Ex-Guantanamo Prisoner Rebuilds Life in Albania
Tirana | 20 January 2009 | By Besar Likmeta and Ben AndoniAbu Bakr Qassim
As Obama ascends to America’s highest executive office, in tiny Albania, Abu Bakr Qassim, a former prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, will be glued to the screen.
Abu Bakr and four other Uighurs from Guantanamo were deemed innocent and released in Albania in 2005, after the US authorities feared that repatriating them in China would expose them to persecution and human rights violations.
The president-elect has already signaled that during his first week in office he will act to overturn some of the most unpopular policies of the Bush administration, including closure of the detention facility in Guantanamo, Cuba.
“The first thing Obama should do is shut it down because the American people and the rest of the world don’t want it anymore,” said Abu Bakr Qassim, speaking of the detention centre where he and dozens of other fellow Uighurs were dispatched after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York.
“It will be welcome news for us but also for the American people because it will lift the doubts that Guantanamo has created about American democracy,” he added.
Casualties of the ‘War on Terror’:
When Abu Bakr left home in China’s Xingjian province in 2001, his dream was to reach Western Europe, or, preferably, the United States.
He joined a larger group of would-be migrants of 17 as they set off through the neighbouring Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
In the winter of 2001, they arrived in the Afghan city of Jalalabad only days before the start of a US bombing campaign aimed at overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Within days of their arrival, Jalalabad was being bombed by US fighter jets, so they left to seek sanctuary in neighbouring Pakistan.
Little did they know that the villagers that would greet them warmly on the other side of the border had, only a few days earlier, been targeted by masses of fliers dropped by US planes, promising that whosoever “hunts an Arab becomes a rich man”.
Though they had no knowledge of, let alone a hand in, the September 11 attacks, the men were handed over to the Pakistan authorities for the promised reward of $5,000. They would spend the next four months in jail in Pakistan before being sent to Guantanamo Bay.
“We were 20 on the plane, all bound and shackled and with the now infamous orange jumpsuits,” remembers Abu Bakr. “At that point, we understood that we were flying into hell,”
The Uighurs would spend the next five years until their release in an iron cage at Camp Delta.
“Even when they found out that we were innocent, they would not release us,” said Abu Bakr. “In Guantanamo, the laws are neither communist nor democrat; they don’t exist at all.”
Relocated to Albania:
The five Uighurs were not released until May 5, 2006, after a US federal court ruled their detention illegal and only hours before an appeals court was expected to order that they be freed.
The Bush administration tried feverishly to find a host country for the five men in order to prevent the appeals court from freeing them onto American soil. After more than 100 countries refused, the US found a host in Albania, its small ally in the Balkans.
Of nearly 250 inmates still in Guantanamo, the US says 55 to 60 cannot be returned to their home country because they risk persecution at the hands of local authorities.
Among them are 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs who, together with Libyans, Uzbeks and Algerians, are also seen as at risk.
The US administration has asked its European allies to help relocate a number of former inmates not deemed a security threat.
However, as the deadline for Guantanamo’s closure approaches, some of its most vociferous critics in the EU appear lukewarm about the idea of taking in detainees.
Portugal is the only country that has said it is willing to host former Guantanamo prisoners. Britain and Germany have made no decision. France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has asked the French authorities to back detainee relocation in France.
Human Rights Groups believe European help is critical to protect detainees that have not been charged with any crimes but cannot return to their home countries.
In a joint statement on November 10, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, Reprieve and the International Federation for Human Rights, urged governments around the world to work with the new US administration in order to facilitate the closure of Guantanamo.
“Clearly, other governments can help make this happen by offering protection to individuals who cannot be released to their own countries,” said Daniel Gorevan, of Amnesty International, during a workshop held in Berlin.
“This would have a double effect: helping to end the ordeal of an individual unlawfully held in violation of his human rights and helping end the international human rights scandal that is Guantanamo.”
Human rights campaigners say that when the US has returned former detainees to countries with poor records of respect for human rights, they have faced threats, torture and persecution.
“President-elect Obama says he will close Guantanamo; the question is when and how,” said Cori Crider, an attorney at Reprieve.
“One of Reprieve’s clients was sent back to Tunisia, drugged, hit, and threatened with the rape of his wife and daughter. Another is fighting, even now, to stay in Guantanamo because Tunisia threatened him with ‘water torture in the barrel’.
“Europe can send a powerful message by reaching out to Obama and providing a safe alternative for these few people,” Crider, added.
“This is a key opportunity for both sides of the Atlantic to move beyond the misguided acts of the ‘war on terror’: rendition, secret detention, and torture.”
Please can we have a map?
Even if the remaining detainees that are not facing criminal charges are sent to friendly third countries, they still face up-hill battles to rebuild their lives.
The first thing that the five Uighurs asked for after their arrival in Albania and after being sent to an immigration centre on the outskirts of the capital, Tirana, was a map.
Having grown up watching Albanian movies from the Seventies, when Tirana’s communist regime was cultivating strong ties to Maoist China, they knew Tirana was in Europe but had trouble locating on the map.
“At the immigration centre, the conditions were not that great, but now we have our own apartments in town, we go to the local mosque and have started to create bonds with the locals,” said Abu Bakr, who has now shaved off his long beard and sports Western clothes.
Although overwhelmingly Muslim, Albanian society is strongly secular and conservative Islam is often frowned upon.
“At the beginning, people looked on us as terrorists but I think the Albanians have come to understand that we were not such thing,” Abu Bakr said.
One of the Uighurs relocated to Albania has moved to Sweden but the other four, including Abu Bakr, are doing their best to build a new life in Albania.
They have worked as volunteers for a local NGO, planting trees in the city, taken practice lessons at a local Pica store, while one has enrolled at the local American university in Tirana.
However, Abu Bakr says that as far as he and his companions are concerned, there will be no closure until Guantanamo is closed.
“I would like to separate the American people from the policies carried out at Guantanamo but the latter is not a closed chapter yet,” Abu Bakr said. “Seventeen Uighurs are still locked up in there while the law says that they are completely innocent.”
Ben Andoni is deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly MAPO magazine. Besar Likmeta is BIRN Albania editor. Balkan Insight is the online publication of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. This article was made possible through the support of the National Endowment for Democracy.
