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Married to a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner
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Moazzam
Begg with three of his children
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When
Moazzam Begg began to consider spending time in Afghanistan, his
ideas instantly became a family project. “For nine years, we did
everything together, went everywhere together,” says his
Palestinian wife, Sally. In Islam, there is a belief that succor
must be offered to those who cannot repay the favor. Reading of
Afghanistan’s infrastructural needs, Moazzem, says Sally,
gradually devised a project – within his means – that would make
an ongoing difference to many who could never repay.
In
June 2001, they leased out their comfortable Birmingham (UK) home
and set off for Afghanistan with their children – Marium (7),
Abdulrahman (5) and toddler Nusaybah. Moazzem planned to install
water pumps in Afghan villages without access to safe water and
establish perhaps two basic literacy and numeracy primary-level
schools where there were none.
“When
we arrived I was really shocked at the conditions.” They found so
much needed, so little taken for granted. By July they had found a
house in Kabul, settled, and began to love the country. “It was
more relaxed. There was time to play with the kids. It became
everything we could want,” reflects Sally. Moazzam found work
teaching while he was battling the bureaucracy needed for the
schools project, and was installing water pumps. “It was all he
wanted. We were together. He was helping those less fortunate. And
we were not in separate countries; he could come home and spend time
with the children.” Momentarily Sally laughed as she sought to
illustrate her husband’s passion for the children: “When Marium
was born, he rushed from the hospital and bought her a hair brush
and comb. She had little hair and I asked why. ‘Because she is my
daughter; daughters need brushes and combs,’ [he answered]. He
just loves his kids.”
With
the bombing of Afghanistan, which began on October 8, 2001, family
life also got blasted apart. They waited for normality to return.
Then, on November 13, Moazzam “went out to get food stocks
and nappies.” He didn’t return.
“I
was furious, actually, then worried, and didn’t know what to do:
To wait for him? To take the children back to Pakistan?”
She
waited, for nearly two weeks, emotionally swaying between anger at
Moazzam’s disappearance and a chilling fear that something had
happened to him. Eventually, she took the children on a complex,
dangerous route – with families (also fleeing) who knew the
terrain – and went to Islamabad. Once there, “I asked if anyone
had seen my husband,” and finally found that he had been there for
days. He had gone shopping the day Kabul fell and found all routes
back to their house closed or too dangerous to travel. Eventually he
crossed to Pakistan and had “just been about to come back to find
us when we arrived.”
“There
is no mercy in their hearts. Tony Blair has a baby nearly
the same age as Nusaybah; can he not relate?” |
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Sally
Begg hesitated, then remarked, “I wish I had not said that now,
because people might think he disappeared because he was fighting.
They won’t understand the chaos. Hundreds and hundreds of people
were fleeing. People, families did get separated. Roads were
dangerous, blocked. Fighting. Bombing. Fear. Unless you were there
you could not understand.” This writer remembered Iraq, and how
years after the 1991 war advertisements still appeared in newspapers
asking if anyone took in a little girl, boy, had seen a man, woman,
elderly person at such and such a location – they had become
separated in the chaos of flight from the bombings.
The
Begg family decided to stay in Islamabad until hostilities ended and
then return to Kabul. “In January, two years ago, we were all
asleep. Pakistani police - men and women - woke us, went through the
house, took our money, phone, computer, and took Moazzam away. I
didn’t know what to do: to pack? To run? To wait? - I felt there
must be some mistake. There was a British Embassy. He was
British-born. He would be back in a few hours. Then I thought of
things we had just bought. Should we go? Should we stay? Sell them?
Take them? Silly random thoughts.” Alone in a country she did not
know, in the middle of the night, pregnant, with three small
children to keep safe, penniless, she walked to a friend’s house.
Unknown
to her at the time, Moazzem – bundled into the trunk of a car –
telephoned his father, Azmat, to say “Look after my family.”
The
following day they travelled to Karachi, from where her brother in
Oman arranged plane tickets for a family conference and to try and
comfort the family in their shock. “Pakistan was quickly full of
rumors that the Americans - the CIA - were behind Moazzam’s
arrest.” Were they? “Well, the next thing we heard he had been
taken across the border, into Afghanistan, and was being held at
Bagram Airbase. George Bush now says these were bad men arrested
with Kalashnikovs in their hands, on the battlefield. Moazzam was
asleep in Pakistan, in bed with me, with the children asleep. If he
did something wrong, we must have too - perhaps they should arrest
us all?”
After
three weeks trying to find what was happening from Oman and via
friends and contacts in Pakistan, they returned to Birmingham. His
first letter, with great chunks blacked out, arrived from Bagram
shortly before Sally learned from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth
Office that he had been transferred to Guantanamo.
“I
broke down and cried. I could not stay in our house. I still break
down. When he was taken to Guantanamo Bay [in February 2002], I had
already heard of torture there. My husband is small, petite...”
Sally Begg’s voice failed her.
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Leaked
photographs of prisoners being transported to Guantanamo Bay
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“He
wrote, ‘I still don’t know why I am here. I need help and I
don’t know where to get it.’ One time he wrote, ‘My beloved
wife and children...’ I could not read any more.”
Surely
she must have been encouraged at the British Attorney General’s
visit to Washington. She must be content that the death penalty will
not apply. “There is no mercy in their hearts. Tony Blair has a
baby nearly the same age as Nusaybah; can he not relate? And if
Moazzam ever does come home, this will not be the man I know.”
Something
else haunts Sally: “He is missing his children’s childhood.”
Moazzam has never seen baby Ibrahim, who was born eighteen months
ago. “I was in labor for three days. The first which Moazzam has
not been there for, I remembered before, when I was sick, tired,
ringing him and asking him to bring back the eggs, the bread, for
tea. We are alone and my heart breaks when every time the doorbell
rings Marium runs to answer it, always sure it is her father - and
it never is. And then, at bed time, she cries herself to sleep.”
“He
kept saying ‘I just want to come home’ in his letters. I want
him home, here, in our house. But even then I won’t be happy. I
know he will be mentally unstable and I will not be able to
understand him, because however he explains it, I have not been
through what he has been through; how can I ever help, ever really
understand?”
The
letters, heavily censored as they were, have now ceased and she has
not heard from Moazzem for six months.
Azmat
Begg, Moazzam's father, is a retired bank manager. He has campaigned
tirelessly on behalf of his son and other detainees. He is calm and
measured. “If it is believed they have done something wrong,
charge them, try them and let the law take its course - either
they must be acquitted, or if they have broken the law, then they
must face the consequences.”
To
this day, Moazzam has yet to be charged with any crime.
Guantanamo
itself is a legal limbo, flying in the face of all international
treaties and conventions relating to legal and human rights norms.
Should any other country “disappear” people to prisons like
gulag Guantanamo, Bagram and the equally unaccountable prison camps
in Iraq, as do US and UK troops, it would be called a “rogue
state.”
Furthermore,
it is important to note that the Begg family traveled to Afghanistan
in June 2001, nearly four months before the September 11 attacks on
the World Trade Center. Moazzam, say all who know him, would never
endanger the family he loved with such passion.
“He
kept saying ‘I just want to come home’ in his
letters.” |
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Azmat
and Sally now live with a new fear: With the cessation of
Moazzam’s letters and the US’ refusal to release him and the
other British prisoners, they no longer have proof that he is even
alive.
“In
the very last letter we received, he said that his nails and skin
lesions were being treated,” says Azmat. The measured, careful
tone temporarily deserted Azmat, his quiet voice shaking as he
spoke. “We did not understand what this meant and wondered whether
maybe he had been tortured.”
Moazzam’s
second-to-last letter said that he was “about to make a decision
which will affect the whole family.” “What did it mean?”
ponders Sally, “That he will tell any interrogator anything they
wish to hear,” simply because he had been broken? Isolated,
without proper legal representation, living in intolerable
conditions, would he admit to anything? Or had he come to think that
life was no longer worth living?
Last
month, Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, a former translator at
Guantanamo Bay, went on trial at Travis Air Force Base in
California. Among the charges against him is the allegation that he
had one hundred and eighty messages on his computer from prisoners
in Guantanamo, to transmit to their families. Charges of “aiding
the enemy,” which carries the death penalty, have been dropped for
two possible reasons, according to Sabah Al Mukhtar, the
London-based President of the League of Arab Lawyers: “The
conspiracy theory one, if you will, is that with such an allegation,
everything would come out in the open: the conditions, the legality
or otherwise of the detentions in the legal no man’s land which is
Guantanamo - and much currently unknown.”
From
a legal/technical point of view, says Al Mukhtar, the prosecution
would have a major problem. Unless the letters were giving details
of how the camp could be attacked, or something similar which might
pose a danger to the US, letters present no threat to the nation.
“Someone writing, for example, ‘my darling wife, I am well, or
ill, happy or unhappy, well treated or ill treated,’ in no way
poses a threat to national security and would not be so regarded
even in time of war.”
Should
the allegations regarding messages to families intended for
transmission by Airman Al Halabi be proven, there may be many who
will think he is the only face of humanity to emerge among the
personnel working in the inhumanity that is Guantanamo Bay.
The
first thing Sally did after Ibrahim’s birth was to apply for his
passport, just in case, anytime, anywhere, they have the opportunity
to see Moazzam again. Hope is just alive, but faith in justice is
fast dying.
Felicity
Arbuthnot is a journalist and activist who has visited Iraq
on numerous occasions since the 1991Gulf War. She has written and
broadcast widely on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for
several awards. She was also Senior Researcher for John
Pilger’s award-winning documentary Paying the Price –
Killing the Children of Iraq.
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