Change of guard

Binyam Mohamed and Hussein Onyango Obama. Two names — separated by decades, yet joined by a peculiar set of circumstances — have gripped the Western media for the past few weeks. Last December, with Barack Obama poised to enter the White House, The Times reported how the president-elect’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, had been brutally tortured by British soldiers during the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya in 1949. The elder Obama had been a cook for a British officer. At the peak of the struggle for independence from the colonial regime, he was arrested, imprisoned for two years and questioned about the rapidly growing insurgency. The interrogation proved largely futile, since Grandpa Obama, as his illustrious grandson calls him, had little to tell.

Binyam Mohamed may not be a familiar name, but he does have an eerie kinship with Hussein Obama. Mohamed, an Ethiopian by birth and a British resident, was picked up in Pakistan in 2002, carrying a false passport. He was kept in custody there, apparently under the supervision of the American troops, for a few months, after which he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. In 2004, he was traced to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where he allegedly had been tortured into confessing his involvement in a plot to plant a bomb in a city somewhere in the United States of America. While he was held in Pakistan, and later in Cuba, British intelligence agents visited Mohamed and gave reports of their interactions with him to their American counterparts.

Now finally, sixty years after Hussein Obama’s ordeal at the hands of his British masters, Binyam Mohamed, another fellow African, is on the verge of freedom, thanks to Hussein’s grandson. Hours after he was sworn in as the US president, Barack Obama announced his decision to shut down not only Guantánamo but also the network of clandestine prisons (“black sites”) run by the CIA all over the world. Was the coming together of these three actors of history — having a common ethnic origin — going to change the history of the present? Would it dare disturb the world order? Some feared that it could well do so.

Michael White of The Guardian called the article on Obama’s grandfather “a painful reminder of a shameful episode in our recent past”. But his contrition was put in perspective by his fear that Obama’s troubled family history “might prove unfortunate for US-UK relations”, especially since his 87-year-old grandmother, Hussein’s widow, still vividly remembers her husband’s torment. But White consoled himself that all may not be lost after all, since Downing Street had “managed to get on” with John F. Kennedy, the US president in the years following the Kenyan revolt (1961-63), “whose scholarship programme allowed Barack Sr [Obama’s father] to meet [his future wife, Ann] Durham”.

White’s suspicion about Obama’s personal history influencing his political moves is a polite extension of the argument that the president would invariably be biased towards Muslims because of his Islamic roots (Obama is Christian). White tries to dismiss his own apprehensions by using a pernicious logic: individuals ought to remain beholden to their benefactors unconditionally, to the extent of endorsing the politics of their sponsors. Presumably, for White, the scholarship bestowed on Barack Obama’s father through JFK would exonerate the US for being friendly with a nation that has a harrowing legacy in the continent from which the Obamas originally come. By this logic, black African Rhodes scholars should be grateful to Cecil Rhodes for plundering their ancestors so that they could eventually go up to Oxford for higher education; and native Zimbabweans should feel indebted to Ian Smith for turning their ‘pre-modern’ country into a nation-state, and then leaving the task of nation-building to Robert Mugabe.

Beyond the implied racism behind White’s remarks, what becomes more disturbing is his simultaneous, almost ingratiating, faith in the fairness of the US law. “I have no doubt,” he writes, “that one day, when the 9/11 panic has receded it will all be declared unconstitutional, as will the camp at Guantánamo … another dark chapter in US history resolved by the rigour of US legal process.” This self-assuring glibness brings to mind White’s anxieties about Hussein Obama, his need to be comforted that all will be well with the world even though bad things may have happened in the past. Now that Guantánamo is on its way out, the “dark chapter” has been exposed to the scrutiny of what White grandly calls “the rigour of the US legal process”, and things do not look very well. What is being “resolved”, it seems, is not merely the “dark history”, but the scope of justice itself.

Binyam Mohamed returns to the picture as an interface between law and justice. Taken to a detention centre and tortured, as Hussein Obama was, Mohamed has become a symptom of all that is irreconcilable in the Western scheme of justice. Last August, the British high court ruled that the “evidence” of Mohamed’s guilt (forced out of him) was “not only necessary but essential” for his defence. By this time, following a ruling by the US supreme court that granted habeas corpus to prisoners, a US district court had ordered the Bush administration to release the “classified information” it has about Mohamed. As the Bush-Cheney brigade was reluctant to reveal the details, charges against Mohamed were dropped in October 2008, only to be filed once again by the Pentagon weeks later. Since then, a key defence lawyer for the Guantánamo prisoners has resigned, citing deliberate suppression of proof crucial to the detainees’ defence. Finally, last week, there was heated speculation about a letter, sent to President Obama by a British legal charity outlining Mohamed’s plight, being suppressed from him by US officials.

Obama has decided to follow due process by giving the detainees a fair trial in the US federal courts. What happens after the proceedings are over? Those convicted would no doubt be sentenced, but what about the others? Deportation to their countries of origin or of residence is not the obvious solution. Sending prisoners from Guantánamo back to, say, a jail in Pakistan would not make their lives any better — to say nothing of the mockery this would make of Obama’s grand plan to outlaw torture. Obama’s plan is dangerously complicated by the Bush administration’s complicity in the workings of its allies in the “war on terror”. Suspects like Mohamed had been packed off to Pakistani or Moroccan prisons during the high noon of the Bush era. As Michael White said, “nasty things [were] done to them” there, “the real-life version of the nastier scenes in Slumdog Millionaire”. Once the ex-colonials had done the dirty work, British or American officers would “come in to ask a few questions”.

Given this efficient outsourcing of torture, Obama’s ban on torture touches just the tip of a menacing iceberg. What is a matter of routine violence in post-colonial countries would easily qualify as torture in the Enlightened West. So, despite the Geneva Conventions and an evolving discourse of human rights, it is not easy to decide how much violence constitutes torture. Hussein Obama and many Kenyans were tortured in the Mau Mau uprising (the death toll was close to 100,00 against the 32 British soldiers killed). But even in ordinary times, the colonial masters had beaten up or killed many more “natives”. How would these atrocities be then dealt with within the contemporary understanding of torture as a legal offence?

Besides, merely recognizing torture as such is not the same as addressing it. Recently, when Jeremy Seabrook pointed out what was essentially wrong about the view of India that Slumdog Millionaire projects, a reader tellingly retorted, “India is not our problem.” Britain is yet to make up its mind if Binyam Mohamed is its problem — or if he is, then what should be done with him. If Mohamed were to be convicted by a court, could he still be given a ‘fair’ sentence, one that is also able to engage with the burden of his scarred history?

Ultimately, law remains an endlessly pliable concept, at once able to protect life and legitimize genocide. Even if Mohamed is set free, this hard truth is not going to change. The question of justice is as old and complicated as the clash of civilizations, and it is far too late to redeem it from its insolubly dual nature — it can be fair to some only at the expense of others. Just as, after 9/11, Bush defended his “extraordinary measures for extraordinary times” by making it plain that it may be wrong to wage war against half the world, but it was worse to condemn it as “unjust”. Obama may be struggling to put the co-ordinates of justice back to their places in a pristine order of rights, but echoes of the Bush regime continue to resound through the corridors of the White House.