Who will take the 104 Yemenis from Guantanamo? (Feature)

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Apr 21, 2009, 12:14 GMT

Sanaa/Aden ­ As more and more details about CIA torture methods in Guantanamo are emerging, US diplomats and terrorism experts are trying to prepare for its closure ordered by US President Barack Obama.

The prisoners from Yemen are causing the biggest headache.

Of the 248 prisoners currently in Guantanamo, 104 are from Yemen. The US authorities classify many of them as dangerous. Their homeland would not like to see them sent back to Yemen - as 23 al-Qaeda terrorists managed to escape from a high-security prison' there three years ago.

The risk that some prisoners who were maltreated by US investigators during interrogation will take up their Holy War against the West again is high.

Othman Abdel-Rahim Mohammed Othman, from the province of al-Beidha is one of the 104. The Yemeni Koran teacher with combat experience on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was arrested in December 2001.

He is thought to have joined the al-Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden. Investigators in Kandahar believe he knows Bin Laden personally. A few days before Othman's arrest his brother Ahmed was killed in the prison at Qala-i-Jangi in Afghanistan, when US forces used overwhelming force to put down a revolt.

His eldest brother, Arif, 40, is campaigning for Othman's return to Yemen. I talked to my brother in Guantanamo on the phone for two hours today,' said Arif Othman, who runs a state-owned firm's guesthouse in Aden in southern Yemen.

He has dyed the grey hairs of his meticulously trimmed beard red with henna. His son Assam is named after Abdallah Assam, the godfather of modern-day Islamist terrorism who was killed in Peshawar in 1989.

Arif Othman is a dignified, hospitable man. After their father was killed in the civil war, he became a kind of substitute father to his younger brothers. He sent them to study Islamic law (sharia) in the province of Taiz.

Othman left Yemen in 1998. First, he went to Pakistan to work as a religion teacher. Then he and his brothers got involved in the Jihad in Pakistan.

Ahmed said 'the war Afghanistan is a war against Islam, it is Jihad, and I'm going there,'' said the elder brother. Othman called him for the last time from Afghanistan in late autumn 2001. Then he was arrested and taken to Guantanamo. He hid out together with other Arabs with a Shiite tribe along the Pakistani border. The tribe betrayed them and sold the Arabs to the Americans for 25,000 dollars per man,' said Arif Othman. A Sunni tribe later burnt the village down.'

The president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, last winter proposed the construction of a 're-integration centre' for Guantanamo returnees in the capital Sanaa. But Yemenis assume that this will be paid for and run by the Americans, an idea greeted without enthusiasm in Washington.

The example of the reintegration centres run by Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia offering brainwashing for former holy warriors' has shown that their success is not guaranteed.

The Pentagon and US diplomats want NGOs to be involved in the rehabilitation in Yemen,' said Khalid al-Anesi, a lawyer from Sanaa whose human rights organization Hood fights for the return of the Guantanamo prisoners. He considers the deportation of the Yemenis to other Arab countries to be the worst possible solution. If they are sent to Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Jordan, then they might be tortured or forgotten,' said Al-Anesi.

He has no sympathy with militant Islamists. I'm only concerned that the rules of international law are observed ­ no should stay in prison for years without a trial,' the jurist said. At a pinch, those who face the threat of death or torture in their own countries could be sent to Europe,' he said. But this cannot be expected in this case of the Yemenis, he said.

So far Germany, France and the UK have not given any sign that they are ready to accept any Yemenis from Guantanamo. In Europe, where some diplomats think the Americans should lie in the bed they have made for themselves, there might be room for a couple of Uighurs from China or a half dozen North Africans. But it is unlikely that anyone is going to go out of their way to help anyone from Yemen, where the Bin Laden family has its roots.