By Daphne Eviatar
Human rights advocates are warning that unless the United States resolves some particularly thorny problems posed by almost 100 prisoners from Yemen stuck at Guantanamo Bay, President Obama will have serious problems keeping his pledge to shut down the prison camp anytime soon. The advocates are calling on the administration to prosecute in U.S. federal courts any Yemenis who pose a real threat, and to work harder to develop a plan with the Yemeni government to let the rest of them go home. Those who face a credible threat of persecution in Yemen could be resettled in another country.
The problem, described in a new report by Human Rights Watch released Sunday, involves about 99 prisoners from Yemen, many of whom have been imprisoned without charge for more than eight years. Of some 550 prisoners released from Guantanamo by the Bush administration, only 14 were from Yemen. Except for Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver convicted by a U.S. military commission and sent home last November, no Guantanamo prisoners have been returned to Yemen in the past year and a half.
Although detainees from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia far outnumbered Yemeni detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison’s early years, about 90 percent of detainees from those two countries have been sent home. Yemenis are now the largest single group at Guantanamo, making up about forty percent of the prison population.
The reason is not that the Yemeni prisoners are any more dangerous, say human rights advocates and lawyers. In fact, about a dozen prisoners from Yemen have been cleared for release since 2005. Yet the United States has been unable to reach an agreement with Yemen on how to repatriate these prisoners and ensure they don’t join Al Qaeda or otherwise pose a threat to the United States in the future.
“The reality is that release has never had anything to do with supposed dangerousness, but rather the ability of the [United States] to work out a diplomatic arrangement with another country,” said David Remes, a lawyer who represents 15 detainees from Yemen. “Almost all the western Europeans have been released,” he said. “All the English residents have gone back. But now you have the Yemenis, and the problem with reaching an agreement is complex.”
The problem is that U.S. officials don’t trust the Yemeni government — whose country has experienced a surge of violence and the growth of Al Qaeda and its supporters there — to handle the repatriated prisoners in a way that will ensure they don’t join terrorist groups upon their return. Yemeni authorities have promised to create a rehabilitation camp where former Guantanamo prisoners would receive counseling, job training and help re-integrating into the society. But as one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, it’s not clear how Yemen could afford to do that without significant foreign assistance. And while Yemen would like the United States to fund the effort, U.S. officials say they’re wary of handing large sums of money over to a government that’s notorious for corruption. They also want other Arab governments to share the costs.
In a summary of its plan provided to Human Rights Watch, the Yemeni government says that returned prisoners would be rehabilitated “religiously, culturally, vocationally and medically” in a “camp” with sports, cultural activities and family visits. Specialists would evaluate detainees and determine “the causes that have contributed to their joining terrorist groups.” The men could spend anywhere from a week to more than a year in custody.
That worries human rights advocates, however, who fear that could lead to yet more arbitrary detention for detainees – essentially, a mini-Gitmo transferred to Yemen. That’s particularly likely if the U.S. government pressures the Yemeni government not to release the men out of fears that they’ll support terrorism. As with Guantanamo, most would probably not be charged with crimes in Yemen or have an opportunity to defend themselves or challenge the legitimacy of their detention.
“Yemeni authorities should not assume these men are terrorists simply because the United States held them at Guantanamo,” said Human Rights Watch researcher Letta Tayler, who traveled to Yemen to interview former detainees and Yemeni officials. “If they feel they must monitor the detainees or restrict their movement, they have to provide the men with a meaningful legal process to contest the measures.”
The group says that any agreement between the United States and Yemen should also resolve the cases of two Yemenis being held by the United States without charge at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
“The best way to prevent the returned Yemenis from becoming a threat is to help them reintegrate into their society and repair their lives,” Tayler said.
Whether Yemen will follow through on its promises to do that isn’t clear. The proposed rehabilitation has yet to be built, although Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised it would be completed in April. Until it’s ready, Human Rights Watch worries that Yemeni detainees could be sent to rehabilitation programs in Saudia Arabia or simply sit in jails and prisons run by Yemen’s security services, as all 14 former Guantanamo prisoners returned to Yemen were initially, with no access to lawyers and minimal access to relatives. None have been given any rehabilitation or reintegration assistance, Human Rights Watch reports.
The group’s report describes one detainee returned to Yemen from Guantanamo in 2004 who says that upon his arrival in Yemen, government authorities imprisoned him and tried to beat him into confessing that he was working as an American spy.
“I was tortured for five days, from nine in the morning until dawn,” the former prisoner told Human Rights Watch. “There were insults, bad words and threats to do bad things to my female relatives and to imprison my father. I told them, ‘if you’re going to torture me, it won’t be anything new. The Americans already put me through torture.’ “
State Department officials reached last week declined to comment on the situation in Yemen or the challenges of returning prisoners there, saying they had not seen the Human Rights Watch report. But some Middle East experts say that the United States’ concerns about repatriating Yemeni detainees are well-founded.
“The Yemeni government has had a very spotty record with its high-value prisoners,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst for the U.S. Treasury Department and Deputy Executive Director of the Jewish Policy Center. “After 9-11, the Yemeni government did a relatively good job trying to crack down on violence in Yemen. But as the situation evolved, Yemen began to experiment with counter-indoctrination, releasing prisoners from jail on family bond”—a family’s promise that it will keep an eye on the prisoner. “So in the last three years we’ve seen a Yemeni revolving door policy with its high-value prisoners and Al Qaeda suspects,” said Schanzer. “We’ve seen a slight uptick in violence, and we can expect to see more. So I think it’s understandable that U.S. intelligence agencies would be a little skittish about handing over these suspects who were presumably picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan and elsewhere when it’s unclear what the Yemeni policy is concerning trying and incarcerating Al Qaeda suspects.”
Whether they were actually picked up “on the battlefield” and what information U