Hedi Hammamy

Hedi was born in Tunisia on January 18th, 1969. He completed secondary school in Tunisia; then, like many Tunisian men, he decided to move to Italy in search of better economic opportunity.

Hedi travelled legally to Italy in 1987, settling in Bologna where he worked as a hotel porter, and later in a restaurant. In 2000, he moved to Pakistan, where he married the daughter of another Tunisian he met while applying for asylum.

They had a daughter, Marwa. From then until his capture, Hedi lived and worked side by side with his father in law and family. But his newfound family life was not to last for long. Before his daughter was old enough to speak, he was in jail on the other side of the world.

One evening, Hedi went with a Pakistani friend to look at a house to rent. He never returned home. Pakistani police, keen to profit from the lucrative bounties being paid by US forces for “foreign fighters” from the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, had arrested him. He was one of many innocent men sold into US custody.

Hedi’s father-in-law had been travelling with his wife to arrange medical treatment in Islamabad for one of his daughters when he received word that Hedi had been seized. His father in law knew what his return would mean—seizure and disappearance—but he decided that he could not in good conscience leave his daughters at the mercy of the ISI. He decided to return, and was promptly arrested.

With the men gone, the Pakistani military ransacked the family's house. They took their papers, the children’s notebooks, their cassettes, the radio, and all of their money and jewellery. The family was easy prey for the Pakistani soldiers, who occupied the family home for over a month after Hedi, and his father in law, were taken.

Meanwhile, the US military had shipped Hedi to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. There, he was beaten so badly by two soldiers that he has severe pains in his back to this day. On August 5, 2002, the military put him on a plane to Guantánamo Bay.

Hedi has spent years in Camp V, one of Guantánamo’s isolation wings. He has said life in his cell there is “like a grave”. Feelings of hopelessness plague him, as do constant worries about his wife and daughter in Tunisia.

Like most of the other Tunisians in Guantánamo, Hedi has been cleared for release by the US military. With likely torture and abuse awaiting him in Tunisia, however, leaving Guantánamo for Tunis is hardly an option, even if it means never seeing his family again.

Hedi knows with greater clarity than most what awaits him in Tunisia: severe abuse, a military trial on the basis of coerced confessions, and abusive imprisonment in isolation. As if to confirm his concerns, Hedi's father-in-law was sent back to Tunisia from Guantánamo – after being cleared by US authorities – only to be beaten, deprived of sleep, denied food and water and threatened that if he did not (falsely) confess, his wife and daughters (one of whom is Hedi’s wife) would be raped before his eyes.

Though Hedi dreams of being reunited with his wife and child one day, return to Tunisia is a fate too dangerous to contemplate. And so he waits in Camp V, hoping that somewherek, someone will offer him a safe haven.