Aletho News

Voices From Guantanamo: Omar Deghayes

By Jasmin Ramsey | Pulse Media | February 5, 2010

Omar Deghayes spent close to 6 years of his life in the US run Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the same prison that President Barack Hussein Obama said he would close down during his presidential election campaign.  Once referred to as a “sad chapter in American history” by Obama, Guantánamo Bay remains in operation today, while its lesser known twin in Afghanistan has undergone ‘improvements‘ and expansion.  A list of the hundreds of detainees in Bagram were only obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after months of campaigning in January 2010.  Bagram has been holding, interrogating, and sometimes killing suspects of the US led ‘war on terror’ since 2001.

In 2007 Deghayes was finally released without being charged, but will carry the physical and emotional scars that he suffered during his imprisonment for the rest of his life.  He will have to face one of those scars every time he looks in the mirror.  For some, Deghayes is just another brown male with a beard and a disturbing story to tell.  Who listens?

Near the end of January Patrick Barkham of The Guardian conducted an in-depth interview with Deghayes.  In it he notes:

It is not hot stabbing pain that Omar Deghayes remembers from the day a Guantánamo guard blinded him, but the cool sen­sation of fingers being stabbed deep into his eyeballs. He had joined other prisoners in protesting against a new humiliation – inmates ­being forced to take off their trousers and walk round in their pants – and a group of guards had entered his cell to punish him. He was held down and bound with chains.

“I didn’t realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers ­inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers. Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes,” Deghayes says. He wanted to scream in agony, but was determined not to give his torturers the satisfaction. Then the officer standing over him instructed the eye-stabber to push harder. “When he pulled his hands out, I remember I couldn’t see anything – I’d lost sight completely in both eyes.” Deghayes was dumped in a cell, fluid streaming from his eyes.

The sight in his left eye returned over the following days, but he is still blind in his right eye. He also has a crooked nose (from being punched by the guards, he says) and a scar across his forefinger (slammed in a prison door), but otherwise this resident of Saltdean, near Brighton, appears ­relatively ­unscarred from the more than five years he spent locked in Guantánamo Bay. Two years after his release, he speaks softly and calmly; he has the unlined skin and thick hair of a man younger than his 40 years; he has just remarried and has, for the first time in his life, a firm feeling that his home is on the clifftops of East Sussex.

Deghayes must, however, live with the darkness of Guantánamo for the rest of his days. There are reminders everywhere, from the beautiful picture of Saltdean that was painted for him while he was incarcerated, to the fact that Guantánamo ­remains open 12 months after Barack Obama vowed to close it within a year.

There are still around 200 prisoners left in the detention camp, many of whom have been there for eight years. Of the 800 freed, only one has been found guilty of any crime and he was convicted by a dubious military commission, a verdict that is likely to be overturned. Deghayes, too, does not want to forget. He says there is so much still to be ­exposed about the ­conditions there, and about British ­collusion in the ­extraordinary rendition and torture of men such as him in the months following the American-led ­invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Although Deghayes is now free (or as free as he can ever be considering the ordeal he was forced to endure), many others continue to suffer within the walls of America’s infamous torture chambers, otherwise referred to as detention centres, while life goes on as usual for others.  Canadian citizen Omar Khadr has matured from a boy into a man within the cell walls of Guantánamo (he was detained when he was 15) while Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government continue to resist demands and even supreme court rulings recommending that Khadr be returned to Canada.  Harper recently went so far as to declare that Canadians “don’t care” about Afghan detainee abuse on national television.  Some will argue that this is not the case and if you care about the actions your government takes in your name, then write to and call your governmental representatives so that there’s no confusion.

Interestingly, in the clip above Deghayes reveals that even though he has every reason to, he has not allowed himself to be swallowed by bitterness and hatred.   Instead, he has been telling his story and campaigning to prevent the same injustices from being imposed on others.  Deghayes and others like him provide inspiring examples of how humanity can endure even in the most challeging of circumstances, in this case brought to us by a brown male with a beard.  Now, who will listen?

February 5, 2010 - Posted by aletho | Subjugation - Torture