"Banning, house arrests-it all sounds eerily familiar " UK Law

[Englander]

Clarke's plans take me back to the days of the South African underground

Gillian Slovo
Wednesday February 2, 2005
The Guardian

There was a moment in June last year when an already irate Foreign Office minister, Chris Mullin, seemed about to erupt. It was when a member of our delegation of relatives and supporters protesting at the Guantánamo incarcerations said that what was being done by the Americans in Cuba was reminiscent of the actions of apartheid South Africa. Snorting with derision, Mullin ridiculed the idea.

Now the government he serves is proposing a set of orders that will bring to Britain the beginnings of the kind of legal travesty that the Labour party once so energetically campaigned against.

Since I started working on the issue of Guantánamo, the South African precedent has kept repeating on me. Interviewing fathers whose sons had been swallowed up by the black hole, first of Bagram air base and then Guantánamo, I was reminded of the succession of people who used to come to our Johannesburg home, asking my parents to find relatives who had been picked up by the South African police and then had disappeared.

Hearing of the way British resident Bisher al-Rawi was transported, by the Americans, from the Gambia, via Bagram, to Guantánamo where, three years later, he is still held, or of the way British citizen Moazzam Begg was snatched from Pakistan and taken to Guantánamo, I thought of the kidnapping by the South African security forces of anti-apartheid activists from Swaziland.


· Gillian Slovo wrote, with Victoria Brittain, the play Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom; her most recent novel is Ice Road. She is the daughter of leading anti-apartheid campaigners Joe Slovo and Ruth First

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