SARAJEVO,
July 6, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Despite the distance separating
them, Um Mohammad and her husband, Mustafa Ait Idir, are close in
their sufferings.
He
has been caged incommunicado there in the notorious US-run Guantanamo
prison in Cuba since 2002 when he, along with five others, were
detained in Bosnia at a request by the United States, alleging they
were planning attacks against US and British embassies in Sarajevo.
Then, they were transferred to the “gulag of our times.”
She
is the mother of his three sons Mohammad, 8, Hamza, 5, and
three-year-old Abdullah. She has to work round-the-clock as a
housemaid just to make a living at a meager $150 a month.
Bosnian
Um Mohammad is indeed a telling example of a forbearing wife and a
caring mother, who took pains to hardly cater for her children, with
the image of her Algerian-Bosnian husband always in her mind,
according to IOL correspondent.
“I
have to work hard for my children as I receive no financial backing
from aid agencies, Arab or Islamic organizations operating in Bosnia
because they fear that they could be designated as terrorist due to my
husband’s status,” the mother of three told IslamOnline.net.
Idir
and the other five prisoners fought alongside the Bosnians in their
1992-95 war, which culminated in the worst massacre in European
history when some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slain at the hands of
Serbian forces.
On
July 11, thousands of Bosnians will mark the 10th
anniversary of the genocide.
Psychological
Scars
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Abdullah has not yet seen his father.
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The
early sufferings of the three children have left their deep
psychological scars, with Mohammad dreaming of the comeback of the
“globe-trotting” father and Hamza is haunted by the image of Idir
behind bars in Bosnia before being handed over to the Americans.
“Everyday,
Mohammad wakes up early to go to one of those charge-free schools
built for orphans and when he comes home at noon, he reads for
Hamza,” the bereaved mother added.
“Mohammad
was only four years old when Idir was arrested, but he remembers every
moment he spent with his father. But as he grew up, he can’t buy
this talk that he father is abroad.”
In
April, a group of lawyers filed a lawsuit against the Bush
administration on behalf of Idir, asserting that he was tortured at
the hands of his US jailers, and his appalling prison conditions drove
Amnesty International to let out a moving plea to release him.
Prison
guards, the lawsuit reads, beat Idir so badly that he suffered facial
paralysis and stuck his head in a toilet, flushing repeatedly until he
almost suffocated.
They
allegedly sprayed him frequently in the face with a chemical, and
threw him, tied up, onto a floor of crushed stones.
“They
further held him down and pushed a garden hose into his mouth. They
opened the spigot. As the water rushed in, Idir began to choke. The
water was coming out of his mouth and nose,” according to the
lawsuit, which was made public by Reuters at the time.
Lawyers
asked the court to compel the US government to provide documents,
medical histories and videotapes from prison monitoring cameras, as
requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
Guantanamo
has been at the center of a political storm since a Newsweek
report claimed that military interrogators at the camp flushed a
Qur’an down a toilet to rattle Muslim detainees.
The
US military also detailed on June 3 five cases in which Guantanamo
jailers had desecrated copies of the Noble Qur’an, including one
incident which occurred as recently as March.
Once
calling the prison the “gulag of our time,” Amnesty International
said in a recent report that Guantanamo has become a “symbol of
abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best
US values.”
Chief
among the Guantanamo critics are former US presidents Jimmy Carter and
Bill Clinton, who both called on the Bush administration to shut down
the prison to demonstrate to the world America's commitment to human
rights.
