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By Eman El-shenawi
AL ARABIYA
An Egyptian ex-Guantanamo detainee faces a misty future ahead in his quest for freedom.

Adel el-Gazzar, 46, detained at Cuba’s notorious Guantanamo Bay for eight years, left the camp with no U.S. charges against him but had no chance of going back home.

But now, with the upheaval of the former Egyptian regime and its constraints on democracy during Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule, Egypt could now be turning its attention to its former suspected jihadists and other militants once suppressed by unfair treatment.

And Gazzar is a prime example. He was a victim of the Mubarak era when he became one of about 100 Islamists rounded up by Egyptian authorities as part of what the state media branded as a counterterrorism coup in 2001.

But in fact, Gazzar had traveled to Afghanistan to volunteer with the Red Crescent. After being injured in an airstrike, he was handed over from his hospital bed in Pakistan to American security agents for a bounty. He was then taken to a Kandahar prison, where he claims he was tortured for 11 days before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2002.
“He had received no medical attention during his time in Kandahar, and as a result, his leg was infected with gangrene so severe that it had to be amputated,” Reprieve, a London-based advocacy group monitoring Gazzar’s, notes in its case study on him.

Realizing that they had made a mistake, the U.S. authorities cleared Adel for release in 2010 but it was deemed unsafe for Adel to return to Egypt as he was considered a political dissident, so he began the long wait for a third country to accept him.

In another blow to any hopes of being fairly treated, Gazzar was then shipped to a holding center detention in Slovakia, unable to return to Egypt after he was convicted in absentia in 2002 for militant activities in a group known as the Waad Cell, a local group that raised funds for the Palestinian intifada. His case had been reopened after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Members of Waad faced accusations of being members in an illegal organization, working against the Constitution, committing crimes against public order, and using terrorism to realize their objectives, Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm reports.

Egypt’s war on terror
Gazzar became a victim of the former Egyptian dictatorship as well as U.S. authorities, who had mistakenly detaining him for eight years in Guantanamo.

Although it was ultimately U.S. pressure on Egypt to keep Gazzar away, Egypt had also begun its own war on Islamists long before began its post-Sept. 11 onslaught on suspected terror groups.

In 2008 it was reported that suspected Hezbollah terrorists were under interrogation in Egypt while ever-increasing brutal state police tactics were used against Islamist detainees under the Mubarak regime.

Back in 2003, Hafiz Abu Sa’eda, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, believes the main reason the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group and now a political party, became more rigid was the torture inflicted on its members.

“Torture demonstrates that the regime deserves destroying because it does not respect the dignity of the people,” he told The Guardian. “They began to argue that society should be destroyed and rebuilt again on the basis of an Islamic state.”

Political analysts say Mubarak’s government had exaggerated the threat posed by Islamists to prove to Washington it was a reliable ally in the fight against terrorism while remaining dependent on U.S. economic assistance.

And indeed, Mubarak took on drastic measures to contain the Waad cell in 2002. He used the Military Order No. 1 issued in 1981, which gives the president extraordinary powers during a State of Emergency, to submit the men ─ all civilians ─ to trial in military courts, Al Masry Al Youm reports.

Meanwhile, Ashraf el-Gazzar, Adel’s brother, who was among those detained but later cleared, recalled that interrogators told the prisoners point blank: “Sorry, it’s just bad timing for you guys. You’re Mubarak’s gift to the Americans,” Reprieve notes.

New Egypt
But now, an important question lies: will “new Egypt,” currently under military rule while facing the prospect of being governed by popular Islamist political parties, grant fair trials to those once branded terrorists?

Gazzar took a chance on this. When the mass revolt in Egypt erupted, he was presented with a new opportunity and was allowed to fly back to the post-revolutionary country in June with the hope that his unjust sentence in absentia would not be upheld by a post-Mubarak court, says Katie Taylor of Reprieve.

But sadly, he was arrested at the airport and is now subject to arbitrary detention at Tora Prison, where Mubarak’s sons were sent earlier this year on corruption charges amid a series of high-profile criminal wrangles to hit Mubarak’s family and former regime affiliates.

An Egyptian military court case set for Dec. 27 could decide on the fate of those like Gazzar and whether they will be granted a free trial and possibly be freed in Egypt.

“With the current political climate in Egypt it is difficult to predict what may happen but Gazzar’s attorneys are hopeful fair procedure and the outcome to be his release,” says Taylor.

Meanwhile his brother Ashraf waits to see whether the “new Egypt” will live up to its democratic promises in the military court case later this month.
“If the revolution really changed anything, he shouldn’t be in prison,” Ashraf al-Gazzar told Egyptian Newspaper Al Masry Al Youm.