Ex-Guantanamo detainee to play self on stage
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 9, 2010 | 12:14 PM ET
CBC News
Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib, seen at right with his wife, Maha, in 2006, will star in a stage production based on his experiences at the infamous U.S.-run prison. (Will Burgess/Reuters) An Australian man who was held in the notorious Guantanamo Bay U.S. military prison in Cuba for years — and released without ever being charged — is set to relive his experiences in a new play opening Tuesday night.
Mamdouh Habib will star as himself in the stage production Waiting For Mamdouh, which opens at the National Institute of Dramatic Art Theatre in Sydney.
"It's not easy. I'm not going to say it's easy," Habib told Australian media, about reliving his ordeal during rehearsals.
"Yesterday, on the stage in front of all the people, I feel the stress and I felt like I was going to cry, but I put up with it."
Waiting For Mamdouh follows Egyptian-born, Australian-based Habib's capture in Pakistan about a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as well as his wife Maha's long struggle to bring her husband home to Australia. Maha Habib and one of the couple's daughters, Hajer, will also make cameos in the stage production.
Habib has said he had travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 because he was considering leaving Australia and was scouting out schools for his four children.
Arrested in Pakistan in October 2001, Habib was detained in Egypt and Afghanistan for nearly a year before finally being transferred to the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Habib said he was tortured and humiliated regularly.
Though U.S. officials had accused him of training militants and aiding al-Qaeda, he was not charged with any crime. After nearly three years at Guantanamo, he was released in January 2005.
Waiting For Mamdouh was written and directed by Kuranda Seyit, who wanted the audience to get a small taste of what life in detention was like for Habib.
"We pepper-spray the audience. We blind them with light and blast them with sound, just like they did in Guantanamo Bay," he said.
Habib also released the book My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn't in 2008.
With files from the Australian Broadcasting CorporationShare Tools
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