The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  “I think the police called you because you bought a new TV, and they don’t want you to watch TV. Don’t you think?” said my mom innocently.

  I smiled and said, “I don’t think so, but everything is going to be alright.” My mom was referring to the new satellite antenna I installed the night before to have better TV reception. The irony is that the arresting agent, Agent Yacoub, was the one who helped me install the antenna. When I was in prison the month before, he had asked me to find a job for him because the police paid him miserably. I promised him I would, and in the meantime, I wanted to offer him an opportunity to do some work for me, so I called him to help fix my antenna, and paid him adequately. That was the only way for a man like him to survive. I helped him get some work, and we were sipping tea and joking in my house.

  “I didn’t bring you to my house to arrest me,” I said jokingly.

  “I hope you will never be arrested,” Agent Yacoub said.

  My mom’s house is next to my brother’s, with a short wall that separates them. I could simply have jumped to my brother’s house, and escaped through his door that opens to a completely other street, and guess what? There would be no finding me, not only because so many people would shelter me, but also because the police agents would not have been interested in finding me. I even believe that the government would have been much happier saying to the U.S., “He fled, we couldn’t find him.”

  You should know, Dear Reader, that a country turning over its own citizens is not an easy deal. The President wished he hadn’t had to turn me over. I wonder why? After all it cost him his office afterward. I understand that if the U.S. captures me in Afghanistan and takes me to GTMO for whatever reason, my government cannot be blamed because I chose to go to Afghanistan. But kidnapping me from my house in my country and giving me to the U.S., breaking the constitution of Mauritania and the customary International Laws and treaties, that is not OK. Mauritania should have asked the U.S. to provide evidence that incriminates me, which they couldn’t, because they had none. But even if the U.S. did so, Mauritania should try me according to the criminal code in Mauritania, exactly as Germany does with its citizens who are suspected of being involved in 9/11. On the other hand, if the U.S. says, “We have no evidence,” then the Mauritanian response should be something like, “Fu*k you!” But no, things don’t work this way. Don’t get me wrong, though: I don’t blame the U.S. as much as I do my own government.

  The secret police agents obviously wanted me to flee, especially Agent Yacoub. But I wanted to keep it real—not to mention that the government itself assured my family that I had done nothing, and so my family always wanted to me to go to the police whenever they asked to see me. The funny thing about “Secret Police” in Arab countries is that they are more known to the commoners than the regular police forces. I think the authorities in Arabic countries should think about a new nomenclature, something like “The Most Obvious Police.”

  There were four of them when I stepped outside the door with my mom and my aunt. My mom kept her composure, and started to pray using her fingers. As to my aunt, that was her first time seeing somebody taken by the police, and so she got crippled and couldn’t say a word. She started to sweat heavily and mumbled some prayers. Both kept their eyes staring at me. It is the taste of helplessness, when you see your beloved fading away like a dream and you cannot help him. And same for me: I would watch both my mom and my aunt praying in my rear-view mirror until we took the first turn and I saw my beloved ones disappear.

  “Take your car, we hope you can come back home today,” one of the guys had instructed me. “The DG might just ask you some questions.” Agent Yacoub occupied my passenger seat, as sad as he could be.

  “Salahi, I wish I were not part of this shit,” he said. I didn’t respond. I kept following the police car that was heading toward the secret, well-known jail. I had been incarcerated a couple times in the same illegal prison, and knowing it didn’t make me like it. I hated the compound, I hated the dark, dirty room, I hated the filthy bathroom, and I hated everything about it, especially the constant state of terror and fear.

  “Earlier today the Inspector was looking for you. You know the DSE is on a trip in Spain. The Inspector asked us who has your phone number. But I didn’t say anything, even though I have it,” said Agent Yacoub, trying to make himself feel better. The only other guy who had my phone number was the DSE, and obviously he didn’t give it to anybody.

  So here we are, at the gate of the resented prison. Inspector Ismael was in his office, looking at me with his dishonest smile, which he quickly changed into a frown.

  “We didn’t have your phone number. The director is on a trip. He’s coming in three days, and meanwhile we are going to hold you in contempt.”

  “Why? I’m really growing tired of being arrested for no reason. What do you want from me now? You’ve just released me,” I said, frustrated and angry, especially since the guy who knows my case was not in the country.

  “Why are you so scared? I never knew you like that,” the inspector said.

  “Look, you arrested me after 9/11, and the U.S. interrogators came here and interrogated me. After that you, when you realized that I’m innocent, you released me. I sort of understand the mass arrest after 9/11, but this arrest right now is not OK.”

  “Everything is gonna be alright. Give me your cell phone,” the inspector lied, smiling his usual forced smile. The police inspector had about as much clue as I did about the goal of my arrest because the government wouldn’t have shared anything with him. I don’t think that the Mauritanian government had reached a resolution on my case; the main guy, DSE Deddahi, was on a trip, and without him a decision could hardly be made. What the inspector and I both knew back then was that the U.S. asked Mauritania’s then-president to hold me; the Mauritanian president asked his Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale—who is now the president—to arrest me; and he in his turn ordered his people, led by the inspector, to hold me in contempt.11

  However, I think that the U.S. wasn’t making a secret of its wish, namely to have me in Jordan, and so at the point of my arrest on November 20, 2001, two people knew the plan: the Mauritanian president and his DG. But since the U.S. was asking so much from its ally, the Mauritanian government needed some time to digest and confer. Turning me over to Jordan involved some serious things. The Mauritanian constitution would have to be broken. The Mauritanian President was hanging onto his office by a spider’s thread, and any trouble would shake him heavily. The U.S. hadn’t asked the Mauritanians to turn me over to them, which would make more sense; no, they wanted me in Jordan, and that was a big disrespect to the sovereignty of Mauritania. The Mauritanian government had been asking for evidence, any evidence, and the U.S. had failed to provide anything, and so arresting me in itself was burdensome for the government, let alone sending me to Jordan. The Mauritanian government sought incriminating evidences from the countries I had been in, Germany and Canada, and both countries provided only good conduct reports. For these and other reasons, the Mauritanian President needed his trusted guy, the DSE, before he took such a dangerous step.

  I handed my cell phone to the Inspector, and he ordered the guards to take care of me and left. So I had to party with the guards instead of Hussein Ould Ndjoubnane and the rest of my cousins.

  In Mauritania, the guards of secret detainees are part of the Secret Police, and as much as they might sympathize with you, they would do anything they were ordered to, even if it involved taking your life. Such people are resented in the society because they are the arms of the dictatorship; without them the dictator is crippled. They must not be trusted. And yet I didn’t feel any hatred toward them, just bad for them; they had the right to be as miserable as the majority of Mauritanians. Most of them knew me from previous arrests.

  “I divorced my wife!” a young guard told me.

  “Why, man? You have a daughter.”

  “I know but I don’t have enough money to rent a p
lace for my wife and me, and my wife got fed up with living in my mom’s house. They just couldn’t get along.”

  “But divorce? Come on!”

  “What would you have done in my shoes?” I couldn’t find any answer, because the simple Math was against me. The guy’s salary was about 40 or 50 dollars a month, and in order to have a somewhat decent life he needed at least $1,000. All my guards had something in common: they all lived way below the poverty line, and without a supplementary job none of them could make it to the end of the month. In Mauritania, the gap between leading officers and enlisted agents is just too big.

  “We have seen many people who have been here and ended up occupying very high level jobs in the government. We’re sure you will, too,” they always teased me. I’m sure they aspired to better jobs in the government, but I personally don’t believe in working with a government that’s not righteous; to me, the need for the miserable wages is not an excuse for the mischief they were doing under the color and authority of an unjust regime. In my eyes, they were as guilty as anybody else, no matter what excuses they may come up with.

  Nonetheless, the Mauritanian guards, without exception, all expressed their solidarity with me and wished they didn’t have to be the ones who had to do the job. They showed me all kinds of sympathy and respect, and they always tried to calm me down because I was worried about being turned over to the States and sent to a Military Tribunal. By then, the U.S. President was barking about putting terrorist suspects before military tribunals, and all kinds of other threats. I knew I would have no chance to be tried justly in a foreign military tribunal. We ate, prayed, and socialized together. We shared everything, food, tea, and we had a radio receiver to hear the news. We all slept in a big room with no furniture and an oodle of mosquitoes. Since it was Ramadan, we ate nights and stayed awake for the most part, and slept during day. They were obviously directed to treat me that way; the inspector sometimes joined us to check on things.

  As scheduled, the DSE came back from his trip. “Hi,” he greeted me.

  “Hi.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine! Why are you arresting me?”

  “Be patient! It’s not a fire!” he said. Why did he speak about fire? I wondered. He didn’t look happy at all, and I knew it wasn’t me who was causing his unhappiness. I was completely depressed and terrorized, and so I fell sick. I lost my appetite and couldn’t eat anything, and my blood pressure dropped gravely. The DSE called a doctor to check on me.

  “You cannot fast. You have to eat,” he said, prescribing some medicine. Since I couldn’t stand up I had to urinate in a water bottle, and as to anything else, I didn’t need to because I hadn’t eaten anything. I really got very sick, and the Mauritanian government was completely worried that the Merchandise was going to vanish before the U.S. client took it. Sometimes I tried to sit up in order to eat a little bit, but as soon as I sat straight, I started to get dizzy and fell down. All that time I drank and ate what I could while lying on a thin mattress.

  I spent seven days in Mauritanian custody. I didn’t get any visits from my family; as I later learned, my family was not allowed to see me, and they were denied the knowledge of my whereabouts. On the eighth day, November 28, 2001, I was informed that I was going to be shipped to Jordan.

  November 28th is Mauritanian Independence Day; it marks the event when the Islamic Republic of Mauritania supposedly received its independence from the French colonists in 1960. The irony is that on this very same day in 2001, the independent and sovereign Republic of Mauritania turned over one of its own citizens on a premise. To its everlasting shame, the Mauritanian government not only broke the constitution, which forbids the extradition of Mauritanian criminals to other countries, but also extradited an innocent citizen and exposed him to the random American Justice.

  The night before the multilateral deal was closed between Mauritania, the U.S., and Jordan, the prison guards allowed me to watch the parade that was coming from downtown toward the Presidential Palace, the bands escorted by schoolboys carrying lighted candles. The sight awoke childhood memories of when I took part in the same parade myself, as a schoolboy, nineteen years before. Back then I looked with innocence at the event that marked the birth of the nation I happened to be part of; I didn’t know that a country is not considered sovereign if it cannot handle its issues on its own.

  The Secret Service is the most important government corps in the third world, and in some countries in the so-called free world as well, and so the DSE was invited to the ceremonial colors at the Presidential Palace in the morning. It was between 10 and 11 o’clock when he finally came in, accompanied by his assistant and his recorder. He invited me to his office, where he usually interrogates people. I was surprised to see him at all because it was a holiday. Although I was sick, my blood pressure rose so much from the unexpected visit that I was able to stand and go with them to the interrogation room. But as soon as I entered the office I collapsed on the big leather black sofa. It was obvious that my hyperactivity was fake.

  The DSE sent all the guards home, and so I was left with him, his recorder, and his assistant. The guards gestured to me happily as they left the building, as if to say, “Congratulations!” They and I both thought that I was going to be released, though I was skeptical: I didn’t like all the movements and telephone conversations that were going on around me.

  The DSE sent his assistant away, and he came back with a couple of cheap things, clothes and a bag. Meanwhile the recorder collapsed asleep in front of the door. The DSE pulled me into a room with nobody but us.

  “We’re going to send you to Jordan,” he announced.

  “Jordan!” What are you talking about?”

  “Their King was subject to a failed assassination attempt.”

  “So what? I have nothing to do with Jordan; my problem is with Americans. If you want to send me to any country, send me to the U.S.”

  “No, they want you to be sent to Jordan. They say you are the accomplice of Ahmed Ressam, though I know you have nothing to do with Ressam’s plot or with September 11.”

  “So why don’t you protect me from this injustice as a Mauritanian citizen?” I asked.

  “America is a country that is based on and living with injustice,” was his answer.

  “OK, I would like to see the President!” I said.

  “No, you can’t. Everything is already irreversibly decided.”

  “Well, I want to say good-bye to my mom,” I said.

  “You can’t. This operation is secret.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two days, or maximum three. And if you choose, you don’t need to talk to them,” he added. “I really have no problem with that.” I knew that he was speaking out of his rear end, because I was destined to Jordan for a reason.

  “Can you assure me of when I’ll be coming back?”

  “I’ll try. But I hope this trip to Jordan will add another positive testimony in your favor. The Senegalese, the Canadians, the Germans, and I myself believe that you’re innocent. I don’t know how many witnesses the Americans need to acquit you.”

  The DSE took me back to his office and tried several times to call his boss, the DG. When he finally reached him, the DG could not give a precise date for my return but assured him that it would be a couple of days. I don’t know for sure, but I believe that the Americans outsmarted everybody. They just asked to get me to Jordan, and then there would be another negotiation.

  “I don’t know exactly,” the DSE told me honestly when he got off the phone. “But look: today is Wednesday. Two days for interrogation, and one day for the trip. So you will be back here Saturday or Sunday.”

  He opened the bag that his assistant brought and asked me to try on the new cheap clothes. I put on the complete suit: a t-shirt, a pair of pants, jacket and plastic shoes. What a sight! Nothing fit; I looked like a skeleton dressed in a new suit. But who cared? At least I didn’t.

  Between the time whe
n I got the decision and the time the U.S. turned me over to the Jordanian Special Forces, I was treated like a UPS package. I cannot describe my feelings: anger, fear, powerlessness, humiliation, injustice, betrayal. . . . I had never really contemplated escaping from jail, although I had been jailed unjustly four times already. But today I was thinking about it because I never, even in my dreams, considered I would be sent to a third country that is known throughout the world as a torture-practicing regime. But that was my only bullet, and if I used it and missed I would look very bad in the eyes of my government. Not that that mattered; they obviously would still comply with the U.S. even if I was an angel in their eyes. After all, I had turned myself in.

  I looked around for ways to escape. Let’s say I managed to get out of the building: I would need a taxicab as soon as I reached the main road. But I had no money on me to pay a cab, and I couldn’t take one to a place where somebody knew me because those are the first places they’re going to look. When I checked the doors, there was only one door that I would not have any reason to approach, so I asked to use the bathroom. In the bathroom I trimmed my beard and meditated about the other door. It was glass, so I could break it, but I knew the plan of the building; that door would lead to an armed guard who might shoot me dead right away. And even if I managed to sneak past the guard, I had to go around the Ministry for Internal Affairs that neighbors the main street, where there are always guards watching people coming and going. It would be impossible to go through the gate. Maybe, just maybe there’s a possibility of jumping the wall, but was I strong enough to do that? No, I wasn’t. But I was ready to pull all my strength together and make the impossible possible.