The new year has brought a flurry of commentary and news about Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp – the infamous U.S.-run prison facility in Cuba that once held some 800 detainees suspected of having committed terrorism-related offenses against U.S. interests.
In recent weeks both the U.S. administration and the countries of some of the men still incarcerated there have put out statements involving the potential fate of the camp and its inmates, leading to a muddled situation that appears far from resolved.
Just 15 men remain at the camp, some of whom have never been charged with a crime, and some of whom have been charged but have yet to go to trial, including Indonesian national Encep Nurjaman, who is also known as Hambali.
Hambali, now 60, was charged in 2021 with masterminding the devastating 2002 Bali bombing in Indonesia, which killed 202 people and injured a further 200, although his case has been plagued with legal issues from the beginning.
Hambali was first arrested in 2003 in Thailand and handed over to the U.S. authorities who transported him to CIA black sites where he was tortured, and then moved him to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. He has remained in custody there ever since.
The arrest in Thailand has always been one of the main stumbling blocks in the case, with confusion over Hambali’s official nationality at the time.
Having lived for years in Malaysia before his arrest, some said that Hambali had officially become a Malaysian national, while others claimed that, as he was born in Indonesia to an Indonesian family, he retained Indonesian nationality. Others claimed that he had a fake passport when he was arrested.
In 2016, the Indonesian government doubled down on this statement, with then-coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, Luhut Pandjaitan, seeking to distance the country from the case. He suggested that Hambali had been traveling on a Spanish passport when he was arrested in Thailand and that there had been no discussions with the U.S. authorities to return him to Indonesia.
“Don’t add any more problems to this country,” he said at the time.
Now, Indonesia appears to have changed course, with Yusril Ihza Mahendra, the coordinating minister for law, human rights, immigration, and correctional institutions, stating two weeks ago that Hambali is in fact an Indonesian national after all.
“No matter what, Hambali is an Indonesian citizen. No matter how wrong he is […] we must care for him,” he told the media.
“The Indonesian government is aware of the sensitivity of this matter and will act carefully.”
However, this newfound support for Hambali could be a case of too little too late from the Indonesian authorities, now that President Donald Trump is back in power and appears to be reversing the U.S. policy of recent years to try and close Guantanamo.
Closing the camp, which costs the U.S. some $13 million per year per detainee, was one of President Barack Obama’s pledges when he took office, although he never achieved it.
President Biden also ordered the release of a flurry of prisoners in a last-ditch attempt to empty the facility in the weeks before he left office.
This week, however, Trump signed an executive order to keep the facility in operation and expand it, to include a specialist center that would “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
This is not much of a surprise as, as far back as 2016, Trump pledged to keep Guantanamo open and fill it with “some bad dudes” without giving specifics – although the executive order now appears to suggest that “bad dudes” means migrants.
While the new immigration facility designed to hold 30,000 people at Guantanamo will be different from the section that incarcerates and deals with Hambali and the other 14 detainees, this development would appear to come at an inopportune moment for the Indonesian authorities, who are finally campaigning for Hambali’s release.
There is also the issue of his case at Guantanamo, which is still in the pre-trial phase, with ongoing questions about the legal mechanism to return Hambali to Indonesia and what would happen if this indeed came to fruition.
For his part, Mahendra noted, correctly, that the statute of limitations on the Bali bombing has now expired, meaning that the Indonesian authorities would be legally unable to charge him if he returned – even if they had the evidence to do so after 23 years.
This seems unlikely to appeal to Trump who, when signing the recent executive order to expand Guantanamo, said that foreign countries couldn’t be trusted with their own nationals.
“Some of them [migrants] are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” he said. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”
Over the past few months, there appeared to be a glimmer of hope that the facility would finally be shuttered and the detainees released, but the new Trump executive order could now breathe new life into the prison camp that has blighted the U.S.’ human rights record for decades and left the men incarcerated there with no legal recourse.
After 18 years incarcerated at Guantanamo, is there any hope left for Hambali?