THE BATHING in the bay is excellent. The beach is beautiful and its shores are lined with seagrape and mahogany, cactus and mango, lime and palm. Wildlife flourishes. Emerald humming birds, fly-catchers, kingfishers and orioles throng the skies, and you may hear the plaintive cries of the mocking bird and the mourning dove.
Conservationists from the United States are hard at work conserving the native iguanas and the threatened hawksbill turtles. There is a unique Stone Zoo of dinosaurs to visit. It’s surprising this paradise coastline is not more popular as a holiday resort.
Its name is Guantanamo Bay. Not many venture, although there is so much to see.
Cuba claims that the American presence and its naval base are illegal, and since Castro came to power he has refused to cash the nominal annual rent cheques of $5,000 (£2,800) that the Americans ritually offer.
Island fortresses and penal colonies have long confined the human race while offering freedom to wild creatures. Many black spots recover from their black history, to feature in the glossy brochures. You may visit Monte Cristo and dive in its green waters, or fly to the verdant paradise of Elba, or take a day trip to Alcatraz, one of the most popular sites in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Its fauna doesn’t sound very attractive — it consists of mice, salamanders and banana slugs — but visitors crowd in nevertheless. Or you can take a Caribbean cruise to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana, and see the place to which Dreyfus was exiled. Prison Island, off Zanzibar, is frequented by snorkellers, and Robben Island and Botany Bay are features on the tourist trail.
Britain has had its own offshore island jails. The penitentiary of the Isle of Wight survives, though the picturesque Castle Orgueil in Jersey has long been decommissioned. It was to Jersey that the ministers of Charles II, after the Restoration, banished many prominent republicans — those that they did not dare to hang, draw and quarter — because there they were thought to be beyond the reach of habeas corpus. As Geoffrey Robertson has pointed out in The Tyrannicide Brief, this shrewd move of Charles II was imitated centuries later by George Bush II, whose administration has held some 750 detainees in Guantanamo without charge or due process, beyond the reach of international or national or any other law. Some have been released (including several British citizens), and some transferred, but there are about 500 left, of whom some are, or rather were, British residents. They linger in a perpetual limbo.
Some prisoners, or “illegal combatants”, are on hunger strike: there are allegations of men being shackled and force fed with a brutality that amounts to torture. Major Jeff Weir, a spokesman at Guantanamo, explains the hunger strikes in these terms: “My understanding is that it’s just because of their continued detention. They’re trying to call attention to that.”
How difficult can you be? It is hard for them to draw attention to their predicament in any other way. We in the West are not interested in incarcerated Muslims, many of whom, like Dreyfus, may not be very pleasant. We rightly agonise about the 90-day proposal, but these forgotten people have been there a lot longer than three months. (My husband swears he heard a police spokesman on the radio justifying a longer detention period in the UK on the ground that it would give detainees “more time to pray”, but he must have made that up.) Occasionally a protest is made: a group of doctors published a letter recently (October 25, The Guardian) invoking the World Medical Association, which “specifically prohibits the force feeding of hunger strikers”, and demanded that doctors who breach the guidelines be held to account by their professional bodies.
That would be a good move. But the main point is that these men shouldn’t be there at all, uncharged, after all this time, starving or fed, or even (as another military person insisted) enjoying a life of luxury.
When I first started to protest about the detentions I and many others made rhetorical reference to the Bastille. I didn’t really think most of those men would still be there today. But they are. The greatest democracy in the world is running its own Bastille. This must be a bad move from the point of view of the history books.
In 1679 the Habeas Corpus Act, because of its evident abuse, was revised and extended so that it had extraterritorial effect. It was no longer possible to hold political troublemakers in offshore castles without charge or trial. Lawyers in the US in 2004 applied to the Supreme Court in Washington in an attempt to invoke this precedent, with what seemed at the time to be some success. It was ruled by a majority verdict of 6-3 that federal jurisdiction applied in Guantanamo and that “ aliens, no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts’ authority”.
Not much has happened since then.
Maybe lawyers in the Supreme Court are deliberating these matters right now. Meanwhile, most of those prisoners are still exactly where they were. No wonder they try to draw attention to themselves. They are the abandoned people. It is hard for lawyers and journalists to highlight their predicament. There are no pegs on which to hang a story, apart from the hunger strike, of which we have no pictures and little documentation.
I wonder if the detainees can hear the cries of the mocking bird and the mourning dove. I wonder if I’ll still be alive when the package tours start.
