Agência Brasil interviews former Guantánamo prisoners

With a smile on his face and a checkered shirt on, Abdelhadi Faraj could pass himself off as a tourist visiting Uruguay on vacation. In an old house in Montevideo, he uses a computer to show the pictures of the trip he made on a private jet to the historical city of Colonia del Sacramento at the invitation of a local businessman. The picture shows the 34-year-old Syrian national standing next to his companions by the swimming pool on a farm, during a barbecue in the country that welcomed him. It wouldn't seem to an inattentive viewer that Faraj has lived at liberty for only three months, after spending a third of his life in Guantánamo, the US military prison facility where hundreds of putative terrorists were taken following the 9/11 attacks in New York.

Arrested in 2002 while trying to cross the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, he could have been released from Guantánamo in 2009, when the US government authorized his transfer. “Nonetheless, I spent another five years in that prison, hopeless, seeing that my own country, Syria, was sinking into a bloodthirsty civil war, making my repatriation impossible,” Abdelhadi recounts in a thank-you letter published in El Pais right after he landed in Montevideo, in December last year. “If it weren't for Uruguay, I'd still be in that black hole on Cuba.”

Abdelhadi Faraj is one of the six prisoners of Guantánamo discharged by the US and sheltered by Uruguay as refugees. “I can hardly believe I'm here,” he said in an interview with Agência Brasil. Three months at liberty were all it took for a technological update to happen: he opened an account on Facebook, learned to type and is now using his computer to learn Spanish. He wants to work as a butcher, as he used to before being taken to jail.

But adapting to new society takes time—especially when it's a foreign country, far away from one's family. “I know how to cut meat according to Muslim rites, which are different from how they do it here,” Abdelhadi explains. “And I still haven't made up for the time I spent in Guantánamo: I have stomachaches, asthma, and I feel tired,” he says.

Over the next two weeks, the six ex-inmates—four of whom from Syria, one from Tunisia, and one from Palestine—will undergo health examinations at the Military Hospital, where they had been taken after arriving in Montevideo. The next step will be lodging: up to now, the refugees were being under the guidance of the Uruguayan trade union center PIT-CNT, which has provided them with an old mansion for housing. But rooms were small and two of them were taken to a hotel, where they should stay until the Ecumenical Service for Human Dignity (Sedhu), an organization dedicated to refugees, takes charge of their case and finds an apartment for each one of them.

Jihad Diyab, from Syria, has concerns other than health and lodging. He is in the only married man in the group. One of his four children died a little more than a year ago and the other three and his wife escaped from Syria to Turkey, but ended up being sent back to their country, where, Diyab says, their life is at risk. He has asked for permission to bring them over to Uruguay, but is still coping with international bureaucracy and waiting for an answer from the Red Cross.

Last month, Diyab traveled to Buenos Aires, where he wore the orange uniform of prisoners before speaking to a group a journalists from Argentina's alternative press. He told them he had been a victim a torture, starte a hunger strike and filed a lawsuit against the US government after prison wardens stuck a tube up his nose to force him to be fed. Diyab, whose mother is from Argentina, appealed to Argentinian authorities to follow Uruguay's example and welcome prisoners who are still in Guantánamo.

The Most Dangerous Prisoner

The refugees believe that, in spite of the good intentions, the situation faced by Guantánamo prisoners is made even worse by President Barack Obama, who promised to shut it down, than it was under his predecessor, George Bush. “They were starting to let people go in large numbers before, but with Obama, they're releasing inmates one by one,” Tunisian national Adbul Ourgi told Agência Brasil.

Of all former prisoners in Uruguay, Ourgi is allegedly the most dangerous one, according to the US Defense Department. He is reported as “explosives expert”, who supposedly met Osama Bin Laden and received firsthand information about plans to attack the World Trade Center. Ourgi, 49, glances at the document and smiles. He says he lost part of his thumb and that he has scars in several parts of his body, because he had been taking shelter in the mountainous region of Afghanistan while the area was being bombarded by the Americans. “What they say is not true,” he argues. “Proof of it is that [former Uruguayan President] Jose Pepe Mujica himself received a document from the government of the United States, stating that none of the former prisoners is a terrorist or poses a threat.”

Mujica paid a surprise visit to the house of the refugees on March 1, shortly before his term of office was over. “He told us he had been a Tupamaro guerrilla, spent 13 years in prison, 10 of which isolated inside a well,” Ourgi said. The Tunisian citizen watched the inauguration ceremony of Tabaré Vasquez, Mujica's successor. “I saw a president hand over his position to another, with no problems. It's not what happens in Arabic countries, where the ones in charge stay in power for 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years.”

Ourgi was also in Brazil for a few hours, during a short trip to Chuí, a Uruguayan city on the border. “We crossed the street to Brazil, but we didn't go very far. Still, we could notice that [life] in Brazil is cheaper than it is in Uruguay,” he said.

Today, what concerns Ourgi the most now is finding the means for his livelihood. “For 13 years, all I thought about was leaving Guantánamo. Now, I have to worry about food, clothes, and bills in an expensive country.” He would like to work as a cook, and, who knows, open up his own Arabic restaurant. “But it's not easy. Ninety days is not much for getting used to freedom, recover from Guantánamo and look for a job,” he said. “But we can't lie about without work, because we get 15 thousand Uruguayan pesos [$568], which is little compared to the country's living costs,” he argues. If everything works out well, Ourgi plans to bring his mother to Uruguay, whom he hasn't seen for 25 years.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira