Guantanamo
Bay: Shame for the Entire World
Miguel Concha, OP is a Dominican friar and Co-Promoter of
Justice, Peace and Care of Creation in Latin America
Four years after the US government began
to use the Guantánamo base as a prison; the international
society continues to manifest its indignation and calls
for this center of violation of fundamental rights to be
closed forever. On Feb 14th, the contents of a 50 page report
that a group of experts presented to the Human Rights Commission
of the United Nations in Geneva filtered out to the press.
According to the available information, the group demands
the dismantling of this detention center and that all those
detained be brought before independent tribunals or immediately
freed for lack of formal accusations.
Without
delay, the Bush administration reacted, as is its custom
in regard to themes that have to do with “the war
against terrorism”, denying the truth of the report
through the presidential spokesperson Scott McClellan, who
tried to lessen the validity of the conclusions of these
experts by saying: “It is a discredit to the United
Nations that a team makes a report without observing the
facts. The team based itself solely on presumptions”
This accusation has its origin in the fact that the group
refused the invitation that the government offered to them
to visit Guantánamo, because it was to be a type
of guided visit without the right to interview detained
persons, nor to move freely within the base, which violates
existing international standards for visits to centers of
reclusion. It ought to be taken into account nevertheless,
that the group of experts had asked for total and unrestricted
access to the base since 2002, a permission that was repeatedly
denied and visits that were programmed with anticipation
were inexplicably delayed by the government in Washington.
The shameful situation of prisoners in Guantánamo
is not an unknown fact in the world. Under the pretext of
the war against terrorism, the US government has invented
sophisticated explanations that violate the human rights
of prisoners, and the prisons of Guantánamo and AbuGarib
are only the more plausible examples of how measures directed
supposedly toward ending human rights´ violations,
have surpassed the limits of the basic dignity of persons.
According to a report called “Guantánamo: Inhuman
Lives”, presented by Amnesty International the past
6th of February, there are now around 500 prisoners of 35
distinct nationalities, many of whom have been victims of
torture and are maltreated. There have been numerous suicide
attempts because of this and fear for the physical and psychological
conditions increase each day. This document is interesting
also because it points out the responsibility of the authorities
of the US for the daily suffering of the families of these
prisoners all over the world, whose lives have been irreparably
affected by the terrorist policy of the United States that
is applied at this base.
Guantánamo is not only a legal limbo,
unacceptable from whatever juridical point of view, but
above all it is, for those affected, a real inferno and
shame for the entire world. There is a saying that “all
is fair in love and war”. This is not the case when
one treats of war because there are certain minimums in
international humanitarian law, established in the Geneva
Conventions. Among these minimums is the agreement over
the treatment of “prisoners of war”. The prisoners
in Guantánamo have been classified by the government
of the US as “enemy combatants”, a classification
that does not exist in international norms and with that,
they are skillfully not made subject to the sacred rights
of the treaties of international humanitarian rights and
of human rights to which they are obliged.
The international reaction over this theme
has not let up, not only among the human rights organizations
that realize this type of denouncement, but also at the
level of State. Such is the case with Germany, which through
its head of state Angela Merkel, recommended to President
Bush that he close the detention center. In the same way,
the Secretary General of the United Nations recently supported
the central conclusion of the United Nations report, in
declaring that those detained ought to be brought before
justice and that the center should be closed sooner or later.
The recognition by the US citizenry of these facts, as well
as other acts that go against the dignity of every human
being, such as videos of torture and forced disappearance,
have resulted in an increasing repudiation of the government
of George Bush and has generated the impression that in
our neighboring country to the north there is a repressive
government worse that that existing in the times of McCarthyism.
Translation: Doris Regan, O.P. (Columbus)
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Read
this article in Spanish
...The government of George Bush [has] generated the impression
that in our neighboring country to the north there is a repressive
government worse that that existing in the times of McCarthyism. |