'Bremen Taliban' or Victim of Circumstance?

BREMEN, GERMANY -- Impersonal white post cards from Guantanamo Bay and a short letter are the only contact Rabiye Kurnaz has had with her son since he left Bremen last October on a spiritual journey to Pakistan, where he wanted to "see the Koran."

Within two months, Murat Kurnaz, 20, was turned over to U.S. soldiers near the airport in Karachi. The Americans accused Kurnaz of fighting for the Taliban and shipped him off along with the third batch of prisoners to Camp X-Ray on the southern tip of Cuba, German investigators say.

There, he and the roughly 600 other prisoners await an uncertain fate, sealed off from personal contact with their families and lawyers and living under conditions that have been criticized by human rights organizations. For Kurnaz’s family, the uncertainty is especially acute: Kurnaz, though born and raised in Germany, is a Turkish citizen and holds only resident alien status in his native country.

That detail, a holdover from old German citizenship laws that were replaced four years ago, has left Kurnaz (photo) in diplomatic limbo, giving the German government little lobbying power over Murat’s fate. Kurnaz's problems are compounded by the fact that the Turkish government has shown little interest in pressuring U.S. officials to clarify his status, said family lawyer Bernhard Docke.

Though many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay are suspected guerilla fighters, German investigators are now expressing doubt that Kurnaz ever made it to that level. In effect, they say, Kurnaz was more of a Taliban wannabe than warrior. That leaves Kurnaz’s family wondering what sort of justice the United States is planning for their son.

"John Walker was captured in the middle of the Afghanistan war," said Rabiye Kurnaz, referring to the "American Taliban," from California captured alongside Taliban forces last winter. "What did the Americans do with him? They put him before a judge. What did they do with Murat? They just stuck him in jail. I don’t see any human rights here, do you?"

The fate of European prisoners at Camp-X Ray remains one of many sticking points in transatlantic relations one year after the terrorist attacks sparked the United States’ war on terrorism.

The U.S. government’s refusal to classify the detainees as prisoners of war has enabled it to deny suspects like Kurnaz the rights guaranteed them by the Geneva Convention. With security heightened in the wake of Sept. 11 and the war against the Taliban and al Qaida, the U.S. has refused to release information about the detainees or what charges it intends to bring against them.

The sheer lack of information makes it extraordinarily difficult to measure the suspicions surrounding Kurnaz and other Guantanamo detainees -- and it has struck a sour note with European countries whose government officials have only had limited access to the roughly 12 EU nationals in Guantanamo.

"The whole rationale of the war on terrorism is that we are upholding the rule of law, we should maintain the moral high ground," said Steven Everts, of the London-based Centre for European Reform. "The decision by the U.S. executive, not the judiciary, not to grant these people the full protection of the Geneva Convention, went against this notion the international coalition to fight terrorism was all about."

Looking for support, finding none for the 'German-Turk’

The United States government has refused to reveal details about the prisoners it is holding or the details of their capture. Nearly a year later, Kurnaz's family knows nothing about the circumstances of how he fell into the hands of U.S. soldiers near the Karachi airport last December. Kurnaz’s mother, Rabiye, has tried to launch a media offensive in the Turkish and German press to get her son’s legal situation clarified.

Early on, she wrote a letter to German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. But given that Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen, Fischer's hands were tied. He could do little more than write a regretful reply, saying he was powerless but would do all he could. Her almost daily calls to the Turkish consulate in nearby Hanover and embassy in Berlin have turned up nothing.

"They keep saying they’ll take care of it, but they haven’t done a thing," she said.

Kurnaz's family and lawyer suspect the reason lies in the fact that he is more German than Turkish.

When asked whether it had taken any steps on Kurnaz's behalf, an official with the Turkish Embassy in Berlin had little to say. "No one here knows much about the case," he said.

Next Page: From a normal childhood to fundamentalism

The son of parents who immigrated to Bremen and worked factory jobs to build up a comfortable life for their four children, Kurnaz attended German schools, had a German-speaking group of friends and dated German girls.

He had, by all accounts, a "normal" childhood where weekly trips to the mosque with his father seemed to be the only thing that differentiated him from his German friends.

It was a typical childhood for a Muslim in the shipping town. Since the early 1980s, when Turkish immigrants working in Bremen’s shipyards and at the Mercedes Benz plant began setting up mosques, Bremen church leaders and politicians strove to create a dialogue that would integrate their Muslim neighbors into the larger society.

The dialogue has flourished into an open relationship between the Islamic community and the rest of the city – one that is unique in Germany. Since 1995, Bremen’s city officials have kept in close and friendly contact with community members, including the government-monitored Milli Görüs organization, which controls more than 30 mosques in the city.

The organization has caused an uproar in the past because of the anti-Semitic and anti-American sentiments that have sometimes been part of its Friday prayers, according to Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. But in Bremen, the group is seen as "open and legitimate," said Peter Meier-Hüseling, a Bremen radio journalist who covers the Islamic community.

A switch in mosques, a shift in belief

Throughout his childhood and teenage years, Kurnaz regularly attended the Milli Görüs-run mosque located near the family’s three-story brick row house. Then, about two years ago, Kurnaz and his friend Selcuk Bilgin, with whom he shared a passion for the Koran and fighting dogs, stopped attending the Turkish mosque and opted instead for the Abu Bakr Arab mosque close to Bremen’s train station.

"He always landed in Arab mosques," his mother said. "He said they were more faithful than we were ... he found them more important."

The remark puzzled Rabiye Kurnaz, as did Murat’s later decisions to grow a beard and buy lace-up boots. When Kurnaz brought home videos showing Russian army atrocities against Muslims in Chechnya, his parents refused to watch.

A senior German investigator looking into Kurnaz’s case, who did not want to be identified by name, said it was in Abu Bakr that Kurnaz finally found the "true Islam" he was looking for. "The other mosque was too tame for him," the investigator said.

Prior to Kurnaz's arrest in Pakistan, law enforcement officers in Bremen had considered the mosque harmless. Then, in the second-guessing that took place in Germany in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bremen public prosecutor’s office launched an investigation into a Kurdish imam who occasionally led prayers at Abu Bakr and was suspected of leading Kurnaz into the radical fold. Government agents then placed the mosque on their watch list.

Officials from the mosque refused to comment, saying only that Kurnaz didn’t draw any special attention to himself.

Next Page: A family asks tough questions

On Oct. 3, Rabiye Kurnaz awoke to find her son’s bed empty. A few hours later, Murat called her, saying he was on the way to Cologne but that he would be back that evening. She didn't believe what he was saying, so she called Bilgin’s wife and got the truth. Bilgin and Kurnaz, the wife told her, were on their way to Pakistan. The German Federal Border Guard stopped Bilgin at the airport because he had a warrant out for an unpaid fine. Kurnaz went on without him.

That’s when the family lost contact with him, and law enforcement picked it up. German investigators said Kurnaz moved from madrassa to madrassa, studying the Koran and trying to take up contact with Taliban fighters in Karachi. Instead, they say, he was turned over to the U.S. forces. Murat’s family and friends heavily deny that he was ever a part of the Taliban.

"Absolutely not," said Jahya Sialah, 22, who has been friends with Kurnaz since moving to the neighborhood from Lebanon six years ago. "First off, he’s never been to Afghanistan in his life. He doesn’t know anybody there. Secondly, he was always avoiding trouble, he would always intervene if problems arose."

In Bremen, investigators have abandoned the theory that Kurnaz ever became a member of the Taliban. A Bremen investigation into suspicions Kurnaz was part of a cell of Bremen Muslims training to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan has been all but called off. Both the Bremen Public Prosecutor's Office and Germany's Federal Prosecutor have stated there isn’t enough evidence to put together a case against Kurnaz.

"I doubt he could have been involved in any type of fighting," the senior investigator in Bremen said.

No charges, just hard time

The last time Rabiye Kurnaz heard her son’s voice was when he called from Pakistan in November, saying he was going to extend his ticket another month. By January, he was on his way to Camp X-Ray on Guantanamo Bay, the third shipment of detainees flown in from Afghanistan.

He has since been visited by the Red Cross three times. U.S. officials have allowed the international organization to check the health and the conditions in which Guantanamo Bay prisoners are in, but representatives are not permitted to relay information to relatives. All attempts by Docke, who has been the family’s lawyer for the past four months, to talk to the American authorities have been fruitless.

"We don’t know what the conditions of the arrest were … they don’t tell us in concrete terms what they accuse him of, they don’ tell us what legal status he has. That is our biggest problem," he said. "They have set up an information ban and, at the same time, are keeping him locked up for an unspecified amount of time."

"U.S. policy is that we're not speaking on anything regarding the individual detainees, mostly because of security concerns," said Lieutenant Commander Barbara Burfeind, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon in Washington. "This is new territory, this is not a conventional war. It's an area in which we are trying to grapple with a lot of unconventional issues."

The uncertainty is taking its toll on Rabiye Kurnaz, who last heard from Murat through a quick postcard saying he was in good health at the end of May. She has stopped looking at photos of her eldest son and tries to keep the television pictures of Guantanamo Bay out of her mind.

She continues to write letters to him, she says, ending them the same way each time.

"I write, ‘Murat, have you received my letters?’," she says, "But I haven’t received any answer."