If you caught Press TV’s interview with Mahmoud Abu Rideh last Friday, you will have witnessed a wheelchair-bound human being, completely broken in health and spirit, without the will to live. Hunched over and with tears trickling down his face, this stateless Palestinian said his life has become so intolerable that he plans to end it within three weeks. He’s likely serious.
Last year, after an unsuccessful attempt to take his own life, he went on a 31-day hunger strike that led to his being taken to hospital in a critical state. Then again, he knows that suicide is forbidden by his religion so he may step back from the brink. He wants to be allowed to leave Britain so that he can begin a new life somewhere else.
This 38-year-old Jordanian-born father of six, who, in 1995, was given the indefinite right of stay in the UK, has been the subject of an indefinite Control Order for five years that involves the wearing of an electronic tag, a 12-hour curfew, monitored phone conversations, and restrictions on visitors to his home. Moreover, he is not allowed to visit anyone unless this is first cleared by the Home Office. No one in his family is allowed a mobile phone or Internet access, which has hampered his children’s schoolwork. He is forbidden from visiting train stations or airports, barred from working, and he is only allowed to keep less than £100 in his home. Almost every time he comes home, he says, he has to undergo a humiliating strip search, while his wife is forced to dress at home as though she is going out because police regularly turn up unannounced.
Abu Rideh once considered Britain a haven of sanctuary after years of being mistreated in Israeli jails, which affected his psychological well-being. “We never had any problems and we were never arrested or investigated by the police,” he said, until “one morning after 9/11 when I was living in New Malden in London, I woke up to find soldiers have broken into my house, broken down the door and came in through the backyard window...” They told him that he was now a threat to British national security and that he was under arrest under the 2001 emergency law (the Anti-terrorist Crime and Security Act).
Confined within Britain’s notorious Belmarsh prison, Abu Rideh was forbidden from contacting either his lawyer or his wife for 40 days. Sick with chest pains, headaches and diagnosed as suffering from a personality disorder, he was eventually shut inside the high-security psychiatric hospital Boardmoor along with killers, rapists and pedophiles.
So what exactly did he do to merit such treatment in democratic Britain that prides itself on its human rights? The answer is we don’t know. The British authorities have produced not one shred of evidence against him and he has never been sent to trial despite his lawyer’s demands. He was initially wrongly accused of being involved in the famous ricin plot, but like many others, so accused, he later received a letter of apology from the Home Office, seen by a British newspaper.
In June, 2006, the High Court quashed the control order on the grounds the home secretary should not have power to make a control order depriving a person not convicted of a crime of the right to liberty. This infuriated the then Home Secretary John Reid who promptly issued a new control order, dashing Abu Rideh’s hopes of a normal life.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently been lecturing Egypt on human rights, although as a representative of the country responsible for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, she has little credibility. In any event, her human rights concerns should also be extended to Britain. No nation should have the right to deprive anyone of liberty without due process and especially not someone who is mentally and physically ill, confined to a wheelchair. With Britain’s reputation as a compassionate country at stake, the government would do well to study Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation program, which seeks to re-integrate returnees from Guantanamo back into society using anti-extremist deprogramming, psychological counseling and practical help with giving these men a new start.
This sophisticated, multilayered initiative has enjoyed phenomenal success and has been lauded by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has asked the Kingdom’s Interior Minister Muhammed bin Naif to accept 100 Yemeni detainees into the program. Gates later spoke of his “positive impression of the rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia, which has done “as good if not better job than almost anybody”.
Looking at Abu Rideh, who epitomizes the depths of human misery, it is hard to imagine he represents any kind of threat to anyone other than himself. If Britain doesn’t want him, the Home Office should let him go. All he wants is to live in a welcoming place, no matter how impoverished. All he wants is for the indignity, the suffocation and the nightmares to finally stop.
