‘Let them kill us, as we have nothing left to lose. We died when Obama indefinitely detained us. Respect us – or kill us. It’s your choice.’ (Hunger striker Faiz Al Kandari)
16 May marked 100 days since the start of a hunger strike amongst detainees at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. By 20 May, 103 out of the 166 men detained at the facility had joined the action, with 30 of them now being force fed. Force-feeding, in which the hunger strikers are strapped down while a plastic tube is painfully forced down through the nasal passage to the stomach, is considered torture by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
The strike was triggered by at the beginning of February by an increase in invasive body searches, confiscation of detainees’ personal belongings, restrictions on exercise and desecration of the Koran. But underlying the action was desperation at a situation where any kind of access to justice seemed increasingly remote. Of the detainees, 86 (including British resident Shaker Aamer) have been cleared for release, in some cases years ago. The remainder – the majority of whom have never been charged or tried – are ‘indefinitely detained’. 46 are considered ‘too dangerous to release’ but, say the authorities, there is ‘insufficient’ evidence to put them on trial. Many have now been there for over eleven years. Nine detainees have died in custody. As former US Defense Secretary Colin Powell has admitted, 90 per cent of those held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002 were ‘innocents sold for bounty’ after being seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At first the US authorities attempted to play down what was happening. ‘There is no hunger strike’, camp commander Robert Durand told the media in February, calling reports a ‘fabrication’. Then he suggested that only a small number of detainees were involved, or that they were eating snacks in their cells. As the determination of the detainees forced their plight into the world’s media, the camp’s methods have become more vicious. In April, guards attempted to undermine detainees’ solidarity by transferring them from communal to single cells and opened fire when they resisted. Clive Stafford Smith, who represents a number of detainees, told Russia Today that smaller feeding tubes, which can be left in for weeks, had been replaced by large-gauge tubes, agonisingly forced in and pulled out twice a day. Detainees are now subjected to humiliating body cavity searches before they are even allowed to phone their lawyers.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama promised to close the camp. Instead, he enshrined detention without trial even more efficiently than his predecessor George Bush, who designated detainees as ‘enemy combatants’ in order to strip them of protection under the Geneva Conventions. Obama reinstated the discredited military commissions – slated by one military prosecutor as ‘a contrivance to obtain convictions based on evidence that would not be admissible in any civilian or military prosecution anywhere in our nation’. Following the ‘Christmas Day’ bomb plot of 2009, the Obama administration banned the release of Yemeni detainees, who make up two thirds of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Congress then ruled that no detainee can be released without a cast-iron guarantee from the Secretary of Defense that he will not engage in ‘anti-American activities’. Promised reviews of the cases of those facing indefinite detention have never materialised. Earlier this year, the official in charge of beginning the process of closing the camp was transferred and has not been replaced.
A number of the detainees are reported to have lost a third of their body weight. At least three have been hospitalised. Yet in the face of excruciating pain, humiliation and repression, the hunger strike continues and is spreading, exposing to a global audience the illegal and brutal regime at Guantanamo. Protests have taken place in the United States, and outside US embassies around the world. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition demanding the closure of Guantanamo and release of the detainees. On 30 April, Obama was forced to reiterate his promise to close the camp down. Solidarity with the hunger strikers now needs to mirror their commitment and courage to make that promise a reality.
Victory to the hunger strikers! Close down Guantanamo! Release the detainees!
