From Guantánamo to Albania

'An unusual choice of destination' was the verdict of the saleswoman in Waterstones where I bought my Albania travel guide.

It is an improbable destination too for the three men who were released there from the prison in Guantánamo Bay on 24 February. An Egyptian, a Libyan and a Tunisian – with no previous ties to Albania – it is perhaps at first glance not obvious why this isolated, post-communist country came to step in to help end their eight years of illegal imprisonment.

The answers are both emotional and diplomatic. Albanian–American relations stretch back to the nineteenth century when a group of Albanian émigrés in Boston began to organise their nationalist movement. They survived Enver Hoxha’s brand of extreme Stalinism and flourished in the post-Communist era. 

Successive Albanian governments have been somewhat indiscriminate fans of the Clinton, Bush and now the Obama Administrations. Around the capital’s main thoroughfare, Skanderbeg Square, posters of Bill Clinton in Kosovo (with its ethnically Albanian majority population) vie with the jaunty façade of Communist-era National Museum: a mosaic of skipping labourers - national heroes.

It is in this new world that Sherif El Meshad, Saleh Sassi (pictured) and Abdul Ra’ouf Al Qusin are hoping to rebuild their lives. They are nominally free but remain pawns in this diplomatic game. After eight years of abuse at the hands of their American guards, in Albania the Americans are still pulling the strings. Confined to a refugee centre in the outskirts of Tirana, both their rights and privileges – including permission to leave the centre and access to medical care - seem to materialise or disappear at the whim of recalcitrant officials.

Eastern European countries have played a key and fascinating role in the War on Terror and its legacy. Poland, Lithuania and Romania hosted secret CIA-run prisons. After doing the dirty work, they and their neighbours are being asked to clean it up. Albania, Slovakia, Hungary and most recently Georgia have already welcomed some of the approximately remaining 40 prisoners still in Guantanamo who have no safe country to return to. There have been public reports that Bulgaria and Latvia will also step forward to help their American allies close Guantanamo.

The journey to recovery for these men after such long and complex trauma is particularly challenging in this context. These states often have poorly developed civil society (important for men who have been so grossly abused at the hands of government) and state structures weighed down by cumbersome bureaucracy. 

Our attempts to visit our clients in Albania were met with the stubborn response, “Protocol, protocol”. Yet the substance of this protocol – which we would have been happy to follow - was never explained. In fact, they seemed rather keen to get rid of us. 

 As one official remarked as we left, “Goodbye. Goodbye Forever!”