Despite 8 years in Guantanamo, he yearns to return
TUNIS, Tunisia — Dressed in a thick jacket and wool hat on a cool winter evening, counting the coins for his bus fare, Hedi Hammami looks like any other Tunisian on his way to work.
But he walks with a limp and sometimes pauses midspeech and screws up his face in pain. “That’s Guantanamo,” he explained. After eight years as a detainee in the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he said he still suffers from headaches, depression and anxiety attacks from the torture and other mistreatment he says he suffered there, even six years after his release.
Married with two children now and employed as a nighttime ambulance driver, Hammami, 47, seems to have rebuilt his life. Yet the pressures of living in Tunisia’s faltering democracy, under harassment and enduring repeated raids by the police, have driven him to make an extreme request.
“It would be better for me to go back to that single cell and to be left alone,” he said recently. “Two or three weeks ago I went to the Red Cross and asked them to connect me to the U.S. foreign ministry to ask to go back to Guantanamo.”
The Red Cross refused to take his request, he said, but he insists nevertheless that at this point, that would be best for him.
“I have lost my hope,” he said. “There is no future in this country for me.”
When he was first released from Guantanamo in 2010, Tunisia was still a dictatorship under the rule of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and notorious for torturing prisoners, in particular Islamists. Deemed no longer a threat to the United States, Hammami was sent to the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
After the popular uprising in 2011 that overthrew Ben Ali and set off the Arab Spring, Hammami negotiated his return to Tunisia. He timed it well, benefiting from a national amnesty for political prisoners and a program of compensation that gave him a job in the Ministry of Health.
“I hoped very much that after the revolution everything would get better,” he said in one of several interviews in his rented home in a working-class suburb of Tunis.
Yet, soon after he began work in 2013, police raided his apartment with dogs at 3 a.m., breaking the door and hauling him down to the police station. “They made me crawl on all fours down the stairs,” he recounted.
At the police station they said they just wanted to get to know him, and let him go after 15 minutes. “That was just the beginning.”
Since then, Hammami has lived under a constant regimen of police surveillance, raids and harassment. His cellphone and computer were confiscated. When he moved to a new house, police followed him, turning up at all hours to question him.
In December 2015 he was placed under house arrest, told he no longer had the right to work and ordered to sign in at the police station morning and evening for six weeks.
He remains under “administrative control,” and police enforce the order at will. He cannot travel outside Tunis. Every so often, like on Sept. 11, the police order him to sign in with them. “I feel someone is doing it for revenge,” he says.
Stress and tension from the police actions have intensified the psychological problems Hammami brought with him from Guantanamo. “I feel too much pressure,” he said, rubbing his temples. “All that blackness comes back.”