Amnesty is lobbying the Government to accept a Guantánamo detainee for resettlement
IN FEBRUARY last year the man known to Guantánamo Bay guards as ISN 452 was told he had been cleared for release and was free to leave.
After being held for six years, Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov should have been elated. Instead, his predicament became even more complicated.
The Uzbek national is caught in limbo - free to leave Guantánamo, but unable to return to his homeland due to the risk of torture or other ill-treatment.
Human rights groups including Amnesty International are lobbying the Government to accept Mr Jabbarov for resettlement in Ireland.
So who is this man, also known as Abu Bakir Jamaludinovich, and how did he end up in a cell in Guantánamo Bay?
In May this year, Mr Jabbarov's Boston-based lawyer Michael Mone told a Congressional sub-committee that his client is "more Borat than he is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed", the latter a reference to the man accused of masterminding the September 11th attacks.
Mr Jabbarov's story, Mr Mone explained, was a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In late 2001, the then 23-year-old farmer, his pregnant wife, infant son and elderly mother were living with other Uzbek refugees in northern Afghanistan, as fighting raged between the Taliban and the Afghan Northern Alliance.
Mr Mone points out that his client was not captured on the battlefield as an armed enemy combatant, but was instead delivered to US forces at Bagram airbase by Northern Alliance soldiers who promised to give him a ride after he met them at a roadside teahouse. Mr Mone believes he was handed over for a bounty.
After Bagram, Mr Jabbarov was taken to a prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, and then transferred to Guantánamo in the summer of 2002. During his first months there, an FBI agent told him: "You are a free man, you are not a problem," and urged him to be patient while arrangements were made for his release. It would be another five years before he was cleared.
An encounter with Uzbek interrogators at Guantánamo made Mr Jabbarov even more fearful of what may be in store if he returns to Uzbekistan, a country with a notoriously poor record on human rights.
The Uzbeks told him he would be sent to prison, and implied he might be tortured to force him to confess to various charges.
Mr Mone believes Mr Jabbarov fits the profile of someone who would face persecution, arrest, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Uzbek regime.
"While Oybek would like to practise Islam freely, even the most basic acts of wearing a prayer cap, keeping a beard and going to mosque in the Ferghana Valley are viewed with grave suspicion by the Uzbek security services," Mr Mone writes in a file presented to government officials here and seen by The Irish Times. "Even worse, the stigma attached to his prolonged detention in Guantánamo will follow him home, with dire consequences."
Before he was cleared for release, Mr Jabbarov had been accused by the US government of being a member of the outlawed Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), as well as supporting al-Qaeda and fighting for the Taliban, all of which he denies, and for which Mr Mone says no credible evidence has been put forward. But, the lawyer notes, these accusations are "tantamount to a death sentence" if his client should ever return to Uzbekistan.
"Having been branded by the United States as an alleged member of an outlaw extremist group that is especially loathed by the Uzbek government, Oybek should expect to face the harshest legal, even extrajudicial treatment if he is ever returned to his country," Mr Mone writes.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Mr Mone described Mr Jabbarov as a "great fit" for Ireland. "He has told me over and over again that he wants to be settled in a country that is free, safe and democratic . . . My client has not been radicalised and he is not angry about what happened."
In a letter contained in the file handed to the Irish Government, Mr Jabbarov, who learned English during his detention, writes of his hopes to study agriculture and return again to farming.
"It's a big mistake that I am here," he writes. "I did nothing wrong and I am innocent. But I do not blame the American people for their government's mistake . . . I have no hate in my heart. My only wish is to get out of here and to be with my family, to see my two sons, and to find a peaceful life."