Written by Victoria Brittain Tuesday, 20 December 2011

 

Mahmoud Abu RidehMahmoud Abu Rideh

Mahmoud was in the small group of men detained in Belmarsh prison on December 19 2011 under anti-terror legislation introduced post 9/11 to give power to detain indefinitely foreign nationals who could not be returned home because of the likelihood of torture or death.

Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s Control Order years were a tragic saga of intermittent, returns to confinement in prisons and hospitals, violent attempts to end his life, hunger strikes, appearances in court, terrifying rages of frustration, all shot through with times of great happiness with his adored children, and acts of kindness and generosity to others.

He was one of the best known of the Control Order men because he insisted on having his anonymity waived, and, spurred by a burning sense of injustice, constantly wanted his story told by any media he could button-hole.

Mahmoud was in the small group of men detained in Belmarsh prison on December 19 2011 under anti-terror legislation introduced post 9/11 to give power to detain indefinitely foreign nationals who could not be returned home because of the likelihood of torture or death. The evidence against them was secret.

He was a Palestinian from Gaza, and was already a mental health patient, suffering the effects of torture in an Israeli prison, and his condition soon worsened in Belmarsh. He was soon detained instead in Broadmoor secure hospital where he spent almost three years. Bail was refused, despite his illness.

His wife suffered serious harassment after a local newspaper published photographs of their home and linked her husband to terrorism. She moved to another part of London, and kept her husband’s circumstances secret from everyone, except the head teacher at the children’s school, and her small group of friends.

In March 2005, following the legal challenges to indefinite detention of non-nationals, Mahmoud was abruptly released to his home – only two hours notice was given to the family to prepare – and placed on a Control Order. The electronic tag, the reporting by phone five times a day, including a midnight call, the restrictions on where he could go, when he could leave his house, and, above all, who he was allowed to be in contact with, were intolerable to this vulnerable sociable man. And always nagging at his mind, he said, were offers from the authorities to ease his situation if he would work for them.

For his family, his welcome return home was soured by the restrictions on their own lives too. There was no internet allowed in the house, no memory sticks or MP3 players, no mobile phones, and no visitors who had not been cleared by the Home Office. In addition there were repeated unannounced incursions into the house by police who searched the premises, and confiscated items such as children’s games, car log book, MOT certificates, school reports, and money. The children noted with surprise the rudeness of the officers.

The impact on the children of another three and half years, even more difficult than the preceding ones when their father was in prison, was deeply traumatic. The family was held together by the extraordinary patience, discipline, and self-sacrifice of their mother. Against all the odds, and burdened by a deep nagging anxiety about what might happen to Mahmoud at any time, she hid her own grief and made theirs a happy home. It was a pleasure to visit, and Palestinian hospitality was their speciality. And the children, despite the extreme difficulties of the household’s isolation, and their father’s eccentricities, managed to do well at school, and were usually fun and cheerful to meet, full of plans for a happier future in Jordan one day.

As an escape from the tension in the house, their mother took them home to Jordan for most of the summers, and on two occasions left some of the children in school there. “They need a normal life, a child’s life,” she said. But they always came back to London, their father needed them so much, and they were deeply loyal to him. But all of them sometimes expressed extremely dark sad feelings too, difficulties with sleeping and an overwhelming sense of the unfairness of what had happened to him, and to them. One child wrote in an open letter in a time of extreme crisis, “Would you be able to cope with this life we have?”

In fact all the children had their mother’s dignity and coping skills. But no child could avoid being scarred forever by the years of strain at home, compounded by the ordeal of visiting their father in a locked hospital ward on a hunger strike, which had reduced him to a near skeleton in his wheelchair, ranting with fury against his doctors, against the British authorities, and demanding to leave the country.`

When Mahmoud came home again that time he was still very fragile in both body and mind. That was the moment the Home Office chose to forbid him to speak on the phone any more to the person who had been his calming lifeline, by phone, through these years – Moazzam Begg. It was a blow that compounded the isolation, anger, and sense of abandonment of Mahmoud, with a resulting ratcheting up of extreme tension and a sense of looming explosion in the household.

In late 2009 his family left for Jordan, where the children have found the happier life they dreamed of in all those hard years in London. Mahmoud left too, for Syria, then for his home in Bani Sheila, east of Khan Younis in Gaza. He later died in Pakistan in December 2010, almost exactly nine years to the date he was first detained.

* Victoria Brittain is a former associate foreign editor of the Guardian. Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths and Death of Dignity

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