Global Justice Academy conversation with Mohamedou Ould Salahi, author of Guantánamo Diary, confirms that accountability and forgiveness are the only ways forward
Thu 7 April 2022
On 14 March 2022, the Global Justice Academy hosted the event “The Past, Present and Future: A Conversation with Mohamedou Ould Salahi, author of Guantánamo Diary” where he shared his experience being renditioned and detained for fifteen years.
Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. His family moved to the capital of Nouakchott when he was a child, where he attended school and earned a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany. In 2001, he was living and working in his home country of Mauritania when he was detained and renditioned to Jordan, beginning an ordeal that he would chronicle in his internationally-bestselling “Guantánamo Diary.”
The manuscript, which he wrote in his isolation cell in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, remained classified for almost eight years and was finally released, with substantial redactions, in 2013. Confirming what he documents in his book, his experience and that of many others in Guantánamo reinforce that ‘The United States of America and its allies cannot defend human rights with a straight face after 9/11.’ These states have used ‘“National security” [as] a baton … to stomp over human rights and destroy the rule of law.’
Guantánamo Diary was first published in the United States and United Kingdom in January, 2015, and has since been published in twenty-five languages. After fifteen years of detention, Mohamedou was released on 17 October 2016 to Mauritania. The following year he published a 'restored edition' of “Guantánamo Diary”, filling in the U.S. government’s redactions.
Despite the immense trauma he suffered, a key message from his book is one of forgiveness, which came through in his conversation with Global Justice Academy director Dr Kasey McCall-Smith. Explaining the importance of forgiveness, Mohamedou highlighted his relationship with his former Guantánamo guard: ’[Steve Wood and I] want to show the world … that reconciliation is possible. That spreading peace is possible… You know, they have a saying in America. I can’t hear what you say, because what you do is so loud…so we want to spread peace and reconciliation and forgiveness through our actions.’