Andy Worthington's Blog, page 30

A Radical Proposal to Save the Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald House in Deptford: Use Besson Street, an Empty Site in New Cross

In Deptford, in south east London, a battle is taking place. On one side are Lewisham Council and the developer Peabody, who intend to destroy the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a garden that has been used by local children and the wider community for 20 years, and Reginald House, a block of structurally sound council flats next door, for a new housing project centred on the old Tidemill primary school. 

Opposing the council and Peabody — in the manner of that little Gaulish village that held out against Julius Caesar in ‘Asterix the Gaul’ — are representatives of the local community, who have occupied the garden since August 29 to prevent it being boarded up prior to its intended destruction, and also to prevent the demolition of Reginald House, whose tenants are also involved in the campaign.

The Tidemill campaign has, very noticeably, the moral high ground, while the council and Peabody have nothing but spin and deception. The garden is a magical green space and community asset that is also of notable environmental significance, mitigating the horrendous effects of pollution on the traffic-choked roads nearby, and is therefore genuinely priceless. As for Reginald House next door, there can be no rational justification for knocking down structurally sound social housing to build new properties that are also described as “homes for social rent”, unless some subterfuge is involved.

That subterfuge involves the council and Peabody being part of a London-wide movement, sanctioned by London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, to do away with homes at genuine social rents, and to replace them with new homes that purport to be at social rent, but are no such thing. The new rental regime that will be in place at Tidemill — for the 104 new properties that are not either for private sale (51) or for shared ownership (41), an expensive rental scam that creates the illusion of home ownership — will involve ‘London Affordable Rent’, an innovation of Sadiq Khan’s that, in Lewisham, according to the council’s own documents, is actually 63% higher than social rents; meaning an extra £3,000 a year that is simply not available to many hard-working families.

The council and Peabody have no interest in addressing any of these salient points raised by campaigners, just as they are not interested in campaigners pointing out that other land is available in the borough if, as is apparent, they cannot build as many properties as they would like on the Tidemill site. 

Years ago, at the start of the planning process for Tidemill, an architect working with campaigners came up with an alternative vision of the site showing how, theoretically, the garden and Reginald House could be spared by building more densely on the old school site. That suggestion, however, was never taken seriously by the council, and is now used against campaigners to suggest that the only alternative we came up with is not viable.

So here’s a radical proposal for Lewisham Council and Peabody: build the extra homes that you can’t build on the garden or by knocking down Reginald House elsewhere in the borough.

I understand, of course, that Lewisham Council, like all councils, has a housing problem — there aren’t enough homes that are genuinely affordable, and housing waiting lists are out of control. In Lewisham, for example, as of February 2018, there were 1,930 residents in temporary accommodation – 530 of whom were in paid nightly accommodation, with 9,905 residents in total on the housing register.

This is a problem that dates back to Margaret Thatcher’s housing policies in the 1980s, when she sold off council homes but refused to allow councils to build any new council housing. However, instead of thinking creatively about an adequate response, Lewisham Council has slavishly accepted a flawed model promoted by the Tory government — selling off land on the cheap to private developers and housing associations, which are increasingly acting like private developers; all in all, a broken and inadequate response to Tory cuts.

As a result, inappropriate developments are rising up everywhere — in the dreadful Lewisham Gateway development, for example, and at Lendlease’s Timberyard development in Deptford, where genuinely affordable social housing has been outlawed, and the new housing is primarily for private sale, with some ropey shared ownership deals thrown in to placate criticism. And the worst of all is yet to come — a Dubai-style development of 3,500 properties, with 85% for private sale, at Convoys Wharf, by the River Thames, where King Henry VIII used to have his Royal Dockyard. Also looming is the proposed destruction of Catford town centre — the shopping centre and Milford Towers estate above it — to be replaced by over-priced “luxury” tower blocks and retail properties that will only be affordable for the dreary corporate chains that plague almost every town centre in the country (please follow Catford Against Social Cleansing if this concerns you), and the proposed destruction of the Achilles Street area in New Cross, where the intention is to demolish 87 homes and numerous associated shops, because their proximity to Fordham Park has the council and developers salivating over the opportunity to build another batch of over-priced “luxury” tower blocks (for the resistance to this, please follow the Save Achilles Area Twitter account).

Elsewhere, however, housing association-led developments are not much more helpful — as can be seen not only in the proposals for the Tidemill site, but also at numerous other developments across the borough, including L&Q’s replacement for the beautiful prefab Excalibur Estate in Catford, and at Parkside, Peabody’s replacement for the Heathside and Lethbridge Estates on the border with Greenwich. Private sales subsidise rented properties, but as at Tidemill the shared ownership scam is still prominent, and the rental properties that purport to be social housing (“affordable” properties) are increasingly being rented at ‘London Affordable Rent.’ While this is less preposterous than Boris Johnson’s definition of “affordable” as 80% of market rents, a 63% rent hike is, as mentioned above, unaffordable for many people, and, in any case, the stealthy replacement of social rent with ‘London Affordable Rent’ is not something that should be allowed to proceed without being challenged.

At Tidemill, we have always made the provision of new housing at social rent an element of our campaigning, and we’re even more committed to that position as we watch the stealthy spread of ‘London Affordable Rent.’ However, while we’re not in a position to dictate to the council and to Peabody what they should do with the old school site — although we would love for them to work with the local community on making new homes on the site for social rent, rather than for private sale — we can more easily suggest an alternative site for the properties that they cannot build on the ashes of the garden or by knocking down Reginald House.

That site is Besson Street, in New Cross, owned by the council, where previous social housing was demolished in 2008. In December, the council announced its intention to enter into a partnership with Grainger plc, a Newcastle-based firm that, as the council trumpeted in a press release at the time, “has been recognised as the market leader in the emergence of a professional private rented sector in the UK.”

Yes, you read that right. Lewisham Council is proud to be entering into a development vehicle with a company that will make it a developer of private homes for rent, a scheme that has been on the cards for some time, as a report from November 2016, reflecting community opposition at the time, shows.

And it gets worse. Of the 232 homes planned for the site, none will be at social rent or at ’London Affordable Rent.’ 65% will be at market rents (a minimum of £323.08 a week for a two-bedroom flat, while 35% will be let at ‘London Living Rent’, another inadequate innovation by Sadiq Khan. While ‘London Affordable Rent’ is intended to be a stealthy destroyer of social rent, ‘London Living Rent’ is an absurd admission that the market is out of control. Aimed at those with a household income of up to £60,000 a year, who, of course, can no longer afford to buy anywhere in London, it would be set in Lewisham at £225.46 a week for a two-bedroom flat, £100 less than the median private rent, but more than double existing social rents, which average £95.54 a week for a two-bedroom flat. In addition, of course, hidden costs include potentially unfettered service charges.

Moreover, ’London Living Rent’ also includes a complicated notion of the scheme as a route to home ownership. The Mayor’s website states, “LLR homes delivered in partnership with the GLA should enable tenants to put themselves firmly on the route to home ownership. Providers are expected to take into account prospective tenants’ ability to save as part of their affordability assessment and to actively support tenants into home ownership within ten years. In most cases tenants should be offered the right to buy their current home on shared ownership terms at any time during the tenancy, and if no tenant has taken up that right within ten years in most cases the provider would be expected to sell it to another eligible purchaser on a shared ownership basis.”

So, instead of ramming through unsuitable plans for Tidemill, it seems to me, and to other Tidemill campaigners, that it would make much more sense to build the homes that can’t be built at Tidemill at Besson Street instead, scaling down the Grainger proposals, or, preferably, abandoning them altogether.

After all, with Theresa May having just announced at the Conservative Party conference that she is removing the cap on council borrowing to build new homes that has done so much to cripple the creation of social homes since Margaret Thatcher, Lewisham Council could now think about using the site in a genuinely novel manner, seeking proposals for how to build new social housing at social rents. Low-cost, cutting edge, ecologically sound options are all out there, waiting to be picked up on, as are options to, for example, look at self-build options, like those pioneered in Lewisham by Walter Segal in the 1980s, or new community-led options options that could involve employing local people. All of this could make a huge dent in the numbers of those currently consigned to temporary accommodation or stuck on the council’s waiting list.

What we need is innovative, genuinely low-cost housing for those in need, not another profit-motivated development that only focuses on so called middle-income earners, as at Besson Street, or the unacceptable destructiveness of the Tidemill plans. What we all need is more homes at social rent, not an acceptance of a heavily bureaucratised system of sliding scales — ‘London Affordable Rent’ ‘London Living Rent’ and ‘London Shared Ownership’ — that will do little to address the underlying injustice of the housing market.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. Since August 2018 he has been part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Just Updated: Parts 1-3 of My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Today the grotesque and unforgivable prison at Guantánamo Bay, on the grounds of the US’s military base in Cuba, has been open for 6,118 days — 6,118 days of denying foreign-born Muslim prisoners due process rights (the right to be charged with a crime, and put on trial), or the protections of the Geneva Conventions, in a place set up to be beyond the reach of the rule of US law, where men could be — and were — tortured and subjected to human experimentation; where nine men have died, and where there is still no end in sight for this legal, moral and ethical abomination.

Today I’m publicising the links to the first three parts of my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I first compiled in 2009, and which I’ve just updated, for the first time since 2016 — Part One (covering prisoners with the Internment Serial Numbers 1-133), Part Two (covering prisoner numbers 134-268) and Part Three (covering prisoner numbers 269-496). The six parts of the prisoner list provide details of all 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo since the prison opened, with references to where they appear in the 2,230 articles I have written about Guantánamo over the last — nearly — ten and a half years, and where their stories are told in my book The Guantánamo Files.

That book, published eleven years ago, a year and half after I began working as a full-time unpaid freelance researcher and writer on Guantánamo, involved me researching and telling the stories of the men held there, and demonstrating how few of them seem to have had any genuine connection to al-Qaeda or any form of international terrorism, and how they were overwhelmingly either just foot soldiers in an inter-muslim civil war in Afghanistan that preceded the 9/11 attacks, or, in many cases, civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, cynically picked off by officials or warlords looking to make some money off the US’s commitment to paying bounty payments for any Muslim who could be passed off as a “terror suspect.”

In adding new links to the prisoner list, and even seeking out some new photos to add, I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, reminded of what a iong and horrible journey it has been to expose the truth about Guantánamo, and to try and get the wretched place closed down. It took me back to when we still didn’t know exactly who was held at the prison, because the US refused to tell the world for over four years until they lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit in the spring of 2006, releasing the names and nationalities of the prisoners, and 8,000 pages of supporting documents that formed the basis of my research.

Further revelations came in 2011, when WikiLeaks released the classified military files on all the prisoners (except 14 of them), as leaked to them by Chelsea Manning. I worked as a media partner with WikiLeaks on the release of those documents, and then spent nearly a year writing detailed analyses of the first 422 prisoners to be released (the plan was to complete analyses of all 779 prisoners’ stories (or rather the 465 that were available), but I ran out of steam — and, crucially, funding.

In updating the list, I also recalled how I have told the stories of 338 men released since 2007, including Shaker Aamer, who I campaigned for specifically, and whose entry takes up what appears to be around half of Part 3 of the list, but under Donald Trump, of course, all releases have essentially ground to a halt. Of the 41 men held when he took office 21 months ago, just one has been released — to continue serving a sentence in Saudi Arabia that was agreed as part of a plea deal in Guantánamo’s discredited military commission trial system.

I am about to update the stories of these men in a series of individual articles, because, as we have learned over the last 21 months, if the president — in this case, Donald Trump — doesn’t want to release anyone from Guantánamo, he doesn’t have to, and — military commission plea deals notwithstanding — there is no domestic or international mechanism that can force him to do so, and the men still he’d deserve to be heard from, to prevent them disappearing from memory their silent suffering drowned out in the tsunami of daily outrage that Trump’s presidency entails.

If you’re an attorney representing any of the prisoners still held, and you’d like to help me provide updates on the stories of the men, please get in touch. Otherwise, I hope these updates are helpful, and will post the final three parts in the next week or two.

If you appreciate what I’m doing, and have been doing since March 2006, please do feel free to make donation to support my work, which is almost entirely dependent on the generosity of benefactors — like you!

With thanks for your support as ever,

Andy Worthington

London

October 11, 2018

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. Since August 2018 he has been part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

‘No Social Cleansing in London’: Campaign Launch and Fundraising Gig for the Tidemill Campaign in Deptford at the DIY Space in Peckham, Fri. Oct. 12

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

If you’re in London and concerned about the unprecedented scale of London’s housing crisis, I hope you’ll come along this Friday to the launch of ‘No Social Cleansing in London’, a new campaign group that I’m setting up to provide a focal point for struggles against the destruction of social housing, via “regeneration” projects, involving the destruction of council estates, that are designed to socially cleanse poorer residents, and to provide largely unscrutinised profits for builders and developers, and an unfettered private rental market that, for the first time in London’s modern history, is pricing all manner of people out of the capital.

The launch is taking place at the DIY Space for London, a volunteer-run social space at 96-108 Ormside Street, Peckham London SE15 1TF, on an industrial estate just off Ildeston Road, and close to the Old Kent Road, where evangelical churches, traditional industries and young creative types cluster in the shadow of the monstrous Old Kent Road re-development plans of Southwark Council, whose mania for unwanted and unnecessary high-rise housing developments betrays a complete lack of understanding about the nature of employment in 21st century London, and the tens of thousands of workers who can only survive in their businesses on an around the Old Kent Road because they are not exposed to the full greed of the corporate market.

Friday’s event is intended to, in the first instance, provide an opportunity for housing campaigners to come together from across London’s 32 boroughs to meet and mingle and to come up with strategies of resistance. In the weeks to come, I’ll be setting up Facebook and Twitter pages for the campaign — and, hopefully, a website — so if anyone wants to be involved, please do get in touch.

Friday’s event begins with an informal opportunity to socialise from 6pm, with music from 7-11pm, via performers who, in general, have been involved in the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ gigs I’ve been organising since last November in my home borough — my band the Four Fathers, the Commie Faggots, Ukadelix, accordionist Flaky Jake and Southwark-based rapper Asher Baker. New additions are MeU, a kind of beatnik jazz ensemble led by Patrick Lyons, who I met through being involved in last month’s inspiring Party in the Park community festival in New Cross, and Anne E. Cooper, poet and activist, who is part of the resistance to the planned destruction of Cressingham Gardens Estate in Lambeth.

The event is also, crucially, a fundraiser for the ongoing occupation — marking six weeks on Tuesday — of the Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford, a priceless community space and environmental asset, which Lewisham Council and the developer Peabody want to destroy, along wth Reginald House next door, a block of structurally sound council flats, for a new housing project — a typically unholy mix of properties for private sale and for shared ownership, and, via London’s disappointing Mayor, Sadiq Khan, for rent via ‘London Affordable Rent.’

The introduction of ‘London Affordable Rent’ is, fundamentally, a stealthy effort to eradicate social rents — those enjoyed by council and housing association tenants whose tenancies began before the Tories wiped out social rents for new tenants in 2011. The Tories’ intention was that all new tenancies would no longer be at social rents (typically, 30% of market rents), but at so-called “affordable” rents that were not actually affordable for most people, being, notoriously, set at 80% of market rents by Boris Johnson, during his execrable eight years as the capital’s Mayor.

Some social housing providers complied with this new regime, while others implemented “affordable” rents that were less than 80% of market rents; at 50%, 60% or 65%, for example. When Sadiq Khan was elected as London’s Mayor in 2016, he responded to this horrendous mess by introducing new graduated rents that were intended to be fairer, but that have only ended up creating even more of a mess. What purports to be social housing provision now consists of social rents, ‘London Affordable Rent’, which in Lewisham is 63% higher than social rents, ‘London Living Rent’, which in Lewisham is 135% higher than social rents, and are designed for households earning up to £60,000 a year, with the intention that those tenants then save up money to buy the properties outright, and, of course, the shared ownership option, whose many pitfalls have been exposed by housing experts.

In addition, some of the 80% “affordable” rents are still in place, and at the private end of the market tenants continue to be fleeced by landlords charging whatever they can get away with; typically, £400-£500 a week for a couple. In response, it is reassuring that organisations have started up to tackle the chronic injustice of the private rental market, like the recently established London Renters Union, and I hope that private renters will also attend Friday’s event, to work out how we can all collaborate to fulfil the founding demands of ‘No Social Cleansing in London’:

1. The refurbishment rather than the demolition of all existing social housing.

2. A massive social homebuilding programme, cutting out the profiteering of builders and developers (whether private companies or housing associations) and establishing a process whereby new homes can be built on a not-for-profit basis at social rent.

At Tidemill it has become obvious that ‘London Affordable Rent’ is designed to replace social rents, because otherwise it makes no sense to demolish a structurally sound block of council flats at social rent to replace them with new properties at ‘London Affordable Rent.’ However, unless we can create a broad coalition to resist the new system implemented by Sadiq Khan, and the Tory-created funding-strangled nightmare behind it, which has led to the housing association sector becoming a horrendous public/private hybrid that is, essentially, a branch of the government (perhaps the Ministry for So-Called Social Housing would be a good name for it), estates will continue to be knocked down and “regenerated”, to provide significant profits for the builders and developers, while everyone involved hypocritically pretends that they are making a major contribution to solving London’s housing crisis.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

“Saifullah Paracha: The Kind Father, Brother, and Friend for All at Guantánamo” by Mansoor Adayfi

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

I wrote the following article  for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Those who take an interest in Guantánamo will have come across the story of Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni and a former prisoner, who was resettled in Serbia in July 2016, and has become a talented writer in English. He has had articles published in the New York Times, and he wrote an essay about the prisoners’ relationship with the sea that was featured in the catalog for “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay,” an exhibition of prisoners’ artwork at the John Jay College of Justice in New York that ran from last October until January this year.

Remarkably, Mansoor Adayfi didn’t even speak English when he arrived at Guantánamo, but he learned it when, after years of anger at the injustice of his imprisonment at the injustice of his imprisonment, which brought him into regular conflict with the authorities, one of his lawyers, Andy Hart, encouraged him to have a more positive outlook. Mansoor’s transformation has been inspiring, but it was only recently that I became aware that another mentor for him was Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman, and Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, who had provided support not only to Mansoor and to numerous other prisoners, but even to prison staff and guards.

In a Facebook post, Mansoor wrote that Saifullah “was a father, brother, friend, and teacher to us all,” and offered to trade places with him. I thought this was such a poignant offer that I wrote to him to ask if he would be interested in writing more about Saifullah for “Close Guantánamo” — and was delighted when he said yes. With bitter irony, while Mansoor has been released from Guantánamo, Saifullah Paracha, who has been such a positive presence for so many prisoners at Guantánamo, is still held, because of the U.S.’s obsession with his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda, which he continues to deny. Just last week, he had a Periodic Review Board hearing, a parole-type process established under Barack Obama, at which his attorney, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve, spoke eloquently about how he doesn’t pose a threat to the U.S., but it remains to be seen if the authorities are capable of understanding.

Mansoor’s article is posted below, and if you like it, please consider making a donation to help to support him and his writing. As I explained when I wrote about him last month, he faces hostility from the Serbian authorities, who are threatening to cut off his support and to send him to a country with a poor human rights record, and any financial support you can give him would be greatly appreciated. The fundraiser has been set up by Erin Thompson, one of the curators of “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay,” who wrote here about how she got to know Mansoor, and who gets straight to the point in her fundraiser by stating, “Mansoor needs funds to write and to live.” As she also explains, “Because GoFundMe campaigns cannot be linked to Serbian bank accounts, I have created a dedicated U.S. bank account for this fundraiser. I will transfer all the accumulated funds to Mansoor’s bank account on the first day of each month.”

If you like what you read below, PLEASE make a donation to help Mansoor keep writing.

The Kind Father, Brother, and Friend for All at Guantánamo

By Mansoor Adayfi

In Guantánamo, I spent years and years being moved from block to block, all the time in solitary confinement. Through all those years I was growing up physically, but I was deteriorating mentally and psychologically. I was just a number — 441 — in a small steel box.

That how was my life was from 2002 until 2010. In the middle of 2010, I was moved to a communal living camp, Camp 6, where the rules were relaxed. I wanted to learn English but there wasn’t much assistance provided. My lawyer, Andy Hart, sent me a dictionary and some books to learn the language and that helped me. I also spent some time with the guards, learning from them, but not all the guards were interested in helping me.

For years and years, I heard that there was a detainee from Pakistan who liked to help other detainees, and taught them English. I heard many good things about him. The detainees and guards called him Chacha — it means “uncle” in the Urdu language. I hoped to meet him in Camp 6 but at the time he was in another camp.

Chacha the teacher

“Knowledge is the light in your life, and the more knowledge you have, the brighter and more blessed life will be,” Chacha says.

Chacha’s classroom

In 2012, I received the welcome news that my most sought after fellow detainee, Chacha, had been moved to Camp 6, but he was in another block, so I didn’t meet him for another few months. Finally I was able to see him and talk to him through the fence. I was happy to see him and to meet him at last, and the very first time I met him I liked him. I told him that I wanted to learn English, and immediately he said, “OK, we start tomorrow.”

We had limited time in the recreation area, so we agreed to meet in a passage that led to the recreation area, with a fence separating us. However, we couldn’t study there because all the detainees knew Chacha, and everyone wanted to talk to him and have fun with him. Chacha has a sense of humor that attracts everyone, especially that cheery smile on his face that makes you want to say something back. He is extremely educated and can converse with anyone. He said, “We can’t study here, you have to move to my block where I can teach you with others who want to learn. Your brothers here want to sit with me and talk to me. I have to treat you equally, and we must share and care.” That was the first time I heard that phrase. Later on, he taught us how to share and care.

I was moved to Delta Block where Chacha was. I joined the class with three other detainees with the same interest in learning English. He asked us to help him to convert one of the cells (cell number 105) into a classroom. We managed to turn that cell into a real classroom with chairs, a table that was made of cardboard, books, pens, paper, a clock, a sign on the wall about classroom rules, the value of time and knowledge, and a schedule of Chacha’s classes. In no time at all the classroom was known throughout the detention center, to detainees and staff alike, as Chacha’s classroom. Everyone — camp staff, guards, ICRC representatives and detainees — all came to see Chacha’s classroom.

I was surprised by his schedule. His first class would start at 8:00 am and the last class would end at 9:30 pm. Chacha was very strict and very punctual, although he also had a sense of humor when he taught. He used to teach around eight classes a day for detainees and guards. Yes, you heard that right — guards. The guards loved him and had a great respect for him. Nobody could resist respecting him. He taught those guards about business and history.

We studied English for a couple of weeks, and one day Chacha asked us, “When you leave Guantánamo what work will you do?” We said we didn’t know. He said, “I will teach you how to start a business.” We didn’t like the idea because we wanted to learn English, but he insisted and said, “I will teach you business in English, so we can continue our classes in English.” We studied for a couple of months, working on writing in cursive script, reading and learning about business.

Eventually, we managed to prepare a business plan — for a “milk and honey” farm business in Yemen.

This was the first business plan that was written at Guantánamo and it was the fruit of our teacher’s efforts.

Many detainees learned English with Chacha, and managed to learn to speak well. Some learned about business. We weren’t allowed to have books about American history, so Chacha gave us some classes and wrote around 40 pages about history. Some guards also got another opportunity to learn, as Chacha also taught detainees and guards how to cook.

Chacha the chef

“Eat what your body needs, not what the mouth cries for,” Chacha says.

When our father Chacha cooked, that day would be one of our happy days. Because Chacha is from Pakistan, where people like spicy food, his family sent him spices, which he saved for the time when he cooked for all of us, detainees and guards. He used to cook for us twice a week, and we all were waiting for those days to have a nice meal that wasn’t the camp food we ate for years and years. He would cook the food for two different palates — either with spices or without — and the food would be distributed among the blocks, and also for some guards who liked our food. He wouldn’t eat until he made sure that every block got their share.

However, if you meet Chacha one day, make sure to tell him how you like your food or you may end up having very spicy food that will make you cry!

Chacha the father, the friend, and the brother

“All of you — detainees and guards — are my kids,” Chacha says.

Chacha is a successful businessman and a successful man in his life, a husband and father.

Chacha is a very keen person, and with his good reputation among detainees and guards, and the good manners that he has, he won the hearts of us all.

During one of my difficult times in Guantánamo, when I spent all my time in my cell not eating or talking to anyone, Chacha called me to come to his cell where he shared with me some of the gifts he got from his family and his lawyers — sweets, cake, juice, dried fruit, almonds, pistachios. He saves these items for significant occasions, for celebrations, for his guests — and for detainees when they get sick.

He knew that I was having a hard time so we talked about it like father and son. He treated me as his own son, and I love him like a father. He showed me his family photos, nice photos, he told me about his kids, his love story that had a happy ending with him marrying that lovely woman that is his wife. While I was staring at his daughter’s photo, he snatched it from my hand, saying, lightheartedly, “Don’t worry, one day you will be a father.” I knew it was rude to stare, but I was curious about what kind of family he has.

He told me the story of his son, Uzair, who was wrongly jailed, and about how his family suffered after his arrest. He wasn’t complaining, we were just chatting, and he was trying to make me talk. When I listened to his story I was ashamed to say anything, and I knew how he suffers in silence, and that the coronary disease he has might lead to his death at any time. Yet I left his cell in better spirits, and even smiling because of his sense of humor.

One time I was sick and couldn’t attend the class. When he found out, he came to my cell carrying some gifts, and would visit me every day until I got better, and would ask if I had eaten, and if I needed anything. This is how we lived with him. He did this with all the detainees around him, and for those who he couldn’t get to he would send his regards and whatever he could, and would ask about them every day.

Chacha has a young soul that attracts people. He would help anyone he could. When General Motors shares went down during the economic crisis in the U.S., Chacha advised one of the interrogators to buy some shares. He told him, “Go and buy some shares, the price will go up in no time.” I remember when he told us that the interrogator came back later to thank him for that advice. He sold the shares a year later and made a profit of about $170,000!

Chacha is the father, brother, and the friend to all of us at Guantánamo — detainees, camp staff and guards — and he was the beating heart of the camp where we lived. Every block wanted to take him; in fact, we had to fight with other blocks to keep him. It was a blessing to have him around. He would spend some time everyday watching the news and writing down what was going on, so that later he could go to those who didn’t have access to the TV and tell them the news. The same process took place when he received something printed in English. He would spend time reading it and report to those who couldn’t speak English.

He always wrote to the camp administration about the problems we had in the camp. He wrote to the White House and Congress giving them advice. A detainee told me that Chacha had told him in 2005 that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States. I went to Chacha and asked if that was right. “Yes,” he said, “and I wrote to Obama telling him that.”

Chacha helped all of us to prepare for the PRBs (the Periodic Review Boards) that President Obama introduced in 2013. Some of us — and I was one of them — were refusing to participate in the PRBs, but Chacha convinced us, and some of us went just for his sake, myself included.

Some of us who liked to take care of pets tried to do the same with the various wildlife at Guantánamo. We made a schedule for those who wanted to feed and take care of them, and Chacha asked to be included. He would wake up early in the morning to feed the animals and to clean the recreation area.

We were very happy to have him with us in the block, and we all felt that we had a father there that was able to comfort us. But we all were worried about his health. Chacha has many health issues like diabetes, blood pressure, gout, cholesterol, clogged arteries, and coronary disease, and when he had a problem with his heart, we all panicked. We didn’t want him to die in Guantánamo, not like this.

I always told him if my time came before his I wanted him to take my place. When I left Guantánamo I thought that the detention center would be closed and Chacha would leave, but here we are, the detention center is still open and Chacha is still there.

That hurts me more than anything, and when I say I want to take his place at Guantánamo I’m deadly serious about it, and I still want to go back to take his place. I don’t want my father to die in Guantánamo. I can’t even think about it. It hurts me that he is still there. I want him to go back to his family and to spend the rest of his life with them. Keeping him at Guantánamo means sentencing him to death. I can only wonder what kind of a threat a 71-year old man with all kinds of health issues can possibly pose to a superpower like the United States.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Shame on Peabody: Calling on the Former Philanthropic Social Housing Provider to Abandon Its Plans to Destroy the Old Tidemill Garden and Social Housing in Deptford

Since the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford began, on August 29th, we’ve been so busy focusing on Lewisham Council’s shameful role as the would-be destroyers of a crucially important environmental and community green space, and the wilful destruction of 16 structurally sound council flats next door, in Reginald House, for a new housing development, that we’ve failed to shine a light on their development partners, Peabody.

This is unfair, because, although Lewisham Council owns the land, Peabody are fully implicated in the plans to destroy the garden and almost all of the 74 trees in the garden and on the wider development site, and to demolish the 16 flats of Reginald House and to replace them with a new form of social housing that is not the same as what they’re proposing to destroy.

Of the 16 flats in Reginald House, three are leasehold, meaning that tenants bought them via the ‘Right to Buy’ introduced by Margaret Thatcher, while the other 13 are council flats let at social rents, which in Lewisham, are, on average, £95.54 for a two-bedroom flat. In the proposals for the site, these homes will be replaced with new flats that will be let at ‘London Affordable Rent’, initiated by London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, which, in Lewisham, are 63% higher at £152.73 a week. That difference, of course, is huge for lower-earning families who are already struggling to make ends meet, and yet the shift to ‘London Affordable Rent’ is fully endorsed by the council and Peabody, leading to the unerring conclusion that both organisations are actually committed to destroying the entire system of social rents, and establishing ‘London Affordable Rent’ as the lowest rents that will be available in future.

Click on the image to enlarge: Figures produced by Lewisham Council showing different rental rates in the borough, and revealing how ‘London Affordable Rent’, for a 2-bed flat, is 63% higher than social rent.

Moreover, both the council and Peabody are so obsessed with doing away with existing social housing that, when confronted by Reginald House tenants who are angry about the proposals to demolish their homes and move them to new properties with more expensive rents, they have resorted to making desperate promises (although never in the form of a binding contract) to guarantee them “like for like” rent deals for life on the new properties.

Given that 80% of the tenants don’t want their homes destroyed (although the council won’t give them a ballot), and the block is structurally sound (although repairs have been deliberately neglected in recent years, in an effort to persuade tenants to move out), the only reason the council — and, by extension, Peabody — can have for not simply refurbishing Reginald House and letting tenants stay is ideological, with both organisations committed to replacing socially rented properties with the far more expensive ‘London Affordable Rent’ option (and, along the way, also reducing tenants’ rights).

To the casual observer, Peabody, established as a philanthropic social housing provider in the 1860s, is a benevolent organisation that is still committed to providing genuinely affordable social housing. However, since the Tories came to power in 2010 and almost immediately cut subsidies for the construction of new social housing by 60%, while simultaneously introducing so-called “affordable” rents at 80% of market rents, they, like all the big housing associations, have become, first and foremost, private developers, with their social housing obligations relegated to a secondary position.

Although ostensibly using profits from private sales to subsidise the social housing components of developments, everything about the arrangement stinks. A search for Peabody, for example, brings up Peabody Sales as the primary website, with a prominent page for investors, where, under the heading, ‘Buy to let investments with Peabody’, the organisation boasts, “At Peabody, we want to nurture great relationships with investors looking at buy to let investments. Whether you are just starting out as a private landlord or manage an extensive property portfolio, we offer a wide selection of buy to let investments and help you the entire way making the process as simple and straight forward as possible. We develop in high valued areas close to transport links and local amenities, which make our properties attractive to potential tenants delivering fantastic rental yields.”

George Peabody, who set up Peabody to provide housing of a decent quality for the ‘artisans and labouring poor of London’ — or to “ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis, and to promote their comfort and happiness” —must surely be turning in his grave, his philanthropic ideal now irrevocably lost. On its Wikipedia page, Peabody today is described as an “urban regeneration agency, a developer with a focus on regeneration.”

In addition, as is readily understandable from the Tidemill proposals, the notion of social rent — the only genuinely affordable rent level for poorer households, and, in its ideological prime, for anyone who wanted a guaranteed home for life at an affordable rent — no longer even exists. Of the 209 properties planned for Tidemill, 51 are for private sale, 41 are for shared ownership (a notorious scam that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist), while the other 117 homes (a figure that conveniently excludes the 13 social homes to be destroyed in Reginald House) are to be rented out at ‘London Affordable Rent.’

No wonder we say ‘Shame on Peabody’ and urge the self-described ‘Property Developer in London’ to remember its roots, and to reverse its transformation into a tool of an ideologically malignant government that is dedicated to the steady destruction of secure homes for life at social rents. At Tidemill, Peabody can also add environmental destruction to its crimes of complicity, and we call on the organisation, along with the council, to tear up their existing plans and to go back to the drawing board, sparing the garden and Reginald House, and working with the community on a new plan that puts new homes at social rents back on the agenda.

Further information

The Tidemill site is not Peabody’s only presence in the London Borough of Lewisham. The council quietly twinned it with the Amersham Vale development, on the site of the former Deptford Green secondary school in New Cross, labelling both sites as Deptford Southern Housing Sites. On this site, however, the provision of new homes mistakenly identified as being at “social rent” is much lower — just 24 units out of 120 in total, with a whopping 81 being for private sale, and 15 for shared ownership. 

In a Labour Group briefing paper in June 2018, Cllr. Paul Bell, the Cabinet Member for Housing, conceded that the council can legally withdraw from the deal with Peabody, but warned that “it would be considered highly likely” that Peabody and Sherrygreen Homes, a private developer whose role in the proposed development is, to be blunt, opaque, “will still seek to claim back some sunk-costs against the Council. They have spent an estimated £3m and will understandably attempt to claw this back irrespective of what we consider to be a strong legal position.” The £3m referred to consists of £1m for Charlottenburg Park, a landscaped open space next to the Amersham Vale site, whose price tag is frankly astronomical, and “approximately £2m in design and planning costs.” Tellingly, Cllr. Bell also mentioned that one reason for not scrapping the scheme was to maintain “Wider partnership relationships and goodwill [with Peabody], which we need on current and future strategic sites.”

One of those sites is Heathside and Lethbridge, on the border with Greenwich, where two council estates (a 1950s estate, and a striking 1960s Brutalist estate) are being demolished to create ‘Parkside’, a project that will not be complete until 2022, and which Peabody describes, in a booklet for investors, (p. 12) as “a six-phase estate regeneration project, which will transform the existing local authority estates of Heathside and Lethbridge in Lewisham, into a sustainable, mixed tenure community”, adding, “The regeneration involves replacing the existing 565 properties with 1,192 modern apartments in a mix of rented (447), shared ownership (129) and private sale (616) homes.” 

A 2016 briefing paper for the g15 (see p. 48), the dangerously powerful umbrella organisation for the 15 largest housing associations, including Peabody, sub-divided the “rented” properties into “social rent” (199, or 17%) and “affordable rent” (248, or 21%), but these definitions, of course, have shifted in the last two years, with Peabody only recently agreeing to stop charging “affordable” rents set at 80% of market rents by Boris Johnson, and, as discussed above, with “social rents” now being shorthand for ‘London Affordable Rent.’ If anyone has further information about the tenures on ‘Parkside’, please get in touch.

This won’t be my last word on Peabody, as I haven’t discussed the organisation’s many dubious activities elsewhere in the capital, but I’ll leave you with just one current campaign taking place in Westminster, where the council recently decided to proceed with the destruction of Ebury Bridge Estate in Pimlico. As the BBC reported last month (and featured in an Inside Out programme on the housing crisis), Westminster Council, working with Peabody, “plans to flatten 300 homes at the Ebury Bridge estate in Pimlico to make way for 750 new properties, the majority of which will be sold on the private market.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

30 Days into the Occupation of Deptford’s Old Tidemill Garden, Campaigners Celebrate Court Ruling Delaying Eviction Until Oct. 24

Yesterday marked 30 days since campaigners — myself included — occupied the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a much-loved community garden in Deptford, and it was a day of celebration, as we secured a court ruling allowing our occupation to last for at least another month.

Campaigners have been occupying the garden since August 29, to prevent Lewisham Council from boarding it up prior to its planned destruction as part of a housing project with the developer Peabody.

Lewisham Council sought to evict the campaigners at Bromley County Court, but although the judge confirmed the council’s right to possession of the garden, he ruled that it cannot take place until seven days after a High Court judge holds an oral hearing at which campaigners will seek permission to proceed to a judicial review of the legality of the council’s plans. This oral hearing will take place on October 17 (and please, if you can, make a donation to our crowdfunder for our legal fees).

Andrea Carey, a member of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, said:

This is great news, as it was clearly unacceptable for the council to seek possession of the garden while a legal challenge to the legality of its plans was in progress. We urge the council, and the developers Peabody, to take this opportunity to do what they have persistently failed to do: to go back to the drawing board, and to work with the community to come up with new plans for the old Tidemill school site that spare the garden and the 16 structurally sound council flats next door, in Reginald House, and that deliver new homes at social rent.

The garden is a precious green lung in an urban environment short of green space, loved by locals of all ages. Crucially, the garden also mitigates the worst effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, where particulate levels have been measured that are six times the World Health Organisation’s recommended safety levels.

The garden features a design of concentric circles, with a magical ability to enable visitors to relax, to heal and to forget the noise and the pressures of the world outside. It was created 20 years ago by pupils, parents and teachers at the old Tidemill primary school, and has matured in the intervening decades. Only those who have shut off their inner self, and their connection with nature could be unmoved by it, and yet Lewisham Council and Peabody are determined to destroy it.

We occupied it on August 29 because that was the date when the council terminated the community’s “meanwhile use” lease on the site, which had lasted for four years, during which time it was opened on Saturdays for local people, for gardening, and for numerous cultural events. Prior to that, guardians in the old school, which closed in 2012 and moved to a new site, had also opened it up up for events, and so, for 20 years, it has been a green focal point for the local community.

As part of their development plans, Lewisham Council and Peabody also want to demolish Reginald House, a structurally sound block of council flats next door, whose only problem is that it has been subjected by the council to a process of “managed decline” — familiar to anyone subjected to regeneration plans. 80% of the residents have told the council — and the GLA — that they don’t want their homes destroyed, but the council won’t allow them a ballot, even though that is now supposed to be Labour Party policy.

In fact, in March, Siân Berry, the co-leader of the Green Party, who chairs the GLA’s housing committee, revealed that Reginald House was one of 34 estates whose destruction he had stealthily approved by Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan before his advice regarding ballots was issued (which, in turn, followed Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement at last year’s Labour Party Conference that there should be no more estate demolitions without residents being balloted). Please also check out my article, The 34 Estates Approved for Destruction By Sadiq Khan Despite Promising No More Demolitions Without Residents’ Ballots.

Siân Berry paid a visit to the garden last Friday, and subsequently published an article on her website, ‘Old Tidemill plans should go back to the drawing board’, supporting all our demands. As she stated, “What is happening in Deptford is central to many of the problems associated with current regeneration plans in London — a project to build new housing that involves the unnecessary demolition of existing council housing that should be refurbished, a refusal to grant residents a ballot on the future of their homes, and a reckless disregard for environmental concerns.”

We have also just had a wonderful short film made for us by Nikita Woolfe, the director of the documentary ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates and residents’ resistance to the destruction of their homes, which I narrate. Niki came to the garden on Monday, took some delightful footage, and also interviewed campaigner Heather Gilmore, who eloquently explained why we’ve occupied the garden, and what we’re demanding, and also explained the legal challenges prior to yesterday’s decision.

Niki’s video, via YouTube, is posted below (and it’s also on Facebook here):

So now a new phase in the occupation begins, as we have a whole month to step up our PR war with Lambeth Council and Peabody, who, quite frankly, are not winning hearts and minds. This weekend we’ll relax as the garden is opened up as part of the internationally acclaimed arts festival Deptford X, with performances, art and films, and a fundraising gig at Sister Midnight Records tomorrow evening, and next week the escalation begins, with more events planned for the garden, Lewisham-wide networking, London-wide networking, calls for environmentalists and housing experts to get involved, and calls to supportive journalists.

If you can help out in any way, please do get involved. This is not only a winnable battle; it’s a must-win battle, as the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden is genuinely too precious to be allowed to be destroyed by politicians and bureaucrats who have lost all connection with nature and with any real sense of community.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Celebrating 500 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Yesterday marked 500 days since I began publishing a photo a day on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’ — photos drawn from the extensive archive of photos that I’ve built up over the last six years on bike rides in all of London’s 120 postcodes (those which begin SE, SW, W, NW, N, E, EC and WC), plus some of the outer boroughs. You can see all the photos to date here.

I began publishing a photo a day on the fifth anniversary of when my project started, when I first began consciously to document the capital in photos, cycling from my home in Brockley, in south east London, down through Deptford to Greenwich, and then, in the weeks that followed, cycling relentlessly around south east London, much of which was unknown to me, and also finding routes I didn’t know to take me to central London and beyond. At the time, London was beginning to be under siege — by central government and the Mayor, Boris Johnson — in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, with bikes banned on trains across the capital, and to get anywhere I had to cycle, which wasn’t always convenient, but it was certainly a good way of getting to know London’s streets.

The Olympics, of course, showed the Tory government in its full jingoistic, corporate and authoritarian malignancy. A bottomless pit of public money was opened up to pay for the Games, even as Tory-inflicted austerity was beginning to crush the capital’s poor, the River Lea was socially cleansed around the Olympic Park in Stratford, and, although I didn’t quite realise it at the time, the heavily-marketed “sexiness” and “cool” that come with being an Olympic city meant that it would be possible to establish a turbo-charged “property bubble” in the capital, even more giddily out of control than the one that had been cultivated by the New Labour government in the ten years before the crash.

Investors, it turned out, were anxious to replace the huge returns that were possible through the complex financial mechanisms that were eventually responsible for the global economic crash of 2008 with a focus instead on housing, reviving the housing bubble in an orgy of high-rise, allegedly “luxury” tower blocks, and ramping up the destruction of council estates, and their replacement with new developments from which, conveniently, existing residents were largely excluded in a process of social cleansing designed to change London’s demographic and to remove swathes of poorer people.

Six years ago, the vast Brutalist blocks of the Heygate Estate, where the modern “London clearances” began, were still standing, but generally fenced off, and I’m thankful that a friend let me know that it was possible to get in, as I spent a magical afternoon in an estate that was empty except for three determined leaseholders, and that, with its vast blocks shielding its interior space from the noise of the outside world (as it was designed to do), had become an extraordinary kind of post-apocalyptic urban jungle.

Since then, sadly, the destruction has spread. I regularly used to cycle through the Aylesbury Estate (see here and here), a much bigger Brutalist estate just down the road from the Heygate, until parts of it too began to be fenced off pending demolition, an ongoing process that is a source of great anger and sorrow in this part of Walworth. To anyone who cares about the cynical destruction of social housing, it is only recently that a demolition company has finally destroyed the first of the Aylesbury’s big blocks to be levelled, but it took many months of arduous work, because it was so well built.

It would have made much more sense to refurbish these flats, as residents voted for overwhelmingly when asked by Southwark Council (who then ignored them), but that wouldn’t have enabled a developer to make fresh profits, and nor would it have facilitated the ongoing social cleansing of the borough, which Fred Manson, in charge of regeneration at Southwark Council 20 years ago, openly described at the time as the need to attract “a better class of people” to the Elephant and Castle. As with so many of the cases outlined here, the councils in question are Labour councils, because, on regeneration, the mania for profiteering and social cleansing crosses party lines.

Almost everywhere I have travelled in my thousands of miles of cycling around the capital’s postcodes these last six years and four months, priapic towers built to extract serious money from foreign investors have been rising up without any kind of restraint (thanks largely to the laissez-faire or easy-bribe tendencies of the execrable Boris Johnson), and, in cases where these have not been built on empty land (often industrial land, because of the political and financial establishment’s contempt for manual labour and small businesses, as well as for those living in social housing), I have also had to watch the steady destruction of council estates — emptied of people not because their homes needed tearing down, but because their presence stood in the way of developers making money.

Recently, I watched, half-incredulous, as one half of the architecturally acclaimed Robin Hood Gardens Estate in Tower Hamlets was demolished (see here, here and here), even as respected architects queued up to denounce the vandalism, but the clearances and the social cleansing are apparently unstoppable — from West Hendon to Woodberry Down in Hackney, from Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth to Grenfell Tower in west London, where the disdain for these living in social housing meant that 72 people died because everyone responsible for them put profiteering and cost-cutting ahead of their safety, the cynical “London clearances” continue.

When I wrote about this project on its first anniversary in May, I also mentioned other destruction I’ve witnessed over the last six years: the Elmington Estate (see here and here) in Southwark, the destroyed Myatts Field North, and the threatened Central Hill Estate in Lambeth, the destruction of the Haggerston Estate and the Kingsland Estate in Hackney, the Excalibur Estate of prefabs in Lewisham, and the Brutalist Lethbridge Estate on the border with Greenwich, the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, neglected, worn-down estates in Woolwich, the early stages of the destruction of Thamesmead, and the levelling of Canning Town.

The tide may be turning — as was hinted at in Haringey, in north London, where the rapacious destroyer of the Heygate, Lendlease, recently got a kicking from a grassroots movement of local people in response to the council’s plans to enter into a £2bn deal with the developer that would, it was presumed, have led to estates falling like dominoes in Tottenham and beyond (see my photos of Northumberland Park and Broadwater Farm), and in Deptford, in the borough of Lewisham, where I live, I’m part of the occupation of a community garden to prevent it — and a block of council flats next door — from being cynically destroyed in an act of environmental vandalism that, although a small scale, is completely unacceptable.

The overbearing towers rising up, and the homes and communities being torn down are not all my project is about, of course. For six years and four months, cycling around the capital has become a way of life for me — involving constant exercise (though not too strenuously, as I’m not into competitive cycling), something akin to a kind of meditation, an anarchic freedom, an opportunity to be incessantly nosey, an ability to get lost and to be off-grid, and, on occasion, to be blown away by some of London’s secrets — hidden or neglected spaces, unknown to many.

When I started this project, my knowledge of London was quite skeletal. There were places I knew well, currently and historically, but entire areas I had never visited. I also had no idea how it all fitted together, and, while that’s still true for parts of north and west London, elsewhere — in south east and east London, in the City and the West End, and in much of south west and, broadly, north London — the shape of the city, its routes, and its built environment have become increasingly familiar to me, the former skeleton of my knowledge coming to life in repeated journeys that have been like the development of an entire system of arteries and veins.

I now feel as if I somehow embody London, and London lives in me, with certain routes that I’m drawn to again and again — along the River Thames, along the great canals and canalised rivers of north and east London, along south London’s hills, and to a lesser extent, those of north London, in bright sun, on days of overcast dullness, and on rainy days, always looking, always finding new angles and making new discoveries, and always thrilled by low light and shadows, by sudden views, and by the things that dwarf us — or put us in perspective — and that we often miss: London’s giant trees, for example, and often the cloud formations that tower over us like extraordinary mythological creatures brought to life.

Another wonderful result of my daily cycling has been to realise that we aren’t meant to be indoors too much, and that we’re waterproof. I’ve been throughly soaked more times than I can remember, and it’s often quite wonderfully invigorating.

Thanks to everyone who’s taken an interest in this project. I look forward to reaching 1,000 days, but in the meantime maybe I’ll finally get round to printing some of my photos and trying to get an exhibition somewhere. And, as ever, I do think a book would be nice!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Radio: I Discuss London’s Housing Crisis, the Tidemill Occupation and Guantánamo on Wandsworth Radio, Plus the World Premiere of ‘Grenfell’ by The Four Fathers

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Last Saturday, I was on community radio station Wandsworth Radio for two hours, taking part in a freewheeling, wide-ranging political discussion with host Andy Bungay and regular monthly co-host Colin Crilly. 

The show is here, and below I’ve broken it down into various topics, if you’re interested in navigating to various discussions.

From 9:00 to 15:00 we discussed the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, which I’m involved in, and which I’ve written about here and here, the latter linking to my article for Novara Media, The Battle for Deptford and Beyond.

From there, from 15:00 to 23:20, we moved on to discussing ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the documentary film about the destruction of council estates, and residents’ resistance to the destruction of their homes, which I narrate, and we also discussed the Grenfell Tower fire, and the important work of ASH (Architects for Social Housing), including their post-Grenfell public meeting, ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’, which was where I met Nikita Woolfe, the director of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, and we also discussed the extent of post-Grenfell cladding issues, and how the government has still failed to address them adequately.

From 23:20 to 33:00 we moved onto the significance of the two main events of the last two decades, 9/11 and the global economic crash, which I wrote about in two recent articles, The Bitter Legacy of 9/11, on its 17th Anniversary: Endless War, Guantánamo, Brexit, Trump and the Paranoid Security State and Ten Years Since the Global Financial Crash of 2008, We’ve Been Screwed by Austerity, and Now The Predators Want Our Homes, pointing out how the 2008 crash led to the current housing crisis. We also spoke about the erosion of the middle class, and the burden of university tuition fees, and how that is eroding social mobility.

From 33:00 to 42:00 we turned our attention to the political situation in the United States, and a discussion of how the world of work is changing, and the over-bureaucratisation of our lives, and from 42:00 to 47:30 we steered back to the story of the Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald House, explaining how, recently, we discovered some shocking statistics about the “managed decline” of Reginald House  — how, on average, tenants have paid over £100,000 in rent and service charges each year for the last two years, but have had only around £3,000 spent in return on repairs and maintenance.

At 47:30 we started talking about ‘Grenfell’, the new studio recording by my band The Four Fathers, produced by the legendary Charlie Hart, who also plays accordion on it, which we’ll be releasing soon. From 48:48 to 52:50 ‘Grenfell’ was played, and from there, from 52:50 to 1:04:00, we discussed protest music, creativity, my photo project ‘The State of London’, songwriting, and Roger Waters, a great force for political music-making, and a great supporter of various Guantánamo campaigns I have been involved in, including We Stand With Shaker, the successful campaign to secure the release from Guantánamo of the last British resident in the prison.

From 1:04:00 to 1:20:30 we discussed the significance of activism, and Tidemill (again), and how it is, to some extent, an experimental lab for alternative methods of living, where discussions of cheap, ecologically sound housing alternatives keep being taking place. We also spoke about how activists tend to think creatively, the Occupy movement, the criminalisation of squatting, Colin’s involvement in the occupation of Battersea Park adventure park a few years ago, fracking, and domestic terrorists.

From 1:25:30 – 2:00:01 we discussed Guantánamo and the campaign free Shaker in detail, and in the last five minutes, from 2:00:01 to 2:00:06:30, we discussed Tidemill again, and the current state of the judicial review that we’ve launched to try and stop the council in the courts.

At that point, I cycled back to south east London, while Colin and Andy continued the show for another hour, including discussion of Colin’s involvement in campaigning for the NHS.

My thanks to Andy and Colin for having me on the show, and I hope to take part in another show sometime soon.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Fears for Guantánamo Prisoner Resettled in Serbia, Where the Government Wants to Get Rid of Him

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

I wrote the following article  for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we have long taken an interest not just in getting the prison closed, and telling the stories of the men still held, to dispel the enduring myth that they are “the worst of the worst,”, but also in following up on prisoners after their release, and to that end we are delighted that Jessica Schulberg of the Huffington Post has recently highlighted the story of Mansoor Adayfi.

A Yemeni, Adayfi (identified in Guantánamo as Abdul Rahman Ahmed or Mansoor al-Zahari) was resettled in Serbia in July 2016, nine months after he was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process introduced by Barack Obama in his last three years in office, which led to 36 prisoners being approved for release, men who had previously been categorized — often with extraordinarily undue caution — as being too dangerous to release.

Adayfi’s story is fascinating. An insignificant prisoner on capture — with the US authorities eventually conceding that he “probably was a low-level fighter who was aligned with al-Qa’ida, although it is unclear whether he actually joined that group” — he only ended up being regarded as threat to the US because of his behavior in Guantánamo.

As one of his lawyers, Carlos Warner, a Federal Public Defender, explained at the time of his PRB, “between 2002 and 2008 Mansoor was not a model detainee.” He added, “When I met Mansoor in 2008-2009, he was a very angry man who professed his innocence and who waited six years to see a lawyer. He spoke no English and did not understand why he was detained, what legal process was ahead or what his prospects for release were.”

However, when he met Andy Hart, another Federal Defender who sadly died in 2013, his life was transformed. As Beth Jacob, another of his lawyers described it, “Andy encouraged Mansoor to take classes and learn English, and this opened up a whole new world.”

As Warner described it, Andy Hart “approached Guantánamo from a humanitarian perspective,” rather than a legal one. He taught Adayfi English — and learned Arabic in return. As a result, in Warner’s words, “Mansoor now speaks and writes perfect English. Andy encouraged Mansoor to grow while detained and not to waste his life in a cycle of anger.”

In his last years at Guantánamo, Adayfi became a huge enthusiast for US culture, and “a model detainee from the government’s perspective,” leading to his eventual release. However, because third countries had to be found that would take in Yemeni prisoners, because the entire US establishment refused to repatriate any Yemenis because of the security situation in their homeland, he ended up in Serbia, where post-Guantánamo life has not been easy.

Mansoor Adayfi’s troubles first surfaced when an NPR reporter visited him early in 2017, which I discussed here, when he was clearly having difficulties with the Serbian authorities. However, when he next appeared on the world’s radar, it was via some revelatory writing — surely a wonderful tribute to how Andy Hart had helped him to unlock his clearly considerable potential. ‘In Our Prison on the Sea’ was published in the New York Times a year ago, a beautiful account of how the sea meant so much to the prisoners, but how the US authorities generally kept it hidden from them, which I wrote about here.

The Times article was adapted from an essay Adayfi had written for “Ode to the Sea: Art From Guantánamo Bay,” a wonderful exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners, which was shown at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York from October 2017 to January 2018, and which, in turn, attracted significant media attention after the Pentagon decided to object to it.

In April this year, the BBC decided to focus on Mansoor Adayfi’s story, via a powerful programme for Radio 4, and in July the New York Times published another article he had written, this one about love. I wrote about that here, and was also delighted to promote Mansoor Aayfi’s own newly-established website, and also a fundraiser to help him survive — and to keep writing — launched by Erin Thompson, the main curator of the New York art show.

It was at this time, however, that I first heard about how his future is now uncertain, because this month, as Thompson explained, “his support will be cut off, and his ability to work, study, or even live in Serbia or any other country is in danger.”

Jessica Schulberg’s article provides an update on the story, suggesting that he will now need to “move into a refugee camp and apply for asylum or agree to be sent to a country in the Gulf with a poor human rights record,” neither of which are acceptable. I do hope you’ll read it, and share it if you find it useful. Given the grave problems caused by Donald Trump, who shut down the office of the envoy for Guantánamo closure, which used to be empowered to deal with issues like this, there appears to be no one to approach in the US government, but perhaps we can make our voices heard by contacting the Serbian government, and letting them know that Mansoor Adayfi needs their support, and not their indifference or their hostility.

He Got Out Of Guantánamo 2 Years Ago. Now He Fears He May Be Deported And Killed.

By Jessica Schulberg, Huffington Post, September 9, 2018

Mansoor Adayfi lives under near-constant surveillance in Serbia and his legal status in the country is uncertain.

On July 11 in 2016, Mansoor Adayfi boarded a plane and left the prison at Guantánamo Bay. The United States had held the Yemeni without charge or trial for more than 14 years before deciding it was safe to release him. There was one catch: The U.S. sent him to Serbia, a country where he knew no one and didn’t speak the language. But could it be worse than spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo Bay?

Now, two years later, the answer to that question is more complicated than you’d expect. Despite being released from prison, he still doesn’t feel like a free man.

The Serbian government has kept Adayfi under intense, near-constant surveillance and blocked his efforts to complete his education or get a job. Earlier this summer, the Serbian government presented him with an ultimatum, Adayfi said. He could move into a refugee camp and apply for asylum or agree to be sent to a country in the Gulf with a poor human rights record. Neither option is a good one. He has heard through informal channels that Serbia is unlikely to grant him asylum. If his application is denied, he could be deported. If he ends up in the Gulf, Adayfi fears, he could be immediately imprisoned — or sent back to Yemen, where a civil war fueled by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has already killed members of his family.

The Serbian government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Time is running out: Adayfi’s government-issued identification card expired at the end of August. He received a temporary extension but he was told he would lose his apartment and government stipend sometime this month.

Meanwhile, officials in Washington — who claim they are committed to keeping track of former Guantánamo detainees and ensuring they stay away from extremist groups — have turned the other way.

While Adayfi doesn’t want to go back to a life of indefinite detention, the dire options that lie ahead bring him close to despair on some days. In Gitmo, he at least had friends and the hope that his life would eventually get better. “This is worse than Guantánamo,” Adayfi told HuffPost during one conversation. “I don’t feel like I am free … I just live in fear of being snatched off the street.”

Adayfi, who grew up in a rural village in Yemen, never wanted to go to Serbia, he said. U.S. and Serbian officials assured him that he would receive financial support and the opportunity to go to college. But Serbia had never received Guantánamo detainees before and seemed uncomfortable with resettling a man who had, at one point, been accused of being a member of al Qaeda. (The U.S. later backtracked and said no al Qaeda leaders have identified him as a member of the group.)

Adayfi has found hidden cameras in his apartment and discovered spyware installed on his cellphone. He has been interrogated for speaking to journalists about his situation — and the government has harassed foreign journalists who interviewed him. During one Skype interview at a cafe, he pointed out a man seated near him and said he was a government minder tracking his movements. He has struggled to make friends or date because he worries that anyone he interacts with is likely to receive a visit from an official warning them to stay away. Fearing unwanted attention from government authorities, the local mosque asked him to visit less often, he said. When Adayfi tried to get a job driving kids to school, the government blocked him from getting a driver’s license, he claimed.

Assurances from U.S. and Serbian officials that he’d receive an education that would allow him to embark on a career also didn’t pan out. Adayfi and his lawyer spent months pressing the Serbian government to agree to pay for university tuition. He was supposed to start classes in the fall of 2016 — but after he got his student ID card and class schedule, he was told he had to take a last-minute, special admissions exam. He failed the test, which he suspected was a ploy to deny him tuition.

Disillusioned, Adayfi went on a 48-day hunger strike — a protest tactic he had used in Guantánamo. He stopped only after his lawyer and his mother begged him to eat.

Serbia eventually agreed to pay for vocational classes in cell phone and laptop repair. And in the fall of 2017, Adayfi finally started college.

Adayfi settled into a routine. He went to classes in the morning and then headed to the public library to study and write. He published short stories in the New York Times about yearning to see the sea and learning about love. He worked on editing his memoir, a collection of hundreds of short stories he had written by hand in Guantánamo about life in the prison. He wrote about the beatings, force-feeding and torture, but he also described the time he tried to convince the mailman at Guantánamo to let him climb inside a giant box and send himself to his lawyer as “legal mail.” He wrote about the detainee who fell in love with a guard, and another who caused a scene after using toilet paper a guard had doused with pepper spray.

But in June, shortly after finishing his first year of classes, he was summoned to a Serbian government office. That’s when he learned he would be cut off in September.

Adayfi believes the Serbian government is trying to get rid of him, in part, because he has publicly complained about his living conditions. Muhammadi Davlatov, another former Guantánamo detainee living in Serbia, has had an easier time adjusting and has kept a lower profile. Davlatov’s lawyer did not respond to request for comment about his client’s legal status.

Since the June meeting, all Adayfi can think about is what to do next — and all of the available options make him fear for his life.

“I have no rights, I have no status. They can arrest me at any time. They can ship me off anywhere,” Adayfi said. “They can do whatever they want.”

Adayfi and his lawyers have asked several countries if they’d consider taking him in. Most places either haven’t answered or have told him he needs to be physically present in the country to apply for asylum. Adayfi doesn’t have a passport and has been unable to obtain travel documents from the Serbian government.

Before President Donald Trump was elected, the U.S. State Department tried to ensure that the countries that agreed to resettle former Guantánamo detainees provided former detainees with long-term support.

“We didn’t feel we had to take responsibility for former detainees’ well-being on an indefinite basis, but we did feel that we had a security imperative to make sure individuals who had been in Guantánamo were in an environment where they could move on with their lives productively and not pursue alternative, and potentially problematic, life paths,” Lee Wolosky, the former State Department special envoy for Guantánamo closure, said in an interview.

Under the Obama administration, Wolosky’s office entered detailed understandings with countries that took in Guantánamo detainees and carefully tracked the former prisoners. The concern wasn’t just humanitarian. State Department officials wanted to make sure former prisoners didn’t go off the grid and join a terrorist organization.

The goal of the agreements with third countries was permanent resettlement. “We never would have entered into an agreement with the expectation that the person would only be there for two years,” Wolosky said. When problems arose between former detainees and the host countries, the State Department office for Guantánamo closure worked to smooth things over.

But that office was disbanded after Trump entered office and State Department officials who were tasked with keeping track of the hundreds of people who have been released from the military prison — people Trump and his allies have long claimed are dangerous militants — were moved into other roles.

A State Department spokesperson said the agency still closely monitors former Guantánamo detainees who were transferred to other countries. “Our top priority is making sure that former GTMO detainees do not pose a threat to the United States and the international community,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

The spokesperson claimed the State Department continues to engage with countries that resettle former Guantánamo detainees but declined comment on Adayfi’s case.

At least two former Guantánamo detainees have disappeared since the office was disbanded. The two Libyans were sent to Senegal in 2016. At the time, Wolosky said, Senegalese officials “were very engaged in the resettlement at the highest levels.” But Senegal deported the men to their home country in April of this year. They disappeared. Adayfi was friends with the men and fears they may have been imprisoned or killed by a militia group.

“Something clearly went very wrong,” Wolosky said. “Suddenly they had no one to talk to in Washington.”

Meanwhile, Adayfi, who has spent the past two years trying to rebuild his life, feels he has been abandoned by both the Serbian and U.S. governments.

“I try to stay positive, I try to do something good, I try to read, I try to learn — but you need some goal in your life, you need some stability in your life,” Adayfi said.

“Imagine, you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow to you. If you are going to live or not. If you are going to be in jail. If you are going to be deported. If you’re going to a refugee camp. If you’re going to end up homeless. How are you going to feed yourself? How are you going to eat? What’s going to happen?”

“I can’t stay here,” he said. “I can’t live like this.”

Note: See here for the video from which the screenshot at the top of this article was taken.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Check Out My Novara Media Article About the Occupation of the Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford, Plus Updates About the Campaign

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Last week I was delighted to get the opportunity to write an article for Novara Media, an online news organisation established in 2011, about the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council and the housing association Peabody, as part of their plans for the re-development of the old Tidemill school site — plans that also involve the destruction of 16 structurally sound council flats in Reginald House, a block next to the garden.

The article, The Battle for Deptford and Beyond, provides a helpful introduction to the struggle, and I hope that, if you haven’t already been alerted to it via social media, where we’ve been promoting it, you’ll check it out now, share it if you find it useful, and even print off copies to let other people know about the campaign.

I’ve been so busy since its publication that this is my first opportunity to promote it via my website — in part because I’ve been playing some gigs and doing other media (including a Wandsworth Radio show on Saturday night, and a No Social Cleansing in Lewisham gig at the Birds Nest on Sunday night, to raise money for the campaign), but also because of my ongoing involvement in the occupation.

On Saturday lunchtime, campaigners from the garden set up a stall in Giffin Square, in the heart of Deptford, to continue with our mission of winning the hearts and minds of the local community. All year — long before the occupation began — campaigners have maintained a presence in Deptford’s vibrant street market on Saturdays, where it has been abundantly clear that Lewisham Council doesn’t have the trust of local people, who see new developments rising up that are not for local people (like Tinderbox House, the block that towers over the market, where a two-bedroom flat is currently on sale for £500,000), and who know, if they live in council housing, that the council persistently fails to spend its rent receipts on repairs and maintenance.

On Saturday, we’d just received information, via a Freedom of Information request, that, in the last two years, Reginald House’s tenants have paid £106,051 and £100,942 in rent, plus service charges of £5,749 and £7,016, and yet the council has spent just £2,907 and £3,265 on repairs in that same period — around 3% of the rental receipts. In the case of Reginald House, this is because the council has been actively engaged in a process of “managed decline,” but elsewhere it is clear that the council is subsidising other aspects of its business through council rents, while failing to look after those properties adequately. When we visited the council blocks on Giffin Street recently, to hand out a newsletter explaining the reasons for the occupation, everyone we spoke to had similar complaints.

This suggests to us that Lewisham Council is failing to explain to its tenants that it is so strapped for cash by central government that it is having to use council rents to subsidise its other operations. Not only does this show weakness when it comes to challenging the Tory government, but, in the case of Reginald House, it has led to the absurd and unjust situation whereby the council wants to destroy 16 flats — and the rents form them — to replace them with new flats owned and run by Peabody, who will be the primary beneficiaries of the new income streams.

What is also clear is that the council doesn’t want to defend existing social housing, because it has no interest in maintaining social rents and secure tenancies. Instead, the flats for rent in the new development, whose construction the council is subsidising, will be at London Affordable Rent, Sadiq Khan’s cynical effort to do away with social rents altogether (which are generally set at around 30% of market rents), whereas, in Lewisham, London Affordable Rents will be 63% higher. In addition, the new flats will be smaller, and tenants will have less rights.

The Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaigners have always made it clear that they are committed to saving both Reginald House and the garden from destruction, but while the proposed destruction of Reginald House is a powerful indictment of how housing policies are intended to do away with council housing at social rents, the defence of the garden also highlights the council’s lack of concern for environmental issues, and for the importance of green space in the heart of Deptford. 

As I explained in my Novara Media article, “In 2016-17, data compiled by Citizen Sense, a science research project at Goldsmith’s, showed that the garden’s large canopy of trees had significantly reduced the levels of carbon emissions that are prevalent in nearby Deptford Church Street, where, on multiple occasions, the levels of carbon emissions have been up to six times higher than World Health Organisation guidelines.”

Now all you have to do is imagine how much worse the pollution will be with four years of building work on the site of the garden and Reginald House — not to mention the pollution involved in other planned developments, with a whole new set of private tower blocks proposed for Creekside, on the opposite side of Deptford Church Street.

Lewisham Council acknowledges that its plans for Tidemill are a betrayal of their environmental requirements, and that they have chosen, in this case, to prioritise their housing targets instead, but we’re not satisfied with that explanation. Simply put, the garden’s ability to combat pollution makes it too important to be destroyed, and the council and Peabody should go back to the drawing board, spare the garden and Reginald House in their plans for the old school site, and, if necessary, cut down the number of properties accordingly. Of the 209 homes planned, perhaps the 52 for private sale ought to be axed, and the profits — or profiteering — from the project adjusted.

Not only is the environmental cost of the garden’s destruction too high to put a price on, but the council’s cavalier disregard for its importance also fails to take into account its social function. Created 20 years ago, and designed by parents, pupils and teachers at the old Tidemill school, it was used by local children from 1998 until the school closed in 2012, moving to a new academy in Giffin Square. However, the guardians installed in the old school opened it up as a community garden, and when they were moved out, so that the council could squander huge amounts of money on security guards instead, the council gave the community a “meanwhile use” lease on the garden, furthering its role as a magical space for children to play in, a healing space for local people to relax in, and a community space for gardening and arts events that has been a powerful example of what the community can achieve in an autonomous green community space.

Until August 29 this year, when the council terminated the lease and the occupation began, with a judicial review underway to keep the council at bay, the garden was generally only open on weekends, but its supporters have long dreamed of maintaining it as an autonomous space, and securing funding to open it up much more frequently, and the occupation has provided extraordinary encouragement for our dreams — discussions about how helpful it would be to have vegetable gardens and an orchard, for example, and a permanent, environmentally pioneering structure as a reception space, information point and gallery.  

And as the nights grow cold, it’s also apparent that the tents that were the first wave of the occupation need to be replaced with warmer solutions, promoting us to work on the brick buildings and sheds on site, and to look into low-cost, environmentally friendly solutions — options that might also suggest how a responsible council should be looking into innovative self-build options far more than they are currently, as a solution to the housing problem, instead of simply caving in to developers, and continuing to endorse a mix of private sales and expensive social housing as any sort of constructive way forward. 

The occupation, which starts its fourth week today, also continues to attract people interested in discussing alternatives to the shoddy, over-priced reality of the housing market, and feeble efforts to address the extent of the housing crisis. We’ve had visitors from the long-established camp at Grow Heathrow, visitors from other countries, and visitors from some of the other housing struggles across London that I mentioned in my Novara Media article, and that I have been researching and writing about over the last few years, along with handful of other committed campaigning journalists and researchers (Architects for Social Housing, for example, and Southwark Notes and the 35 Percent campaign).

Do come and check us out — and join in the fascinating discussions we’re having, as we resist the proposed destruction of this priceless space and the well-established homes next door in Reginald House, and dare to imagine other futures that do more than provide profits for the few, and housing solutions that lack vision. We’ve set up an Alternative Open House London this weekend, gatecrashing the official Open House London, in which over 800 properties are open to the public, and on Saturday we’re also holding a debate on the potential of community-led regeneration, something that clearly doesn’t interest Lewisham Council (or, it should be noted, councils in general). And next weekend (September 29-20) we’re taking part in the internationally acclaimed Deptford X arts festival. We look forward to seeing you!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.