Srebrenica, January 1995. Her country in the midst of a civil war, pregnant Hava Muhic, staying in the UN-designated Safe Area, was confident that she would give birth to a healthy and safe child. Half a year later, in July 1995, the baby Hava gave birth to wasn’t breathing and was taken away by the Dutch peacekeeping forces, just days before they failed to protect the camp from an invasion by Serbian military.

Guantánamo, some three years earlier. Marie Nicole Louis, a Haitian refugee at the base, was told that she suffered complications from her pregnancy: both her twins had to be removed. Months later, while Marie was still waiting for political asylum, a blood test revealed that she had never been pregnant, despite receiving continuous medication and undergoing several surgeries.

Upon starting the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, I had little knowledge of the base’s history. I was shocked to realize that the demeaning and abusive treatment of detainees was a repeated narrative, part of a larger, much more complicated American history. What struck me even more than the experiences of Cuban and Haitian refugees and suspected terrorists is the fact that not just I, but most people with me, had never heard of them (or, at other times, have chosen to disregard the controversies revealed). Why do certain stories go unheard?

Haitian refugee disguised with mask at demonstration. Photo courtesy of Miami Herald.

When one’s story is part of a larger history of imperialism and Western exceptionalism, one of the principal sufferings is to have this story twisted, if not ignored. The public has been exposed to Guantánamo, the Safe Haven, and Srebrenica, the Safe Area, even though Marie and Hava, rather than feeling protected, found themselves in misery, with insufficient food, lacking medical treatment and derogatory treatment by the American and Dutch forces respectively. The media hailed these forces as rescuers, focusing on the difficulty of their ‘humanitarian’ mission, rather than the experiences of those they ‘rescued’. Shifting the center of attention would, after all, necessarily invoke criticism of U.S. policy and, in the case of the Srebrenica, international governments and the UN.

More difficult than having a story told is how to tell a story. While the Americans at Guantánamo became humanitarian heroes, Haitians were powerless victims, first of a poor and weak Haitian state and later of discriminatory U.S. policies. The Haitians were dehumanized not only during their time at Guantánamo, but also when recollecting it, their identity closely associated with rightlessness, disease and victimhood, making the sharing of their own perspectives even more painful. The dehumanization of the Haitian people is part of a larger historical, racialized discourse, in which the Haitians were dubbed “syphilis-soaked” (Paik, 45) and “absolutely unfit to receive full Constitutional responsibilities and protections” (Kaplan, 842), while graffiti in the Dutch UN-base revealed similar racist comments about Bosnians and the third-world status of their country.