Islands of despair

A detainee at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay. The U.N. stated this May that the facility violated international law. - JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS

Law and justice, besides the many innocent prisoners at Guantanamo, are the casualties of the U.S. `war on terror'.

WORD comes from New Delhi that the Indian government has nominated Shashi Tharoor to replace Kofi Annan as the United Nations Secretary-General. Tharoor is a well-known novelist and columnist whose young face and sense of humour endears him to people across the political spectrum. He spent most of his career at the U.N.; currently he is Undersecretary General for Communications and Public Information. This job has brought Tharoor front and centre as the defender of the U.N. against the assault by the United States government. When asked about U.N. reform, Tharoor said, "The U.N. needs reform not because it has failed but because it has accomplished enough over the years to be worth investing in."

Such optimism in the U.N. and its Charter is not welcome in Washington. The Bush team came to office in 2001 with a hostile attitude toward the U.N. As part of its commitment to cut back on government spending, the Bush administration refused to pay its U.N. dues until the organisation decreases its bureaucracy (56,000 employees). It also accused the U.N. of being anti-American. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) came in for special criticism. The U.S. government has had a seat on the UNCHR since its creation in 1946. In May 2001, U.N. member-states did not re-elect the U.S. to that seat. President George W. Bush said this was "an outrageous decision. To me, it undermines the whole credibility of this commission - to kick the United States off, one of the great bastions of human rights, and allow Sudan to be on."

During the summer of 2001, the U.S. took on the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. A former President of Ireland, Robinson held strong opinions about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. refusal to join the International Criminal Court. A showdown that began in Durban at the World Conference Against Racism continued as the U.S. initiated its special rules against combatants in the war against terror. On January 11, 2002, the U.S. brought its first captives from the war to a camp in Kandahar and onward to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba. As "enemy combatants" and not "prisoners of war", these men (and some children) were held in contravention of the Geneva Convention. Five days later, Robinson challenged this view.

The U.S. nudged her out. She was not alone. Along with Robinson went Jos Bustani, head of the U.N. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Robert Watson, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Peter Hansen, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency: all had annoyed Washington. Bush also brayed for the departure of Annan.

In late 2003, Tharoor wrote a piece for the influential journal Foreign Affairs with the straightforward title, "Why America Still Needs the United Nations." The balanced essay offered a defence of multilateralism and a plea for the U.S. to appreciate the U.N.'s global role. The U.N., Tharoor wrote, "is only a mirror of the world: it reflects divisions and disagreements as well as hopes and convictions. Sometimes it only muddles through." As Dag Hammarskjld, the U.N.'s second Secretary-General, put it, "the U.N. was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell." The U.S., being the world's pre-eminent military power, cannot be allowed to stand outside the U.N.'s framework. But the U.S. will not enter the U.N.'s embrace if that means that its power is constrained. This, for Tharoor, is the challenge. "A U.N. that provides a vital political and diplomatic framework for the actions of its most powerful member, while casting them in the context of international law and legitimacy (and bringing to bear on them the perspectives and concerns of its universal membership)," he wrote, "is a U.N. that remains essential to the world in which we live."

Even this conciliatory approach will not win friends in Washington. Tharoor's colleague at the U.N., Deputy Secretary-General Mark Molloch Brown, who is generally pro-U.S., broke U.N. nicety to offer a stringent criticism of the Bush administration. In a speech in early June, Molloch Brown listed his grievances: the U.S. refuses to pay its dues, it continues to demand all manner of reforms and its U.N. Ambassador, John Bolton, disrespects diplomats from nations who do not cower before the U.S. Bolton, Molloch Brown pointed out, buttresses `the widely held perception, even among many U.S. allies, that the U.S. tends to hold on to maximalist positions when it could be finding middle ground." On June 9, at a seminar at Oriel College, Oxford University, Bolton suggested that the next Secretary-General should come from Eastern Europe and not Asia. According to historian and author Michael Carmichael who was present at the talk, "Bolton left the impression that he is deeply involved in the selection process for the next Secretary-General. From his remarks, it is clear that he is making every effort to influence this selection by anointing an Eastern European functionary loyal to the neo-conservative agenda."

Eastern Europe plays an important role in the Bush strategy. Some of its conservative leaders, such as Poland's Lech Kaczynski and Romania's Traian Basescu, are strong allies of the Bush dispensation, and their countries stand accused of being home to secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons. In November 2005, The Washington Post's Dana Priest broke a story for which she later won the Pulitzer Prize. Her article on the secret prisons began: "The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago." Priest did not reveal the names of the countries as part of an agreement with her sources. The fracas in Europe introduced the names of Poland and Romania, although it is unclear if these are the specific countries or if they are the only ones involved.

On June 7, the Council of Europe released a report that showed how the U.S. wove a "spider's web" of secret detention prisons, extraordinary rendition transit sites and other unlawful inter-state transfers. In his memorandum that accompanied the report, Dick Marty excoriated the U.S. policy of denying "terror suspects" recourse to the Geneva Convention. He quoted Cicero's adage, inter arma silent leges (in times of war, laws are silent) and noted that "it is frankly alarming to see the U.N. Security Council sacrificing essential principles pertaining to fundamental rights in the name of the fight against terrorism."

At the centre of all this is the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo. The U.S. government leased the 31 square mile base in 1903 as a refuelling station. In 1991, the U.S. turned the base into a prison to hold 34,000 Haitian refugees in lieu of allowing these victims of the coup against Aristide to enter the U.S. They became the first non-persons to be held captive at Guantanamo. Since the inauguration of the war on terror, the U.S. government has brought close to 500 "enemy combatants" into the extra-legal Guantanamo prison (first to Camp X-Ray, then to Camp Delta). The legal challenges to this prison system have been fast and furious, and even the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in against the denial of rights to the detainees.

A study by two lawyers of detainees showed that the U.S. government admits that more than half of those held have not conducted any hostile acts against the U.S., and only 8 per cent are Al Qaeda fighters. Detainees freed through international pressure have been outspoken about the appalling conditions in the prison (including torture).

In early June, three of the men held indefinitely committed suicide. One of them, Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, was only 17 when he went into the Guantanamo archipelago in 2001. To attempt suicide has become commonplace in the prison: in August 2003, over an eight-day period, 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves. Almost 100 detainees have been on a hunger strike. Such desperate measures are taken because these largely innocent men have no recourse to justice.

"There is no hope in Guantanamo," said British citizen and former Guantanamo inmate Shafiq Rasul. "The only thing that goes through your mind day after day is how to get justice or how to kill yourself. It is the despair - not the thought of martyrdom - that consumes you there." U.S. officials were less existential in their response to these suicides. The commander of Guantanamo Rear Admiral Harry Harris, said, "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

On June 14, Sabine Christiansen of ARD Television (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der ffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland - the consortium of public-law broadcasting institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany) asked Bush if Guantanamo was now a liability. "We're at war with an enemy," said the President. "And we've got to protect ourselves. And, obviously, the Guantanamo issue is a sensitive issue for people. I very much would like to end Guantanamo. I very much would like to get people to a court." Bush's two concessions are an enormous victory for the idea of international law: that the Guantanamo prison, a symbol of lawlessness, should be closed down, and that the detainees need to have their day in court. But he hesitated to offer a timetable for the demolition and for the hearings.

In February the U.N. published a report that condemned the Guantanamo prison. Annan presented the report and cautioned that the international community needed to "be careful to have a balance between effective action against terrorism and individual liberties and civil rights." So far the U.S. has erred on the side of liberty for most of its citizens and the denial of any rights to those who live outside that charmed circle. If Tharoor ascends to Annan's chair, perhaps he will do so as the Bush administration retreats. Otherwise he will have an unenviable job.