Salaam Alaikum.
As a former Guantanamo detainee GTMO441, we spent years in Guantanamo on hunger strike and force feeding. I know how governments punish and break hunger strikes.
Today, prisoners in UK prisons are on hunger strike for justice.
They have gone more than forty-five days without food.
Their bodies are breaking down, and the British government has chosen silence and violence. The British Government punishes them, ignores them, and refuses to provide the necessary health care they urgently need. This is a death sentence.
Hunger strikes are not protests of choice. They are protests of last resort.
The British government wants these men and women to disappear quietly.
The media wants to look away.
This silence is a weapon of violence.
Today, I am joining this hunger strike in solidarity.
“I do this because I see now that Guantánamo is embedded in the UK prison system.”
I do this because it is our duty to stand with the oppressed and confront the oppressor.
I do this because I’m able to do it, and this is the least I can do to support them.
This hunger strike is not about food.
It is about dignity and justice.
It is about remand being used as punishment.
It is about a system that believes silence will protect it.
It won’t.
I stand with the hunger strikers.
I will not look away.
And I will not let them be erased.