HOTREVIEW.ORG - Hunter On-line Theater Review

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.