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.