When Ahmed Rabbani ran out of paint to satisfy his artistic yearnings during 20 years of incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, he turned to whatever came to hand — dirt, coffee grinds and spices such as turmeric from the prison canteen.
“Through painting, I would feel myself outside Guantanamo,” the 53-year-old Pakistani last week said at an exhibition of his work in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi. “Painting was everything for me there.”
Rabbani was detained by Pakistan authorities in September 2002, and handed over to the US Central Intelligence Agency for a bounty of US$5,000.
Photo: EPA
He was “sold” on the basis that he was a notorious militant known as Hassan Ghul, but Rabbani always insisted it was a case of mistaken identity.
He was also accused of recruiting his older brother Muhammed into extremist circles.
Neither were charged or faced trial during two decades of detention, and they were only released in February.
“The US had paid good money and did not want to have been taken for a ride,” Rabbani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, wrote in the exhibition catalog.
“Something neither he nor I knew until the US Senate published its Rendition Report in 2014 was that Ghul was captured and brought to the same prison — only to be released back to Pakistan for ‘cooperating,’” he wrote. “While Ghul went back to his terrorist ways and was killed in a drone strike in 2012, Ahmed got a one-way trip to Guantanamo Bay.”
Born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where his parents worked, Rabbani moved back to Karachi as a teen and was a taxi driver at the time of his detention.
Fluent in Arabic, he specialized in guiding visitors from the Middle East — a factor which contributed to him being misidentified.
While imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, painting became an obsession for Rabbani, although years spent on hunger strike meant he was often too frail to even hold a brush.
If he ran out of materials, he would improvise.
“I would find and turn a piece of discarded or torn clothes into canvas,” he said. “Sometimes I drew from coffee, sometimes from turmeric.”
The exhibition, “The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantanamo Bay,” displays about two dozen pieces that Rabbani was allowed to take from prison — alongside works by local artists who have reimagined paintings that were confiscated.
“He is someone who has lost so much of his life, so to produce the images of this quality is a miracle... it’s remarkable,” exhibition curator Natasha Malik said.
“Displayed alongside Ahmed’s uncensored artwork, the artists amplify his protest and creative expression, by recreating the work that the public was never meant to see,” Malik said.
At the exhibition’s opening, Rabbani outlined grand plans for the years ahead. First up is the publication of a cookery book — he rekindled a passion for the kitchen while at Guantanamo.
“It will have his memoirs in it, but in the setting of a cookbook,” Stafford Smith said.
Then he wants to open a restaurant based on recipes he learned in prison — hopefully using funds raised from sales of his art.
Depicting his hopes and despair, his artwork is accomplished for someone who did just a smattering of art at school.
Some pieces are obvious expressions of yearnings for freedom — nature seen through narrow openings, birds flying and endless oceans.
Another shows a cage containing bright orange fish — the color of overalls Guantanamo prisoners were forced to wear.
“I spent many years in orange,” he said. “I never accepted their laws. I would always break their laws.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS