Fri May 5, 2006
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Friday it had flown five Chinese Muslim men who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison to resettle in Albania, declining to send them back to China because they might face persecution.
The State Department said Albania accepted the five ethnic Uighurs -- including two whose quest for freedom went all the way to the the Supreme Court -- for resettlement as refugees.
The Pentagon said 17 other Chinese Uighurs remained at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because, unlike the five sent to Albania, they were still deemed "enemy combatants."
Ethnic Uighurs come from Xinjiang in far western China. Many Muslim Uighurs seek greater autonomy for the region and some want independence from China. Beijing has waged a relentless campaign against what it calls the violent separatist activities of the Uighurs.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Albania's resettlement of the men was an important humanitarian gesture, and expressed U.S. appreciation. The U.S. Supreme Court declined on April 17 to consider whether a federal judge could free two of the five men -- Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim -- even though the U.S. government had determined that they were not enemy combatants. A federal judge had found their continued detention unlawful.
Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights representing the two men, said their case was due to be heard again in court on Monday. Olshansky said the U.S. government's decision to send them to Albania was made "to avoid having to answer in court for keeping innocent men in jail."
"We had no idea they were going to Albania. We didn't have any time to get anything on the ground to assist them with resettlement or to find out about whether they are trying to send them into some kind of detention," Olshansky said.
The two men were captured in Pakistan and have been detained since June 2002 at Guantanamo.
NOT TO CHINA
The United States still holds about 480 detainees at Guantanamo, the Pentagon said, and has freed or handed over to their home governments a total of 272 detainees.
The U.S. government has said it cannot return the Uighurs to China because they would face persecution there, but Beijing has insisted that Chinese nationals held by the United States as part of the "war on terror" should be returned.
"The United States has done the utmost to ensure that the Uighurs will be treated humanely upon release. Our key objective has been to resettle the Uighurs in an environment that will permit them to rebuild their lives.
Albania will provide this opportunity," the Pentagon said in a statement. The Chinese Foreign Ministry on April 20 said the United States should "repatriate Chinese-nationality terror suspects held at Guantanamo as quickly as possible" to China.
"The United States has made it clear that it does not expel, return or extradite individuals to other countries where it believes that it is more likely than not that they will be tortured or subject to persecution," said Air Force Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman.
The Bush administration opposed bringing them to the United States. Rights activists decry the indefinite detention of Guantanamo detainees since the jail opened in January 2002, and accuse the United States of torture. The Pentagon denies the torture allegations and says many dangerous al Qaeda and Taliban figures are held there.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.