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There have been a number of large scale hunger strikes among captive held in the United States Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in Cuba.
[edit] Hunger strikes among refugee claimants
The United States has, for three decades, housed refugee claimants and economic migrants, intercepted while trying to illegally enter the United States in camps at Guantanamo Bay. The United States Coast Guard rescued 41,342 refugees who fled Haiti after the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 257 of those refugees were ruled inadmissible to the United States because they were HIV/AIDS positive. They engaged in a mass hunger strike in 1993, over the conditions of their detention. The strike was ended with a negotiated settlement with their lawyers.
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Main article: Camp Bulkeley
[edit] Hunger strikes among the captives taken during the "war on terror"
The United States opened a controversial detention facility in Guantanamo where captives taken during the "war on terror" are held in extrajudicial detention.
There have been at least four widespread hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay detention camps.
The camp authorities do not consider a captive a hunger striker until they have missed nine consecutive meals.
Known hunger strikes at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility
| date |
estimated
size |
notes |
| May 2005 — July 28, 2005 |
200 captives |
- First hunger strike to become known to be public, while it was in progress.
- The strike was held to protest of the conditions of detention.
- The strike was the last to end with a negotiation between the captives and the camp authorities.
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In return for ending the strike:
- Camp authorities agreed that all captives, not just the most compliant ones, would be given potable water to drink.
- The base has no natural source of fresh water. There is a large desalinization plant, but no one drinks that water.
- All GIs and civilian workers drink bottled water. The priviledged captives, those classified as the most compliant, were also provided with bottled water.
- The rest of the captives had to drink the water from the desalination plant, which tasted foul, smelled, and was strongly colored.
- Camp authorities agreed that all captives would get a container of bottled water at every meal.
- Camp authorities agreed that they would allow, and consult, a prisoner's committee, just as they would if the detention camp was a Prisoner of War camp, that complied with the Geneva Conventions.
- Camp authoriries agreed that they would make sure the camp guards stopped administering beatings of the prisoners.
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| August 10, 2005 - May 2006 |
200 captives at its height
camp authorities acknowledged 80+ |
- Strike commenced when captives agreed that the camp authorities were not coplying, in good faith, with their recent agreement.
- All captives did start receiving clean drinking water at every meal.
- A Prisoner's committee was set up, but was promptly shut down
- Guards did continue admiinistering brutal beatings, in retaliation for what they perceived as slights, or non-compliance.
- Captives believed that Omar Khadr was still recovering from the strike, was brutally beaten by guards when he was being returned from the camp infirmary to his cell.
- Captives believed that Hisham Sliti was beaten during an interrogation, including having a chair thrown at him, while he was in restraints.
- Instead of negotiating an end to this strike the camp authorities stepped up the brutality of their force feedings.
- Captives alleged that the force feedings were sometimes administered by untrained guards, who did not practice sanitary procedures, were as brutal as possible, and used over-size feeding tubes, to make the process more painful.
- Camp authorities denied these allegations, insisting the force feeding was always administered by trained medical personnel, and was not done in a manner any more pianful than necessary. Further, they denied that unsanitary used feeding tubes were re-used on other prisoners, and that they ever used overs-size tubes.
- However, the director of the prison infirmary was later to confirm there was a period of about three weeks when oversize tubes were used.
- After the November 2005 elections the camp authorities started using a "restraint chair" for administering the force feeding.
- Camp authorities justified the use of the chair as preventing the captives being able to induce vomiting, obviating the purpose of the force feeding.
- Captives described the use of the restrainst chair as feeling like a kind of torture.
- They reported being painfully overstuffed.
- They reported suspecting that their feeding fluid was adulterated with laxativees, or more noxious drugs.
- They reported stomach cramps as painful as torture.
- They reported being kept in restraints even though they lost control of their bowels, and had involuntarily covered themselves in diarrhea.
- Within ten days of the introduction of the restraint chair the back of the hunger strike was broken, being reduced to less than a dozen strikers.
- One of the strikers who held out was Mani al Utaybi, one of the three men who the camp authorities reported committed suicide on June 10, 2006. Camp authoriites reported he continued in his hunger strike until late May of 2006.
- Camp authorities handed over the bodies of the three dead men to their families, but with organs missing, including the dead men's livers, brains, and their throats.
- Dr Patrice Mangin, the chair of a blue-riboon panel of independent forensic pathologists, reported that the panel could not definitively confirm the men hung themselves due to lack of cooperation from the camp authorities, who failed to hand over the sheets they claimed the men used to hang themselves, and who failed to hand over the men's throats, which had been dissected, and retained, by the DoD's autopsy.
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Hisham Sliti had been brutally beaten
