Guantánamo Diary (17 page)

I
t was a very busy day:
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for one, I was involved in organizing the wedding of my lovely niece
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, and for two, I was invited to attend a big dinner organized by a very important man in my tribe named
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. This man had unluckily been involved in a terrible car accident, and had recently come back after spending some time in the U.S. for medical treatment.
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enjoys a high respect among the people from the South, and the dinner was to aid what we call The Cadres of Trarza.
^†

In the morning I asked my boss to give me some money to
help my sister with the wedding.
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In Mauritania we have the bad habit of organizing everything on the whim, a heritage of rural life that all Mauritanians still deal with today. My job was to help transport the invited guests to the site where the wedding was taking place.

Weddings in the Islamic, Arabic World are not only different from one country to another, but within the same country there are all kinds of different customs. My niece’s wedding followed the customs that are practiced by average prestigious families in southern Mauritania.

Most of the work is usually done by the guy. He investigates the would-be wife’s background by unleashing the female relatives he trusts the most. The report of this “committee” will produce an assessment of the technical data of the girl, her attitude, her intellect, and the like; sometimes this investigation step can be skipped when the girl already has a good reputation.

The next step is dating, though that is different than the American model. The interested guy dates his would-be wife in her family’s house, usually in the presence of other family
members. The goal of these dates is for both to get to know each other. The dating can take between a couple of months and a couple of years, depending on the man and the girl. Some girls don’t want to start a family before graduating from school, and some do—or let’s say family pressure and the man compel her to start the family right away. On the other hand, most guys aren’t ready for marriage; they just want to “reserve” the girl and go about their business until they are financially ready. The groom is usually older than the bride, sometimes even much older, but in a few cases the bride happens to be older, and sometimes much older. Mauritanians are relatively tolerant when it comes to age differences.

Before the guy officially asks for the hand of the girl, he secretly sends a good friend to the girl to ask her whether she might consider him. When that is established, the decisive step comes next: the guy asks the girl’s mom whether she would accept him as the husband of her daughter. Guys only ask for the hand of a girl if they know they will more than likely be accepted, so sometimes the guy sends a trusted third person in order to avoid the embarrassment of being turned down. Only the mother of the girl can decide; most fathers have little say.

This step, though not official, is binding for both. Everybody now knows that
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is engaged to
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. Premarital sex is not tolerated in Mauritania, and not only for religious reasons: many guys mistrust any girl who accepts having sex with them. They assume, If she accepts having sex with me, she would accept another man, and another man, in an endless sexual adventure. Although the Islamic religion treats males and females the same way in this regard, the society tends to accept premarital sex from men much more than women. You can compare it with cheating in the U.S.: the society tolerates it
more if a man cheats than if a women does. I never met an American man who would forgive cheating, but I did meet many American women who would.

There is no party or engagement ring, but the fiancé is now entitled to give his wife-to-be presents. Before the engagement, a lady would not accept presents from a stranger.

The last step is the actual wedding, the date of which is set by agreement of both; each party can take as much as time as he or she needs, as long as it is reasonable. The man is expected to produce a dowry as a necessary formality, but it is not appropriate for the girl’s family to ask for any sum; the whole thing must be left to the man and his financial possibilities. So dowries vary from a very modest to a relatively sinfully high amount. Once the man produces whatever his possibilities and judgment allow, many families will only take a small, symbolic amount and send the rest to the man’s family, at least half of the dowry.

The wedding party traditionally takes place in the girl’s family house, but lately some people have found a lucrative business in professionally organizing weddings in club-like houses. The Party begins with the
Akd
, the marriage agreement, which can be performed by any Imam or respected Sheikh. Mauritanians don’t believe in governmental formalities, and so hardly anybody declares his marriage at a government institution unless it is for financial advantages, which rarely exist.

The wedding party equally drains both the groom’s and bride’s family. Traditionally, Mauritanians would party for seven full days, but the punishments of modern life cut those seven days back to one single night. Only the friends of the groom from his generation are allowed to attend the wedding, unlike women, who can be all different ages. At the party women don’t mingle directly with men, though they can be in the same hall; each sex respects the spot of the other. However,
all the attendants talk to each other and enjoy the same entertainment that takes place in the middle of the hall, such as sketches, music, and poetry. When I was a child, women and men used to pass coded messages back and forth targeting a particular individual who certainly understood the message; the messages usually unfolded a funny situation that could happen to anybody and that is somewhat embarrassing. The person’s friends would laugh at him or her, and he or she would have to fight back targeting the anonymous person who sent the message. People don’t do this teasing entertainment anymore.

During the wedding food and drinks are generously served. The party traditionally closes with what they call the
Taweez-Pillage
, which doesn’t have anything with the literal meaning of the words. It just describes the plot by the women to kidnap the bride, and the brothers’ efforts to prevent the act. The bride’s female friends are allowed to conspire and kidnap the bride and hide her; it is the job of the groom and his friends to prevent this event, and should the men fail in preventing the abduction, it is their duty to find the bride and deliver her to her husband. The bride must cooperate with her female friends, and she usually does, otherwise she’ll be branded with all kinds of bad adjectives. It sometimes takes many days for the males to find the bride.

When the man succeeds in getting the bride the party is over, and the bride is given to the groom. Both get escorted by their closest friends in a long rally leading to the house of the new family, while the rest of the attendants retreat to their own homes.

The wedding of my beloved niece
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would have gone more or less like this. I wasn’t supposed to attend the party because I was way older than the groom, and in any case I didn’t have time. I had another interesting party waiting on
me. When I finished delivering the guests I checked with my mom on the situation. Everything seemed to be alright; my services no longer were required as far as I could see. The atmosphere of wedding was clearly going to take over.

When I got to the party, which was in the beautiful villa of
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in Tevrlegh Zeina, the warmth of companionship hit me gracefully. I didn’t know the majority of the guests, but I spotted my beloved
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drowned in the middle of the crowd. I right away fought through the crowd and sat beside
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.

He was happy to see me, and introduced me to the most remarkable guest. We retreated to the margin of the party with a few of his friends, and
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introduced me to a friend of his, a young
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. The
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asked
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and me whether he could defend
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, who now was wanted by the U.S. authorities with a $25,000,000 reward.
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“What are you going to do for him? Reduce his sentence from 500 to 400 years?” I asked wryly. People in the other parts of the free world like Europe have problems understanding the draconian punishments in the U.S. Mauritania is not a country of law, so we don’t have a problem understanding whatever the government does; even so, the Mauritanian legal code, when it is followed, is much more humane than the American. Why sentence somebody to 300 years when he is not going to live that long?

We were just talking like that, and enjoying the food that was generously served, when my cell phone rang. I pulled it out
of my pocket and stepped aside. The display read the phone number of the DSE, the Directeur de la Sûrete de l’État.

“Hi,” I answered.

“Mohamedou, where are you?” he said.

“Don’t worry! Where are you?”

“I’m outside of my front door! I’d like to see you.”

“Fine. Just hold on, I’m on my way!” I said. I took
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aside.

“Look,
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called me, and I’m going to see him.”

“As soon as he releases you, give me a buzz.”

“Alright,” I said.

The DSE was waiting in front of his house, but he was not alone: his assistant stood beside him, which was not a good sign.

“Salam Alaikum,” I said, stepping outside my car.

“Waalaikum Assalam. You’re gonna ride with me, and somebody else is going to drive your car.”

“Fine.” The Inspector and I rode with the DSE and headed toward the secret, well-known jail.

“Look, those people told us to arrest you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but I hope you’ll be free soon. This whole 9/11 attack thing is screwing up everybody.” I didn’t say a thing. I just let him and his assistant make small talk, to which I paid no attention. The DSE had already called and interrogated me twice in the two and a half weeks since the 9/11 attack, but obviously the American government was not satisfied with a yard; they wanted a mile at first, and then the whole Autobahn, as it turned out in the end.

They put me in the same room I had been in one and half years ago. The Inspector went out to brief the guards, which gave me the opportunity to give a quick call to
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.

“I’m arrested,” I whispered, and hung up without even waiting on his answer. Then I erased my whole phone book. Not that I had any hot numbers—all I had were some numbers of business partners in Mauritania and Germany—but I didn’t want the U.S. government harassing those peaceful people just because I had their numbers in my phone. The funniest record I deleted read “PC Laden,” which means computer store; the word for “store” in German just happens to be “Laden.” I knew no matter how hard I would have tried to explain that, the U.S. interrogators would not have believed me. For Pete’s sake, they always tried to pin things on me that I had nothing to do with!

“Give me your cell phone,” the Inspector said when he returned. Among the belongings the Americans took back home with them later was that old, funny looking cell phone, but there were no numbers to check. As to my arrest, it was sort of like political drug-dealing: the FBI asked the U.S. President to intervene and have me arrested; in turn George W. Bush asked the vanishing Mauritanian President for a favor; on receiving the U.S. president’s request, his Mauritanian colleague moved his police forces to arrest me.

“I really have no questions for you, because I know your case,” the DSE said. Both the DSE and his assistant left, leaving me with the guards and oodles of mosquitoes.

After several days in the prison, the DSE came to my cell.

“Look! Those people want to know about
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, and they said you were a part of the Millennium Plot.”

“Well,
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are my friends in Germany, and as to the Millennium Plot, I had nothing to do with it.”

“I’ll give you a pen and paper, and you write whatever you know.”

After two weeks of incarceration in the Mauritanian prison, two white U.S. interrogators
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came to the jail late one afternoon to interrogate me.
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Before
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met me, they asked the police to storm my house and office and confiscate anything that could give leads to my “criminal” activities. A special security team took me home, searched my house, and seized everything they thought might be relevant for the Americans. When the team arrived my wife was asleep, and they scared the hell out of her: she had never seen police searching somebody’s house. Neither had I, for that matter, but I had no problem with the search except that it bothered my family. My neighbors didn’t care much, first because they know me, and second because they know that the Mauritanian police are unjust. In a separate operation, another team searched the company where I worked. As it turned out, the Americans were not interested in any of the garbage except my work computer and the cellphone.

When I entered the interrogation room, the two Americans were sitting on the leather sofa, looking extremely angry. They must have been FBI, because the stuff they confiscated ended up on FBI’s hands back in the States.

“Hi,” I said, reaching out my hand. But both my hand and my “Hi” remained hanging in the air.
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seemed to be the leader. He pushed an old metal chair toward me.