At about 70kg, the Syrian prisoner is gaunt for a man more than 1.8m tall. He is pale and weak, so lethargic at times that one of his lawyers said he had to lie on the floor when he met with her one day this summer at the prison on the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The hunger strike that 43-year-old Abu Wa’el Dhiab started 18 months ago to protest his indefinite confinement without charge was supposed to be over by now. He was told in the spring that he would be resettled in Uruguay, along with five other Guantanamo prisoners, but as the months have dragged on and the transfer put on hold, his standoff with military officials has only deteriorated, at times turning violent.
“Everyone who has seen him recently is alarmed,” said one of his attorneys, Alka Pradhan.
The prisoner has been engaged in a tense struggle with guards in recent months, according to documents filed in US federal court in Washington, where Dhiab, who has been fed through a nasal tube to prevent starvation, is challenging some of the tactics used by the military to deal with prisoners on hunger strike.
In July, the Pentagon gave the US Congress a legally required 30-day notice that it intended to transfer Dhiab and five other Guantanamo prisoners — three other Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian — to Uruguay, where Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, a leftist former political prisoner, offered to accept them as a humanitarian gesture.
The other prisoners have kept a much lower profile at Guantanamo than Dhiab, so little is known about them. However, they are among the several dozen prisoners who cannot return to their homelands because they would face persecution or because their own countries are considered unstable.
However, the transfer to Uruguay, where one poll shows it is opposed by a majority, is not imminent.
Uruguayan presidential spokesman Diego Canepa announced last week that aspects of the transfer were still being finalized and that it would be unlikely within the next two to three months.
That would put it past Uruguay’s Oct. 26 presidential and legislative elections and perhaps even a possible Nov. 30 runoff.
The US government says the transfer of Dhiab and others is still going to happen.
“We are very appreciative of Uruguay’s decision to resettle these individuals,” said Ian Moss, adviser to the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure. “It truly is a significant humanitarian gesture.”
Dhiab was captured in Pakistan in April 2002 and turned over to US authorities, who detained him at Guantanamo along with other men suspected of ties to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
His lawyers say Dhiab was a honey salesman in his native Syria and that he was in Pakistan to get medical treatment.
In any case, he was never charged with a crime and in 2009 deemed to pose no threat and cleared for release. The US cannot send him back to war-torn Syria.
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