REVIEWS: Inside the gulag
Reviewed by S.G. Jilanee
Dawn: January 14, 2007
Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back
By Moazzam Begg
Free Press, 2006.
ALL adventure stories real or imaginary from the Odyssey to Robinson Crusoe, provide excitement. But Enemy Combatant is a different kind of adventure story. It is the spine-chilling, first-person account of the horrors the author suffered at the hands of the Americans from the time of his arrest in Pakistan, through Kandahar, Bagram to the American gulag at Guantanamo, for three long years.
It is also a chronicle of what the author witnessed happening to others, including two deaths by merciless beating, as well as what other detainees told him about themselves.
The curtain rises with a knock at the door just as the clock strikes midnight on January 31, 2002. As Moazzam Begg opens the door, he is overpowered by a group of people, shackled, hooded and carried away. He is questioned for several days by the Americans and the MI5. The Pakistanis appear helpless. Finding nothing incriminating, they are even a bit soft on him. One of them whom he began calling ‘Uncle’, confides: “If we don’t, we’ll be so hurt by … President Bush’s army. You know that statement of theirs, ‘you’re either with us or against us.’ Well, we had to take the position.” Another tells him as he is being sent off into Kandahar, “Moazzam, … I have sold both this life and the next for what I am about to do … I’ll have to answer for it one day.”
Enemy Combatant is also Moazzam Begg’s autobiography. He was born and raised in Britain. His early education in a Jewish school and a Christian seminary gave him insight into the two faiths so, when he studied the Quran, he was in a better position to appreciate Islam by comparison. Begg had experienced racial discrimination from a young age. He had even been involved in violent encounters with skinheads and punks.
He had always been a good Samaritan. The macabre stories of the sufferings of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya, therefore, touched him deeply. “My political views were not formed listening to radical Islamic clerics or jihadists. The media and the events it reported had shaped my outlook on the world,” he says.
So he became actively involved in assisting them. He visited Bosnia with a relief convoy. Next he set out for Chechnya but when denied entry into Georgia, returned from Turkey. After his first visit to Afghanistan, he was struck by the misery of the people. Initially involved in digging wells for drinking water, he ultimately shifted with his family to live in Kabul where he started an educational project. When America invaded Afghanistan, he went to live among his many relatives in Islamabad. Moazzam Begg was a marked man. The MI5 had already questioned him about his trips abroad and his bookshop had been raided, though nothing incriminating was ever found. So capturing him was no problem.
From Kandahar he is sent to Bagram and ultimately to Guantanamo. He is subjected to various kinds of physical and mental distress during relentless questioning on the same topic, until he signs a confession drafted by his interrogators.
Life in Guantanamo is monotonous. He suffers alternative bouts of hope and despair. He writes some poetry besides reading books and memorising the Quran. The last stanza of one such poem, which he quotes, contains the juicy four-letter word which Dick Cheney once hurled at Sen. Leahy.
But it is not all a sob story. Amidst the misery there are occasions for fun and even jokes. For example, when he says to one of the guards that “he needed to take his trouser down so I could hear him properly,” the guard writes it down verbatim. Or when a gay Afghan detainee mistook a lesbian woman soldier, with her short hair and boyish looks, for a boy and “grabbed her hands attempting to stroke and kiss them.” Equally fascinating are his intellectual encounters with some of his interlocutors where he always ties them into knots.
Moazzam strikes friendship with a number of guards, both men and women, who often tell him about their personal lives. Some express disgust for the job they are doing. One, Mesadore, even writes a poem about the detainees. He reignites the pride of the blacks in their ancestors who, he points out, were Muslims.
Moazzam’s story establishes the fact that 9/11 had made the Americans paranoid. It also reveals that Muslim countries like Egypt, Jordan and Syria do to Muslims what (non-Muslim) America would be shy of doing. In fact he is initially threatened with being sent to Egypt but later the idea is dropped.
Added interest is provided by learned discussions on jihad, suicide, Islam versus science, Osama bin Laden as well as the harrowing tales of other detainees who were less lucky than Moazzam.
Even as an inside story of how America is fighting its war on terror and what Gitmo is all about, Enemy Combatant is a must-read. But what makes it particularly irresistible is the author’s strictly balanced and unbiased approach. He faithfully records and generously praises every kind gesture. Those who were compassionate, he mentions by name because, as he says, “One of the more ambitious aims of this book is to find some common ground between people on opposing sides of this new war to introduce the voice of reason”.
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