"They forced me out of Guantánamo the same way they took me there," Mansoor Adayfi tells Folha. "Blindfolded, hooded, and handcuffed, I was thrown into Serbia." Born in a small village in the mountains of Yemen, he was captured by the United States in 2002 in Afghanistan, when he was 18, and transferred to the military base in Cuba shortly after. He was imprisoned for 14 years without ever being charged with a crime. In 2016, he was transferred to Belgrade, where he still lives today.
It's not easy to talk to a former Guantánamo detainee. Lawyers said their former clients who were released prefer to lead discreet lives—"honestly, boring," one of them defined. Mansoor is one of the exceptions to the rule and has taken on a kind of spokesperson role. Since his release, he has published a book, "Don't Forget Us Here," about his life in prison; a second one is in production. He recorded a podcast aired by the BBC. He received a grant from the Sundance Institute to develop an audiovisual project. In parallel, he works as a project coordinator for the Guantanamo project at Cage, an NGO established in 2003 in defense of prisoners in the context of the War on Terror.
"They throw you out on the street like garbage without any support." He himself claims to have suffered various abuses, such as beatings, electric shocks, and a mock execution. "They hooded me, I heard dogs barking loudly around me and people shouting in English 'don't resist.' They cut my clothes and dragged me into a truck, and then into a helicopter," he says about his capture.
"We weren't the only victims of Guantánamo. Many guards and prison staff were also. If they showed humanity and tried to cooperate with us, they suffered because we were after all the 'worst terrorist killers,'" he says. Still, his opinion about the U.S. is short and to the point. "I believe the American government is what Guantánamo is." "The country that preaches democracy, human rights, justice, equality. Nonsense. You can't have both, you can't. You can't have all this blah blah blah and Guantánamo."