The power of the hunger strike lies in how the frailty of the body is contrasted with the might of authority

Sharman Apt Russell, Canwest News services 


Within the last few weeks, Bolivian president Evo Morales began and ended a hunger strike as a way to force a vote on election law. Oil workers in Kazakhstan successfully concluded their hunger strike protesting lay-offs. Russian journalists threatened a hunger strike for being illegally dismissed from their jobs. Prisoners in Turkey continued a hunger strike against ill-treatment. Hunger strikes around the world — from Paris to Ottawa — have been held against the Sri Lankan government’s offensive against Tamil secessionists.

What draws so many people working for so many different causes to choose the hunger strike as a form of protest?

For one thing, hunger strikes are historically successful. In medieval Ireland, fasting “on the doorstep” against someone who had wronged you was a legitimate legal action. Similarly in ancient India, “sitting dharna” was a traditional protest against injustice.

The hunger strike was brilliantly revived in the early 20th century by the English suffragettes seeking the vote, followed by American women who also wanted a share of political power, and then by Irish nationalists. In 1920, the lord mayor of Cork, stated the heart of the matter, “It is not those who inflict the most but those who will suffer the most who will conquer.” He died after 74 days without food.

One man or one woman’s hunger strike can literally change the world. Through multiple fasts, Mahatma Gandhi helped shape the India we know today. His most influential fasts were not against the British but his own people as he protested the treatment of Hindu “untouchables” by other Hindus or Hindu-Muslim violence. His fasts were meant to “sting the conscience” of people who cared about his welfare. Importantly, his fasts also became public dramas in which every detail, every sip of water and rise in blood pressure, was noted by the national and international media.

Without doubt, the Tamil strikers in Ottawa and elsewhere are aware of this history. Hunger strikes require a context in which someone cares about your suffering. That someone may not be the government official or the prison guard or the person causing your suffering. Rather, hunger strikes are a way to reach out beyond your immediate situation to the larger world. They are a call for judgment from a larger audience. Someone’s conscience must be stung.

A hunger strike to the death is compelling. What else can the powerless, the weak and disenfranchised, offer up to the world but their own soft bodies? The frailty of that body is contrasted with the might of authority. Yet strangely, as one weakens, the other weakens, too. How can authority or “rules” or government power compete with the willingness of a human being to strip down to nothing, to give away everything, to relinquish all personal power and might, to slowly and painfully die?

The hunger strike is not only a political act; it may be the only political act remaining to an individual, particularly when a striker is in prison or feels helpless for other reasons. A hunger strike may be the ultimate statement of free will — an incongruous symbol of freedom. A hunger striker may feel that in choosing this freedom, she is fulfilling her highest potential as a human being.

For this reason, how we deal with hunger strikes is an important ethical question. Those ethics are still evolving. The controversy does not usually involve free citizens such as the protesters in Ottawa, but prisoners of the state. In 1992, the World Medical Association confirmed its prohibition against force-feeding prisoners — a procedure which almost always requires physical violence, restraint, and a tube running through the nose into the stomach. (The early suffragettes likened their experiences of force-feeding to rape.) The British Medical Association, however, states that prison doctors have the final decision on when to force-feed.

In America, prisoners can also be force-fed under certain circumstances. America’s Department of Defense allows health professionals to force-feed detainees — such as those at Guantanamo Bay — when a hunger strike threatens their health. But a 2006 United Nations Human Rights Council report stated that the force-feeding of these detainees amounted to torture.

Apparently, we still have some contradictions to resolve — and decisions to make.

Death by self-starvation is not an easy one, and no one would choose it lightly. In a fast that includes water but no food, the turning point often comes at 40 days. The striker may no longer be able to walk, see, or hear. There may be considerable pain from lesions in the central and peripheral nervous system. The heart is failing. There may be “skin breakdown.” The kidneys shut down. The brain is resilient to the end, but the final hours can be accompanied by what doctors call “global confusion.” (Because a hunger strike can lead to mental incompetency, the World Medical Association suggests that strikers fill out a statement of non-intervention that covers all possible circumstances.)

Of course, hunger strikes are not always to the death and not always so serious. People fast for eccentric reasons (No, I won’t pay my income tax! No, you can’t make me mow my lawn!) and there are such things as round-robin hunger strikes, in which strikers fast for a number of days, until another striker takes over, and so forth. The cause promoted by a hunger strike is not necessarily or inherently noble. The very act of hunger striking can be seen as a form of emotional blackmail.

Hunger strikes reached their hey-day in the 20th-century. One historian documented more than 200 strikes in 52 countries between 1972 and 1982, resulting in the deaths of 23 strikers, including the 10 Irish prisoners in 1981 whose story is grimly documented in the current movie Hunger.


Sharman Apt Russell is the author of Hunger: An Unnatural History.

Ottawa Citizen