Former Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab and Other Guantánamo Prisoners Freed in Uruguay Discuss Their Problems | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)
To donate to support the six men released in Uruguay, please follow this link to a Just Giving page set up by Cage for Reprieve.
A month ago, I wrote a well-received article, “Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Uruguay Struggle to Adapt to Freedom,” looking at the problems faced by the six former Guantánamo prisoners given new homes in Uruguay in December. The six men, long cleared for release, couldn’t be safely repatriated, as four are from war-torn Syria, one is from Tunisia, where, it appears, the US is now concerned about the security situation, and the sixth is Palestinian, and the Israeli government has always prevented Palestinians held in Guantánamo from being returned home.
As I pointed out in my article, and in a follow-up interview with a Uruguayan journalist, “Strangers in a Strange Land: My Interview About the Struggles of the Six Men Freed from Guantánamo in Uruguay,” the former prisoners are struggling to adapt to a new country, in which they don’t speak the language and there is no Muslim community, and in which they are still separated from their families, over 13 years since they were first seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan by or on behalf of US forces.
Most of all, however, I believe that, while there have been murmurings in Uruguay about the men’s apparent unwillingness to work, those complaining are overlooking the fact that all six men are evidently grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after their long ordeal in a experimental prison where abusive indefinite detention without charge or trial is the norm.
Since I wrote my article and undertook my interview, there have been developments. On April 8, the Associated Press reported that Uruguay’s new President Tabare Vazquez said the US should provide financial assistance to the six men, and promised to raise the issue with President Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Panama, which began shortly after he spoke to the media.
President Vazquez said, “Uruguay gave them asylum, but the US government should provide all the necessary means so that those citizens of other countries can have a dignified life in our country.” As the AP put it, he also said he had “heard Obama was worried about the men’s progress in adapting and added that he also saw them struggling.”
“I put myself in their place and it must be very hard to come from another part of the world, with other cultures, other religions, other customs, and be planted in a foreign country,” President Vazquez said, adding, “I’m also worried because their arrival, this placing of Guantánamo prisoners here, has also impacted our society.”
On April 11, President Vazquez told reporters at the Summit of the Americas that, following discussions, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had provided a commitment that the UNHCR would provide homes for each of the six men, who were assigned a house to share by a prominent Uruguayan trade union on their arrival in December, and are given $600 a month to live on.
After meeting with President Obama, President Vazquez confirmed the news. “UNHCR has the necessary resources to meet the needs of the prisoners and soon each will have a home,” he said.
On Monday, Fox News Latino followed up by suggesting that the six men are “considering a job offer at a meat warehouse not far from Montevideo, the capital,” adding, “A company located in the department of Canelones is giving the men the chance to work processing tons of beef,” according to local newspaper El País, which is also “offering them a place of worship at the site.” The local paper said that the offer “is being seriously considered by the former prisoners.”
While we wait to hear if this is a genuine offer, and if the men are willing and able to take it up, further insights into their state of mind were provided in a detailed article last month in the Washington Post by Joshua Partlow, who spent a week with the men in the house in Montevideo that was assigned to them.
Describing the men’s arrival in Uruguay, and the plans for their resettlement, Partlow wrote:
Uruguay arranged for a workers’ union to take care of their daily provisions. The union moved them into a two-story building in a working-class Montevideo neighborhood across from a bakery and a bicycle repair shop, a few blocks from the Atlantic. Their building abuts an overgrown vacant lot ringed in barbed wire. Graffitied across the wall is a man’s screaming face, a cluster of skyscrapers growing out of his head. On hot days, a dead-fish tang wafts up from the sea.
Their place, which used to be a home for battered women, has the feeling of a convalescent ward. The men pad around the hardwood floors in flip-flops and sweat pants. Their thoughts seem elsewhere, on the Arabic news streaming over the Internet, in the hours of long-distance calls and laptop Skype chats to relatives in the Middle East. Five times a day, they go to their rooms and face northeast, toward the bakery and beyond to Mecca, and pray.
The men were invariably gracious and welcoming — offering tea and small talk — but most did not want to discuss their situation on the record. Some want to forget about Guantánamo. One would talk only if paid.
Partlow spoke the most to Abu Wa’el Dhiab (aka Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab), the former hunger striker who was involved in a significant court case against the US government last year regarding their claimed right to be able to force-feed him as they saw fit.
The men’s new freedom in a strange land has been “hardest on Dhiab,” according to Partlow, who wrote:
The marks of a dozen years in a cell and the hunger strikes he held there show in his gaunt 43-year-old frame, his beard flecked with gray. He hobbles around on crutches, still wearing the Army green T-shirt and sweat pants given to him in Guantánamo. The infamous orange uniform — a Bob Barker brand 65-35 poly-cotton blend made in El Salvador — hangs in his closet for safekeeping.
Partlow also noted that, “While free — in theory — to leave Uruguay, the men do not yet have passports.” Dhiab, he added, “hardly ever goes outside now. He feels the promises made to him have been betrayed. He wants his own house, his family brought from Syria, enough money to live with dignity and start a business. He demands that the United States own up to its responsibility for having imprisoned him without charge for more than a decade, finally releasing him with a letter from the State Department saying there was no information he or any of the other men had any role in ‘conducting or facilitating terrorist activities.'”
At the time, Dhiab was threatening to embark on a hunger strike outside the US Embassy, but it now seem probable that the latest developments, involving the UN, will have addressed at least some of his concerns.
Nevertheless, as Partlow noted, “For Dhiab, the anger has not subsided.” During those discussions with the journalist last month, he “invariably returned to what he sees as the ultimate culprit, the United States, which he blames for an unjust war against Islam, for the theft of 12 years of his life, for the death of his son (one of four children) in Syria, who may have been killed in a chemical attack by the Damascus government. As he sees it, he is guilty of one thing: being a Muslim. He is grateful to Uruguay for accepting him but feels the United States needs to provide for his well-being. ‘Who is to blame for my wife and I living in hell?’ he asked. ‘America.'”
Partlow also noted Dhiab’s struggles to adjust to a world in which so many changes have taken place in the last 13 years. He stated that he “had a fascination with technology before his imprisonment,” but that “the developments of the past decade confound him. His last computer before his capture ran a Pentium III microprocessor. Now, he wants to understand the differences between the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Apple iPhone 6. He wants to know which Canon camera is good for video, how to install Viber on the house computer.”
However, when he sits in front of the computer provided by the union, He “is mostly frozen,” Partlow wrote, adding, “He doesn’t know how to copy and paste. He said he has opened several e-mail accounts, but keeps forgetting the passwords.”
As Dhiab told him, alluding to what I see as his PTSD, “I forgot everything in Guantánamo.”
Partlow proceeded to tell Dhiab’s story, as follows: “After growing up on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, Dhiab served three years of compulsory military service in the Syrian air force in the early 1990s. He worked for years in his father’s restaurant, which had more than 100 tables amid gardens and fountains … Before Sept. 11, he said, he sold honey in Kabul … He was captured in Lahore during a Pakistani police raid in 2002 and later taken to Guantánamo.”
Unconfirmed are claims aired by Partlow that appeared in Dhiab’s classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011: that he was “a member of the Syrian Group, a dismantled terrorist cell that fled to Afghanistan,” that he was “sentenced to death in absentia, ‘probably for terrorist activities in Syria,'” and that he “once hosted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, and received training at an al-Qaeda camp in Kandahar.” Trusting anything in the files that is not openly corroborated elsewhere is not recommended. Most of what purports to be evidence comes from statements produced by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, in circumstances involving torture, other forms of abuse, or bribery, none of which are conducive for revealing the truth.
Partlow proceeded to explain that Dhiab “did not want to discuss in detail” his life before Guantánamo, but added that he “has begun writing a book about his life that he insists will reveal all he endured. He alluded to beatings by the prison guards over the years — boot kicks in the back, punches to his neck. During his months of hunger strikes, he was strapped in a restraining chair and force-fed through tubing inserted into his nose, a procedure that US District Judge Gladys Kessler described as causing ‘unnecessary pain’ and ‘agony.'”
Partlow added, “Whether to make the videos of that process public is now the subject of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Dhiab and several media organizations, including the Washington Post,” and as I explained in a recent article, an appeal against the government’s obstruction has been submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court, with oral argument scheduled for May 8.
Partlow also noted how all the men “recounted smaller daily indignities. How the guards allowed them to go to prison classes but escorted them there so late they routinely missed most of the instruction. How the large sizes of the orange jumpsuits would go to the short detainees and the smalls to taller men. On their flight to Montevideo, five years after they were cleared for release, they were still shackled hand and foot and forced to wear blackout goggles and ear coverings. One of them said he urinated on himself twice during the flight because they were not allowed to use the toilet.”
Providing an overview of the men’s situation, Partlow wrote, “Adapting has come easier for some. After morning doctors’ appointments, some exercise at a gym. They have walked among crowds in parades and street festivals. They’ve saved from their stipends and bought cellphones. Some want to learn the language and make a life here.”
He added, however, that “several of the men feel they are not yet equipped to do so,” and added that they “don’t all get along well and chafe at living together in bunk beds.” He confirmed, as has been noted before, that one of the men, Adel bin Muhammad El-Ouerghi, the Tunisian, who is 50 years old, “now sleeps in a nearby hotel,” and that they generally “complain the money is insufficient.” He pointed out that one of the Syrians, Ali Husain Shabaan, 33, “said in a televised interview that he would not be able to provide for his family if they came to Montevideo.”
Shabaan said, “Give or take, almost half of my age has been spent in a prison. To ask me to support myself and to be independent from the first week or the first month or two months, that’s quite unreasonable.”
As with some of Dhiab’s complaints, it is to be hoped that the intervention of the UNHCR will address some of these problems, but it seems likely that, even if the housing situation is resolved to the men’s satisfaction, money problems will probably persist. It has, as Partlow noted, “become a sore subject with their hosts. A couple of weeks ago, the union sponsors cut off the long-distance phone line to the house after they saw the bill. They stopped buying the men the kosher meat they had requested, because it was too expensive. Although they were given some laptops, the men each wanted their own headset for Skype calls, while the union wanted them to share one.”
Importantly, however, Partlow recognized that many of the men “still struggle from the effects of chronic ailments such as tuberculosis and hepatitis B.” As he pointed out, “Shabaan has impaired vision that he attributes to his time in Guantánamo. Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, a 37-year-old Syrian, has intestinal trouble and a perforated eardrum. Dhiab can’t drink coffee or tea because of kidney problems. The right side of his body frequently goes numb. He says his constant pain keeps him from sleeping more than two hours a night. His lawyer says Dhiab is plagued with post-traumatic stress and mental illness.”
Leonardo Duarte, a union official who, as Partlow put it, “regularly visits the house and ferries the men on their errands,” succinctly explained the men’s problems. “They didn’t arrive here in good health,” he said, adding, “They’re not ready to work; that’s the reality.”
Dhiab’s lawyer in London, Cori Crider of the legal action charity Reprieve, “praised Uruguay for its goodwill,” but also highlighted Dhiab’s problems as a result of his long and brutal imprisonment. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that after over a dozen years in Gitmo, years of brutal force-feedings, a son’s death and a homeland laid waste, both Dhiab’s body and his mind are going to need time to recover,” she said.
In conclusion, Partlow wrote, “Dhiab doesn’t know what he will do. He cannot go home; his village of Otaybah has been devastated by the war, his family scattered to refugee camps. He wants to be elsewhere — Qatar, Malaysia, Brunei — somewhere he can speak Arabic and be among Muslims.”
As Dhiab told him, “In 13 years, I’ve not seen my family. I miss my family. I need my family. Nobody helps me like my family.”
“We are broken,” he added. “And we need to heal.”
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).
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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.
- Posted in Guantanamo, Guantanamo media, Life after Guantanamo, Syrians in Guantanamo Tagged Abu Wa'el Dhiab, Force-feeding, Guantanamo, Hunger strikes, Joshua Partlow, President Vazquez, Syrians in Guantanamo, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, United Nations, Uruguay, US courts, Washington Post
- Permanent Link