A Glimpse of Light in the Darkness, As Former Guantánamo Prisoner Mansoor Adayfi is Welcomed to the UK Parliament

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Sometimes, when darkness is all around, just one small ray of light is sufficient to keep hope alive.

A week ago, on November 15, amidst the almost all-encompassing darkness of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, that small ray of light was provided when former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi was welcomed into the Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, by Chris Law, the SNP (Scottish National Party) MP for Dundee East, who is the co-chair of the recently established All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility.

Mansoor — the very definition of human irrepressibility — was held for over 14 years at Guantánamo before being resettled in Serbia in July 2016, where his outspoken nature and complaints about his treatment (which included a ban on travelling outside Serbia) led, for many years, to harassment and intimidation from the Serbian authorities.

This is a situation that only slowly began to change when he started having articles published in the New York Times, related to his involvement in “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay”, a significant exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which ran from October 2017 to January 2018.

In August 2021, Mansoor’s riveting memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo”, was published by Hachette Books, a unique insight into life at the prison that I have described as managing to be, simultaneously, harrowing, hilarious and full of humanity. Around the same time, he began regularly engaging with the outside world via Zoom meetings, which was where I first began to meet with him regularly online, and this year, with the help of Amnesty International and his US attorney Beth Jacob, he finally secured a Yemeni passport, allowing him to travel outside the confines of Serbia for the first time since his arrival there in 2016.

In June, he visited Norway for a human rights event, and in September I finally met him for the first time in Brussels, for “Close Guantánamo!”, an inspiring event in the European Parliament, hosted by the tenacious independent Irish MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, which brought together other former prisoners, lawyers, myself and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism.

In February, Fionnuala became the first UN Rapporteur to visit Guantánamo, and her subsequent report was an absolutely devastating condemnation of historic and continuing human rights abuses at the prison, which also exposed the plight of former prisoners, resettled in third countries that fail to respect their rights, or who have been repatriated to face further abuse.

For his first visit to the Houses of Parliament, during his first ever visit to the UK, Mansoor was accompanied by a posse of friends and supporters — myself, Sara Birch, Lise Rossi and Khandan Lolaki-Noble, all members of the UK Guantánamo Network, an umbrella group of organizations committed to the closure of Guantánamo — as well as a new friend, Yusuf Mingazov, the son of former prisoner Ravil Mingazov, who Mansoor knew well, and whose plight is high on the radar of the APPG.

Held at Guantánamo without charge or trial for over 14 years, Ravil, an ethnic Tatar, was released in January 2017, and sent for resettlement in the UAE, where the promise that he would be allowed to rebuild his life turned to ashes, when he — and 22 other men sent from Guantánamo — were, instead, imprisoned in conditions even worse than those they had endured in the US’s most notorious offshore prison, held almost incommunicado, and subjected to abusive treatment.

All of the other men were subsequently repatriated — four to Afghanistan, and 18 to Yemen — leaving Ravil alone, threatened, since the summer of 2021, with forced repatriation to Russia, where his life would be at risk. This summer, as the threat of forced repatriation once more surfaced, members of the APPG, including Yusuf’s constituency MP, Apsana Begum, began trying to put pressure on the British government to call for his release in the UK, where his family, including Yusuf, have all been granted asylum.

This is an ongoing and uphill struggle, given the parlous state of the Home Office, engaged in the creation and maintenance of a “hostile environment” for refugees and asylum seekers under Theresa May, Priti Patel, and, most recently and even more calamitously, the recently departed Suella Braverman, but I have hope that it is a struggle that will eventually end in victory, with Ravil reunited with his family in the only country that is well-placed to rescue him from his arbitrary imprisonment in the UAE, and the constantly hovering threat to send him back to Russia.

For Mansoor’s visit, we were detained at the security checkpoint on the way in, and were obliged to wait for help from Chris, after the police politely but firmly refused to allow him to enter Parliament wearing the bright orange “Close Gitmo” T-shirt, featuring his prison number — 441 — which had been printed up for the meeting in the European Parliament, and which Mansoor has been wearing ever since.

Once this hurdle was overcome, and Mansoor agreed to de-brand himself as a personification of Guantánamo, we entered the Houses of Parliament through the cavernous Westminster Hall, the oldest surviving part of the Palace of Westminster, dating back to 1097 AD, long before it became home to Parliament, when it was still the seat of England’s kings — in this case, William II, the son of the recent usurper, William the Conqueror.

With Chris as a guide, we passed through the hall, marvelling at the surviving 14th century hammer beam roof, made of local oak and the largest medieval timber roof in Northern Europe, noting where King Charles I was tried and condemned to death in January 1649, where William Wallace, who had led the Scottish resistance to King Edward I, was condemned to death in 1305, and where Sir Thomas More, the Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532 was tried and condemned to death in 1535 for having opposed King Henry VIII’s separation from the Catholic Church, and the opportunistic annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. Escaping the bloodshed for a moment, we also noted where Nelson Mandela had spoken on his visit in 1996.

Entering the masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture that is the ‘modern’ Palace of Westminster, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, and largely completed between 1840 and 1860, after most of the old palace burnt down in 1834, we passed through the hubbub of MPs and Lords striding to and fro, the gaggles of journalists, and the clusters of lobbyists, pressure groups or constituents, making our way to the Pugin Room — formerly a Peers’ committee room, which was turned into a reception room and bar for MPs and Officers of the House and their guests after restoration and renewal works in 2015.

In the Pugin Room, a lavish and ornate example of the obsessive nature of Augustin Pugin, we found seats by its windows overlooking the River Thames, and had tea, with Mansoor presenting Chris and his assistant Paul with signed copies of his book, as well as showing Chris his thesis, written after he was allowed to study at a university in Serbia, which was about the rehabilitation and reintegration of former Guantánamo prisoners into social life and the labour market. He also brought along a document providing a business plan for prisoners’ life after Guantánamo, used to help to persuade military review panels that it was safe to recommend them for release, which he had been involved in creating at Guantánamo under the guidance of Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman and Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, who was a mentor to many of the younger prisoners, and who was finally released in October 2022.

Mansoor also brought along his most remarkable memento of Guantánamo — an original two-piece orange prison uniform, which he had managed to take with him when leaving Guantánamo, and had also managed to get through the Parliamentary security system. On this latter point, I should note that it was entirely appropriate that Mansoor was allowed to bring it in as, unlike his T-shirt, it couldn’t be construed as an overt political statement that might be used to stage some sort of guerrilla protest action inside Parliament.

This was the third time I’d had the great pleasure to be involved in accompanying a former Guantánamo prisoner as they were welcomed into the House of Parliament. In November 2015, I accompanied Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was freed a few weeks before, as he was welcomed by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and other MPs who had fought long and hard for his release, and in March 2022 I had accompanied Mohamedou Ould Slahi, at the end of his first UK speaking tour, as he was welcomed by Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, and the other co-chair of the APPG for Guantánamo’s closure, on a visit in which he also met Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn and other supportive MPs.

Although Mansoor’s visit was the most low-key affair of the three, it was very moving — in large part through seeing Mansoor’s ingenuous openness, and the permanent energy that almost, but not entirely, masks his vulnerability, in the heart of British Parliamentary power, as he sipped tea by the Thames in the company of friends and supporters, but also because the welcome provided for him by Chris showed Parliament at its best, home to at least some elected representatives who work hard to uphold human rights and the rule of law, so shamefully jettisoned by the US government at Guantánamo, and so often similarly discarded by the so-called ‘Mother of All Parliaments’ in Westminster.

I must add that the welcome extended to Mansoor by Chris would have been the same had he also met with any of the other MPs in the APPG for Guantánamo’s closure, as well as other MPs involved in good causes, rather than — as all too many MPs are — being largely consumed by greed and power, or cynically maintaining their jobs by relentlessly toeing the party line.

After the visit was over, I made my way to a protest outside Parliament, where appropriately noisy campaigners were calling on the MPs inside to vote for an SNP amendment to the King’s Speech that demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Chris, as I knew, was voting for it, and, in the end, it turned out that 126 MPs in total voted for it, including, unsurprisingly, all the members of the APPG for Guantánamo’s closure. Shamefully, however, 293 other MPs voted against it, while 232 other MPs abstained — another example of the gulf between those MPs who believe in upholding human rights and the rule of law (as well as being sickened by watching a genocide take place in Gaza), and those who don’t.

I’m so glad to know, and to have had dealings with, over the many years that I’ve worked on Guantánamo, so many of those MPs who have a heart.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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