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Mansoor Adayfi knew next to nothing about Serbia when a delegation from his government approached him in 2016, in his fourteenth year at Guantanamo Bay prison.
All Adayfi knew was that Serbian forces had massacred Bosnian Muslims in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. All the prisoners who were to be released from Guantanamo that year knew that part of the story, Adayfi said, and no one intended to go down in history. Serbia.
Adayfi sought to move to Qatar, where he had family, or Oman, which had earned a reputation at Guantanamo for treating former detainees well. But when it came time for his delegation to meet in the designated room of Camp Six, Adayfi discovered a Serbian team waiting for him. He listened to them, he said, and then told them not politely.
“I said thank you very much, I know the story. “
According to Adayfi, the head of the delegation confided to him that Muslims were welcome in Serbia. The government is going to treat you like a citizen, they said: help you finish your studies, give you monetary help and get a passport and ID. Fueron is going to help you start over.
After the meeting, Adayfi told U. S. officials at Guantanamo that he did need to leave. But they were frank about the extent of their influence in the process, he said.
“A State Department emissary came to me after the delegation assembly and said, ‘Mansoor, you have no choice. You’re going to Serbia. ‘”
Four months after Adayfi’s arrival, the United States invaded Afghanistan and began expelling al-Qaeda members. Leaflets were dropped from airplanes promising huge cash rewards for returning people.
Adayfi’s first prevents a black American siege in Kandahar, where he says he stripped naked, beaten, interrogated and accused himself of being an Egyptian al-Qaeda commander. From Kandahar, he flew, hooded and chained, to Guantanamo Bay.
His 14 years in the notorious criminal are recounted in Don’t Forget Us Here, a published memoir that was due last year. He recounts the torture, mental violence and death of his brother and his imprisonment. He learned English from scratch at camp, as well as some computer science and business theory. But the story ends some time after his release, when he lands in Belgrade in the dark one afternoon in July 2016 and is taken through the secret service to a small apartment in the city center. , where he later discovered surveillance cameras, he said. Adayfi stayed up that first night, wondering what was in store for him.
“I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep, I was hungry but I couldn’t eat,” he said, sitting in his current Belgrade apartment that was defeated one night in February. “There’s loneliness in Guantanamo, but it’s a new genre,” he said.
What came next is what Adayfi calls “Guantanamo 2. 0”: a remote and limited lifestyle in Serbia, from which he cannot leave and where he says he is followed by the police who warn him that he is trying to make friends.
Half a dozen former Guantanamo detainees in other countries — all released without a fee — described similar experiences: lives in limbo; limited by a lack of documents, police interference, and restrictions that confine them to a country or even a single city, making it difficult to find work, scale in the family, or build relationships.
“Welcome to ourArray,” said Adayfi. This is after Guantanamo. “
Resettlement agreements have dispersed the former detainees around the world: in Serbia, Slovakia, Saudi Arabia, Albania, Kazakhstan, Qatar and elsewhere. Some have been lucky enough to be repatriated to their home countries, adding the UK, others have been sent to a country.
Adayfi was barred from returning to Yemen, where his circle of relatives lives, because the U. S. Congress has been barred from returning to Yemen. The U. S. military was a security threat from returning detainees to what it considered volatile countries. Yemen also refused to grant Adayfi a passport, as did Serbia, so he is well stateless, stranded in Belgrade.
The deal that got him there, like many things about Guantanamo, remains shrouded in secrecy. “I don’t know anything officially, because the United States doesn’t say anything to lawyers,” said Adayfi’s lawyer, Beth Jacob, who represented nine Guantanamo detainees for free. sea of darkness. “
The U. S. Department of State The US told the BBC it had received assurances from all third countries that former detainees would be treated humanely, as well as “security promises designed to mitigate the risk a former detainee would possibly pose after their transfer” and a “framework to facilitate the detainee’s successful reintegration into society”. The State Department has at times contributed to prices related to supporting former detainees, a spokesman said, even though the amounts at stake and the duration of aid remain unclear. The Serbian government did not respond to questions from the BBC.
To Adayfi, the resettlement agreement looks like an invisible web. He doesn’t know where it starts and ends. You cannot leave Serbia because you do not have a passport and you cannot leave Belgrade without asking for prior permission. He is being tracked through the police, he says, and discovered eavesdropping software installed on his government-issued phone. You are not allowed to drive, so you rarely attend Friday prayers as this is a long bus ride to and from the nearest mosque. He has an apartment permit and has earned monetary assistance for rent and additional studies, but he has a hard time locating paintings because he can’t afford the 15 years he’s spent at Guantanamo, so he struggles to make ends meet. He lives in an apartment discovered for him through the government in a suburb of the city where there are few Muslims and there is no position to buy halal meat. He usually eats alone at home and, to break his loneliness, takes the bus to a nearby mall and walks.
When he encounters young families, Adayfi looks too much. “I can’t help it,” he once said on a mall circuit. “I feel like a shell, empty inside. “
Shortly after arriving in Belgrade in 2016, Adayfi gave his first interview to the American media and told them that he was not satisfied with his new life. In response, a widely read Serbian tabloid published a full-page article calling it an “al-Qaeda jihadist. “and a “convicted terrorist” ungrateful to his host country.
Those he tried to befriend were warned through police, he said. He has screenshots of WhatsApp conversations in which other people described those interactions to him, from his first solitary stop at a coffee shop, weeks after his arrival, when police questioned an organization of Lithroughans at an adjacent table, to his last interaction, last year, while having coffee with a young Muslim he met at the mosque.
“They arrested him and asked him, ‘Do you know Mansoor from al Qaeda?'” said Adayfi. “In the end, I told him to delete my number. I don’t need to be hurt. “
After an interview with PBS Frontline in 2018, Adayfi arrested through police and beat him, he said. Two friends from his language course were also arrested. Said. He still has messages she sent him afterwards, asking why the plainclothes policemen had warned him.
And so, Adayfi spends most of his time alone in his apartment. He rarely interacts with his neighbors and goes less to the mall, he said, since he realized he was praying in an outdoor area last year and was escorted off the premises by police.
“After a while, you give up, you retreat,” Adayfi said. “But it means isolated. I live most commonly in my head now. “
Adayfi’s closest replacement for his friends in Belgrade is a foreign network of former Guantanamo detainees he helped connect and whom he calls “the brothers,” who speak through WhatsApp computers or over the phone. The content of the teams is largely apolitical, to avoid endangering anyone in their host country. “We sing songs, tell jokes, take pictures, talk about our health. We make memories of Guantanamo: the clothes, the food,” Adayfi said. “It’s helping us move forward. “
Among the former detainees Adayfi talks to to the fullest is Sabry al-Qurashi, a fellow Yemeni who spent some thirteen years at Guantanamo before being forcibly resettled in Semey, a small town at a former nuclear checkpoint in the far east of Kazakhstan, which he is. no. allowed to leave.
Al-Qurashi transferred to Kazakhstan in 2014 along with 4 other former detainees, plus Asim Thahit Abdullah Al Khalaqi, who died of kidney failure 4 months after his arrival, and Lotfi Bin Ali, who was unable to get the medical care he needed in Semey for illness from the center and died last year of the center’s illness after being deported to Mauritania.
With Bin Ali’s departure, al-Qurashi remains in Semey, where he “lives in a state worse than a prison,” he said. he returned to Guantanamo, but received no response. The Kazakh government did not respond to questions from the BBC.
“Guantanamo is bigger than here, because at least there I had hoped to one day be in a better place,” al-Qurashi said.
“When the delegation of the government of Kazakhstan arrived, they told me that they would treat me as a citizen of Kazakhstan. But that’s a lie. I have no status, no ID, no circle of family or friends. I’m stuck here and there’s no end. “
Al-Qurashi is arrested by police as he leaves his apartment, he said, and is asked to present an ID he does not have. Sometimes he is taken to the police station and forced to wait seven or eight hours until someone from the ICRC’s national teams. He wants specialized medical attention for the injured nerve in his face after being beaten by a plainclothes policeman for refusing to take off his jacket one day, he said, but like his old friend Lotfi Bin Ali, he was denied permission to travel to the capital to get it.
“I went to the police station to ask what happened to the guy who hit me, and they said, ‘Shut your mouth, there’s nothing here, go to the house. ‘”
The incident sums up his lifestyle in Semey, al-Qurashi said: a life lived entirely at the mercy of local authorities, that he was a convicted terrorist. “The first pain is the punch,” dijo. no you have access to justice. You have no rights. “
Al-Qurashi never charged the United States, which alleged that he was a member of al-Qaeda who had participated in an education camp in Afghanistan. He was arrested through Pakistani security forces at an alleged al-Qaeda safe haven in Karachi, but denies ever doing so. was a member of the group.
While being held at Guantanamo, al-Qurashi began to portray, generating a giant volume of portraits that were later confiscated. He tried practice at Semey. C is “the only thing that helps me stay sane,” he said. You are not allowed to order anything online, so your access to portraits and canvases is limited. He has been asked to contribute to a portrait exhibition through former detainees, but he does not have a Kazakh identity document and therefore cannot have the portraits authenticated as his own and sent.
“I asked the ICRC, do I burn my paintings?” said al-Qurashi. They told me their only task was to make sure I had shelter and food, and that was it. “
Seven years ago, al-Qurashi married, through a circle of family arrangements, a woman in Yemen, whom he never met because she is not allowed to leave Semey and she cannot go to Kazakhstan to live with him. He has pleaded with several Kazakh governments for permission to leave, but his scenario remains unchanged. “I’ve been waiting seven years for my life to start,” he said.
A total of 779 men passed through the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Twelve were charged with one crime. Only two were convicted. According to a 2006 investigation of the U. S. Department of Defense’s knowledge. In the U. S. through Seton Hall University School of Law, only five percent of the five inmates who remained in the prison that year had been detained by U. S. forces. was held through Pakistan or the militant Northern Alliance coalition in Afghanistan, and “handed over to the United States at a time when the United States was offering significant rewards for the capture of alleged enemies. “It was Adayfi’s fate, he says: caught in the wrong position at the wrong time. “I was a package,” he said, “sold to the United States and then sold to Serbia. “
At a Guantanamo Administrative Review Board in 2007, seven years after his arrest, Adayfi said he was a “jihadist” and a “son” of Osama bin Laden, and that it was an “honor to be an enemy of the United States. “claims the explosion is a protest. The Administrative Review Boards were pseudo-judicial hearings in which detainees were not accompanied by lawyers.
“We don’t perceive the review panel, we think some other interrogation,” he said. “For us, quite an interrogation. I am your enemy. “
Adayfi then became a casual leader of the other detainees, organizing hunger movements and other protests. He earned the nickname among the guards, “smiling troublemaker”. He twice wrote his memoir on Guantanamo. The first version, written on contraband pieces of paper, confiscated and destroyed. he wrote letters, which later became the basis for his book.
Adayfi is recently running on a new e-book that tracks the struggles of his post-detention life in Serbia. A wall of his Belgrade apartment is filled with colorful sticky notes describing the events that make up its contents. The notes record interrogations through police, thwarted attempts to make friends and find a wife, and efforts to draw President Biden’s attention to his plight. Every day, he communicates with other former detainees, more than a hundred in total, through online discussion teams and WhatsApp. Many have faced the same tipos. de restrictions as Adayfi.
“The United States has created a terrible scenario for these men,” said Daphne Eviatar, Amnesty USA’s Director of Security and Human Rights. “Many of them were tortured and did not get recognition, compensation or genuine rehabilitation,” he said. “Then move them to a scenario where they are restricted, can’t travel, can’t make a living, can’t move on, this is unacceptable. “
For Adayfi, the only path to a new life after Guantanamo is to find a wife and have his own family. This is what you think about at night when you have no distractions. But efforts to meet in Serbia were not a success. His religion dictates that he marry a Muslim woman and meet her in the classic way, through his family, but his attempts to integrate into Belgrade’s Muslim network have failed, due to widespread concern on the network, he says, of being linked to terrorism. .
Adayfi discovered an attack in 2019, with a woman abroad, he said. She came from a smart circle of relatives and they communicated for a year while he asked the Serbian government for permission to register her. She was his first love, he says. In the end, he begged the government to allow him to come and see her, he said, but they refused. Eventually, her circle of relatives lost patience and she married another man.
“The worst pain I’ve ever felt is not the black site, it’s not the 15 years at Guantanamo, it’s when I lost someone I loved,” Adayfi said.
“At Guantánamo they torture you and they can’t touch your soul. Love is a pain that touches your soul and you suffer a lot. “
In July 2004, more than two years after the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo, the Pentagon introduced its first formal review of detainees’ prestige and allowed 38 men to be released with the prestige of “NEC” or “non-enemy combatant. “”The statute identified well that the men were related to al-Qaeda or the Taliban and had taken hostile moves opposed to the United States.
Among the 38, there were five Uighurs arrested in Afghanistan who the United States said were suspected of being members of the East Turkestan Independence Movement, a small militant organization committed to the independence of the Chinese region also known as Xinjiang. back to their home country of China, where Uighurs are persecuted by the state. So, the U. S. The US made a deal with Albania to take them away. They were still released in 2006 and landed late in Tirana, the Albanian capital. Their initial joy of being on the loose was extinguished when they were taken directly to a seedy refugee camp on the outskirts of the city, where they would spend more than a year.
“It’s like another world,” said Abu Bakker Qassim, a 52-year-old Uighur who now lives a quiet life with his circle of relatives in a poor and dilapidated suburb on the outskirts of Tirana. “Five years we were in Guantanamo, in the heat, and suddenly we were in Albania in the deep cold. Every day we dressed heavily and ate tasteless food among the foreigners in the camp. “
Qassim denies being a member of the East Turkestan Independence Movement. He was traveling to Turkey through Pakistan when he arrested through activists, he said, and passed to the United States. Like Adayfi, Qassim and the other former detainees bound for Albania were promised monetary aid, passports, citizenship and apartments that were in a position for them, they said, to notice a very different truth on the ground.
“Guantanamo had six camps at the time, and the refugee camp in Albania seven,” said Zakir Hasam, an Uzbek detainee at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2006. , and we had no cash or smart food,” Hasam said. “The government told us that their only task was to protect us politically and physically, and that’s it. “
After a year in the refugee camp and a series of protests, the former Tirana detainees were relocated to apartments. They are now more complex in their post-Guantanamo lives than Adayfi and al-Qurashi, and in some tactics they are luckier. Many have married or remarried. . Qassim and Hasam have children. They get monthly cash assistance for rent and expenses and have controlled integration into their local communities. Your ability to locate in a predominantly Muslim country.
But in other respects, they live under the same restrictions as former detainees from Serbia, Slovakia and Kazakhstan. They don’t have passports or painting permits, so they can’t even make a living legally to supplement their modest monetary assistance.
“This is not freedom,” Qassim said. Thank God they got us out of jail, but we are not free. “
Qassim’s wife “buys the cheapest vegetables, the cheapest fruits, the ones that are a little spoiled,” he said. “We can’t buy on the market because we don’t have more cash in 15 days. So we save where we can We are alone here, we are strangers, we don’t have a circle of relatives who can help us. “
Financial assistance helps keep them afloat but also helps keep them in a precarious situation, as it is only attached to former detainees and not to their families. When Qassim’s friend and former detainee, Ala Abd Al-Maqsut Mazruh, died of Covid five a few months ago, his wife Hatiche received a letter from the Albanian government telling her that assistance would be immediately interrupted. He also said the government-leased property on which he lived with his three young children would be taken next September.
Like Qassim, Ala was liberated without a fee in 2005, after being designated a non-enemy combatant. Hatiche went to the Interior Ministry, he said, to defend his case, but was not allowed to enter and did not obtain an authorization. reaction to your messages. You can’t afford a lawyer. For your 3 children, you will have to find a full-time job, while worrying about them. Her biggest concern is that she won’t be able to house and feed her children. Their biggest concern at the moment is that they will be persecuted in the long run because their father was in Guantanamo.
“I fear for my young people and the day after Array,” he said. “I’m afraid they’re going to follow them through the stigmatization of Guantanamo. “
The Albanian government responded to requests for comment on the story.
“Our biggest challenge is that we don’t have an identity,” Hasam said. “It interferes with each and every facet of life. You have no choice, you can’t decide where to live, you can’t decide what to see. “your circle of relatives abroad, you can’t decide where to paint, each and every one asks you for an ID and documents and your painting history,” he said.
Hasam goes to a large flea market every week where he looks for electronic and mechanical parts he can buy, repair, and resell: broken smartphones and laptops, radios, drills, anything he can open and restore. But the possible options: and margins are scarce. A two-hour layover at the market on a February weekend reported only one set of broken enclosures.
Above all, he needs to be able to get a smart job, based on his mechanical skills, and a greater provision for his two autistic children, who lately cannot be treated properly. He learned in 2020 that his call was on “World Check”: a global database that meant nothing to him at the time, but is used through banks around the world to screen consumers for criminal history. Being indexed in the database can restrict a user in a way they can’t see, and Refinitiv, the corporate one, doesn’t say the indexed ones.
That year it emerged that many former Guantánamo detainees had been added to the database, many of them in their “terrorism” category had never been charged with a crime. Now, with the help of a British law firm, they are slowly receiving small payments. Hasam earned $3,000. Qassim won $3,000. Mansoor Adayfi has not yet won the payment, dispute the offer. “When you consider the fact that lawyers take 30 percent, that’s not much,” he said.
Last month, Adayfi cut off Western Union’s cash transfer service without explanation. He had used the service to send small amounts of cash to his circle of relatives in Yemen to help pay for his mother’s monthly medical expenses, he said, too. as to obtain donations or invoices for paintings from abroad. Citing corporate policy, Western Union said it may simply not tell Adayfi or the BBC why it was cut. A spokesman said the company “takes its day-to-day compliance and regulatory work very seriously. “and contacted Adayfi about his case.
Adayfi is convinced that this is Guantánamo. La shadow of his extrajudicial detention has been in so many facets of his life that he sees it everywhere.
“He follows you wherever you go,” she said sadly. America punishes you for 15 years, and then the rest of the world punishes you for the rest of your life. “
One afternoon in February, a few days after the 20th anniversary of his arrival at Guantánamo, Adayfi set up his apartment to give a videoconference to an organization of academics from the state of Virginia, in the United States, about the art produced in Guantánamo. He moved his little one in front to his favorite Zoom background, the post-it wall that lines the design of his new eBook, took an orange silk shawl from a hook and tied it around his neck. Orange was the first color Adayfi saw when he got rid of the headband. Guantanamo, the color of the suits the men were forced to wear, which came to symbolize U. S. human rights abuses in the camp.
He clicked on a reasonable ring lamp he had bought online for such apparitions and lit up a corner of the apartment. Adayfi rarely rejects the offer of an interview or convention: he has an e-book to announce and considers it his duty to teach younger generations about Guantanamo. And that brings other people into your life, briefly.
Adayfi gave an introductory statement about the art catalog produced by the Guantanamo detainees and the artists’ ongoing war to pull their paintings from crime with them. He then encouraged the students to ask questions. Many of the school and school-age teams he talks about have a blurred understanding of what happened at Guantanamo and how the story began, and Adayfi will have to remember that most of them were not born when he was sent there.
At this point, Adayfi has probably had each and every one of the consultations that need to be done on Guantánamo. But fortunately he committed to each and every one. ” When did you give up?” one student asked.
“There is no abandonment, the moment you give up, you lost,” Adayfi said. “We paint and they take away our paintings. We write and they destroy our words. We approved the hunger strike and they broke the strike. We are still on hunger strike. I wrote my ebook twice. . . but I wrote it again. “
Adayfi finished his manuscript in Belgrade, with the help of an American writer, and it was published late last year. life and the labor market wherever they were sent. Guantanamo still circumscribes Adayfi’s global: there is virtually nothing to do other than an exploration or a war with the consequences of his detention.
After the online verbal exchange ended, Adayfi turned off his ring lamp and rearranged his apartment. It was late at night, but I wanted to talk. The verbal exchange returned to the family and, at some point, Adayfi began to imitate a father who sought to gather his young children and make them behave. Soon, he let himself be carried away by fantasy, jumping to chase his imaginary son and daughter in the room, smiling with a wide smile and laughing silly as he called their imaginary names. Then he got up, stopped, and sat for a moment in silence.
For Adayfi, turning this fantasy into anything she can touch will be the only genuine escape from Guantanamo. To this day, he is locked in the strange phase of his life that is explained by his long extrajudicial detention. There would be suspicions all around me,” he said despondently. “People just can’t make a mistake. “
In April, Adayfi’s lawyer won an enigmatic email from his government aide, telling him that the government was “done with Mansoor” and that “the program was over. “and it would be lifted. He replied that it would be discussed at the next assembly of officials. Nearly six years after Adayfi was sent to Serbia, it was the first, albeit tacit, acknowledgment that the restrictions that opposed him existed. They are waiting for an answer
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Publisher: Esmalte Hoque Chowdhury
Published through Maynal Hossain Chowdhury on behalf of Bashundhara Multi Trading Limited, 371/A, Block No: D, Bashundhara R/A, Baridhara, Dhaka -1229 and published through East West Media Group Limited, Plot No: C/52, Block-K, Bashundhara, Khilkhet, Badda, Dhaka-1229.