hunger strike

hunger strike refusal to eat as a protest against existing conditions. Although most often used by prisoners, others have also employed it. For example, Mohandas Gandhi in India and Cesar Chavez in California fasted as religious penance during otherwise political or economic disputes. An ancient device, the hunger strike was revived in England in the early 20th cent. by militant woman suffragists and became the accepted technique of those sentenced for suffragist activities. The passage of the so-called Cat-and-Mouse Act in 1913, by which the prisoners in ill health due to fasting could be temporarily discharged, ended the forced feeding to which the authorities had resorted. The Franchise Act of 1918 ended the suffragist hunger strikes in England. The hunger strike was used by Irish nationalists in 1912 and again later on. Hunger strikes were used by members of Sinn Féin in 1920, and Terence MacSwiney, lord mayor of Cork, died in a London prison after a fast of 74 days. Thereafter, hunger striking was forbidden by the Sinn Féin. It was used again in the 1970s and 1980s by imprisoned members of the Irish Republican Army. Hunger striking was used between 1917 and 1919 by American woman suffragists and also by conscientious objectors imprisoned in the United States. During the Vietnam War, the Roman Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan used the hunger strike in 1969 at Danbury Prison, Conn., where they had been imprisoned for destroying draft records. In 1970 inmates in California's Soledad Prison used it on a massive scale to protest prison conditions. and in 2000-2001 several hundred leftist inmates in Turkish prisons and others in Turkey used "death fasts" to protest prison conditions. Alleged Taleban and Al Qaeda members held at Guantánamo Bay by the United States since 2002 have also used hunger strikes to protest their imprisonment there.

hun·ger strike • n. a prolonged refusal to eat, carried out as a protest, typically by a prisoner. DERIVATIVES: hun·ger strik·er n.

hunger strike, as a protest tactic by prisoners, has been fancifully traced back to early Irish traditions of shaming an enemy by fasting in protest at his actions (‘fasting upon’ him). A more likely derivation is from the example of the suffragettes (see feminism). On 25 September 1917 Thomas Ashe died after force feeding following a hunger strike in protest at conditions in Mountjoy jail, Dublin. A second strike in 1920 was suspended following the deaths of Terence MacSwiney and two others. Another, in October–November 1923, by republican prisoners still held following the end of the Civil War, collapsed in disarray, with two dead. De Valera's refusal to grant political status to IRA men imprisoned during the Second World War led to the death of two hunger strikers in April 1940 and a third in May 1946. In Northern Ireland the withdrawal of ‘special category’ status from IRA prisoners convicted after March 1976 provoked an immediate ‘dirty protest’, followed by a hunger strike during May–October 1981. The election to parliament of the strike's leader, Bobby Sands, initiated Sinn Féin's entry into electoral politics, while nationalist outrage at the death of Sands and nine others helped ensure some dramatic early successes at the polls.