Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Helen Rae Bamber, OBE
Oration given on 10 July 1998
Chancellor: The Senate of the University has resolved
that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred on Helen Bamber.
Students and teachers in universities are privileged people because their
tasks include recording and studying the best or most remarkable human
behaviour, as scholars of the arts, social sciences or life sciences. This
attractive work can all too easily close off academic attention to the worst and
most remarkably horrible human behaviour. So universities owe a duty also to
study and publicise the wickedness of the world. Poverty, exploitation,
hatred, terror, war and genocide must all find a place in the pictures of the
world which the public pay us to make and to keep for posterity.
Such a strongly social science university as this one would hardly fail in
this duty: although the duty is not confined to social sciences. We
try to go rather further than most other universities, with our special efforts
to study, publish, and teach within our Human Rights Centre and also to give
practical help in our Children's Legal Centre. It is this specially
important aspect of the university’s work which we register today when
welcoming one of Britain’s leading human rights figures. She is also one
of the world’s most prominent and respected campaigners against the very worst
type of human suffering, alongside poverty, famine or war: deliberate -
usually coldly calculated - torture.
Helen Bamber is the founder and director of the Medical Foundation for the
Care of Victims of Torture, based in London. It is one of the world’s
leading specialist agencies on this terrible subject and its being British is
just one example of this country’s wider achievement in the human rights field.
So much concern and expertise among non-governmental organisations (the ‘NGOs’)
about the world’s suffering and tyranny is based in London - Amnesty
International’s world headquarters is another major example.
Indeed, Helen Bamber created the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims
of Torture thirteen years ago as a specialist spin-off from Amnesty
International. She saw the need to go beyond the monitoring, political
protest and diplomatic lobbying against so many governments’ use of torture by
providing individual care. The victims need personal help - medical and
psychological - as well as political representation in such international bodies
as the United Nations.
The Medical Foundation has 76 paid full-time or part-time staff of whom 41
provide medical and clinical services. Another 67 clinicians (mostly
retired from practice) work as volunteers. It sounds a lot but the demand
is high and rising. In their first year, thirteen years ago, they saw 79
patients. Last year, they accepted 2,210 new ones, from 91 different
countries, in addition to those already registered. Since 1986, some
13,500 torture survivors have been referred to the Foundation.
Helen Bamber has devoted her life to the care of the victims of horror and
violence. She grew up before the Second World War as the only child of
Jewish parents. Her parents took in German refugees and her father fully
shared his fears for the future with his daughter. She felt painfully
close to Nazism, although living in London. At nineteen, she trained to
work in occupied Germany and cared for victims of the Belsen concentration camp.
In 1947 she returned to England, to work with orphan children, some of whom had
done forced labour in the very gas chambers and ovens at Auschwitz. She
quickly learned that suffering of this order requires expression:
storytelling or making drawings. She has said: “It lessens the
madness for them: their sense of a mad world. After a while you gain
a strength from listening to the stories, a strength to share them”.
She volunteered for nearly twenty-five years at Amnesty International and
joined the Amnesty British Section’s Group No. 1, in Hampstead, as well as its
medical treatment section.
Her Foundation has its roots in Amnesty’s medical group which has led the
international campaign to remind the world’s doctors of their responsibilities
in the face of government and police torture. Most torture of both
political and alleged criminal prisoners is at least semi-official. The
torturers are trained; the limits are cynically known; official army, prison or
police doctors are sometimes on hand to revive insensible prisoners, to treat or
disguise torture injuries and to lie about how obvious injuries were produced.
The Foundation offers reports to the United Nations on some of the roughly
one-half of the world’s governments (about 90 out of 180) which promote or
tolerate torture. Our colleague in the School of Law here at Essex,
Professor Nigel Rodley, is the official UN Special Rapporteur on torture and
other maltreatment of prisoners and therefore follows the Foundation’s reports
closely.
Her personal commitment is prodigious. Internationally, she is
associated with anti-torture efforts in Palestine and Israel and with
rehabilitation and reconciliation involving women and their families in Belfast,
Sri Lanka and Latin America. In 1993 she was declared European Woman of
Achievement. She was honoured last year with the OBE.
One of her long-standing ex-Japanese prisoner of war clients, Eric Lomax, has
written about her in his book, The Railwayman, which is his memoir of the
Japanese forced labour Burma railway atrocity during the Second World War.
The key to Helen Bamber’s personality and counselling method, he wrote, is that
she is “utterly unhurried”. While she is with a client she is wholly
attuned and devoted to that person, their memories, terrors and hopes. It
is a wonderful gift, wonderfully shared with some of the most wretched of our
fellow human beings. And she has been doing it for much of the last half
century since arriving at Belsen at the age of twenty.
Yet she has said in one interview not long ago: “There’s nothing very
special about me ... I knew that I would become depressed if I sat back and did
nothing about repression and torture.”
Everyone who knows her story will also know what to think of that
disclaimer. There is indeed something very special about her. It is
our privilege to have her at our Ceremony today; to salute her noble cause; and
to confer the mark of our deepest admiration and respect.
Chancellor, I present to you Helen Rae Bamber.