Time out in Cuba
Richard Beeston
ENEMY COMBATANT: A BRITISH MUSLIM’S JOURNEY TO GUANTANAMO AND BACK by Moazzam Begg Free Press, £18.99, pp. 395, ISBN 0743285670 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one of the faceless caged figures in Guantanamo Bay, the US detention facility in Cuba.
Thanks to a campaign by Western human rights lawyers and the fact that he is a British citizen, Begg emerged from captivity last year to be reunited with his family. He has now produced the first authoritative version of conditions in Guantanamo and the legal no-man’s-land where hundreds of terrorist suspects are trapped.
His account is utterly plausible and very disturbing. The writer is a devout Muslim, openly hostile to US policies and sympathetic to the cause of militant Islam. But his story of daily life is written without rancour. More often than not American soldiers and intelligence officers are portrayed as naive, ignorant, sometimes brutish, but rarely evil. Most of the guards he encounters — and for two years in solitary confinement they were his only human contact — are simple soldiers from middle America glad to have an English-speaking prisoner to chat to.
Begg’s contempt is not directed against them but against the system they serve. Guantanamo was established by the Pentagon as a means of keeping suspected members of al-Qaida and their allies out of circulation. As ‘enemy combatants’ they do not enjoy the rights of bona fide prisoners of war. Most have never had access to a lawyer or been charged with an offence. In theory they could be incarcerated in this manner for the rest of their lives.
I do not challenge Begg’s account of his time in American custody. It is a disgrace that the very principles that the West is struggling to foster in the Muslim world have been so comprehensively trampled by the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the continued existence of Guantanamo. It is now nearly five years since the attacks against America on 11 September. The war today is as much a battle of ideas as a military conflict.
But Enemy Combatant is also a deeply flawed book. For all the Left’s championing of Begg as a latter-day Alexander Solzhenitsyn exposing the evils of America’s ‘gulags’, the writer is completely unconvincing in his version of what led to his arrest.
He can reproduce detailed accounts of his time in American captivity, but the preceding decade is far more sketchy. He admits to several visits to mujahedin training camps in Bosnia and Afghanistan and even to trying to join Chechen rebels in 1999. On each occasion he insists he never took up arms and appears Zelig-like just to be passing through on some adventure holiday.
This flirtation with militant Islam clearly turns into something deeper when in 2001 Begg decides to move his wife and young children from their comfortable life in the West Midlands and relocate to Kabul. The city is then under the control of the Taleban, the fanatical Islamic regime.
Begg’s story really comes unstuck after the attacks on America on 11 September . ‘There were no televisions for me to see the horrifying images of the victims of the attacks, and I simply failed to grasp the enormity of the event, until things began to change for me personally,’ he writes.
Begg would have us believe that he was sleepwalking through the biggest international crisis of our time. Even an illiterate street vendor in Kabul could have told him what was about to happen next. Within days of the attacks, the prime suspect was Osama bin Laden, then living under Taleban protection with a house not far from Begg’s own villa in the Afghan capital. Yet the author, who constantly reminds us how wellinformed he is and how much he cares for his family, stays put. When war does break out he is separated from his wife and children. He is forced to flee to Pakistan across country while his family make their own perilous way out.
This sequence of events is highly implausible. It is easy to see why the Americans suspected Begg was actually fighting with alQaida forces in their final battle at Tora Bora.
If this conflict is ever going to end both sides need to face up to some truths. America must stamp out abuses against detainees and the sooner Guantanamo is dismantled the better. Begg and other home-grown jihadists must accept that their cause is no longer a game for bored Muslim boys from English cities. The battles being waged in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya are ruthless and bloody. British citizenship and flimsy excuses can no longer provide immunity. Begg is lucky to be alive and free. He would do well to stay at home with his family. Next time he may not be so fortunate.
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