by Lee, M
The ‘foreman’ of this section, Tawfique, directed Matt and me to a room where, he said, there were a couple of other English speakers. That sounded encouraging. This part of the prison was under-populated, so we had our choice of bunks, two top ones, as close to the side wall as possible. From my bed I could see out through the high, tinted windows. There wasn’t much out there besides endless desert, but it was a step up from having no window for so many months.
The prison complex had various buildings — two for men, one for women, one for juveniles. As we came in we’d seen prisoners in uniforms like ours, but with coloured stripes around the chest and down the sides of their pants. These indicated the length of your sentence: green was less than six months, blue six months to three years, yellow three to seven years, and red seven years-plus. Our uniforms had no stripes because were in the section called the Out-Jail that housed people who had not yet been convicted, and in most cases hadn’t even yet been charged with a crime.
Another part of the Out-Jail was for foreign workers being held on ‘immigration issues’. I could see this area from the dormitory window. There were never fewer than 1000 men there and on at least three occasions I saw this leap by thousands overnight as a construction company, government or private, decided the simplest way to downsize was to sack these labourers without paying what they were owed, leaving them without the means to buy a ticket back to their home countries.
I introduced myself to three men sitting on nearby bunks. They were Ryan, Charles and Arthur, all English, who had been arrested on another ‘government corruption’ case, this one involving a AED500 million loan dispute and the Dubai Islamic Bank. They showed me where the four payphones were and said we were allowed to make phone calls of five minutes’ duration between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays (that is, Sunday to Thursday). They also said there was only one visiting time a week, on Saturdays. When I called Julie I felt myself crumbling, wondering how I could get through this. She reminded me of what I had achieved as an ironman and told me she had faith in my strength.
I wasn’t so sure.
I remembered something adventurer Bear Grylls had once said about being trapped in a dire situation where the end goal seemed impossibly far. He had broken it all down into manageable goals and parts. I tried to apply that principle. I thought, if I can survive today that gets me one step closer to the next court hearing and maybe something will change then.
JULIE
Marcus was moved to Al Aweer on a Tuesday. I needed to visualise where he was so, after poring over Google Earth to try to locate it, the next day Rosemary and I drove out into the desert to see it. Looking at the complex for the first time made my stomach churn. I couldn’t see him for almost a week, although we could talk on the phone and at least I knew exactly where he was. It was very hard to have to wait so long, but Rosemary and I continued with our busy schedule.
ROSEMARY ADAMS
Every day was a hectic blur of telephone calls, reviewing and discussing the evidence and email trails, and composing questions for Marcus’s lawyer Ali Shamsi. Every move we made had to be carefully planned and every conversation scripted. We had to be persuasive but not pushy. Marcus would call frequently and ask for progress reports, make suggestions for things for Julie to do or give her questions to put to his lawyer. Some days he seemed to spend the whole day queuing up to use the telephone, calling, then going straight back to the end of the queue and wait to ring Julie again. He had managed to memorise all the evidence Julie had taken in to show him. On more than one occasion when I mixed up a detail he would correct me.
I’d been due to fly out after just over a week, but Marcus and Julie had asked me to stay on so I rearranged my appointments back home and stayed.
On three occasions I went with Julie to see Mr Ali. His answers to Julie’s questions were noncommittal but at the same time he tried to be reassuring. He tended to talk in parables and in the kind of language you might find in older versions of the Bible. On one visit Mr Ali told us he had been speaking to the prosecutor, whose wife was ill. When Julie asked about the likelihood of Marcus’s bail application being successful, Mr Ali replied, ‘I told the prosecutor that the reason his wife was ill was because he had the wrong people in jail.’ You never got a straight answer to a question.
Julie and I visited the Australian consular office in Dubai to ask for their support with Marcus’s bail application. We were initially told this was impossible, but eventually we persuaded them to help us.
Every step of the legal process required Julie to firstly find out what she needed to do, then figure out how to do it, and then harass people politely to get it done. She would often come to dead ends and have to start again as things changed with no reason given. Everything was a puzzle that you had to figure out. You never felt that anything was stable or reliable.
Towards the end of the second week, the prosecutor’s mood changed. Mr Ali told us the prosecutor had moved from being supportive about bail to noncommittal. Marcus’s imminent release was no longer imminent. It was devastating to have to leave them at this point.
JULIE
My group update email from 7 May captures the state we were all in:
We were up early, Rosemary finishing off her packing and me sorting out cash, booth cards (phone credit) and Ventolin to take to Al Aweer. All seemed OK, but then in the midst of the morning phone calls we all fell apart. Dudley . . . cowered under the desk, not sure what was happening with all the tears and hugging and phone calls. During the tears and calls Rosemary managed to get the taxi to the airport and on the plane home. Marcus and I continued the calls and the tears.
MARCUS
The days in Central Prison (Al Aweer) started at 4 a.m. with the PA blaring out ‘khaana, khaana, khaana’, Hindi for ‘eat’. Because the vast majority of prisoners were from the subcontinent a lot of the instructions were in Hindi and most of the food was Indian-style dishes featuring rice and watery curry, and not much of it. The food was usually off or just inedible. Tuesday breakfast was the exception — we were given two white hotdog rolls and a small packet of jam, of the kind you’d get in a hotel. It wasn’t much, but compared to the other food it was an absolute luxury.
Again, I was fortunate I could afford to place food orders, though only for dinner. I would usually choose fruit salad (a small, sparsely filled tub), green salad (ditto) or chicken on a bread roll, although it was a long time before I risked eating the chicken. Often this was all I would eat all day, but at least I could keep it down. Even this extra bought food came in such meagre servings that it left me feeling famished. I hated to think how the majority of the prisoners, who couldn’t afford to pay, were managing. I often lined up for the prison meals and gave my serving to anyone who wanted it.
The central eating area was only opened for the three meals and kept locked at all other times. A small caged courtyard opened off this eating area, so the choice was either eat or go outside for some ‘fresh’ (baking summer desert) air. I knew I had to eat, so I often did, but a lot of times I found I preferred to be out there, just standing and breathing, or walking around the perimeter, trying to get some exercise. It was the only regular chance to do anything other than sit on your bunk.
The head of the prisons department claimed in a local newspaper that all the inmates in Central Prison were ‘assigned a daily activity’. That certainly wasn’t true of Out-Jail. We were locked up for the 22-and-a-half hours a day that weren’t meal times, and there was little to do other than sit on your bunk or walk up and down the dormitory. There was a small TV in the central area between the two dormitories, which played Bollywood movies on repeat and was the cause of endless conflict, with people fighting over which of the three channels to watch.
At irregular intervals we would be allowed out onto a basketball court for half an hour. Some of the prisoners would kick a ball around if there was one out there. Matt and I each ran laps, trying to burn off pent-up energy and relieve some stress.
T
he number of prisoners in F5/F6, where we were located, fluctuated from week to week. It often rose to 250 as Dubai’s police-station jails became too crowded. Again, aside from drug-traffickers, who were put in another section, there was no separation between people accused of petty crimes and those arrested for murder. As in Port Rashid, there was the constant threat of violence. I would call Julie early in the evening to say goodnight, then hunker down in my bed, trying to disappear into a book.
There was no escaping, however, from the noise of alarms or the PA system, both of which the guards used to torment us and amuse themselves. They would set the fire alarm off and leaving it running, blaring out automated warnings at top volume, in Arabic and English, while a siren screamed continuously in the background. After hours of this you really felt like you were losing your mind.
The PA was a toy for the guards to make pointless announcements, such as ordering everyone to get off their beds and line up in the central area for a roll-call, then as soon as we complied, ordering us all back, after which you’d hear them laughing hysterically in their control booth. Or they would use it in conjunction with the security cameras, targeting an Indian prisoner doing something perfectly legitimate and, addressing him as ‘blacky’ or some other derogatory word, shouting at him, telling him to stop whatever it was. The police and the guards’ behaviour added hugely to the tensions and fights.
In Port Rashid the daily visits had helped me cope, but here the wait for that first Saturday felt endless. I called Julie many times a day. Phone calls were one of the few inexpensive things in Dubai. When I’d moved to Port Rashid Jail we’d set up a system which we continued to use: Julie arranged for all calls made to our home number to be forwarded to her mobile. Using this system, the calls I was making from prison cost only a dirham (30 cents) each at most, so a phone card went a very long way.
We were allowed to see male visitors on Saturday mornings and female visitors in the afternoons. The visiting room had two rows of 25 booths. Visitors and prisoners were separated by plexiglass, but there were no telephones, instead there was just a small circle in the plexiglass with holes in it that you took turns yelling through while the other person pressed their ear against it trying to catch what you were saying over all the other people yelling in the room. The only upside was that the time allowed was reasonably long. On that first day, Julie and I had an hour and a half together.
Three days later, I called Julie to hear some very unwelcome news. My bail had been rejected by the Technical Office. We didn’t know why this had happened; even Mr Ali said he didn’t understand it after the prosecutor’s ‘green light’ and prior agreement, but he had told Julie he would apply again (this was done five days later). I clung to this tiny ray of hope.
I knew we were forbidden to make calls on weekends, and the penalty was solitary but I couldn’t get through Fridays without speaking to Julie. Hearing her voice and having her tell me she loved me was enough to keep me going, sometimes only for an hour, sometimes for a day. I was on such an emotional low by then, I felt I absolutely had to risk it.
I watched the CCTV cameras and saw that they were set on automatic; they swept past the area where the phones were every 60 seconds. That was just long enough to duck in, call, say I love you and hear it back, then hang up and get out before the camera returned.
JULIE
Marcus didn’t tell me he was risking solitary with these calls — that would have completely freaked me out — but I did know he was breaking the rules. I couldn’t help but melt at the thought that he was taking this risk just to talk to me, the wonderful, crazy man!
Mr Ali continually tried to persuade the prosecutor that, as the investigators had finished their work, there was no reason to keep Marcus in jail. A few days after this, he told me the new bail application had been approved by the prosecutor and this time by the technical office. Now it just had to be approved by the Attorney General.
The couple of weeks between Rosemary leaving and Wayne arriving back in Dubai were really tough going. The 12 May group email said:
Not sure what happened today, but Marcus and I were on another one of those emotional rollercoasters. I didn’t get much sleep last night so I wasn’t set up for the day. I had my ‘to do list’ prepared, timing of meetings at work organised and it went out the window. The smallest thing sets the day off badly . . . By the end Marcus and I had managed to pull ourselves back together, lots of deep breaths and we are not giving in, we are not losing hope, we will keep fighting. We will get through this.
There was supposed to be another Tamdeed hearing around this time, but on the morning of the day concerned Matt told Marcus he was sick and wasn’t going. The guards did not want to take one without the other (I suspect because it meant less work). Because neither of them appeared in court, there was an automatic extension of their detention — for 30 days.
Later that day I was told by Mr Ali that Matt’s non-appearance was a ploy by his lawyer to try to force the Chief of the Courts to get involved and to make the prosecutor charge or release the men. Mr Ali said, in his view, this had little chance of success. His view was correct. The tactic confirmed that Matt and Ange were working on strategies without regard for us.
At Al Aweer you could apply for a ‘special visit’. Prisoners applied to the prison Captain and approval could be refused at the Captain’s discretion, which it often was. The problem for Marcus (and the other non-Arabs) was that the request had to be written in Arabic. Finally Marcus arranged to make the application and got approval for such a visit on Wednesday 20 May.
I took some fruit — bananas, mandarins and dates — to supplement the rather meagre meals Marcus was getting, but none of the food was permitted. We met in a room that had two entrances, one from the locked section of the prison and one from the visitor’s side. It had two rows of metal chairs against walls and we could sit next to each other for the first time since Marcus’s arrest without someone else in the same room or watching over us.
The feelings were intense as we first touched hands, then hugged and kissed. We talked and hugged and held hands some more. We’d been told that these visits could last for a long time, up to an hour, but as with many things in the UAE nothing was certain. It was much sooner than that when the guard told us our time was over.
After the visit we both hit rock bottom. I stumbled back past the reception desk and through the big security doors in tears, muttering to myself, ‘This is all so, so wrong. Marcus was just doing his job, why is this happening, who is doing this to us, this is so wrong’. I continued this mantra the entire miserable drive back home through the desert.
But as I pulled up outside the villa that evening, with a very sad Marcus talking to me on speaker-phone, I saw that the ‘tree of hope’ that Indrani planted from a cutting had flowered for the very first time. I tried to describe to Marcus how beautiful it was, and we each felt just a little more optimistic as we hung up. We were both so fragile it didn’t take much to tip our emotions up or down.
Chapter 16
LIFE IN HELL
JULIE
Wayne had returned to Dubai and almost every day we sat in the prosecutors’ waiting area from 7.30 a.m. till midday prayers, hoping to get a meeting. Mr Ali also tried to see him almost every day, hoping to hear that the Attorney General had approved Marcus’s bail. But weeks went by with no action. It was hard to keep Marcus buoyant, but Wayne and I kept telling him we were close now, he just had to keep hanging in there. On 1 June we finally got in to see the prosecutor, who said to Wayne and me that Marcus’s case was ‘simpler’ than the accusations against the others. This sounded great and kept us, and Marcus, going. Mr Ali was also very positive about this comment and he continued to follow up with the prosecutor.
But just a few days after this we received a terrible blow. Mr Ali’s assistant, Leonie, called to tell me that the Attorney General had rejected Marcus’s bail application, despite the prosecutor and the Technical Office having agreed to it. It
was a horrible kick in the guts for Wayne and me, and I just dreaded having to tell Marcus. But when he rang the next morning and asked if we had heard, I couldn’t lie.
MARCUS
When Julie told me the news I couldn’t contain myself, I totally broke down. I couldn’t kid myself, I was trapped in here with no hope of release. The feeling of helplessness and being wronged was overwhelming. Not only would I not be released on bail, but I might be held responsible for other people’s deals in which I had no involvement. Everything seemed to stop for me now. The days passed in slow motion. I all but ceased to eat and any remaining skerrick of hope disappeared. The media in Dubai were reporting that people convicted of financial crimes not only had to serve their time but had to serve additional time equal to the fines levied against them. This meant if you got ten years for a crime it might take a further ten years’ prison to repay the debt. My future seemed bleak.
What had persuaded the Attorney General to refuse my application when the prosecutor and now the Technical Office had agreed to it? Months later we learned it was Sunland’s submission of the ‘Eames memorandum’, in which the company again accused me, along with Matt, Angus Reed and Anthony Brearley of engaging in deceptive or misleading conduct. It also said we were all liable for prosecution under Australian law. The Dubai Public Prosecution department regarded this memo as so damning they refused me bail.
There’s a saying that there are three kinds of people in jail: mad, bad and sad. It’s more accurate to say that every person in there gravitates between sad and mad at various points. Sad people just give up. I had been incarcerated for nearly five months and even at my lowest point I’d always been able to tap into my sense of justice and find a spark of life-giving anger. But I couldn’t summon this anymore.