Hunger strike and refusal of water

Hunger strike and refusal of water describes Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s deliberate refusal to eat and drink during the 2003 interrogation regime at Guantánamo. It was not presented simply as a public protest: he used it to try to escape the immediate ordeal and to deny interrogators another means of controlling him. The episode also shows how basic needs, religious observance, and cooperation were drawn into the interrogation itself.

Circumstances of the Refusal

During an interrogation session in October 2003, in Ramadan, Slahi refused both food and water. He later explained that he wanted to pass out and identified that hope as the main reason for his hunger strike. Although water was offered from time to time, he continued to refuse it. The interrogators said they would provide food and water even if he did not eat, but Slahi also described being fed by force after being forbidden to fast during Ramadan.

The refusal took place amid restrictions on religious practice. Slahi wrote that he was prohibited from performing ritual prayers for about a year after refusing to stop praying during an earlier session, and that he was not allowed to fast during the sacred month. The conflict was therefore not only over nourishment: the treatment of eating and drinking intersected with the control of his religious observance.

A Refusal Intended to Limit Control

Slahi connected refusing food and water to the practical vulnerability of needing to use the bathroom. He reasoned that even asking guards for permission to use it handed interrogators a form of control. By avoiding food and drink, he hoped to avoid that dependence. In his account, this was part of a wider effort to withhold cooperation during torture and to speak only when the interrogators relieved the pressure.

His explanation distinguishes this action from a strategy intended to persuade interrogators through the threat of death. He believed they would not be impressed by a hunger strike, and his stated aim was to pass out rather than to make them change their position. The refusal was thus both a response to acute suffering and an attempt to preserve a narrow measure of agency within a setting where interrogators controlled access to ordinary necessities.

From Refusal to Conditional Food

The episode did not end with an unchanging refusal. In a later exchange, Slahi told an interviewer that he was starving and asked for the guards to give him food. The interviewer answered that he would receive more food if he began to cooperate, and said he would return later that day to question him. Slahi’s request marks a shift in the immediate circumstances, but the answer kept food within the interrogation’s system of incentives: access was linked to cooperation rather than treated as separate from questioning.

That conditional offer gives the state its central tension. Slahi’s refusal was intended to reduce the interrogators’ control over his body and daily needs, while the response made nourishment another condition they could use to seek cooperation. His hunger and his decision to ask for food do not erase the earlier refusal; together, they show how deprivation and promised relief could shape the changing terms of an interrogation.