The Circle of Rendition

Amir Yagoub is from Sudan. He currently finds himself a prisoner in Guantánamo Bay. For Amir, extraordinary rendition has come full circle, from the British colonial powers’ treatment of his great-grandfather more than a century ago to his own predicament at the hands of the American authorities today.

On January 25, 1885, General Charles Gordon died trying to maintain British control over Sudan. His death was romanticized by George Joy’s contemporary painting into an heroic myth. Victorian England was horrified. Gordon had died at the hands of the Mahdi, the spiritual leader of the ‘extremist’ Muslims, who led his Dervish forces on a jihad to expel the colonialists from his country. To the British public, the savagery of the Mahdi and his first lieutenant, the Khalifa (or Caliph) Abdullah, was epitomized by reports of Gordon’s decapitated head appearing on a pike.

There was a populist clamour to avenge General Gordon’s death and reestablish British dominance in Sudan, but despite Britain’s overwhelming superiority in military technology, this did not prove to be easy. Eventually, on September 2, 1898, Colonel (later Lord) Horatio Kitchener wrought a terrible revenge at the Battle of Omdurman. The Khalifa’s army, betrayed and weakened by some rival Sudanese Muslims, charged the ranks of Maxim guns with a desperate but futile valour. The day lost, the Khalifa refused to save himself, but sat awaiting death on his prayer rug in the Sudanese tradition as his enemies closed in.

Many of the Khalifa’s family were captured alive during Kitchener’s campaign. One such prisoner was the great-grandfather of Guantánamo prisoner Amir Yagoub. Al Amir Mahmoud wad Ahmed was the Khalifa’s cousin and brother-in-law. The nineteenth century abuse of Amir Mahmoud began with a relatively minor humiliation: he was brought bare-headed before Kitchener. However, Kitchener then dispatched (or, in modern terms, rendered) him, along with many Sudanese civilians, to Egypt where they were held in a prison called Abasiyah.

Needless to say, life in this Egyptian prison was brutal, for there was not even a Geneva Convention on hand to be ignored. Amir Mahmoud died there. The women and children who managed to survive the ordeal were returned to Omdurman in 1908, after ten years of captivity. They were followed two years later by the surviving men. This repatriation was not to freedom. They were held under house arrest, with the men required to report to the authorities every morning and evening. Since they came home to an internment similar to their experience in Egypt, they dubbed the area where they were held Abasiyah, a name that survives in Omdurman to this day.

The fact that the Victorians conditioned the prisoners’ return on such wholesale punishments without any form of trial, in violation of the very rule of law that they were supposedly imposing on Sudan, remains a dirty smudge on the British reputation for fair play.

Fast forward a century and we find Amir Yagoub, great grandson of Amir Mahmoud, in Guantánamo Bay in 2007. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He had never been to Afghanistan, let alone fought jihad. However, he was sold over to the U.S. by fellow Muslims for a bounty, rendered to Afghanistan for humiliation and torture, and then dispatched to Guantánamo Bay, where he remains five years later. He is held in solitary confinement in Camp VI, a maximum security prison, without the benefits of the Geneva Conventions, or a trial of any kind.

I recently returned from a visit to Khartoum, where I met the grandson of the Mahdi, Oxford-educated and the last democratically elected leader of the country. I also met the grandson of the Khalifa, and various members of the current government. To a man, they expressed concern that Amir Yagoub had been illegally rendered, and was now being held, like his great-grandfather, by the world hyperpower of the day, in a brutal and lawless prison far from home.

Of equal concern were the conditions that the U.S. would like to impose on Amir Yagoub’s return: that he should undergo continued detention in Sudan, based on the U.S. military’s assurance that he is a ‘bad man’. The Foreign Minister complained to me that the U.S. was insisting that Sudan violate its own constitution, which requires that a person be investigated before he can be held and charged, rather than the other way around. America is once again preaching rights while perpetrating wrongs.

This article also appeared in the New Statesman.