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Guantanamo Bay casts shadow on Britain
Times of India, Monday 28th April 2003
It may all have been very different if we were talking about the rights of terrorists operating in Jammu and Kashmir or the extradition of Abu Salem to India. But, Britain's famous sense of fairplay and exaggerated emphasis on human rights is nothing when it comes to the following, intensely ugly facts:
* At least 20 European nationals, from countries ranging from across the European Union, are presently incarcerated in the legal black hole, that American-run Gulag, called Guantanamo Bay.
Though impossible to confirm, it is entirely likely that none of these Europeans is white. The only Taliban-Al Qaeda fighter of America, publicly charged, tried and despatched with due legal process, is the white Muslim American convert, John Walker Lindh.
* Britain, Denmark, Spain, Belgium and France are all accused by human rights groups of publicly caring little and privately not at all about their citizens who continue to be illegally incarcerated with more than 600 detainees.
* Sweden is the only European exception, bravely and somewhat controversially, to have protested most forcefully about the "legal limbo" in which its lone national is being held in Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta.
Few in public or political life in Britain, America's chief ally and cheerleader, appear worried that their own nationals make up the largest Western contingent at Guantanamo Bay.
The West's conspiracy of silence over Guantanamo Bay is deafening, but it may actually speak volumes about multi-culturalism and the real-time skirmishes of the clash of civilizations. Is multi-culturalism really an article of faith for Britain and the new EU? Or is it just a fashionable marketing tool for ready-chilled meals and ethnic room chic?
Unlike the Stalinist Gulag, there may never be a latter-day Alexander Solzhenitsyn to tell us and lay bare the reality of the Stars and Stripes gulag. Few believe we will ever know, even later, whenever the morally brutalised American administration declares its "war on terror" to be over.
But it is striking that Europe's carefully-constructed, complex architecture of laws, human rights legislation, fussy safety procedures and diplomatic do-gooding is almost quiescent while the world's most powerful country drives a battering ram through the gates of civilised conduct. Now, the Americans have admitted they are holding children captive as well. The Europe that is perilously strict about visa violations, smoking in public, over-long sausages and extraditing Salem to a country where he would receive the death penalty, is unresponsive.
The detained men, who were flown to the remote military base are still illegally classified "enemy combatants". In defiance of the Geneva Convention and all international law, they continue to be held without charges.
When the rhetoric of rights and responsibility is directed at the Third World, it may be right to remember, say, these sons of Tipton in the English Midlands, and hundreds of others, Terrorists or Taliban, reckless adventurers or the unluckiest of innocents, Guantanamo Bay raises serious concerns about their future, their health, the future of international law and health of the Western concept of justice-for-all.
