Hunger strikers tortured at Guantanamo. UN report calls for closing U.S. prison

When I see the images of the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, I feel a deep sense of shame. It encapsulates the failure of all the elements of my multifaceted identity.

I am a Westernized Arab, possibility the most Westernized Arab that I know. As a friend once put it, I have an Arab heart and an English mind. Most of my values, thoughts and beliefs are a product of this mix: The Arab knee-jerk emotional reaction backed by pragmatic English intellectualization. Except that it is more complicated. My Arab heritage is mixed.

My mother was Syrian, a product of Syrian independence, a woman who believed in Arab nationalism and who marched in the streets as a child. My father was a Saudi diplomat born out of a family whose origins are Kurdish, from Diyarbakir in modern-day Turkey.

He was the quintessential diplomat who could look at any political issue and dissect national interest. His personal beliefs were far more liberal than those of the country and government whose interests he fervently defended and promoted. But he could see the general picture, he could take the long-term lens. This meant believing in principles and institutions that in the long run would provide the tools for humanity to evolve.

My cultural identity is the polar opposite of my ancestral identity. I am European. I learned history and geography in French schools. I learned economics and psychology at British universities. I witnessed the machinery of international relations from a short stint as an intern at the European Commission in Brussels. I rather naively believe in the European dream.

Until I see the images of Camp Delta. When I look at those images and read of the conditions under which the inmates are kept, I am faced by disillusion. All those lofty values I bought into, they become meaningless. I feel like the child who believed in the tooth fairy. This was the kind of thing I told my Arab friends did not happen in the West.

The camp is a place where humanity has been stripped bare. The inmates have had their humanity peeled off layer-by-layer, while the guards have become robocops. The strongest idea the images reinforce is that there is now a subclass of human being and it so happens that this subclass is Muslim and predominantly Arab. Only citizens from “civilized” countries, like the US or the UK have human rights, the others have undefined rights, the rights of “enemy combatants”.

The Bush administration has the impunity to preach democracy and freedom to the world while blindly forging ahead with a vision of the world where the ends justify the means. But while they may have created Guantanamo, we have all colluded with them.

The British government reinforced the two-tier human citizenship notion by only fighting for the rights of its own citizens in the camp and not even those of long-term British citizens who have British wives and children. Tony Blair for all his international statesman persona and talk of American influence showed just what happens when a poodle shares a kennel with a bulldog. Brave Angela Merkel said all the right words and said them right there on Capitol Hill, but what good could it do? As for the UN, Guantanamo has yet again exposed its impotence. The International Committee of the Red Cross — the only international organization that has been given complete access to the camp — has shown its limitations. By being constrained only to divulge the results of its visits to the Americans, it is almost powerless to act.

And what of the Arab world? Can we really cry foul at detentions without trial or inhumane conditions in prisons?

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, has rejected outright the findings of this week’s report by the UN Commission on Human Rights. He stated unequivocally that inmates were treated humanely.

How frightening that the definition of humane treatment now extends to keeping prisoners in open air wire cages, shackled and chained, hooded with their eyes in goggles and their ears in headphones so that they cannot see, hear or walk. That force-feeding hunger strikers has become humane, as has exposing inmates to extremes of heat and cold and leaving them in prolonged isolation. How depressing that keeping prisoners detained without trial for four years should seem perfectly acceptable to an administration that dresses itself in the glory of the American Constitution.

McClellan is right though. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is humane compared to the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib for instance or in the secret prisons where the CIA holds those it considers most dangerous.

The conditions of the inmates at Guantanamo is merciful compared to that of thousands of prisoners languishing in jails throughout the developing world, but is that now the yardstick for humane?

When in January 2002 the first images of Camp X-ray emerged it represented a personal turning point for me. When I saw those pictures, I found myself identifying not with those who held the power but with those who were on their knees. It was the first time I saw myself as part of a minority, until then I had thought of myself simply as an outsider, neither British in Britain nor truly Saudi in Saudi Arabia. What Guantanamo did and Abu Ghraib compounded was instill in me a belief that by being Muslim and Arab I was now under threat.

If someone like me who is the anti-thesis of an Al-Qaeda sympathizer found herself identifying with the men in orange and screaming from within, what effect did those images have on those with a predisposition to sympathize with the terrorists?

Surely if the Americans are serious about destroying Al-Qaeda, then keeping that camp open simply serves to do the opposite. If these men are terrorists, try them. If there is no evidence against them, set them free. That after all is what my Western education taught me.

ikurdi [at] yahoo.co.uk

http://arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=78093&d=20&m=2&y=2006