Guantanamo detainees: Bittersweet return for Guantanamo Britons

Royal welcome

After three years in detention as “enemy combatants” in the US naval base at Guanatamo Bay, Cuba, four British detainees were returned to the UK, after rumours of persistent lobbying by the British government and the inability of US government to press charges against them. The four men – Moazzam Begg, Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar – were held upon arrival in a West London police station but were expected to be released shortly afterwards without charge, as were five other British detainees last year. �I would like to think that they will just let them go because these people have suffered enough, but we will just have to wait and see,� said Clive Stafford Smith, lawyer for two of the four detainees and one of the first to see them in Britain. Mr Begg’s father, Azmat Begg, added, “I am not very excited for the simple reason that [he has suffered] mental torture for three years and I don’t know what that has done to him. At the same time, I am happy my son is coming home.” The release follows reports that 23 detainees tried to commit mass suicide without success in 2003 (US officials called all but two attention-seeking “gestures”). Last week, Australian detainee Mamdouh Habib was released under similar circumstances, though the Australian government threatened to confiscate any proceeds Habib might receive from telling his story, despite not being charged with a crime. Add to that the US demand that he be shackled upon return to his country, a story that was all but invisible in the US press. Meanwhile, the four British detainees are expected to sue the US government upon release for allegations of torture and human rights abuses. Shadowing the US actions, the British government made an announcement on Wednesday about the state of detainees in its own high security Belmarsh Prison (“Britain’s Guantanamo”) after the UK’s Law Society ruled against policies of indefinite imprisonment without charge. Some of the 12 foreign nationals there will be freed but under virtual house arrest after being held for up to three years. Others may be deported to their home countries (Algeria, Jordan, and the like) with “memorandums of understanding” that they won’t be tortured. Hmm… shadowing the US indeed.

Zahed Amanullah is associate editor of altmuslim.com. He is based in London, England.