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Moazzam Begg with three of his children |
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.”
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“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 |
“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.
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“He kept saying ‘I just want to come home’ in his letters.”
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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.
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.
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