(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[cuba] – It felt like crossing the river Styx, the mythical border of hell, and then ascending right into Dante's ninth circle. But the worst thing was really to travel back across the bay and be offered a better meal at the restaurant. I cried terribly, says Michael Ratner.
This is not about the torture and imprisonment that is happening on the US military base today. Ratner talks about the prehistory, about when Guantanamo became the world's first internment camp for HIV-infected people.
- It's the most cruel thing I've seen in my long life as a lawyer.
Michael Ratner says this in an exclusive interview with Ny Tid. Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and is the man who coordinates the defense work for all the prisoners at the US Guantanamo Bay base.
Norwegian industrial giant Aker Kvaerner has so far suggested that Guantanamo was a haven for Caribbean boat refugees. Aker Kvaerner's commitment to the island extends back to 1993, through its subsidiary John Brown Engineering. Guantanamo was used to intern refugees until 1994.
But the story encompasses more than that. When Ratner gets buzzed, he continues:
It all started with the coup in Haiti against Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991, at the end of the presidency of the first Bush administration.
Leftist presidential candidate Aristide had won the election in Haiti, with great support from the country's many poor people. Neighboring the United States in the north was less satisfied and supported Aristide's opponents who committed the coup in 1991.
In the following weeks and months, many of Aristide's followers escaped from the island, escaping in simple wooden boats. Many went to the United States, and in the first few weeks they were granted residence and work permits.
- Our American hospitality lasted only just over two weeks. Then the Bush administration closed its borders. A ring of navy ships was established around Haiti and the refugees in international waters were picked up in a kind of blockade. Contrary to the Refugee Convention, as I see it, Ratner sums up.
The US now began a large-scale transport of Haitians to the Guantanamo base, where they established an immigration office. It was about processing the applications before the Haitians reached the US border so that they could not enjoy the rights of refugees.
- Some of them were still allowed to come to the United States, while many were sent back to Haiti. But what caught my interest was that some of them stayed at Guantanamo. What was it with this group? says Michael Ratner.
HIV infected children
- I have traveled all over the world in my job as a human rights lawyer, but this is the worst I have ever seen. My countrymen had set up camp where it was unbearably hot, very unhygienic, hard and uncomfortable. In practice, it was a prison where people sat without law and judgment, and without having done anything other than seek asylum. It rained in through makeshift roofs and tarpaulins. There was barbed wire everywhere. There were children trapped.
Ratner was told that the group that was not further expedited were HIV-positive Haitians. He decided to fight for their rights to freedom, to fair treatment, and to help them with residency applications in the United States. A two-year battle to close the HIV detention camp has started.
- Did these prisoners receive any medical treatment?
- Yes, a kind of follow-up. But by no means what they needed. And here lay both some of the problem and some of the reason why the case was resolved. In the early 1990s, there was some focus on HIV-infected pregnant women and how to prevent the infection from being transmitted to the child.
Ratner found allies in the Bush administration at this point and got some clients into treatment in the United States.
- Sometimes it went well. But I remember I got a woman here with an HIV-infected child. It took longer than it should because of the bureaucracy. I watched as both died in great pain just ten days later.
Other HIV-infected children were born in the detention camp.
Camp Buckley
The HIV camp was called Camp Buckley. It had at most nearer 500 interned. Whole families were put in Camp Buckley with no way to get back to Haiti or to the United States.
The total number of Haitians who visited Guantanamo these two years is far greater. It is estimated that the entire 40.000 got their cases processed here, while most were sent so quickly that the camp never counted more than just 12.000 people.
Lawyers, critical media and a growing public opinion in the United States eventually got Presidential candidate Bill Clinton to promise to close Guantanamo camp if he won the election.
After he became president, Clinton broke the promises. Ratner and his colleagues started a series of lawsuits that raised both the question of the constitutional rights of those detained at Guantanamo, about their right to medical treatment, and about the legality of the detention camp itself.
The US Supreme Court ruled that the United States Constitution is valid on Guantanamo, but did not decide what rights detained prisoners on the base had.
A federal court first ordered HIV-infected children to receive treatment in the United States. And then the court decided on the detention of the HIV infected as such.
A historical judgment
"The Haitians' complaint concerns a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, and continued detention is completely unacceptable to this court," Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. wrote on June 8, 1993.
With this startling verdict, the US judiciary declared that the world's first internment camp for HIV-infected people had to be closed.
"Insensitive", "scandalous" and "clandestine" were the terms the judge used to describe the treatment the HIV-infected Haitians at Guantanamo base had received. Ten days later, Camp Buckley was closed and the more than a hundred remaining prisoners were allowed to stay in the United States.
However, the story of Guantanamo as a detention camp does not end here. Although the flow of Haitians stopped, new refugees knocked on the door. This time about 25.000 Cubans. Many of these were also detained at Guantanamo, and this had been a matter of trial: the Haitians felt discriminated against compared to the Cubans.
refugee Convention
- It has always been an alluring thought for the United States to use Guantanamo to make an exception to the whole basic idea behind the UN Refugee Convention. You have certain rights when you come as a refugee to another country's border. It is forbidden for the host country to just push you back across the border, says Michael Ratner.
But by systematically picking up the refugees out at sea, this "problem" escaped. And since Guantanamo is actually Cuban territory, it could be said that ordinary US law does not apply.
- Of course we tried to challenge this in court, but lost. And it has contributed to the problems we have today with prisoners from other parts of the world.
The Cubans who arrived at the base were not particularly satisfied with the conditions in the camp.
According to the Associated Press, some of the Cuban refugees were persons whom Fidel Castro had granted amnesty from prisons. Some should also have been former patients from mental hospitals.
Jane Franklin, a historian based in New Jersey, has written a number of books and articles on US-Cuba relations. She has been particularly interested in this part of Guantanamo's history.
Franklin tells Ny Tid about suicide attempts and hunger strikes.
- I also know of 85 Cubans who tried to escape back to Cuba from the detention at Guantanamo, she says.
- 39 of them managed it. They first had to push barbed wire fences and jump down a 20 meter high cliff, and then swim more than one and a half kilometers. All this to get back to the country they originally fled from. That says a lot about what kind of conditions they lived under in the camp at this time, Franklin says.
She recalls that the place was called "the refugee camps Alcatraz" by the refugees themselves.
Prison again
During 1994, the camp was also emptied for Cubans. This was followed by seven years of regular operation of the Naval Base at Guantanamo.
But when the United States attacked Afghanistan to find and punish those suspected of being behind the terrorist attack on the 11. September 2001, the country also passed a law that reintroduced the use of Guantanamo.
The United States has since operated with a whole new group of prisoners in American language: "illegal combatants", illegal combatants. These prisoners need not be treated either as prisoners of war or as civilians with ordinary civil rights.
Today, about 500 prisoners are interned at the Guantanamo base. Only nine of these have been formally prosecuted. The Bush administration believes the prisoners here can be held indefinitely, without law and judgment.
The man who coordinates the cases of all the prisoners at the base, and who has contact with a large number of prisoners and lawyers in a number of countries, is the same Michael Ratner who closed the HIV camp in 1993.
- There is a line between these cases, Ratner says.
- Try to follow it. It is not a beautiful sight.
Cuba: The area is occupied
[black hole] The story of the US naval base at Guantanamo extends over a hundred years back in time. The United States secured access to the area through the David Platt Agreement in 1903, which gave the United States a right to lease the area of Cuba forever, for only 4085 US dollars a year.A good deep harbor and a strategic location have meant that the United States has chosen to retain the area, which is formally Cuban territory. Cuba has not raised a single check from the United States since the country's revolution. Fidel Castro has characterized the US presence as an occupation.
Formally, therefore, Cuba and the United States agree that Guantanamo is Cuban territory. But since the US maintains its base despite protests from the host country, it is legally very complicated to find out which laws are valid here.
The main criticism of US prisoners at the Guantanamo base has been precisely the fact that they operate in a legal "black hole".
Kvernner present since 1993
Aker Kvaerner dismissed his role at Guantanamo with the camp being built for boat refugees. It made history even worse.
[Norwegian deliveries] Aker Kvaerner has been strongly criticized for his assignments at the Guantanamo base during the period 2001-2005. The company's total 700 staff at the base has performed a lot of operational and maintenance work at the naval base, but has also supplied water, connected to electricity and participated in construction work related to the Camp X-ray prison. This is where the United States has detained prisoners from its "war on terror".After TV 2 had shown Erling Borgen's documentary A Little Piece of Norway, Aker Kvaerner sent out a press release. There it was stated that a balanced representation of their business on the base should include the story that Camp X-ray was built over the old camp of Caribbean boat refugees at Guantanamo at the beginning of the 1990 century.
Service Assignments
Aker Kvaerner further stated that they have been present at the base since 1993. This presence was by virtue of a company named John Brown Engineering, which Kvaerner acquired during the acquisition of Trafalgar House in 1996. But the company continued its operations until 2005, the last few years under the name Kvaerner Process Services Inc.
When Ny Tid asks Aker Kvaerner's information manager Torbjørn Andersen what kind of role the company actually played in relation to the boat refugees, we get no clear answers.
- None of those who work in the company today were there at that time. We do not know exactly. But our assignments at the time were also about general maintenance, service assignments, infrastructure, water and power connections. It is in practice the same contract, he says.
To the Attorney General
Oslo politician Ivar Johansen (SV) has previously reported police Aker Kvaerner's Guantanamo mission. Aftenposten reported a week and a half ago that his report had been dropped by the Oslo Police Chamber, but now Johansen has appealed the case to the Attorney General.
- Such a fundamentally important case can not only be rejected by a lawyer at a local police station. It is very important that the Attorney General looks at this properly, says Ivar Johansen.
He believes that Aker Kvaerner has been an accomplice in gross human rights violations through his extensive work at the US naval base.
PRISONERS:
- When Guantanamo was used as a prison camp in the US war on terror, Aker Kvaerner participated in the construction of the first prison cages on the remains of the 1990 century internment camp. The new camp was called Camp X-ray.
- Today, the United States has built two fortified prisons on the base under the name Camp Delta.
- At Camp Delta in Guantanamo, there are now about 460 prisoners interned. Only nine of these have been formally prosecuted for alleged crimes against the United States.
- Over 60 of the original prisoners were under 18 years when they were taken, the youngest being 14 years. At least ten of the youngest are still trapped.
- 78 of the prisoners on the Guananamo hunger strikes., Four of them forced.
