Guantánamo’s forgotten child: the sad story of Mohammed El-Gharani

Since last June, when Omar Khadr, a Canadian prisoner at Guantánamo, was first hauled up before a Military Commission — the novel system of “terror trials” conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — he has rarely been out of the news. Just 15 years old at the time of his capture, Khadr’s treatment has been widely condemned, not just because the trial system is weighted in favor of the prosecution, and is empowered to accept secret evidence obtained through torture or coercion, but also because of his age. As his lawyers have pointed out, “No international criminal tribunal established under the laws of war, from Nuremberg forward, has ever prosecuted former child soldiers as war criminals.”

Omar Khadr is not, however, the only prisoner at Guantánamo who was just a child when he was captured. Almost entirely overlooked is Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, who was just 14 when he was captured in October 2001. Unlike Omar, Mohammed is one of at least 120 prisoners who will almost certainly never face charges, and who are left, instead, in severe isolation in Guantanamo, with no opportunity whatsoever to bring their cases to the attention of the wider public.

And yet Mohammed’s story is one of the saddest in the prison’s long and unjust history. Although he was born in Saudi Arabia, his parents are from Chad, so he was never granted citizenship, and was prevented from having the same opportunities as Saudi nationals. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, but was not allowed to finish secondary school, and was selling religious paraphernalia to pilgrims attending the Hajj, when a Pakistani friend advised him to travel to Pakistan to learn how to repair computers so that he could establish a business in Saudi Arabia.

In order to pursue his dream, Mohammed visited the Chadian embassy, and exaggerated his age to obtain a passport. Only those aged 18 or over are allowed to travel without their parents, so he boldly declared that he was 20. With a valid three-month visa for Pakistan, he took his savings and bought an airline ticket to Karachi.

Soon after arriving, in October 2001, he was praying in a mosque, when it was suddenly surrounded by police, who arrested everyone inside. Most were released, but he was taken to a prison where, for 20 days, he was hung by his wrists, suspended so that only the tips of his toes touched the ground, and was beaten if he moved.

He was then sold to the Americans, who were offering bounty payments of $5,000 a head for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and was transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport in Afghanistan, where, like every other prisoner sent to the makeshift prison, he was subjected to systematic brutality.

Imprisoned in a barbed wire pen with five other prisoners, he was beaten during interrogations, and on several occasions had freezing cold water thrown over him during the night. He reported that one particular soldier “would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.”

He was then flown to Guantánamo, but unlike three Afghan boys (released in January 2004), who were held separately from the adult population, and treated with something approaching the appropriate care of juvenile prisoners, he has never received any preferential treatment as a juvenile, and has, instead, been subjected to torture and abuse as severe as almost any other prisoner.

He has been hung from his wrists on 30 occasions (an experience he described as worse than in Pakistan, because his feet did not even touch the ground), and has also been subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation — including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions — that clearly constitute torture.

On one occasion, a heavily-armoured riot squad — the Initial Reaction Force (IRF), used to quell even the most minor infringements of the rules — slammed his head into the floor of his cell, breaking one of his teeth, and on another occasion an interrogator stubbed out a cigarette on his arm.

As a result of this violence he has become deeply depressed, and has attempted to commit suicide on several occasions, by slashing his wrists, trying to hang himself, and, on one occasion, by running head-first into the wall of his cell as hard as he could.

Despite all his suffering, and the lack of evidence against him, no attempt has been made to address the clear deterioration of his mental health, and he has been held in some of the prison’s harshest cell blocks, where prisoners are held, for 22 or 23 hours a day, in solid metal cells with no windows and no opportunity to socialize with their companions.

Although the violence against him continues unabated (he is regularly set upon by the IRF teams, because of his frustrations with the regime), he will almost certainly be released if the government of Chad engages in serious negotiations with the US government. In August 2007, lawyers from Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents Mohammed and 30 other Guantánamo prisoners, visited Chad to meet members of his family, and to present his case to the government. They received assurances from President Deby and the Foreign Ministry that they would act on his behalf, but the negotiations appear to have stalled, in part because the government has been caught up in a well-publicized struggle against rebel forces.

This week, a representative of Reprieve is visiting Chad in an attempt to resurrect the struggle for Mohammed’s freedom. He takes with him evidence that, when it comes to securing the release of prisoners, the most significant factors are public pressure and diplomatic negotiations. Last December, after two years of stonewalling on the part of the Americans, the Sudanese government secured the release of two of its innocent citizens, simply by refusing to give up. If it wishes, the government of Chad can do the same for Guantánamo’s forgotten child.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press).

As published exclusively in the Daily Star, Lebanon.