Road To Guantanamo, 2006. Directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross. Starring Riz Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Waqar Siddiqui, Afran Usman, Shahid Iqbal, and the actual Tipton Three, who give us their story in interviews: Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul.
Since June 29, my wife and I have been enjoying a visit with friends in Saudi Arabia. It is interesting to note that there are no movie theaters here in Saudi Arabia, ostensibly due to the fact that too much would have to be edited out from every picture: there can be no cleavage, no hugging, no drinking, no drugs, etc. But what is most concering to the Saudi government, according to most of the people I’ve spoken to, is any criticism of their government or the U.S. policy, which skip along hand in hand. Even if there were theaters in Saudi, you can bet that Road To Guantanamo would not be around to rile up a public whose collective anger is simmering at a low boil.
Here in the Arabian Peninsula, cultures are in collision, from the Westerners working for the oil industry to the guest workers in for little pay to clean the houses of the wealthy, to the Saudis themselves, all of whom are too complex to try and shoehorn into a category. Here, you meet people like Fearful Sam, a resident of Aramco, the Saudi/American oil company. Sam is a man who, when asked if he likes it in Saudi, says that he loves it and proceeds to relate, for twenty nonstop minutes, how he never leaves the city-sized compound because ‘they’ hate people like him and want to cut his head off.
We Americans all feel this way, I think, to a degree: the weeks and months prior to departure were filled with concerned friends, family and strangers–liberals and conservatives–expressing sober concern for my life and safety on this trip. I, too, had trepidations. But after barely a week in the Middle East, these concerns have become secondary. My utter ignorance of the world is what concerns me today.
You won’t get a taste of the Middle East by watching a film. I saw Road to Guantanamo a few weeks ago and was outraged, went home, and by the end of the day it’s lessons were simply another bon-bon in the box of my intellectual chocolate sampler. I consider myself learned, read Harpers, visit the Guthrie, the museums, and don’t know squat about the Middle East. To this dilettante, this awful subject quickly gets boring, it never ends.
But here, in Saudi, you get the world in your face every day, moment after moment: children play soccer and cricket while Saudi jets fly over; the war in Israel over the captured soldier is in every breath, nearly as prevalent and soul-sickening for the locals as 9/11 was for us; the attacks on the U.S., Spain and Britain were simply more devastation in a now half-century skirmish, The Great War for Civilization, as Robert Fisk calls it.
The Road to Guantanamo is a harrowing film at times, a damning account of three innocents who were swallowed alive by the machinery of our “war” against terrorism. From a purely aesthetic perspective, Road is a good movie, but nonetheless a film with a trio of actors at its center playing the Tipton Three with very little emotional range. I don’t doubt director Michael Winterbottom’s intentions aren’t anything but noble, but all he’s done is take the story and recreate it onscreen with as much verisimilitude as he can. The result is an oddly distant movie, whose scenes of torture are strangely unaffecting at times, and, worse, confusing and at times veering out of context. The film has been criticized for not making any attempt at understanding some of the American guards at Guantanamo, but my chief complaint is that we really don’t come to understand the three poor kids whose lives were stolen for two long years.
The facts: Just a week after September 11, 2001, young Asif, all of nineteen years old, travels from Tipton, England to Pakistan to meet with a girl his mother has deemed worthy of him to marry. Asif asks his friend Ruhel to come and be his best man. Ruhel agrees, and brings along some other pals, Shafiq and Monir. These are three typical teenage goofballs–eager to eat, to talk, and share their passionate ideas with one another. While praying at a mosque, an Imam there suggests that all good Muslims should go to Afghanistan to give aid to the people whose lives have been disrupted by the war there. Along with a cousin, Zahid, they travel to Afghanistan to help.
From there, a series of horrific events meet them: they are stuck in a village, helping no one and getting deathly ill; being whisked supposedly back to Pakistan but instead right into the heart of Taliban territory; their group is split up, and Monir vanishes, forever.
Worst of all, however, and the crux of the story: the three boys from England are captured by Northern Alliance troops, detained, beaten, questioned, and finally sent to Guantanamo Bay for two years.
The Road to Guantanamo has no plot to speak of, really: as I said, it’s simply an often confusing exact reenactment of what the Tipton Three tell us. Like United 93, this is an outstanding account of events that we can only imagine–and, like that movie, I ask, to what end? Is it, like the Coney Island Hurrican Recreations, simply to ‘take us there!’? Well, that’s an impossibility. We’ll be squeamish for two hours, then go home and hope and pray for an end to the Bush Administration or send our checks to Amnesty International at most. Don’t ask me what I want instead, because I don’t know the answer. As far as the film is concerned, The Road To Guantanamo would have been more powerful with up close interviews with the them, and let my imagination roam–it is still more potent than Winterbottom’s recreations.
You could do no wrong in bookending a depressing day with viewings of both United 93 and Road to Guantanamo–these stories tell us how different people are affected by our so-called war on terror. In the interviews with the Tipton Three, you see that their experience as they relate it do not reflect on their faces–in fact, there’s a certain peace to them, a resignation of fate, a sad acceptance that, in the words of one of the men, “the world’s not a nice place”. Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul all stare straight at the camera, as if trying to see something in us that will help them to understand their ordeal, and it’s wrenching. Has their faith helped them heal? Has it helped them to forgive? Or will they carry an anger with them for the rest of their lives?
It is striking to drive down the manic streets of Dammam and Khubar and suddenly hear the call to prayer resonate from a mosque, and then another, off by a few seconds, from another, and then more, until the skies are filled. Then the stores shuttering, the people praying. Spirited discussions erupt in the cafes and foule shops for any westerner eager to listen. There is anger here, no doubt, but there is also a sense of calm, of trying to get to the bottom of generations of conflict, of a hunger for peace, and not necessarily a peace through conquest as one might expect. The Tipton Three have been through a wringer so distant from our own experiences that nothing can compare. When I saw The Road to Guantanamo, I knew about this tragedy from a distance nearly equal to this planet and the dark side of Mars. Now that I’m in Saudi, trying to figure out my place in the politicial firmament, this is what amazes me: these three young men’s capacity for forgiveness, relief, resignation to their God’s will.
