Five years on from his release from the controversial US detention camp, Hackney resident Tarek Dergoul speaks to Oliver Shah about coming to terms with his traumatic experiences and struggling for recognition from the state.
In a quiet street behind Whitechapel tube station, the Maedah Grill serves up spicy lamb kebabs and deep fried squid.
Like any other Turkish restaurant in London it buzzes with the chatter of city types, cash-strapped students and hungry locals. Once every six months, though, it hosts a more extraordinary party.
The dozen or so men who meet on these nights come from as far away as Birmingham and Manchester to embrace each other with warm cries of “salam e lekum”. They laugh and exchange gossip before ravenously scanning the menus and ordering generous portions of shish kebab and steak.
To an outsider they look like brothers happily arguing, but their bond is as unique as it is terrible. They are the Britons who were held without charge in Guantánamo Bay naval base during the Bush administration’s war on terror. According to their version of events, they have seen each other beaten by US guards, heard each other scream, and traded fruit through the barbed wire of Camp X-Ray.
Among them is Tarek Dergoul, a 31-year-old from Hackney. He was released from Cuba in 2004 after almost three years of imprisonment, during which time he alleges he was mistreated and tortured. Beneath the jollity of every reunion, Tarek says there is a starker reality. Meeting up with his fellow detainees is the only chance he gets to truly relax. “It’s still hard for me to communicate with people who weren’t there,” he begins. “I feel paranoid, like people are out to get me. I feel more comfortable with the guys that were there with me – I feel at ease and I’m OK. If I’m with other people I start to feel they don’t understand me.”
Tarek’s struggle to settle back into life in the East End has been a long one. He came home to his terraced house five years ago, fighting his way through the gathered media scrum and fending off the attentions of publicist Max Clifford. He sat down on the family sofa and realised he didn’t know where to begin.
“All my brother said to me was that when I was looking at him, it was as if I was looking through him,” Tarek says. “I had this weird look in my eyes, looking straight at him as if he wasn’t in front of me. I had so much in my head, there was so much evil to explain. Who was I going to tell it to? Who was the right person to speak to? All these things were rushing through my head.”
Having lost most of his left arm in a bomb blast in Afghanistan shortly before he was captured, Tarek was unable to work. But he says he was refused benefits and had to wage a three year war to reclaim his passport, register for income support and get the housing benefits he needed. He has only recently won the full range of financial support the state offers to vulnerable people in his position.
“I’ve worked all my life,” he protests. “I’ve worked three jobs in one day before. When I left school my brother’s business was sign making, doing billboards for windows. I did that for seven years.
“Then I worked as a rubbish cleaner, as a mini cab driver, as a cleaner, as a double-glazing salesman – I still remember the pitch to this day – and then as a carer for old people in their homes, before I left for Pakistan.”
A note of rising anger creeps into his voice. “Sorting out my benefits was just a nightmare. I’m not able to work because I’m an amputee and I’m not in the mental state to mix with people.
“The Government was saying ‘no, no, no’ to everything and I had to appeal every time. As if I wasn’t disabled, as if I hadn’t spent time in prison, as if I was a nobody. It took about three years to get the things I was supposed to get in six months.”
Tarek says his eventual victory in securing income support and housing benefits would have been impossible without the help of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a group set up in 2005 to aid victims of human rights violations.
A spokesman for the Helen Bamber Foundation says hardening public attitudes and arbitrary governmental systems mean people like Tarek are often met with “indifference or outright hostility” when they try to claim state support.
“As a society we are becoming increasingly wary of outsiders,” he adds. “We shy away from their suffering.”
Other former Guantánamo inmates put it more bluntly. Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, two young men from the Midlands town of Tipton who were held in Cuba at the same time as Tarek, blame the Government directly for their inability to begin rebuilding their lives.
“The Government has never said we are innocent, so we can never move on,” says Ruhal. “It makes you feel pointless, like a waste of space.”
Tarek is resigned to the fact he will never earn a decent living again, and he admits he missed his chance to make money from tabloid interviews when he was first released (“I’m not eloquent at all in my words, so I wouldn’t have known how to act,” he shrugs).
And although he becomes roused when he talks about some of the treatment he experienced at the hands of the US military police in Guantánamo – he says they spat in his food and once forcibly shaved a crucifix into his hair – he appears to have reached a state of acceptance about his ordeal in Cuba and his difficult return to UK life.
“I wish I could turn back time sometimes, but we as Muslims believe that our life was written, everything was written, 50,000 years before the earth and heavens were created,” he says.
“Whether you’ll be rich or poor, happy or sad, everything that’s going to happen in your life was determined. It’s what you make of it.
“Things are going to happen but you shouldn’t sit there regretting it, because then the devil starts whispering.”
Cageprisoners, the charity set up to support the families of Guantánamo prisoners, is now in the process of filming a new documentary featuring fresh interviews with all 13 Britons held and released without charge. The project was Tarek’s brainchild, and he is currently focusing his energy on completing it.
“It’s taking time because we haven’t got the funding,” he says. “We’re trying to interview as many guys as possible. It’s going to be the first time it’s been done. It’s an idea I had two years ago, but it took ages to get started because finding a cameraman who doesn’t charge except for costs is hard.”
According to Dr Abigail Seltzer, consultant psychiatrist at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, being able to face a trauma experience and use it to creative ends is one of the key things that help victims recover.
“Every individual will cope in a slightly different way [when they return to normal society],” she says. “People who can find meaning in what they’ve been through and who can find positive coping strategies, whether it be through getting involved in campaigning or speaking out, find it reparative.”
Or, as Tarek succinctly explains: “I shouldn’t dwell on it. I’m not going to grow another arm. If you’re a Muslim you have faith, and that’s not something you do – sit there thinking about it.”
The number of prisoners still held in Guantánamo Bay fell from 245 to 244 in February when Binyam Mohamed, the Ethiopian-born asylum seeker, returned to the UK.
Mohamed will be the thirteenth person at the table when the British detainees meet at the Maedah Grill in a few months’ time to celebrate his freedom. Tarek says he will welcome the homecoming man like a brother, and hopes Mohamed will tell his story for the Cageprisoners documentary.
Tarek describes the conflicting emotions he feels when he thinks of the people who inflicted pain on him, Mohamed and hundreds of Muslim men around the world.
“If I saw one of the guards walking past me in the street now, I’d still probably punch him in the face,” he admits. “But if he apologised and became a Muslim, that’s it, there’s nothing between us.
“Even if Bush apologised, I would invite him to my house and give him a hug. Bush – who’s killed millions of Muslims, who said it’s a crusade, who’s an evangelist.
“If he apologised I’d invite him to my house and help him in whatever way I can.”
More from Oliver Shah on interviewing Tarek Dergoul on the Hackney Postcast.
Image courtesy of publik15.
wow, it is really sad that people actually think like boris. i feel for Tarek and I can only hope that Obama will help to abolish atrocities like his.
load of fucking bullshit, send the scrounging bastard back to pakistan, where he can be with his muslim brothers, the worthless piece of shite.
wow…..this is really powerful