MP Watson in hunger strike over inmates of US camp
WEST Browmwich MP Tom Watson is going on a day’s hunger strike to raise the plight of Guantanamo Bay detainees being “slowly starved to death”.
The Labour deputy leader has announced he will drink only water as a show solidarity with two detainees Ahmed Rabbani and Khalid Qasim.
Rabbani has been held at the controversial prison camp, on a US naval base on Cuba, since 2004 and Qasim since 2002 as part of the US war on terror campaign. But neither have been charged or faced trial in that time and insist they are innocent.
The pair have previously used hunger strikes as a means of protest – but Guantanamo’s doctors have intervened and force fed them.
But according to human rights organisation Reprieve a recent change in the regulations implemented by Donald Trump’s administration means they are now being left to starve and doctors have stopped monitoring their health – a move described by Mr Watson “criminal neglect”. The pair have now been on hunger strike for 26 days. Mr Watson said: “They have been on long-term hunger strike in protest at their indefinite detention in the notorious prison camp without charge or fair trial. Neither man wants to die, but after over a decade of torture, injustice and indifference, they are desperate. The only thing they feel they can do, the only control they have, is to refuse food.” He added: “After a day of no food, I will be quite hungry. I might even feel a bit weak and find it hard to concentrate. After 26 days of nothing at all, Khalid and Ahmed are almost certainly close to severe organ failure. It is a of time until irreversible is done; we may have passed the point of no as matter damage already return.
“Make no mistake, force-feeding is cruel. But this dramatic change in practice is sadistic.”
He is now calling on his fellow MPs and the government to intervene and raise the issue with the US authorities.