This was supposed to be the moment Ahmed Bel Bacha was waiting for — the end of his five years in prison at Guantánamo Bay. Instead, the Algerian is fighting to stay put rather than return home.
Bel Bacha, reportedly slated to leave Guantánamo Bay soon along with three of his countrymen, fears he will be tortured back in Algeria, a country he had already fled once before to seek asylum in Britain, his lawyers say.
And so lawyers for the 38-year-old former hotel cleaner have been waging an 11th-hour legal battle to keep him temporarily at Guantánamo while looking for another country to give him political asylum.
Bel Bacha is not alone in his fears: Human rights groups say at least two dozen Guantánamo detainees — including many from the North African countries of Libya, Algeria and Tunisia — are afraid they will face abuse on returning home.
”How many times is the US willing to take the risk with someone’s life and send them back to regimes with terrible human rights records?” said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney for the rights group Reprieve, which represents Bel Bacha and three dozen other detainees. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are among other groups that are worried.
About 80 detainees have been declared eligible for release. Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesperson, said detainees at the US navy base in Cuba can leave only ”once humane treatment and continuing threat concerns have been satisfactorily addressed by the receiving country”.
”I reiterate that detainees are not repatriated to countries where it is more likely than not that they will be tortured,” he said.
Algeria’s presidential office told the Associated Press (AP) that Algeria had US concerns about the prisoners covered, both through the country’s ”constant and incontestable commitment to the struggle against international terrorism”, and by having signed ”numerous international conventions for the protection of human rights”.
But rights groups say countries’ promises are not enough. With United States President George Bush facing international pressure to close the military prison camp down, and with the US administration struggling over what to do with roughly 360 remaining prisoners, rights groups fear US officials may overlook the torture records of inmates’ home countries.
In at least one other case already in North Africa, a former Guantánamo detainee says he was mistreated on returning to Tunisia.
Prison conditions ‘appalling’
Abdullah bin Omar’s lawyer and wife say the 49-year-old father of eight was struck while in Tunisian custody, and that security services also threatened to rape bin Omar’s female family members.
Bin Omar’s wife said in an interview that his physical and mental state has improved since his returned, though his prison conditions are ”appalling”.
”If he had known he was going to be treated that way, he wouldn’t have accepted to come home” and would have sought asylum elsewhere instead, Khadija Bousaidi told AP.
Tunisia’s Justice Ministry has dismissed the allegations he was mistreated as ”baseless”.
Another Tunisian who was recently returned home and jailed, Lofti Lagha, has still never seen a lawyer, either before or after leaving Guantánamo, Reprieve says. Two representatives from the rights group left Tunisia on Sunday after trying unsuccessfully to see them.
”We were basically given the run-around the entire week,” Cori Crider of Reprieve said.
One North African country, Morocco, seems to be treating former Guantánamo prisoners ”relatively fairly”, Reprieve’s Katznelson said.
Ten prisoners have gone back, and all are free except two.
In the case of Algeria, Amnesty International said this weekend that US authorities planned to send Bel Bacha and three other Algerians home on Monday. Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director for Reprieve, said on Monday that his client had been granted another week. It was unclear whether that might have an impact on the three others.
Algeria is still trying to turn the page on an Islamic insurgency that has killed as many as 200 000 people since 1992, and anyone suspected of terrorist activities or knowledge of Islamist groups there ”faces a real risk of secret detention and torture in Algeria”, Amnesty says.
Beatings and electric shock treatments are often reported in Algeria, as is a method of tying victims down and forcing them to ingest dirty water, urine or chemicals through a rag stuffed in their mouths, Amnesty has said.
Bel Bacha lived for a time in Britain where he worked as a hotel cleaner before his capture in Pakistan, where he had gone to study the Qur’an, his family said. His brother, Mohammed Bel Bacha, complained that Algerian authorities gave the family little information on the case and that his lawyers had not been allowed to visit the country.
”If authorities are afraid to let the lawyers in, who can guarantee that my brother is going to come back to Algeria safe and sound?” he asked.
The Pentagon alleged Bel Bacha had weapons training in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden twice, declaring him an ”enemy combatant”. A later review found, however, found he no longer posed a threat to the US and could be released.
Bel Bacha has been held at Guantánamo since February 2002 and is held in a solid-wall cell by himself for as many as 22 hours a day.
Twenty-four Algerians are being held there, according to the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights.
”If anyone comes back to Algeria it’s a golden opportunity for Algeria to show that they have changed, that there is a new page in Algeria,” said Katznelson of Reprieve. ”Because the world will be watching.” – Sapa-AP