During 1993, twenty-one people were tortured to death in Turkish prisons. Figures of this kind are largely meaningless, but the casual brutality from which they died and the obvious indifference of the Turkish government to world disapproval are not. Four of them, according to officials, died of heart attacks; five committed suicide – one by jumping from a four-foot-high water tank. Three were children. Very little effort has been made by the Turkish authorities to investigate these irregular deaths, even though the coalition government came to power in 1991 promising to bring all torture to an end. Kate Millett’s timing for The Politics of Cruelty is excellent: if the disregard of most governments for international opinion when it comes to human rights needs fresh confirmation, it is to be found in President Clinton’s recent embarrassing capitulation to China over its most-favoured-nation status. For torture continues to be widely documented in China’s prisons and labour camps, and China’s newspapers continue to carry advertisements for torture instruments.

Torture, carried out by the state on its citizens, is one of the most abhorred and most frequently denounced of all human rights abuses. Unlike ‘disappearances’, in which the lack of all knowledge about the missing person leads to confusion and doubt, there is nothing ambiguous about it. Torture is the ultimate act of state power, and to be arrested knowing that torture will follow is to know absolute helplessness. It makes dignity virtually impossible.

Torture is also the violation most legislated against. Even Tsar Alexander I, a man not renowned for the liberality of his views, issued an edict, in September 1801, saying that ‘the very name of torture, bringing shame and reproach on mankind, should be erased from human memory’. Few have phrased it better. Since the turn of the century, its total prohibition has been enshrined in countless conventions and international agreements, and seventy-one countries have ratified the UN Convention against torture. Yet many of them, like Turkey and China, who have both ratified, continue to torture just the same. Well over a hundred countries, some two-thirds of all nations, are believed to tolerate, if not actively encourage, torture in their prisons today. There is probably more torture in the world in the 1990s than at any time since the Middle Ages.

Not surprising, then, that the literature on the subject is growing all the time. Prisoners emerge from detention in India, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia and Mexico with accounts of beatings, electric shocks, burns, submergings in water tanks, mock executions and rape, and with a new vocabulary of pain – the ‘parrot’s perch’ or the ‘ice box’. Every story is painful, and every story is in some way compelling, for, as Millett points out, tales of torture are impossible to hear without asking how one would have endured the suffering oneself, and also without marvelling at the power of human beings to survive – and to survive intact, remaining, as Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim and many others have affirmed, a ‘human being’. Millett’s book is full of these descriptions of pain, terror, longing for death – and endurance.

As a history of the spread of torture in the twentieth century, The Politics of Cruelty makes for a gloomy read. By analysing at some length the conditions under which torture is legitimised and thrives, as it did when the military came to power in Brazil in the 1960s, Millett argues that the reinstatement of torture in so many parts of the world is a depressing return to the absolute power of the state, and that it cancels out the fundamental reforms of the last two hundred years. The fact that it has no legal backing today, that its use rests only on powers conferred under martial law and emergency regulations, makes it more rather than less frightening. She is rightly passionate in her denunciation of America in helping train and set up the machinery of torture for Latin America’s ‘dirty wars’ in the 1960s and 1970s – there is a terrible account of prisoners being used in lectures as guinea pigs for practical demonstrations – warning against the ‘medicalisation’ of torture taking place today. Victims, whose sufferings have been turned into a ‘syndrome’, are sent to seek not legal redress but medical care, not justice but healing. The politics of cruelty, as she observes, must not be ‘banalised into a “case” … telescoped, trivialised, shrunken’.

However, The Politics of Cruelty contains what I believe to be a dangerous flaw: the definition of ‘torture’ is never made clear. In among the chapters on Brazil, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland, and the essays they spark off on the relationship between eroticism, male domination and torture, comes a long passage about Mark Mathabane, a South African who later wrote of his experiences in Kaffir Boy. Mark was five when police raided his township. His father was away and his mother fled, leaving Mark, his sister Florah and George, still a baby, in the dark. Though the police never actually entered the house, the sense of terror, with the baby crying and Mark trying to silence him under a blanket, is acute. This is certainly state violence of an intolerable kind – but it is not torture. Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s extermination camps were both places of extreme cruelty, but they were not about torture either. Where torture did take place, it was all part of a process leading towards death. As with the word ‘genocide’, which has been weakened by years of casual usage until it has lost a resonance it so desperately needs in Rwanda, the word ‘torture’ is in danger of being weakened. Only by making it very precise can the law begin to address it.

Torture, like the use of ‘disappearance’ as a way of dealing with political opponents, has proved extremely hard to eradicate once endemic in a country. The secrecy in which it flourishes both intensifies the terror and serves to protect the torturers: if the state denies what is happening, what can anyone do? Millett embarked on The Politics of Cruelty hoping that by examining torture in all its meanings and modern forms some solution to its proliferation might emerge. She ends by experiencing a ‘certain futility’. Not, however, total futility, for one antidote, she suggests, lies in the power of the ‘witness’, people like Nien Chang who stood up to her Chinese tormentors during five years of the Cultural Revolution, or Alicia Partnoy, who survived several months in the hands of the Argentinian paramilitary forces. In this context, Henri Alleg’s account of being ambushed and tortured by French parachutists at the height of the Algerian war is important: Alleg survived to write a book, The Question, which was immediately banned in France, but not before it had unleashed a storm of protest among Frenchmen and – women revolted by what they had learnt of French atrocities in Algeria. The power of The Question lay in the fact that it was written in the first person: Alleg was a witness to his own torture.

That was a victory of sorts; torture in Algeria was curbed because the French people refused to collude with it any longer. Another hopeful note lies in a solution increasingly adopted today, the setting up of nongovernmental human rights organisations to lobby, campaign and publicise. The Human Rights Conference that took place in Vienna in the summer of 1992, the largest such gathering ever held, will be remembered more for its success in holding the line against governments intent on weakening the machinery of human rights than for any gains in enforcement. But it will also be remembered for the astonishing number of nongovernmental organisations, many of them from remote areas of the world, who came to forge common cause against the misuse of power by states. It is with them, as Kate Millett observes, that the best hopes in the war against torture now lie.