Three Guantanamo detainees, one Yemeni and two Saudis, died simultaneously on 10 June 2006 at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The US authorities at the time put forward the theory of suicide by hanging. The bodies of the three victims were autopsied by a military medical team, then repatriated and handed over to their respective governments. A second autopsy, requested by the family of the Yemeni victim, organised by Alkarama, a Geneva-based human rights NGO, and conducted by a medical team from the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the University of Lausanne, revealed many grey areas and raised a number of questions about the circumstances of the death and about unexplained findings on the body. These questions, also raised by the Saudi medical team that carried out a second autopsy on the bodies of the Saudi victims, were addressed through official channels to the US authorities. To this day they remain unanswered. This refusal to explain the matters raised by the experts has only strengthened suspicion and lent weight to the view that a collective suicide is implausible in a high-security camp, committed by believers whose religion forbids taking one’s own life.
A year later, almost to the day, we learn that a fourth detainee has met the same fate. According to the official version, the victim, a Saudi national, was found unresponsive in his cell yesterday. After an attempt at resuscitation by the camp doctor, he was pronounced dead.
Whatever the cause of death, the US authorities are responsible for it, and even if it was suicide, we are entitled to question the conditions of detention that drove believing detainees to an act of despair of extreme violence.
The Guantanamo Bay camp was opened in January 2002 as part of the “global war on terror”. More than five years on, nearly 400 detainees still endure there the torments of lawlessness, made the norm by the American Empire. Who can come to their aid? Certainly not their own governments, which are servilely bent on pleasing their master by practising widespread torture by proxy, nor the European governments, which do not wish to irritate their transatlantic ally too much. The UN Council and the human rights NGOs are no match for the arrogance of the Bush Administration. All that remains, then, is worldwide citizen action to halt this regression of humanity. Why do we not decide to wear orange once a week as a sign of protest? To display a colour that for some is an emblem of liberation and for others a symbol of oppression and humiliation. If we fail to have Guantanamo Bay closed, we shall all bear, for ever, shared responsibility for one of the main moral wounds of the beginning of this twenty-first century.
Abbas Aroua, 31 May 2007
