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FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE -- AN INNOCENT MAN IN GUANTANAMO |
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Chapter 6: BREMEN, HEMELINGEN I WAS BORN IN 1982 IN THE MATERNITY WARD OF A HOSPITAL in Bremen. My family rented a top-floor apartment in the working-class district of Hemelingen. When I was twelve, my father bought a row house on a small side street. There were lots of jobs in the area. There was a large meat-packing factory, a soft-drink plant, the Bremen public utilities company, and a company that makes silverware called Wilkens & Sons. The district was a city unto itself, made of red-brick buildings with towers and gables. There were countless derelict warehouses and factory buildings along the Weser River, which separated Hemelingen from the rest of Bremen. My father worked for Mercedes, as did most of the Turkish men in the area. He did the night shift as a metalworker. It was a hard job. He'd been on the assembly line since the mid-1970s, working the whole night through. The assembly line never stopped-he didn't even have time to scratch his head. For that reason, it was always quiet in my house. We always had to whisper so we wouldn't wake up my father. We only spoke to each other in normal voices after 9 PM, when he would drive off to the factory in his Mercedes. I also worked for Mercedes during some of ,my vacations-in the carpenter's workshop and in the cleaning department. Mercedes was a world all its own. The factory halls were so big that everyone used bicycles or golf carts to get around. They had their own carpentry shop, cleaning service, and electricians' division-even their own fire department. Almost all of the employees lived in Hemelingen. Our district, with its fruit-and-vegetable merchants, kebab shops, and tea salons, began directly behind the Sebaldsbriick train station. From miles away you could tell, by the jungle of satellite dishes on the roofs and next to the apartment windows, that the district was almost entirely Turkish. The sky above the Weser was often cloudy from the fumes of the utilities company. There was the Solen kebab stand, the Sultan Travel Agency, the Foreign Workers' Association and the bridge over the train tracks. As a small boy, whenever I would cross the bridge with my father, he would lift me over the railing and hold me on the narrow concrete strip at the edge of the abyss, trying to scare me. "You're going to fall," he'd joke, but he always held me tight in his grasp. There was the Tokcan Market and the bakery where my mother would send me in the afternoon to fetch bread and some baklava. And then the Aladin Discotheque, which was famous for its laser show, one of the biggest discos in Germany. A lot of my friends worked there, including my uncle Ekram who was a bouncer. I went to school in Glockenstrasse, or "Bell Street," after which the school was named. My friend Orhan lived right around the corner. Back then I also had a Chinese friend whose parents ran the Chinese restaurant at the end of our street. We played together. He'd speak Chinese and I'd speak Turkish, but as kids we didn't need a common language to understand one another. Sometimes his parents would invite me over for dinner and I found it very exotic. I first learned German in kindergarten- almost all of the pupils came from Turkish families. I had a crush on one of the girls. Often I'd convince her to play "family" with me. She was the mother, and I was the father. But after kindergarten, she went back to Turkey with her parents. Every afternoon, either with Orhan or on my own, I'd ride my bike to the industrial part of town. I'd pedal under the autobahn overpass, past the vacant fields with the abandoned trailers and into the industrial area. That was my favorite spot to play. You could climb on the cranes and on the heaps of sand and gravel. I used to slide down them on my belly like we used to do in Dede's hazelnut grove in Kusca. There were old barges on the sides of the Weser, loaded up with sand, gravel, and giant crates. Fishermen stood in the shallow, marshy water. We kids played everywhere, and sometimes they would even let us hop onto the barges. Abandoned trailers were parked alongside uneven paths full of potholes. We cleaned them up and made them look nice again. They were our homes. That's where we played. I went everywhere by bike. I knew every corner, every abandoned ship, and every three-foot-high roll of cable. There was a junkyard full of metal ship containers and broken furnaces. They were as big as caves. I fooled around between the train tracks. It smelled of either diesel fuel or coffee, depending on whether the wind was blowing in from the wharves or from the coffee factory where they roasted the imported beans. Below the factory was the spot where I used to go swimming. The ground around the electrical house in front of the wharf was full of rabbit droppings. There, on the slope leading down to the lake, were blackberry bushes surrounded by chain-link fences. I climbed over them, hid in the bushes and ate blackberries. In the evening, the rabbits came out to play. The place got really romantic in the evenings. The factories closed their gates, but the yellow lights stayed on and were reflected in the water. During the day, the machines growled, there was noise everywhere from behind the fences, and thick clouds of steam and smoke rose from the chimneys-but at night, everything was peaceful and quiet. I was alone with the rabbits and the yellow lights. Sometimes Uncle Ekram came with me to the Weser. He was my mother's younger brother, and I adored him. Uncle Ekram was a funny guy and an adventurer. He taught me how to ride a bike when I was little. Later, we'd go fishing together along the Weser. He'd been in prison once in Cologne. He was very strong. He could pick me up with one hand and hold me over his head, even when I was twelve. *** I never found it a disadvantage to be a foreigner. As a kid, it was great to be able to speak two languages. I could have both Turkish and German friends. With my Turkish friends, I could play along the banks of the Weser until it got dark. The German kids had to be home earlier, and many weren't allowed to go to the industrial part of town. They were only allowed to play in their yards or inside their homes. I didn't like that. In the summer, Turkish families spend almost all their time outside. We were different. We Turkish boys used to play fight. It was completely normal to punch someone. German kids weren't used to it. They immediately took it seriously and started crying or got insulted. Our families and traditions were also very different. We had scores of uncles, aunts, siblings, and cousins. We didn't celebrate Christmas and Easter. We celebrated Eid ul-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice after the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and Eid ul-Fitr, the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, when we would gorge ourselves on sweets. For the Festival of Sacrifice, I would accompany my father to the butcher, and we would select a lamb. We blindfolded the animal. "Bismillah," my father would say. In the name of Allah. Our animals had to be killed by halal slaughtering. As its blood drains out, the animal doesn't feel any pain. The Prophet Mohammed ordered that the knives we use be as sharp as possible. A portion of the meat is supposed to be given to needier people, but most families would just send money to Turkey. After grade school, I went to the Parseval High School in the Sebaldsbriick district. At the age of eight, I started doing judo. But soon I wanted more. I was fascinated with martial arts, Bruce Lee, and kung fu. Lots of Turkish kids go to karate and kickboxing schools as well as to regular fitness studios. It's an important part of our culture in Germany. All of our uncles and older brothers worked out. Uncle Ekram showed me how to do one-arm push-ups. He told me he'd give me ten Marks if I learned how to do them. I practiced until I could do no more. A friend of mine even became a European Champion in kickboxing. He was a year older than me, and we were all proud, my friends and I, that he coached us. For a while I joined a boxing club. I was good, but my thoughts were always elsewhere. After working out, we'd hang out with the girls in the Hemelingen Youth Club. All I thought about back then was which disco had the best-looking girls. With German girls, being a foreigner wasn't a disadvantage. I also had Turkish girlfriends, but problems would quickly arise with them. They weren't allowed to have boyfriends -- let alone have sex -- before they were married. For me, however, what was written in the . Koran was one thing, and what I thought was right was another. Boxing ceased to interest me by the time I was sixteen. Then I discovered bodybuilding. I already had barbells at home. I'd work out before breakfast, and in the afternoon I'd go to the gym. At the age of seventeen, I could press over three hundred pounds-almost twice my own weight. If someone had encouraged me back then, I could have gone places with my weightlifting. But I wasn't interested. I wanted to build up my triceps and shoulders. I wanted to look good, have big muscles, and be strong. I had a five o'clock shadow and had put on a lot of bulk. I was very strong for someone my age. Once, at the age of fourteen, I had to appear in court because I had beaten up someone who was over thirty. Things happen. One day we went go-cart racing. Most of my buddies were already sixteen or seventeen. Some of us were racing while the others watched. We got a bit wild on the track and rammed each other a couple of times. We just wanted to have fun. We hadn't broken anything or done any damage. Beside the track, there was a glass wall and a ticket counter. After our turn was over, the other members of our group wanted to drive and tried to buy tickets. The woman behind the counter said she wouldn't sell them any tickets because the boss said we hadn't behaved. We promised to be good. The lady smiled and gave us the tickets. But there was another man at the counter. He was well over six feet tall. He took off his glasses, rolled up his sleeves, and attacked my friends. He was very strong. He took two of them simultaneously and smashed their heads against the glass wall. They defended themselves, but they didn't stand a chance. The rest of us joined in and tried to wrestle the man to the ground. Even my friend, the European Champion, got in on the action. But the man managed to get everyone in a headlock or throw them to one side. So I took a barstool and hit him in the back. He turned around and the second time I caught him in the face. In court, they said I broke his chin. News of that fight soon got around Hemelingen. Two years later, when I joined the fitness studio, the adult members still remembered it. Soon thereafter, I had a number of jobs. I worked in Bremen and the surrounding area as a bodyguard and a bouncer at concerts, parties, and dance clubs. I was earning good money for a sixteen-year-old. But it was risky. My job was to prevent fights. You have to be able to keep strong people apart and, if necessary, hustle them outside. Since I also worked as a bouncer in a Turkish disco, I had to be prepared for people pulling knives and other weapons. I began to ask myself whether I wanted to risk my life for a couple hundred Marks. But everything went well and I never had any problems. I wore designer clothes. Jackets by Hugo Boss and designer shoes you could buy cheaply in our district. We were always buying and selling something. Jackets, PlayStations, cell phones; we always wanted to have the latest models. I could afford this because I earned a lot of money for my age. I tried to look good. Uncle Ekram was proud of me. It was around this time that I met Selcuk. We met through Apollo, my Rottweiler. Selcuk lived on our street with his German girlfriend. I was taking the dog for a walk one evening when Selcuk called down to me from his balcony. He wanted to know what to look out for when you get a dog. I had read a lot about being a good dog owner. Then he asked me where I worked out. Selcuk was eight years older than me, and I felt proud when he suggested we go to the gym together. When I met him several days later, he was carrying a puppy under his arm, a Kangal dog. We were like two peas in a pod. We lived on the same street, we did the same sport, we took our dogs for walks together along the Weser, and we went to the same disco. Selcuk was as religious as I was in those days, which is to say not very religious. Eventually, we found our way to the Muslim faith at roughly the same time. I was eighteen and had begun my apprenticeship as a shipbuilder. It was fall 2000, around Ramadan. I hadn't seen Selcuk for two weeks. I fasted during the daytime like all the other Muslims and hadn't shaved for a while. Selcuk rang my doorbell. When he saw me, he laughed. "What happened to you?" he asked. "Are you going on the hajj to Mecca?" He had a good laugh at my expense. I didn't know what he was talking about. "You look like a pilgrim." We both laughed at that, and he left. But Selcuk's remarks had made me think. Wasn't it part of Islam and our heritage that men grew their beards? Surely, fasting wasn't all that connected us as Muslims. The Prophet Mohammed wore a beard. Was that really funny? I didn't shave for the rest of Ramadan. More and more Turks started asking me why I was growing a beard. They said I should shave it off. I told them I was a Muslim, and that growing a beard was part of our faith. I didn't really know much more than that. But once I had taken that first step toward Islam, I grew curious. What was our faith exactly? What was it about? I bought some books about Islam, but I didn't really understand them. I went to our mosque in Hemelingen, the Kuba Mosque. I'd gone there sometimes with my father on Fridays, but I didn't understand the Arabic prayers and rituals. That was how I began to get interested in religion. The trigger was Selcuk's joke about my beard. But at the same time, I had already begun to notice how my friends in Hemelingen were changing. Faruk and Ilias, for example. I had known Faruk since childhood. We had played together a lot along the Weser, sometimes getting into fights. His parents were divorced. After the divorce, his mother got together with a new man who didn't want Faruk around, and they sent him to live with his grandmother in Turkey. Two years later, he returned. He'd become a tough guy, someone who tried to solve every problem with violence. His mother threw him out of her apartment. He was sent first to a home and then to reform school. By the time we were both sixteen, he was in love with money. He stole things and often got caught. I felt sorry for him. I ran into him all the time in discos, but no one liked him any more. He had become a criminal and started taking drugs. Sometimes when I looked at him, I felt he was drowning in drugs-that's how absent he seemed. Ilias, too, was hooked. He had grown up with his mother in Turkey, while his father worked in Germany and was married to a German woman. At the age of twelve, he came to Bremen to live with his father, this woman, and their two children. But he didn't get along with his father. When he got into fights with his German half-siblings, his father always took their side. Ilias was also sent to a home. Those homes couldn't have been very good. Alot of people I knew who went there came out broken. When Ilias got out, he told me he knew people now who made a lot of easy money with drugs. I told him that that wouldn't get him anywhere. And I was right. He was thrown in jail, and when I saw him next, hanging around the train station, he was totally stoned. The police nabbed him and deported him to Turkey. I lost several friends this way. They became criminals and addicted to drugs, and then they were deported. It wasn't because we were foreigners. Allah creates all human beings so that they need love, regardless of whether they're tough or soft. If a person doesn't get any love, I thought, he becomes hateful and violent as he no longer has any feelings for other people. If you take a puppy away from its mother too soon, it will become a problem dog. Of course, there were cases of foreigners being treated badly in school or by the police, and that could easily get to be too much. Back in Bremen, I started to feel like a foreigner for the first time in my life. Once, when I had to go to a government office for foreign residents to take care of some simple formality, they made me wait outside in the cold for half a day, then they simply sent me home without an explanation. "Come back tomorrow," they said, showing no respect at all. If I had been German, they wouldn't have treated me that way. Things were easier for me at first because I wasn't as noticeably Turkish as other kids. As a child, I had blond hair and very light skin. And I had a good mother and father. Faruk and Ilias didn't have families any more. But didn't Allah create us to have families and love? Eventually, I gave up the life I had been leading. The people I knew, even if they had been friends, had started ripping each other off. All anyone was interested in anymore was money so that they could buy the latest stuff-cell phones, GameBoys, and laptops-and they didn't care where they got that money. As a bodyguard, it would have been no problem for me to start selling drugs. I had offers. But I couldn't. Someone would be taking the drugs, and that person would have a mother and a father who would worry about him. Islam, as far as I knew, forbids everything bad in our lives: drugs and alcohol, lying, stealing, and unfaithfulness. *** In the winter of 2000, I went to the Kuba Mosque a lot. On holidays, I went to the Abu Bakr Mosque near the main train station on my way home from trade school. It is named after the Prophet's father-in-law. Some Arab and black Muslims also prayed there. One day, a group of Muslims from Jama'at al-Tablighi appeared. They said they represented one of Islam's largest groups. There were five of them, two Turks and three German Muslims. After prayers, I started talking to them. German Muslims? I was both fascinated and ashamed. The' German Muslims knew a lot more about Islam than I did. I didn't even know the five prayers that we were supposed to say every day. From then on, for several months, I saw the tablighis almost every day in the mosque. One of them had visited the Mansura Center in Lahore. He talked about it a lot, and I asked him about the school. The tablighis, they explained, came from Pakistan. If you wanted to do the Hajj, they said, you had to go to Mecca; if you wanted to learn about Islam, you had to go to Lahore. I read about the tablighis on the Internet. One day, they said: Come with us! They wanted to show me what they did. They approached addicts and homeless people in the train station and other parts of the city and offered them help. We visited people who used to be criminals or addicts and who now, thanks to the tablighis, had jobs and families. It wasn't just Turks-there were Germans, too. The tablighis got people off the streets and helped them find work. I liked the way they practiced Islam. I decided that I was going to visit the center in Lahore before I got married that summer. I could have chosen an Islamic school in Turkey or Saudi Arabia. But neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia interested me. I had only heard good things about the Mansura Center, and I wouldn't need much money in Pakistan. I would learn the language, I thought, somehow. In the meantime, Selcuk had moved to the Sebaldsbriick district. He'd broken up with his German girlfriend and married a Turkish girl. He also wore a beard now. We met up sometimes on the weekends and prayed in the Kuba Mosque. Once again, we seemed to fit together. Selcuk also wanted to know more about Islam. He had gotten to know the tablighis and was going to the mosque even more often than me. I excitedly told him about the school in Pakistan. He listened, saying nothing. In the summer of 2001, before I went to Turkey, I had told him about my plans to get married, saying that I had probably found a wife. When I got back, I declared I was definitely going to Pakistan. "If I can work it out, I'll come with you," he said. Apparently, he wasn't in as much of a hurry as I was. "If you want to come with me," I said, "then let's go. I want to see this through now. I'm planning to bring my wife to Hemelingen in December. I have to be back by then." Selcuk hesitated. "Now or never," I said. "Otherwise I'm going alone." "You're right," said Selcuk. We agreed not to tell anyone about what we were planning. The one person we let in on our plans was Ali. I'd met Ali in the Abu Bakr Mosque. He was 35 back then and he also knew Selcuk. He was in the mosque every time we were there. I'd already told him before the summer that I was looking for a multesima to marry. Ali had told me everything I needed to know about the ceremony. When I returned from Turkey, he was very happy that I had married Fatima. So I told him about the I and our travel plans. At first Ali said nothing. But a couple days later, he took me aside. "If I can give you some advice, don't go." He repeated that a number of times. "I'm not trying to tell you two what to do, but I'd advise against it." I told him that I liked traveling and didn't see any danger, and he shrugged. "I hope you know what you're doing." *** On September 11, I was at shipbuilding school when the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington took place. On my way home, I met a friend who said that a plane had crashed in the United States. That's not so unusual, I said. Why are you telling me this? When I got home, my mother called me into the living room. Come quick, she said. There's something earth-shattering in the United States. Then I saw the two towers collapsing. As I watched the images being repeated, I knew that this was not an accident. I felt sorry for the people who had been in the buildings. My mother had woken my father up, even though it was still afternoon. I sat in front of the TV for a long time, as if under a spell. A few days later it was reported that the attack had been carried out by a group led by a terrorist named Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan. I didn't think there would be a war with Afghanistan, and my father agreed. They only wanted to capture Osama bin Laden and his cronies. I heard about U.S. preparations for war on the news. But I thought that they would only go into the mountainous region where the terrorists were hiding. Or that the Afghans would give him up. It would work itself out somehow. I couldn't imagine there was going to be a war. And if that happened, it would be a war between Afghanistan and the United States. I would be in Pakistan. What did Pakistan have to do with Afghanistan? It was a different country. I didn't see why I should change my plans. For Friday prayers, I went to a Turkish mosque. The imam spoke about the attacks. He said that it should never be allowed to happen again. Selcuk and I called the Pakistani consulate in Berlin and asked about the entry requirements. We got an appointment to apply for visas and we drove to Berlin. The consulate took our passports and mailed them back to us two weeks later with our visas. I didn't tell my parents about our plans. They would have gotten upset and tried to keep me from going. We're not allowed to contradict our parents-it's part of our faith that we should show them respect; it's laid out explicitly in the Koran. I couldn't tell my mother, she wouldn't have let me go. So I decided to call her from the airport. I withdrew money from the bank and Selcuk and I went to buy our plane tickets. The only travel agency we knew was located in a shopping center my parents also went to. My mother sometimes ran into her friends there. Some of our relatives also went to the mall to drink coffee and go shopping. If anyone had seen me coming in or out of the travel agency, they would have asked questions. I gave Selcuk 1,100 Marks for my ticket and waited in a Turkish tea salon several streets away. I called Ali, and he tried to talk us out of our trip. But I already had my return ticket in my pocket and wasn't willing to change my plans. Several days before I left, I sold my cell phone. It was a Nokia phone with a pre-paid German card that wouldn't have worked anyway in Pakistan. We always sold our old cell phones, sometimes once everyone or two months, so that we could always have the latest model. What's more, 1 needed the money, After I returned, I thought, I'd get a new cell phone. Selcuk and I agreed to leave at night. The closer our day of departure came, the more excited I got. I had a bad conscience because of my parents. I would have liked to say good-bye to them, but that was impossible. Then it occurred to me how I could at least give my mother a hug. I knew my parents and my brother Ali were visiting a family in Sebaldsbruck, but they were sure to come home before midnight. *** "Ana, my back aches." "It's late. I'll give you a massage in the morning." "Salam alaikum," I said. "Aaikum salam," she said. *** We checked our bags at the ticket counter, received our boarding passes, and went to the passport control with our visas. The customs officer scanned my passport and motioned for me to go through. But he didn't let Selcuk pass. After he'd entered Selcuk's details into his computer, he said: "You're not allowed to leave the country. There's a fine you haven't paid." "What kind of fine?" "For bodily injury," said the customs officer. "If you want to leave Germany, you have to pay the fine." I was already in the waiting area. I heard Selcuk try to clear up the matter with the customs officer. Selcuk said he wanted to call a lawyer. "That's fine," said the customs officer. "Come this way." Another officer asked me if I wanted to take the plane or not. The bus to the aircraft was waiting for us-all the other passengers were checked in. Our names were called via loudspeaker. We were to proceed immediately to the boarding gate. There was no way Selcuk would make it. Everything happened so quickly. "I'll call my brother," Selcuk said. "He'll pay the fine for me, if there's no other choice." "Okay." "I'll take the next plane," Selcuk said. "We'll meet at Karachi airport. Wait for me there." "Okay," I said. "I'll wait for you." Selcuk followed the customs officer, and I went to the bus. I never saw Selcuk again.
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