vietnam War, the Nazi concentration camps, the Cambodian killing fields, the Chinese cultural revolution, the military regimes in Latin America, the Rwanda genocide and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans remind a captive audience throughout the world of savage times of uncertainty and cruelty. Thus, if previously I asked if God was tortured in the Villa Grimaldi of Chile, today one could ask if God was being tortured at Guantanamo Bay. For the sitz im leben of this question has not changed today because most human beings and most members of Christian communities have not experienced arrest, kidnapping, beatings, torture and the fear of not knowing where they were. Thus, torture remains an experience of a limited number of human beings.

The subject of torture remained an indecent one that could not be talked about after the U.S. 9/11 because no other country or non-U.S. citizens could speak any longer about suffering and victimization. 9/11 became central to the U.S. victims and other calendars were erased; they became the only victims because they had the power of the press and because they were nationals of a powerful country. Jon Sobrino has noted that in Spain 3/11 exists ‘but 10/7 (2001) and 3/30 (2003), when the Western nations bombed Afghanistan and Iraq, do not exist’, concluding that ‘the Third World does not have a “calendar”; it does not exist’. ¹ Once again discussions on history, memory and torture became colonized in a way that chronologically related events such as the Chilean military coup of 11 September 1973 became forgotten, thus burying the possible memories of injustice and torture where U.S. personnel was also involved not as victims but as perpetrators of suffering and human rights abuses.

Following from such correlative dates and in a very insightful analysis of remembering and forgetting, Asma Barlas inscribed and commented on the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman's writings in which he reminded his readers that,

During the past 28 years, 11 September has been a date of mourning, for me and millions of others, ever since that Tuesday in 1973 when Chile lost its democracy in a military coup, that day when death irrevocably entered our lives and changed us forever. And now, almost three decades later, the malignant gods of random history have wanted to impose upon the same country that we blamed for the coup that dreadful date, again a Tuesday, again an 11 September filled with death. ²

Barlas questions why these two events of 11 September are not remembered together; the answer is clear for her: ‘it would require the US not only to acknowledge its own 9/11 against Chile, but also to engage in this process of mutual recognition’; in Dorfman's words it would require to ‘look into the mirror of our common humanity’. ³ Of course, the idea of a common humanity springs out in every conference given by the 14th Dalai Lama and those involved in a dialogue of a common humanity. ⁴ Torture destroys the possibilities of a common humanity and it is a practice that contradicts completely the values of the Kingdom of God, the values, attitudes and actions of Jesus of Nazareth. ⁵

Until the U.S. opened the prisoner's camp of Guantanamo Bay in the island of Cuba, all interrogations under torture were associated with deviant forces in the mostly third and fourth world simply because all U.S. and allied interrogations were under absolute secrecy and personnel never talked about it in public and they were bound to secrecy. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall opened the possibilities for media scrutiny on civil liberties and army practices that previously were always under the confidentiality of national security acts and national security risks associated with the Cold War. At the beginning of the 21st century and after prisoners at Guantanamo Bay spoke to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International of torture techniques such as ‘waterboarding’, the general public started being concerned about torture in a way that they had not been concerned at the time of the Vietnam War. In 2008 the American writer Christopher Hitchens, writing for the magazine Vanity Fair, allowed himself to be waterboarded and spoke at length to the media about it with major interviews being carried out by Jeremy Paxman of the BBC and the issue being discussed in the BBC prime-time program Newsnight. ⁶ At that time a long discussion had taken place after criticism towards the U.S. administration regarding their use of waterboarding and the assertion by the U.S. government that waterboarding was not torture. Regardless of the U.S. silencing of such discussions the fact was that torture, the realities of torture and the kidnapping of suspects through rendition flights, by which the suspects were not accounted for and were tortured outside the jurisdiction of the courts, national and international, had arrived as a topic of discussion in the public domain. The U.S. with the help of some of its allies was clearly implicated in the kidnapping of human beings and their interrogation outside the realms of national or international law, a practice that was not different than those of the Pinochet regime in Chile during the 1970s.

THE SILENCE OF THEOLOGY

Despite these developments within the public discussions of torture in the 21st century most human beings have not asked theological questions or established divine communication with God in torture chambers, prison camps or detention centres outside the laws of a nation state. Thus, the factual elements of torture and the subsequent reflection on God's presence, God's absence and the theological reflections of one or the other have not been theologically explored whereas the connection between the tortured, the cross and the Eucharist has been elucidated, arguing, as William Cavanaugh did, that within ‘liturgies of fear, the state thus shows itself as both menace and protector’ so that ‘to be truly omnipotent the state must be both the taker and the giver of life’. ⁷

Following from the methodology of liberation theology, whereby theology is a ‘second act’, praxis is first, this chapter looks at the act of torturing and the liberating praxis arising out of this act of non-duality with the possibilities of theologizing that arise within this action-reflection-action. Praxis within this theological context becomes ‘a response to a word that constantly summons us to emerge, to take the road, to go on a pilgrimage to a new land’. ⁸ For if one is to argue that God was being tortured in the torture chamber the methodological assumptions for addressing such materiality of salvation requires setting the methodological scenario for such assumptions and such theological scenario, both criteria critically applied in the last part of this work.

THEOLOGY AS MEMORY

Gustavo Gutiérrez has defined theology as a ‘second act’ by the theologian and praxis as the ‘first act’. In simple words the act of theologizing follows the theologian involvement with a human reality and a human history because history becomes not only the scenario for God's action but a clear tool for the act of theologizing. In order to ask questions about the presence or absence of God in the torture chamber (the ‘second act’), one must reconstruct the necessary conditions and methodological considerations that are implied within theological praxis (the ‘first step’) and the conditions within history that precede Christian practice and that are present in the actions of humans within the particular history of states such as Chile, South Africa, Rwanda or Northern Ireland in the past and Syria, Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo or the island of Cuba today. For no reflection on God's presence within a particular human event can be discussed without knowing the historical details of such moments of human interaction and divine presence. To discuss God's presence in a torture chamber is not dissimilar from the journalistic work of a political or human rights activist who is trying to discover, in order to tell, what happens within the secluded places of detention and torture. This knowing about something is not an intellectual exercise but it brings involvement and risk to the one discovering what lies in secret. One is reminded of what happened to Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek, who despite being part of a middle-class family and of the same clan as President Bashar al-Assad (the Alawi clan), found herself taken by the police for posting writings against the regime on the internet. ⁹ After being slapped in an office they showed her a cell where young Syrian demonstrators were lying in their own blood and excrements. This is praxis, the act of knowing and getting involved, a utopian or gospel action of involvement within human history that can have terrible consequences. It is the question posed by onlookers to Peter in the Gospels after Jesus's arrest; however, three times Peter denies any association with the prisoner in case the Romans would arrest him as well (Mark 14:66–72).

After praxis there is reflection on what happened, a process of theologizing or negatives about human actions and God's involvement or dis-involvement with them. Samar Yazbek theologized about the Syrian national god, Bashar al-Assad, realizing that the security forces were burning pharmacies after the protests started in March 2011 in order to avoid the possible treatment of the wounded protestors. ¹⁰ Thus, the police cell or the concentration camp must be looked at first as traces of human and divine history within the central question of every historian: what happened? For the chain from history to God in the torture chamber starts with the act of kidnapping or arresting of a person by agents of the state or by groups opposed to the state. A citizen is arrested and vanishes, she is not seen by others and even when the whereabouts of a person are known because witnesses saw a prisoner in a particular detention centre the state negates the arrest of such person. Some of those arrested, in fact the majority of those arrested, are released later into society or are charged or sent into exile but some people do not return and become part of the disappeared. Thus, the act of torture as human history becomes an active component of suffering and the suffering of the poor, making considerable negative changes in human and social relations and the relation of human beings with God. For if God were not present within the act of torture and the human surroundings of a torture chamber one would have to ask why God permits the suffering of the victims by others.

MEMORY AND THE ACT OF THEOLOGIZING

The act of torture, the narrative of that moment between the torturer and the victims can only be ‘witnessed’ and remotely understood by reading the testimonies of those tortured, their memories of hell that they have passed onto the public sphere through their narratives for asylum processes, court appearances or through the testimonies needed in order to bring to trial those who have tortured and have committed crimes against humanity.

I would argue that it is within those legal testimonies and those memoirs that we can attempt to look at the presence or absence of God theologically. Those narratives cannot describe the actual experience of rejection or the nightmares that haunt the victims of torture but within a legal framework they can be trusted because they have been ratified under oath and are fully accessible to us with few exceptions. Those exceptions are the conversations between the victims and their therapists (psychologists and psychiatrists), conversations developed in the context of extreme trauma and mental conditions that affect the victims in their attempt to reconstruct their lives after they have been tortured. Those conversations remain private and confidential whereas legal records for the courts are public. Those legal records become available to the courts and they become scriptural testimonies within the second act of theologizing. The memories of torture create uneasiness in the reader but they are the realities of broken lives, of those whom Jon Sobrino has termed victims; it takes courage to read them and after reading them the reader will never be the same person again.

TORTURE AS A HUMAN PHENOMENON

One of the ways of exploring testimonies about torture that cannot be contested is to examine the findings of a national commission on torture, for example, the Chilean commission that under the leadership of the late Bishop Sergio Valech investigated cases of torture during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). It is a fact that globally there were many Truth and Reconciliation Commissions but none of them dealt solely with torture. Among them the most prominent and successful Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the South African one led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; however, several Latin American countries held one. ¹¹ The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unique in that murderers and torturers confessed and narrated their own crimes in public, through the media of television and as a result escaped penal sentences and were forgiven by the state. ¹² However, most Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have gathered confidential and private testimonies by those who were victims of atrocities in order to seek equity on issues of national truths, contested memories and in some cases state compensation for the physical and psychological damage inflicted by state agents on political opponents. Rwanda, where in 1994 almost a million people were killed, has not had a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One of the reasons has been the fact that current government functionaries also stand accused of human rights violations and crimes against humanity including President Paul Kagame, who in 1994 was a commander of the incoming rebel forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RFP).

My preferred way of understanding torture as a social ill and as a deviation and negation of Christianity is to examine the history of a country so that torture does not become an isolated social or political policy but is understood in the context of other kinds of violence and of processes that in some cases go back to colonial times. For this work I have chosen a country in Africa that despite the fact of being known as the world capital of rape and its related torture has been a predominantly Roman Catholic country due to its colonial past as a colony of Belgium. It is my argument that in order to understand a theology of torture and the presence or absence of God one has to understand history because it is in history that the Lord of history provides grace and presence, despite the conditions of inhumanity and violence. In choosing the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and its history of rape I am also providing consciously a history of women because through rape women have been the most significant victims of torture at a globalized level.

THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (DRC)

From all social tragedies and all places of horror in the world the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains, despite this human tragedy, one of the most successful places of Christian colonial evangelization. Thus, in April 2010 Margot Wallstrom, the United Nations representative on sexual violence in conflict, urged the UN Security Council to press the DRC to uphold the protection of women labelling the DRC as ‘the rape capital of the world’. ¹³ According to the official figures, more than 8,000 women were raped during fighting in the year 2009 and since the start of a very complex war labelled as ‘the world's worst war’ whereby five million people have died. ¹⁴

The Democratic Republic of Congo, previously known as Zaire, was before colonial times known as the Kongo Kingdom. King Leopold II of the Belgians claimed most of the Kongo Kingdom in 1876 and in 1908 the territory was taken over by the Belgians with the name of the Belgian Congo. In June 1960 the Belgian Congo achieved independence as Congo-Kinshasa, renamed Zaire in 1971, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. As the Belgians left the country in 1960 Patrice Lumumba was appointed Prime Minister and Joseph Kasabuvu became president. In 1965 Joseph Mobutu led a military coup that replaced the government of President Kasabuvu and Prime Minister Moise Tshombe. Lumumba had already been dismissed as prime minister in September 1960, and arrested and killed in February 1961. In 1971 Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and named himself as Mobutu Sese Seko. The Katanga Region became Shaba and the River Congo became the River Zaire. In 1996–1997 Tutsi rebels took over much of eastern Zaire while Mobutu was abroad seeking medical treatment. In May 1997 Tutsi rebels and other rebel groups took over Kinshasa and the country was renamed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prolegomena
• Introduction: The Theologizing of Indecent Torturing
• 1 The Act of Torture and the Praxis of Theology
• 2 Torture and Beatitudes in Chile
• 3 Theological Reflections on Dungeons and Caves
• 4 A Tortured God That Liberates
• 5 The Hermeneutics of Torture and G. C. Spivak
• Index