Injustice Is Served
By Terry Stoller
Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to
Defend Freedom'
By Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo
New Ambassadors Theater (London)
[Note: The London production of Guantanamo,
reviewed here, transferred from the Tricycle Theatre to the West
End in June 2004. A restaged production, with a new cast including
Kathleen Chalfant, opened on Aug. 26, 2004, at the Culture Project
in New York City, 45 Bleecker St. Box Office: 212-253-9983. The
photo above depicts the New York production.]
Since the mid-1990s, the Tricycle Theatre
in north London has demonstrated a commitment to documentary theatre.
In Britain, where the content of government inquiries has not
commonly been available to the public on television, the Tricycle
has taken up the mantle and staged edited versions of a number
of investigations. Artistic director Nicolas Kent, who believes
that "all art can significantly influence political and social
change,"* has presented tribunal plays on both international and
local issues.
In 1994 Half the Picture was a
re-enactment of sections of the Scott Inquiry into the sale of
arms to Iraq. The Colour of Justice (1999) uncovered
racism and negligence in the police investigation into the murder
of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man who was attacked by a gang
of white youths in south London in 1993. The play is based on
the transcripts of an inquiry launched five years after Lawrence's
murder, for which no one had been convicted. By 2003, weapons
and Iraq were again under discussion at a tribunal. The Tricycle's
Justifying War, done that year, is based on testimony
at the Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the suicide
of British weapons expert David Kelly, whose name had been leaked
as a source for a BBC report that accused the government of exaggerating
Iraq's weapons capabilities as a rationale for waging war against
Iraq.
In January 2004, not waiting for a government
inquiry into the human-rights violations of the British detainees
who were sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Tricycle commissioned
a play and began its own inquiry. Victoria Brittain, formerly
a journalist for The Guardian, and novelist Gillian Slovo
collected testimony from released detainees and their family members,
lawyers and human-rights workers. They supplemented the interviews
with correspondence from detainees, news conferences and lecture
material. The result is Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend
Freedom,' a chilling play whose subtitle is an ironic reference
to a sign to the prison camp.
Through verbatim accounts, the play relates
the circumstances of the detention of four men. Wahab and Bisher
al-Rawi, brothers whose family had emigrated from Iraq to Britain,
traveled to Gambia on a business venture to open a mobile peanut-oil
plant. Jamal al-Harith started out from Manchester to Pakistan
for a religious tour. Moazzam Begg went with his family from Birmingham
to Afghanistan in hopes of setting up a school there. Three Muslim
British citizens and a resident--all were picked up as terrorist
suspects. Wahab was released in Gambia after almost a month of
detention and interrogation. Bisher, Jamal and Moazzam wound up
at Guantánamo Bay. In the course of the play, we meet Ruhel Ahmed,
a young man from the Midlands who was also at Guantánamo, through
his letters home and testimony from his father. After more than
two years, Jamal al-Harith and Ruhel Ahmed were able to return
home. Moazzam Begg and Bisher al-Rawi, a voice-over announces
at the end of the play, are being held indefinitely at Guantánamo
Bay.
The accounts include unsubstantiated accusations,
guilt by association and being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. The al-Rawi brothers were detained and questioned by the
Gambian secret service and American officials about, among other
issues related to terrorism, their association with Islamic cleric
and alleged al-Qaeda leader Abu Qatada, a friend whose children
they had taken swimming. Wahab was eventually released, but his
property worth a quarter of a million dollars had "disappeared."
Bisher, an Iraqi citizen (when the family left Iraq they kept
the youngest son's citizenship in case there was a chance to recover
the property they had left behind), and Wahab's Jordanian business
partner wound up at Guantánamo.
Jamal's horror story began in October 2001
on a truck ride to Turkey, his new destination after he was warned
that the British might be unwelcome in Pakistan. The truck was
hijacked in Pakistan by Afghanis, and he was handed over to the
Taliban, who imprisoned him in Afghanistan, accusing him of being
part of a British special-forces military group. When America
bombed Afghanistan and the Taliban government fell, he was freed
but was soon transported by the Americans to a jail at a base
in Kandahar, interrogated about his life in England, and eventually
sent to Guantánamo.
Moazzam Begg's father tells the story of
"the best son of mine." Moazzam, who his father says always had
an altruistic nature, moved to Afghanistan because he wanted to
help the people there. He had difficulty obtaining approval from
the Taliban government to open a school, so instead he began to
install hand pumps for people who didn't live near a water source.
When America attacked Afghanistan, Moazzam took his family to
Pakistan, where he was arrested by Pakistani and American soldiers,
sent to Bagram air base outside Kabul, and later to Guantánamo.
After a year in custody, Moazzam wrote to his father: "After all
this time I still don't know what crime I am supposed to have
committed."
The traumas for the men pile up--endless
interrogations, censored and unsent correspondence, various methods
of being led around in chains, solitary confinements in a freezing,
bare metal cell, confessions made out of desperation. (In a stroke
of luck, Ruhel's confession to having been at an al-Farouq training
camp in 2000 was discredited, because, as MI5 discovered when
it checked the story for the U.S., he was working in a Currys
store in Birmingham at that time.) We hear testimony from lawyers
and human-rights activists who present powerful arguments on behalf
of the detainees, both on legal and humanitarian grounds. Lord
Justice Johan Steyn, in excerpts from a lecture that frames the
play, decries the U.S. practice of holding the detainees in the
military camp, thus putting them beyond the protection of any
courts. A brother of a Sept. 11 victim wonders why the American
government, with its abundance of resources to fight a war on
terrorism, hasn't used those resources in processing the detainees'
cases more quickly. When Donald Rumsfeld enters the scene, he
fends off questions at a news conference with imperious responses,
making distinctions between prisoners of war and unlawful combatants,
who, he claims, are not classified as prisoners but as detainees.
Indeed classifications became a strategy for skewing statistics
at Guantánamo: the number of suicide attempts dropped off when
they were reclassified by the military as Manipulative Self-Injurious
Behavior.
Much of the play is presented in direct
address to the audience, the character either standing or seated.
On a claustrophobic set, crowded with tables, chairs, cots, prison
cages, co-directors Nicolas Kent and Sacha Wares use spare staging
in which every movement counts. As detainees are said to be transferred
to Guantánamo, we watch them put on the requisite orange jumpsuits.
We see them exercise to keep in shape and stave off boredom. The
piece is punctuated with a call to prayers, announced over tinny
loudspeakers, and we see the detainees exercise one of the few
rights that hasn't been taken away from them: the right to pray.
It's through the practice of religious rites that we witness the
deterioration of Moazzam Begg. In an early letter home, Moazzam
writes from Bagram air base of having read the Koran almost seven
times and memorized many of its passages. Months later, he is
upset that he has nothing to do except read the Koran. At the
end of the play, now at Guantánamo, Moazzam, who has been chained
and held in solitary confinement, no longer responds to the call
for prayers. A final image is of Moazzam, beautifully acted by
Paul Bhattacharjee, seated on a cot, staring ahead blankly, while
those around him perform their devotions.
When I saw the play in London's West End,
I overheard a conversation during the intermission. An American
woman was informing her companions that Americans would not be
able to understand why the men had left England for such places
as Gambia, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Indeed my suspicions were aroused,
and I wondered why these men weren't trying to make a life for
themselves in Britain, why they didn't feel at home there. The
play offers a hint in Mr. Begg's story of his son's harassment
by the Birmingham police, who accused (then cleared) Moazzam of
having ties to the Taliban. But in fact the play is not trying
to prove the detainees' innocence or guilt. As Mr. Begg argues,
"Let the court decide whether he is guilty or not. If he is guilty
he should be punished. If he is not guilty he shouldn't be there
for a second." Guantanamo is about denying people due
process of law, about the violation of their human rights, about
the deterioration of democratic processes in the name of the war
on terrorism.
The power of this documentary drama lies
not just in actualities, in the heartbreaking stories, but also
in the presence of a group of actors who bring conviction and
humanity to the characters whose pain and outrage they embody.
Shaun Parkes, as Jamal al-Harith, movingly conveys Jamal's anger,
bitterness and hurt when he wonders why, if he's "scum of the
earth," he was ever set free.
The Guardian recently reported
that Ruhel Ahmed and two other men from Tipton (known in the press
as the Tipton Three) have made claims in a 115-page report about
abuses they suffered at Guantánamo Bay, some similar to those
inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib that made headline news just
a few months ago. The Tipton Three say detainees still at Guantánamo
are deteriorating physically and mentally. Now that the U.S. presidential
campaign, the continued fighting in Iraq, and reports of terrorist
threats have overshadowed prison-abuse stories, at least in America,
the documentary play Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'
is making a significant contribution by keeping the detainees'
stories very much alive.
*Quoted in Dave Calhoun, "Screen Test,"
Time Out London, July 7-14, 2004, 69.
print version