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  • القياس اضيع [Likening Can Be Misleading]:Reflections on Africa and Africans in Guantánamo
  • Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Looking back on my incarceration in Guantánamo from the relative security of my home in Nouakchott, I now realize how significant the African presence was in the illegal detention facility. While at the time, and as my Guantánamo Diary makes clear, our captors treated us primarily as Muslims, jihadis, Arabs, and Middle Easterners, the reality was that many of us were first and foremost African. We were born in African countries, our citizenship was that of African nations, we were handed over or surrendered by our own African governments to the U.S., and we shared the common experiences of Africans. The ASA forum held in celebration of my memoir has enabled me to reflect further on this and on what happens when we rethink Gitmo as a place of African detention, created by the collaboration of independent African governments. Fewer than one hundred detainees in Guantánamo hailed from the African continent, which is 12 percent of the total population at its peak. Algeria and Morocco had the most representation, and most detainees were North African, but sub-Saharan Africans featured prominently too. In this commentary, I want to share a little bit about my experience, with a view to making Guantánamo Diary more comprehensible to an Africanist audience.

African countries, to their everlasting shame, yielded to political pressure and actively participated in torture, false imprisonment, and kidnapping on behalf of the United States. It pains me to admit that I'm mostly angry with the way our corrupt governments helped facilitate the mafia-style renditions that U.S. Securitate was conducting after the tragic events of 9/11. The [End Page 403] government of Mauritania—my own government—permitted my "extraordinary rendition" to Jordan, a country where I could not argue my case before an independent judge. Furthermore, as WikiLeaks data has shown, my government refused to negotiate my release in 2007 when it had an opportunity to do so. It was chilling to read the statement of my own Foreign Minister when he confided to the U.S. ambassador that "IT WAS MORE IMPORTANT FOR HIS GOVERNMENT TO BE SEEN TRYING TO HELP ITS NATIONALS IN GUANTÁNAMO THAN ACTUALLY RECEIVING THEM."

After reading this I wanted to throw up. I didn't know how to feel or what to say. After what I'd been through, I thought that I could no longer be surprised, but I must admit this caught me off guard. My government also helped arrest and transport at least one Libyan citizen, Saleh Di'iki.1 Captured in Mauritania in October 2003 at the behest the U.S., Di'iki was then detained in Mauritania, Morocco, and Afghanistan. The rendition itself for a third country was bad enough, but Di'iki recounts undergoing hours of interrogation, being forced to sit naked for days, and being beaten when he was finally sent back to Libya.2 Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, The Gambia, Djibouti, Somalia, Tanzania, South Africa, Egypt, and Libya also participated actively in and were vital to the illegal networks of prisons and airfields the U.S. built around the world, the goal being to evade the American judiciary system and to be able to get "down and dirty" without the technicalities of the rule of law, human rights, or any other form of accountability.

In Mauritania, we say, "He who finds a cook need not burn his hands." The United States found a "cook" in plenty of African countries, something that leaves me filled with shame as an African. It is deeply painful when one's own people are used to harm in the name of the oppressor, like black police in apartheid-era South Africa, or Palestinians who spy on their own people, or German collaborators who collaborated with the Nazis against their fellow Germans. As much I love and believe in the ideals of democracy as defined by Western countries, the fact is that Western "democracies" used Africa in their own undemocratic actions abroad. Africa was used and abused, much as it was during the colonial period.

The blocks in Bagram (Afghanistan...

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