Freed from Guantanamo, a poet pleads for lost verses

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost knows the US military can't return the three years that he spent locked inside a cage-like cell at Guantanamo Bay. But it could at least return his poetry.

''Please help," said Dost, who says he penned 25,000 lines of verse during his long imprisonment on the southern tip of Cuba. ''Those words are very precious to me. My interrogators promised I would get them back. Still I have nothing."

The lost poems are the final indignity for Dost, 44, a cultured and soft-spoken man who was flown back to his native Afghanistan with 16 other detainees last year, apparently after military officials believed his pleas of innocence.

Three years earlier, however, nobody seemed to be listening. Dost, an Afghan native who was living in Peshawar, a city in northern Pakistan, was whisked from his home in November 2001, and transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, accused of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. Five months later he was shackled, blindfolded, and flown to Cuba.

In the difficult days and months that followed, the gemstone dealer and part-time poet crafted his escape through verse.

''I would fly on the wings of my imagination," he recalled in a recent interview in his home here. ''Through my poems I would travel the world, visiting different places. Although I was in a cage I was really free."

His military captors didn't make it easy to keep writing. During Dost's first year of captivity, inmates were forbidden pens or paper, so he composed poems at the bottom of his Red Cross letters home. Many of the letters, which his family has collected, were censored.

When that didn't work, Dost said, he found a novel solution -- Styrofoam teacups.

''I would scratch a few lines onto a cup with a spoon. If you held it up to the light you could read it," he said. ''But when the guards collected the trash they threw them away."

It was only when prison authorities provided awkward rubbery pens -- so soft they could not be used as weapons -- that Dost wrote in earnest. He said his themes were love of his homeland, poetry, and his children, and especially his hope of release.

Sitting against a large bookcase inside his well-stocked library, he quoted a mournful couplet from one of his poems: Handcuffs befit brave young men; bangles are for spinsters or pretty young ladies.

He composed his verse in between 150 interrogations sessions, he said. His spirit dipped and soared. ''Some days you composed 50 verses, other days you couldn't write a word," he recalled.

Dost also employed his devilish wit to lampoon his military captors, mocking what he saw as ridiculous -- women with men's haircuts, men without beards. ''In the American Army I could not see a real man," he said. ''And they talk rudely about homosexuals, which is very shameful to us."

The satires delighted his fellow inmates, who passed them gleefully from cage to cage using an ingenious pulley system fashioned from prayer cap threads, Dost said.

But the poems always ended up in military hands. During periodic cell searches, he said, guards would confiscate his latest sheaf of writing, sealing it in an envelope with his cell number.

Early last year, Dost was brought before a military court and was declared free to go. ''They had known I was innocent for over a year before," he said. ''It's all a big game."

Still in shackles, he and 16 other Afghan detainees were flown back to Bagram Air Base near Kabul on April 19, 2005, and released. A US military statement said they were ''found to no longer be an enemy combatant" by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

Dost said he was allowed to keep his final sheaf of poems and told the rest would be returned on arrival at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul. But they were not, and he was set free without apology or compensation.

About 110 Afghans are still detained at Guantanamo Bay; 250 others are being held at a second center in Bagram Air Base, said a US Embassy spokesman in Kabul. The United States plans to transfer all Afghan detainees from both facilities to a renovated wing in Pul-i-Charki prison outside Kabul, possibly by the end of this year.

Back in Peshawar, Dost found his younger brother Badruzaman Badr, who had also been detained at Guantanamo and had been freed six months earlier. The men come from a proud Pashtun tradition of poetry and guns.

During the 1980s, the brothers ran a number of Pashto-language magazines lionizing Afghan jihadi rebels fighting the Soviets. Their father was a scholar, and their great-grandfather was famed for his fighting passion against 18th-century British colonists.

Now the brothers are engaged in a more prosaic struggle -- to rebuild their disrupted lives. They have reentered the gemstone trade, selling mostly tourmaline from a small mine the family operates across the border in Nuristan Province, in southern Afghanistan.

They continue to write. Badruzaman is working as a journalist, and Dost has written an account of Guantanamo, ''The Broken Chains," which he hopes to have translated into English and Urdu.

Dost hinted that his experience could turn him toward the terrorist activities of which he had once been accused. ''If they do not return my poems I may think of picking up a gun," he said, with perhaps a touch of poetic license.