Detainee 441: this was Mansoor Adayfi’s only identity in Guantánamo for fourteen years. Gutted from his previous life in Yemen, the frog’s orange color equated him to other prisoners, such as torture in the form of drownings, electrocutions, sleep deprivation, force-feeding, beatings and verbal, sexual and psychological abuse. Fourteen years, from 19 to 33, in which he lost track of time, his former life, and his ambitions, and in which he was never charged with a crime by the United States government. An arbitrary and indefinite detention: another of the more than 700 that have taken place at Guantánamo in more than two decades of the war on terror.
He arrived there on February 9, 2002, being one of the first detainees to land in this legal hole in the southeast of Cuba. Three months earlier, at the age of 18, he had been kidnapped in Afghanistan by a warlord who sold him to the United States claiming he was a “combatant” of Al-Qaida. No test was needed for the George Bush administration. “After 9/11, US military aircraft began dropping leaflets offering $5,000 for anyone suspected of belonging to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Many Afghans made a lot of money out of it. I was touched by the other side of the coin”, explains Adayfi in a telephone interview.
He spent the next three months in a clandestine CIA detention center. In that unknown location – or, rather, classified – his hell began. He did 19 during the three months he was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, which were nothing more than torture in search of a confession. Adayfi ended up giving answers that satisfied the officers, eager to end the abuse. But the matter did not end then.
“When we were transferred to Guantánamo, we had no idea where we were going. That is not just a prison, it is a black hole: there is no system, no laws, no justice, no human rights, nothing. That’s why they chose that place, to be able to put people outside the legal system of the United States”, he complains. “No one told us anything: where we were, why, or until when. I had no rights, no explanations, not even charges, not even a trial.”
Adayfi explains that the torture he had experienced in the CIA prison multiplied during the first years in Guantánamo, in which he remembers being the object of abuse “day and night”, which confused him when they left him in solitary confinement as punishment, in a small, lightless cell. “I became a number. They dehumanized us each and every day. We were punished for speaking, for behaving like human beings. They wanted to turn us into monsters so they could tell the world they were arresting evil people. They did everything to create this narrative.”
“They used us as an experimental laboratory”, he says, something that many independent investigations have confirmed over the years. Like that of lawyers Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz, who in their study America’s Battle Lab explain how prisoners were tortured with impunity with two objectives: the first, to obtain useful information to locate terrorists from Al-Qaida and other Islamist groups; the second, experimenting with torture techniques taking detainees to the limit, to use them in other places in the world and train their interrogators.
“Our body was the battlefield”, sums up Adayfi. “His weapon was torture, and ours, the hunger strike. When you are there, your body and mind go on a journey towards death. It’s not fun, you notice how they are destroyed little by little. It was the way to protest against the abuses”. But they couldn’t even do that: “When we were on hunger strike, they forced us to eat, put a tube through our noses to feed us and increased the torture so we would quit. Afterwards, they put us in isolation as a reprisal.”
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he stopped many of those practices and “improved living conditions”, admits Adayfi, “but we had already lived through many years of torture and the abuses did not stop”. In addition, “at that point I was already completely broken inside. Just the fact of being imprisoned for years without reason and without charges is already a form of torture”. Another constant remained: the prisoners did not receive adequate medical treatment, a complaint that today continues to be maintained by the lawyers of the thirty detainees who are still in Guantánamo.
Over the years, new prisons were added to Guantánamo, and Adayfi was moved to a new cell, but he was still in terrible condition: “In the summer, it was like an oven, and in the winter, it was cold and wet”. He began to have more contact with the other detainees, with whom he shared the abuse that they all went through without exception: “It was a collective thing. It was a US program for all prisoners.”
Chatting with others helped him remember his past, gave him back his identity. Something he also achieved through art. “We drew flowers using apple stems as pencils and polystyrene cups as paper,” he recalls. “We started drawing in 2010, but most of it was destroyed years later. It was very important to us, because it humanized us, connected us to our previous life: it helped us survive. And also to resist, because our art was a way of expressing ourselves against injustice and mistreatment”.
After 14 years of closure, in 2016 an escape route arrived. The previous year the US had reassessed his case and had officially acknowledged that they had no evidence that he had been linked to Al-Qaida. His release was authorized and he was included in the complex system of relocation of detainees abroad, which consisted of a series of secret agreements with third countries.
He wanted to go to Qatar, where he had family, or to Oman, whose treatment of detainees had a good reputation among Caribbean penitentiaries. But the US government offered him another way out: Serbia. At first he rejected the offer, since his only knowledge of the country was the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the Balkan war. The government insisted, promising him that he could start from scratch and that he would be treated as a common citizen, with financial aid , passport and identity document. Adayfi agreed when he saw that he had no other choice.
When he arrived in Belgrade he realized that nothing was as he had been promised. “It was a Guantánamo 2.0”, he says flatly. He was alone and guarded in a new country where he was not allowed to leave. Eight years later, he is still in Belgrade, from where he answered this call. Although his situation has improved and he has rebuilt part of his life, he feels, like hundreds of ex-prisoners from Guantánamo, in a legal limbo. “Many are under house arrest. They can’t work, or visit their families: they can’t live, they can’t do anything, basically. They threw us into other countries without any monitoring. They tortured us, abused us and now they just want to get rid of us”.
