By Murali Krishnan, IANS,
Lillehammer (Norway) : During his over six-year-long agonizing incarceration in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, a graduate of Pune university, was never charged but there were several accusations levelled against him – accusations that changed from year to year.
Interrogators who questioned him over 130 times in that period levelled allegations beginning from how Sami ran a website supporting terrorism, that he sold Stinger missiles to Islamic militants in Chechnya and that he interviewed Osama bin Laden.
“It was humiliating. Rats are treated with more dignity and humanity. I was lucky to get out alive and also lucky that god allowed that I be released,” said Sami, 39, the assistant cameraman who was apprehended on the Pakistani border at the end of December 2001.
Guantanamo’s internee number 345 is the only journalist to have been held prisoner without charge or trial at the detention camp. Freed in May, where he was a pale shadow of himself, having lost more than 20 kilos from a virtual 17-month hunger strike, Sami is angry yet peculiarly philosophical of all that he has gone through in the period he describes as “living hell”.
Incidentally, Sami, who did his graduation from Pune in the early 1990s, has fond memories of India.
“Now I will uncover the truth. If journalists won’t cover each other, who will? It is our responsibility,” Sami told IANS in an exclusive interview at Lillehammer where he recounted his experiences before a journalism conference, first in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase.
“I have documented at least 500 cases while inside which I will write down and put out their stories,” he remarks, ambling gingerly with a walking stick.
“They (interrogators) beat us, did not allow us to stand or sleep and set the dog squads on me. There were bugs on my body. To humiliate me further, they tore up the Quran and flushed it down the toilet.”
On most occasions, he was also in shackles and blinded with a hood.
Sami says he endured months of brutal force-feeding and lost nearly a fifth of his body weight during the hunger strike. At times, the harshest methods of forced feeding were deployed which he had to endure – the feeding tube being forced down into his lungs by mistake several times.
“It was only after four years that I was allowed to talk to my lawyers. It was clear that the US hated Al Jazeera. Can you imagine one interrogator told me that a US citizenship would be arranged for me if I gave information about Osama bin Laden’s coordinates?”
Sami’s disappearance was not made public until September 2002, when Al-Jazeera announced that its cameraman was being held at Guantanamo.
For months, the station said, it sought to resolve the matter through behind-the-scenes contacts with Pakistani and US officials, fearing that publicity would jeopardize any release.
Sami’s colleague Ezzeddine Abdelmoula, who is incharge of Al Jazeera’s international media relations, is pained that the Western press did not put its best foot forward to campaign for his release.
“There was no outcry as we saw in the case of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl or BBC’s Alan Graham Johnston,” says Abdelmoula.
Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic radicals in Pakistan in early 2002 while Johnston was kidnapped by a group of Palestinian militants in March 2007 and released nearly four months later, after Hamas’ military occupation of Gaza.
For now Sami is back, working for Al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar where he is currently heading a newly created “Liberties and Human Rights Affairs” desk.
“We (journalists) have to be involved in real issues that affect us even in the face of opposition, otherwise things will go from bad to worse,” he says.
(Murali Krishnan can be contacted at [email protected])