Re: FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE -- AN INNOCENT MAN IN GUANTANAMO
Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2015 10:23 pm
Chapter 12: BREMEN, HEMELINGEN
I WENT DOWN TO THE BASEMENT AND TURNED ON THE LIGHT. I wanted to see my room, which was exactly as I had left it. Nothing had changed. Even the note I'd written a couple of days before my departure reminding myself to buy batteries was still on my desk. My parents hadn't touched anything, and Ali and Alper hadn't been in there playing. It was a strange feeling-seeing my black leather couch, my blue sofa bed, my glass-fronted wardrobe, and my model ship again. I'd decorated my room when I was thirteen and had never changed a thing.
There was a case under my wardrobe. I pulled it out and removed the old slide projector my uncle Ekram had given me. I looked at it for a while and then went into the living room.
My family was sitting around our living-room table, everyone except Alper, who had gone to bed. The television set was on quietly in the background, and I stared at the screen for a while. Ali took out his wallet and showed me euro bills and coins. It looked like play money. The fan in the comer was running, and my mother and Ali complained that the room was too cold. But I found it pleasantly cool.
"Son, you must be hungry," my mother said.
The pots were on the stove. They had prepared Turkish mince-meat burgers, lamb, kebabs, rice, green beans, French fries, potatoes, and a couple of different soups. They must have been cooking for days. I opened the refrigerator. It was like being in paradise. I sat down on the tile floor in front of it and removed everything down to the last jar of mustard. I piled it all up in front of me and tried to decide what I would eat first and what second: spicy peppers-and-rice soup, cheese, meat patties, olives, kebabs, green beans, baklava, pickles ...
I decided to have a Kit-Kat.
I ate a whole package of them.
I ate everything I could.
I didn't know how late it was, and I didn't care. I could always pull the curtains in my room. My father was already asleep, and my mother had made my sofa bed. It was the first time in five years that she had done anything in my room. I folded the bed back up, pushed the desk to one side and lay down on the carpet. It was dark. That was something completely new, I thought, going to sleep in the dark. I lay my head on the soft pillow and smelled the blanket. My mother had dried the laundry, as always, outside on the clothesline.
It was totally still.
Tonight no one would come to search or beat me.
For the first time in almost five years, I got a great night's sleep.
***
The next day Bernhard came with Baher, who wanted to say goodbye.
That was just the beginning of the excitement. My father had disconnected the doorbell and the telephone to keep us from being besieged by reporters, but I took the phone into my room, reconnected it, and called just about everyone I know. It was great fun calling people again. My door was constantly opening to let in relatives who wanted to see me.
Everyone brought me something to eat, and of course I tasted it all. Then my friends came. Some of them stayed deep into the night, and the next day it was more of the same, It took several weeks before I had seen everyone again. In my free moments, I said my prayers.
I didn't talk to my parents about what had happened to me in Guantanamo. I spent a lot of time listening to my relatives and friends. They didn't ask me any questions, although I would have answered them, if they had.
No one wanted to know about Guantanamo, except Bernhard-he was constantly asking me questions.
The photographers and cameramen continued waiting outside our house for around ten days. Then most of them left. I waited for three weeks before daring to sneak out of the house. Two friends from Hemelingen visited me, and we borrowed my father's Mercedes. After all those years, I finally got to drive a car again, and we went to the spot by the river with the wharf and the junkyard where I had played and gone fishing as a child. It was dark by the time we got there. We walked for a while in the yellow glow of the warehouse lights, and I sat on a bollard and stared at the water.
Only then did I feel that I was truly back at home.
***
I still enjoy walking alone by the river. I used to go there on my bicycle -- now I take my motorbike. It's great driving a motorbike along the new streets. There's, an industrial park now along the banks of the Weser River where there once used to be fields of potato and corn. But the lake still smells like coffee. I come here a lot in the evening to regain my peace of mind.
***
Since I've returned to Bremen, I seldom walk anywhere. I prefer taking my father's car or my motorbike. I wouldn't get far on foot. I tried it a few times, but I kept getting stopped by people who wanted to take pictures. Some even asked for my autograph. Most of them are friendly and ask me a couple of questions. But I can't answer all of them, and I don't want to seem arrogant if I say no.
I know that I stick out from the crowd with my long beard and hair. But I like my beard. I think it looks nice, and growing a beard was the only freedom I enjoyed in Guantanamo.
Recently a young man came up to me on the street in Hemelingen, the kid brother of one of my childhood friends. Now in his mid-twenties, he said he'd done three years in a Bremen jail, and while he was there, he collected everything that was written about me. It was almost as if I were a kind of a role model for him. People who have been in prison themselves always seem to be especially interested in my story.
***
One day the mayor of Bremen paid us a visit. He brought a bouquet of flowers and said he had nothing to do with the previous city government, who had tried to revoke my residency permit. He wanted to welcome me back. He was the only authority who did so. No one, other than my lawyer, ever asked me if I needed medical, psychological, or any other kind of help.
Until recently, I had no health insurance because they said I either had to have a job or be on welfare to qualify. I tried to apply for welfare benefits, but no one offered me any assistance. I was always missing this or that piece of paper. In the end, I gave up. Today I have a job-working for the city of Bremen on social projects.
One day there was a fire in our neighborhood. I had just come back from a motorcycle ride and was still wearing my helmet and a face mask underneath. I could smell smoke in the hallway of our house. I ran upstairs, and the smoke got stronger. I shut the windows and went out to see where it was coming from.
The auto-repair garage at the end of our street was on fire, and the pitch-black smoke from burning tires was blowing over to our house. The fire trucks had already arrived on the scene, and a lot of people from our neighborhood were watching them put out the blaze. I was still wearing my motorcycle jacket and kept my face mask on to protect myself from the smoke. When the police arrived, I asked one of the officers if it wouldn't be better to evacuate the surrounding houses.
"Everything's under control," the officer said.
I looked at the fire. Cameramen were showing up.
A little while later, a policeman approached me and asked to see my face. I took off the mask.
"Now I know who you are," the policeman said.
He went to his patrol car and said something into the radio. Then he returned.
"Why are you wearing a mask?"
"Because of the fire. I was riding my motorcycle and I left it on to protect myself from the smoke."
He asked to see my passport, but I only had my driver's license with me.
"Where's your motorcycle?"
"Right outside. Do you want to see it?"
"No. We're taking you in to investigate if you've been involved in an act of arson."
On the way to the station, my mother called me on my cell phone.
"Talk in German, not in Turkish," the policeman hissed.
I told my mother that I was being taken to the police station and explained why. I asked the officer whether they would take me back home or whether I should have my mother come pick me up. He didn't answer. At the station, the officers said I would have to get completely undressed, so they could see whether I had any flammable liquids on me. I told them my religion prohibited me from taking all my clothes off in front of them.
One of the officers said, "Then we'll get one of our colleagues and make you. You won't enjoy it!"
I suggested that they close the windows and I cover my private parts with my jacket.
They agreed.
I don't smoke. I didn't even have a lighter on me.
***
It's not a story I look back on happily. My mother got an unnecessary scare, and I had to ask myself why, out of more than hundred people on the street, I was the only one who had to go to the police station. Did the police still suspect me of being a terrorist? Or a Taliban fighter who sets tires on fire at a garage six hundred feet from his own home?
In late 2006, Bremen's criminal police department took a statement from me about the two German soldiers who had beaten me in Kandahar. I was supposed to identify them from photographs. I went with Bernhard to the police department, where they wanted to search us for weapons at the door. Bernhard protested. I was here as a witness, he said, not as a suspect.
Were they afraid of me?
For a long time I suspected I was being kept under surveillance. Sometimes I heard a strange echo on our phone. Sometimes a delivery van would be parked on the street in front of our house for what I thought was a suspiciously long time. Once a letter concerning this book didn't arrive at my house. But maybe these were all coincidences.
My statements to the media led the German parliament, the Bundestag, to set up two special investigative committees to look into whether the previous German government was complicit in my detention and whether German soldiers had mistreated me. I have since testified before that committee and well as one set up by the EU in Brussels to investigate possible illegal CIA operations in Europe. During a break in the proceedings, an official who had brought me to my family after I landed in Ramstein came up to me and said: "I never knew about all this."
What I didn't know was that the Americans had allegedly decided as early as 2002 that I was innocent and were willing to let me go. That shocked me. Why didn't they just release me, then?
I discovered that the German government apparently didn't want to let me reenter the country, and claimed that my residency permit had expired because I hadn't applied for an extension on time. Of course, I couldn't file for the extension because I was in Guantanamo, and even if I had thought of it, the Americans would have laughed at me and sent me to the cooler.
My lawyer told me that government officials had even tried to get the Americans to send them my passport so that they could void my residency permit. I don't know whether this is true. If it turns out that they allowed me to be tortured, when they could have prevented it, I'm speechless.
Today, I have a permanent residency permit and would like to become a German citizen. I don't know whether I will get citizenship, but I'd like to stay in Germany and live and work in Hemelingen. I was born, grew up, and went to school here like most people I know. We may speak Turkish at home, but I live in Germany and feel like a German. I'm especially grateful to Germany's current Chancellor Angela Merkel for getting personally involved to help secure my release.
The country of which I am a citizen, Turkey, did nothing for me, and now they want me to do military service. They wasted no time trying to get me in the army. The letter asking me to report arrived one day after I got back to Hemelingen from Guantanamo.
***
My friend Selcuk, who was mistaken for a suicide bomber, still lives in Bremen, and I've heard he's become a father. I don't know what he really believed or did back then. I never saw him again. I'm not angry that he never came to Karachi, but I don't want to have any contact with him. I want to start a new life and make new friends.
Things might have turned out differently if Selcuk's brother hadn't told the border police in Frankfurt that we intended to go to Afghanistan and fight with the Taliban. But you can't change the past. I read in a newspaper that Selcuk's brother has since retracted his statement.
With time, I have come to understand how I got caught up in the mill of a major international political conflict, although I still can't grasp how certain things fit together. What I do know is that ever since January 2007, which is when I testified in front of the special investigations committee of the Bundestag in Berlin, I have once again unwillingly become a political figure in Germany.
All I did was tell people what happened to me, and I was happy that someone listened. But since then, it seems as though I constantly have to defend myself against accusations of being a terrorist-even though both the Americans and Germans who interrogated me in Guantanamo, as well as the prosecutors in Bremen, all concluded that I was clearly innocent. I hope that some day no one will doubt my innocence any more. But there's something else that's even more important to me.
The moderator of a Turkish television news show once asked me whether I'd seen the movie The Road to Guantanamo. He wanted to know how realistic it was. I said that it was a good movie, but that it only depicted some of the truth.
It's important that our stories are told. We need to counter the endless reports written in Guantanamo itself. We have to speak up and say: I tried to hand back my blanket and got four weeks in solitary confinement. We have to tell the world how Abdul lost his legs and how the Moroccan captain lost his fingers. The world needs to know about the prisoners who died in Kandahar. We have to describe how the doctors came only to check whether we were dead or could stand to be tortured for a little longer.
***
Did Guantanamo change me? I don't think so. I believe I've remained the same person I always was, with the same name, living in the same house. At the end of the interview with the Turkish TV show, the moderator asked me what I wanted to do when this book was finished. I said I wanted to get married, if God was willing, and start a family.
On the other hand, maybe Guantanamo did change me. I now know what people are capable of doing to their fellow human beings, and how politicians speak and act. I have a new appreciation for the value of simple things like sleeping and eating. Of being free.
Maybe you can picture my situation like this. Right now I'm sitting in my room with everything I need: Internet access, television, a phone, and enough to eat. I have my weights, and I can do sports. But what would happen if someone locked the door and imprisoned me? How long would someone last in this room? Twenty-four hours wouldn't be a problem, and maybe a week wouldn't be too bad either. But months? Perhaps you can imagine then how difficult it is for the prisoners still being held in Guantanamo.
I think a lot about their suffering. While I sit here eating chocolate bars and peeling mandarin oranges, they are being beaten and starved. I think less about my own time there than about the people who were only fourteen years old when they were captured, and have spent their youth being tortured. I can eat, drink, and sleep much the same as I did five years ago, but I never forget that people are being abused in Cuba. It makes me sad when I think of them.
I pray that they will be released and that the camp will be shut down.
***
I've never talked with my mother and father about Guantanamo, and they've never asked me about it. Maybe that's just a question of time.
***
Once I was looking out the window at the snow falling. My mother came up to me and asked whether it had ever snowed in Cuba.
No, mother, I said. Of course not.
It never snows in Cuba.
I WENT DOWN TO THE BASEMENT AND TURNED ON THE LIGHT. I wanted to see my room, which was exactly as I had left it. Nothing had changed. Even the note I'd written a couple of days before my departure reminding myself to buy batteries was still on my desk. My parents hadn't touched anything, and Ali and Alper hadn't been in there playing. It was a strange feeling-seeing my black leather couch, my blue sofa bed, my glass-fronted wardrobe, and my model ship again. I'd decorated my room when I was thirteen and had never changed a thing.
There was a case under my wardrobe. I pulled it out and removed the old slide projector my uncle Ekram had given me. I looked at it for a while and then went into the living room.
My family was sitting around our living-room table, everyone except Alper, who had gone to bed. The television set was on quietly in the background, and I stared at the screen for a while. Ali took out his wallet and showed me euro bills and coins. It looked like play money. The fan in the comer was running, and my mother and Ali complained that the room was too cold. But I found it pleasantly cool.
"Son, you must be hungry," my mother said.
The pots were on the stove. They had prepared Turkish mince-meat burgers, lamb, kebabs, rice, green beans, French fries, potatoes, and a couple of different soups. They must have been cooking for days. I opened the refrigerator. It was like being in paradise. I sat down on the tile floor in front of it and removed everything down to the last jar of mustard. I piled it all up in front of me and tried to decide what I would eat first and what second: spicy peppers-and-rice soup, cheese, meat patties, olives, kebabs, green beans, baklava, pickles ...
I decided to have a Kit-Kat.
I ate a whole package of them.
I ate everything I could.
I didn't know how late it was, and I didn't care. I could always pull the curtains in my room. My father was already asleep, and my mother had made my sofa bed. It was the first time in five years that she had done anything in my room. I folded the bed back up, pushed the desk to one side and lay down on the carpet. It was dark. That was something completely new, I thought, going to sleep in the dark. I lay my head on the soft pillow and smelled the blanket. My mother had dried the laundry, as always, outside on the clothesline.
It was totally still.
Tonight no one would come to search or beat me.
For the first time in almost five years, I got a great night's sleep.
***
The next day Bernhard came with Baher, who wanted to say goodbye.
That was just the beginning of the excitement. My father had disconnected the doorbell and the telephone to keep us from being besieged by reporters, but I took the phone into my room, reconnected it, and called just about everyone I know. It was great fun calling people again. My door was constantly opening to let in relatives who wanted to see me.
Everyone brought me something to eat, and of course I tasted it all. Then my friends came. Some of them stayed deep into the night, and the next day it was more of the same, It took several weeks before I had seen everyone again. In my free moments, I said my prayers.
I didn't talk to my parents about what had happened to me in Guantanamo. I spent a lot of time listening to my relatives and friends. They didn't ask me any questions, although I would have answered them, if they had.
No one wanted to know about Guantanamo, except Bernhard-he was constantly asking me questions.
The photographers and cameramen continued waiting outside our house for around ten days. Then most of them left. I waited for three weeks before daring to sneak out of the house. Two friends from Hemelingen visited me, and we borrowed my father's Mercedes. After all those years, I finally got to drive a car again, and we went to the spot by the river with the wharf and the junkyard where I had played and gone fishing as a child. It was dark by the time we got there. We walked for a while in the yellow glow of the warehouse lights, and I sat on a bollard and stared at the water.
Only then did I feel that I was truly back at home.
***
I still enjoy walking alone by the river. I used to go there on my bicycle -- now I take my motorbike. It's great driving a motorbike along the new streets. There's, an industrial park now along the banks of the Weser River where there once used to be fields of potato and corn. But the lake still smells like coffee. I come here a lot in the evening to regain my peace of mind.
***
Since I've returned to Bremen, I seldom walk anywhere. I prefer taking my father's car or my motorbike. I wouldn't get far on foot. I tried it a few times, but I kept getting stopped by people who wanted to take pictures. Some even asked for my autograph. Most of them are friendly and ask me a couple of questions. But I can't answer all of them, and I don't want to seem arrogant if I say no.
I know that I stick out from the crowd with my long beard and hair. But I like my beard. I think it looks nice, and growing a beard was the only freedom I enjoyed in Guantanamo.
Recently a young man came up to me on the street in Hemelingen, the kid brother of one of my childhood friends. Now in his mid-twenties, he said he'd done three years in a Bremen jail, and while he was there, he collected everything that was written about me. It was almost as if I were a kind of a role model for him. People who have been in prison themselves always seem to be especially interested in my story.
***
One day the mayor of Bremen paid us a visit. He brought a bouquet of flowers and said he had nothing to do with the previous city government, who had tried to revoke my residency permit. He wanted to welcome me back. He was the only authority who did so. No one, other than my lawyer, ever asked me if I needed medical, psychological, or any other kind of help.
Until recently, I had no health insurance because they said I either had to have a job or be on welfare to qualify. I tried to apply for welfare benefits, but no one offered me any assistance. I was always missing this or that piece of paper. In the end, I gave up. Today I have a job-working for the city of Bremen on social projects.
One day there was a fire in our neighborhood. I had just come back from a motorcycle ride and was still wearing my helmet and a face mask underneath. I could smell smoke in the hallway of our house. I ran upstairs, and the smoke got stronger. I shut the windows and went out to see where it was coming from.
The auto-repair garage at the end of our street was on fire, and the pitch-black smoke from burning tires was blowing over to our house. The fire trucks had already arrived on the scene, and a lot of people from our neighborhood were watching them put out the blaze. I was still wearing my motorcycle jacket and kept my face mask on to protect myself from the smoke. When the police arrived, I asked one of the officers if it wouldn't be better to evacuate the surrounding houses.
"Everything's under control," the officer said.
I looked at the fire. Cameramen were showing up.
A little while later, a policeman approached me and asked to see my face. I took off the mask.
"Now I know who you are," the policeman said.
He went to his patrol car and said something into the radio. Then he returned.
"Why are you wearing a mask?"
"Because of the fire. I was riding my motorcycle and I left it on to protect myself from the smoke."
He asked to see my passport, but I only had my driver's license with me.
"Where's your motorcycle?"
"Right outside. Do you want to see it?"
"No. We're taking you in to investigate if you've been involved in an act of arson."
On the way to the station, my mother called me on my cell phone.
"Talk in German, not in Turkish," the policeman hissed.
I told my mother that I was being taken to the police station and explained why. I asked the officer whether they would take me back home or whether I should have my mother come pick me up. He didn't answer. At the station, the officers said I would have to get completely undressed, so they could see whether I had any flammable liquids on me. I told them my religion prohibited me from taking all my clothes off in front of them.
One of the officers said, "Then we'll get one of our colleagues and make you. You won't enjoy it!"
I suggested that they close the windows and I cover my private parts with my jacket.
They agreed.
I don't smoke. I didn't even have a lighter on me.
***
It's not a story I look back on happily. My mother got an unnecessary scare, and I had to ask myself why, out of more than hundred people on the street, I was the only one who had to go to the police station. Did the police still suspect me of being a terrorist? Or a Taliban fighter who sets tires on fire at a garage six hundred feet from his own home?
In late 2006, Bremen's criminal police department took a statement from me about the two German soldiers who had beaten me in Kandahar. I was supposed to identify them from photographs. I went with Bernhard to the police department, where they wanted to search us for weapons at the door. Bernhard protested. I was here as a witness, he said, not as a suspect.
Were they afraid of me?
For a long time I suspected I was being kept under surveillance. Sometimes I heard a strange echo on our phone. Sometimes a delivery van would be parked on the street in front of our house for what I thought was a suspiciously long time. Once a letter concerning this book didn't arrive at my house. But maybe these were all coincidences.
My statements to the media led the German parliament, the Bundestag, to set up two special investigative committees to look into whether the previous German government was complicit in my detention and whether German soldiers had mistreated me. I have since testified before that committee and well as one set up by the EU in Brussels to investigate possible illegal CIA operations in Europe. During a break in the proceedings, an official who had brought me to my family after I landed in Ramstein came up to me and said: "I never knew about all this."
What I didn't know was that the Americans had allegedly decided as early as 2002 that I was innocent and were willing to let me go. That shocked me. Why didn't they just release me, then?
I discovered that the German government apparently didn't want to let me reenter the country, and claimed that my residency permit had expired because I hadn't applied for an extension on time. Of course, I couldn't file for the extension because I was in Guantanamo, and even if I had thought of it, the Americans would have laughed at me and sent me to the cooler.
My lawyer told me that government officials had even tried to get the Americans to send them my passport so that they could void my residency permit. I don't know whether this is true. If it turns out that they allowed me to be tortured, when they could have prevented it, I'm speechless.
Today, I have a permanent residency permit and would like to become a German citizen. I don't know whether I will get citizenship, but I'd like to stay in Germany and live and work in Hemelingen. I was born, grew up, and went to school here like most people I know. We may speak Turkish at home, but I live in Germany and feel like a German. I'm especially grateful to Germany's current Chancellor Angela Merkel for getting personally involved to help secure my release.
The country of which I am a citizen, Turkey, did nothing for me, and now they want me to do military service. They wasted no time trying to get me in the army. The letter asking me to report arrived one day after I got back to Hemelingen from Guantanamo.
***
My friend Selcuk, who was mistaken for a suicide bomber, still lives in Bremen, and I've heard he's become a father. I don't know what he really believed or did back then. I never saw him again. I'm not angry that he never came to Karachi, but I don't want to have any contact with him. I want to start a new life and make new friends.
Things might have turned out differently if Selcuk's brother hadn't told the border police in Frankfurt that we intended to go to Afghanistan and fight with the Taliban. But you can't change the past. I read in a newspaper that Selcuk's brother has since retracted his statement.
With time, I have come to understand how I got caught up in the mill of a major international political conflict, although I still can't grasp how certain things fit together. What I do know is that ever since January 2007, which is when I testified in front of the special investigations committee of the Bundestag in Berlin, I have once again unwillingly become a political figure in Germany.
All I did was tell people what happened to me, and I was happy that someone listened. But since then, it seems as though I constantly have to defend myself against accusations of being a terrorist-even though both the Americans and Germans who interrogated me in Guantanamo, as well as the prosecutors in Bremen, all concluded that I was clearly innocent. I hope that some day no one will doubt my innocence any more. But there's something else that's even more important to me.
The moderator of a Turkish television news show once asked me whether I'd seen the movie The Road to Guantanamo. He wanted to know how realistic it was. I said that it was a good movie, but that it only depicted some of the truth.
It's important that our stories are told. We need to counter the endless reports written in Guantanamo itself. We have to speak up and say: I tried to hand back my blanket and got four weeks in solitary confinement. We have to tell the world how Abdul lost his legs and how the Moroccan captain lost his fingers. The world needs to know about the prisoners who died in Kandahar. We have to describe how the doctors came only to check whether we were dead or could stand to be tortured for a little longer.
***
Did Guantanamo change me? I don't think so. I believe I've remained the same person I always was, with the same name, living in the same house. At the end of the interview with the Turkish TV show, the moderator asked me what I wanted to do when this book was finished. I said I wanted to get married, if God was willing, and start a family.
On the other hand, maybe Guantanamo did change me. I now know what people are capable of doing to their fellow human beings, and how politicians speak and act. I have a new appreciation for the value of simple things like sleeping and eating. Of being free.
Maybe you can picture my situation like this. Right now I'm sitting in my room with everything I need: Internet access, television, a phone, and enough to eat. I have my weights, and I can do sports. But what would happen if someone locked the door and imprisoned me? How long would someone last in this room? Twenty-four hours wouldn't be a problem, and maybe a week wouldn't be too bad either. But months? Perhaps you can imagine then how difficult it is for the prisoners still being held in Guantanamo.
I think a lot about their suffering. While I sit here eating chocolate bars and peeling mandarin oranges, they are being beaten and starved. I think less about my own time there than about the people who were only fourteen years old when they were captured, and have spent their youth being tortured. I can eat, drink, and sleep much the same as I did five years ago, but I never forget that people are being abused in Cuba. It makes me sad when I think of them.
I pray that they will be released and that the camp will be shut down.
***
I've never talked with my mother and father about Guantanamo, and they've never asked me about it. Maybe that's just a question of time.
***
Once I was looking out the window at the snow falling. My mother came up to me and asked whether it had ever snowed in Cuba.
No, mother, I said. Of course not.
It never snows in Cuba.