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01.02.07

Several weeks ago, on a visit to Guantánamo Bay, I was preparing for a meeting with Jamil el Banna, a prisoner there. I was trying to work out how best to talk to him about the death of his mother. The funeral had already taken place, and it might still be years before he would be free to visit her grave. Naturally, as we talked, he cried and, 5,000 miles away from his family, his loneliness deepened.

Last week, I was in Nouakchott, Mauritania, working to secure the repatriation of two other Guantánamo prisoners. I was checking e-mail messages during a brief break before a meeting with the country’s Justice Minister, when I learned that my father had died that morning, in his nursing home outside Cambridge. The airline would not let me on an earlier plane for the 2,000 miles home, which compounded my sense of alienation from the world around me.

The hotel room was claustrophobic. As I sat on the balcony, the evening call to prayer echoed across the city. I stared out at the Sahara desert, stretching from the edge of the city across the entire African continent. For a moment, I felt an aching parallel between the predicament of client and lawyer. Ultimately, though, the prisoners’ pain was greater.

Unable to leave Mauritania for 36 hours, I went along with two American colleagues to visit the family of another Guantanamo prisoner, Mohammed Amin. We rode in a smart black Toyota Landcruiser out to their house, three rooms and an outside toilet on the outskirts of the city. On the way, we overtook caravans of trotting donkeys pulling barrels on rickshaw trailers, the only running water that their neighbourhood knew.

Mohammed has five sisters and an ailing mother. His father has died, and there are no other brothers. The family is poor in a country where the average per capita income is less than £250 per year.

Mohammed is not alleged to have done anything against America – nobody even pretends that. He had never been to Afghanistan until the U.S. purchased him from the Pakistanis for a bounty, and took him to Bagram Air Force Base in chains. But the U.S. nevertheless considers him a troublemaker, as he has been among the most resolute of the hungerstriking prisoners, dwindling himself away by refusing to eat, demanding a fair trial for all.

As we sat cross-legged on the floor in their main room, we explained his courage to his family. Their response took us aback.

“Tell him stop this hunger striking! Tell him to obey his jailers! We need him back here!” exclaimed Mohammed’s oldest sister. She pointed out the area on the roof of their tiny house where they plan to build him a room, and the building across the road where they hope he can start a one-room shop. “He will never need to leave here again. Not even to go into the middle of the city.”

They are six women alone in the world. They speak English well, a talent that might normally be a ticket to a good job. But their skin is dark black in a country that favours the lighter-skinned ruling Arabs, and the discrimination they face has been deepened now they are known to have a brother in Guantanamo Bay. The women struggle to find the most menial jobs.

I thought of my own brother and sister in Australia. If I were the one locked up in Guantánamo, they would not rest until I was freed. Yet these women lack the influence to cross Nouakchott to meet with the Mauritanian ministers, let alone cross the Atlantic to petition the courts to free their brother. Now we lawyers had come across an ocean to see them, they struggled to present a meal for their guests, the couscous, lamb, and fruit spread across the carpet before us.

Outside, as we drove away, there was a small boy, four or five years old, dressed all in blue. He swiveled frantically with a small brush made of twigs, spraying the dust into the air. He seemed intent on sweeping up the Sahara. In fifteen years, where will this boy be? Will he still be sweeping up the sands in some McJob trying to hold his family together? Or will he, by some miracle, grapple himself an education and become a voice for democracy in his part of the world? Or will he become frustrated at the futility of his existence, and the inequity of the world that beams into the televisions even on the poorest street, and joined in the jihad against those he perceives as his oppressors?