Today, Portugal announced its willingness to take in some Guantanamo detainees as refugees and encouraged other members of the European Union to follow suit. The Uyghur detainees, as is increasingly common, are receiving especial media attention.
See, though, this peculiar quote in a BBC article from John B. Bellinger III, legal advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
“[The Uighurs] were properly detained, they were in training camps… but they wanted to fight the Chinese. So there’s no question that we had the proper authority to detain them,” he told the BBC in an interview.
“Since we determined who they were, and that they were not intent on fighting us, we’ve been trying to release them. But China is the only country that wants them back,” he added. [...]
Mr Bellinger said American immigration laws were such that it would be extremely difficult to resettle them in the US, so he welcomed the “first breaking of the ice in European resistance in trying to help out”.
Who, exactly, is “we,” here, as in “we’ve been trying to release them?” Judge Urbina made it pretty clear back in October that he and the judicial system think they should be out. It’s the Bush administration, where this guy works, that’s been blocking their release by appealing Urbina’s ruling. Come to think of it, this is the same administration responsible for locking them up seven years ago, the same people who wanted to throw away the key. Since they’ve been cleared of all charges now for several years, shouldn’t this administration have started making an effort to resettle them even then?
Granted, I am no expert in US immigration law. I am sure that settling a military detainee is difficult. However, it’s not true that only “China” wants these men. Several Uyghur families in the US have agreed to house the detainees as they adjust to life in the land of the free. Is it possible that the US has been waiting for a European country (besides Albania) to clean up its mess?
This does make me wonder, where was Sweden in all of this? Where was the Uyghur community in Germany? Canada? Honestly, I couldn’t blame them for considering this an American problem. The US — my country — detained these men, locked them up, processed them, gripped them tight, kept them firmly inside. Since they were imprisoned in the American realm, their place in America gained a certain naturalness. When a country tries to hard to hold onto something, why would it want to give it away?
Then we have the question of US-China relations. First off, I honestly have no way of knowing under which circumstances exactly the remaining Uyghur detainees were captured and delivered to the US. It is my suspicion that they were not receiving any sort of military or paramilitary training. In light of Bellinger’s comments, however, I wonder: Did he just say that the United States tolerates armed insurgency against the People’s Republic of China? “[T]hey wanted to fight the Chinese … they were not intent on fighting us.” Does that make them any less of a threat to human life?
To my mind, this can mean one of three things. 1. The United States government wants Uyghurs (and others) to be armed and angry and ready to disrupt the PRC presence in Xinjiang. 2. The US, having declared the men enemy combatants, has found a compromise for them, an identity that makes them insurgents but also prevents their return to China. 3. This is an acceptable story for media consumption, one that draws on preestablished ideas of Muslims in China and that obscures a more complex and bureaucratically byzantine truth.
Comments 3
I don’t know about the other countries’ immigration policy, but one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to resettle them in the US is because the US immigration code defines terrorism in an overly broad manner. For example, rape victims who were forced into domestic servitude by armed rebels have been barred from protection for providing “material support” to terrorists, as have refugees who were forced to pay money or provide food or medical care to armed militants. Afghans who fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980’s and Iraqis who banded together to fight Saddam Hussein have been defined as members of “terrorist organizations” and similarly turned away. It’s funny that last year, General Petraeus recommended an Iraqi, who fought against Saddam with the US troops, to be admitted as a refugee. The DOJ rejected the application based on the reason that the guy belonged to a terrorism organization which fought against a sovereign government, that is, the Saddam regime. So by the current definition, as long as you, as a member of a non governmental group, fought against a sovereign government, you are a terrorist. If our forefathers who fought the British can live till today, they too are terrorists, by definition.
Posted 14 Dec 2008 at 6:40 am ¶Just a brief comment from Sweden on “where Sweden is” in regard to this issue. The Swedish government has refused (this far) to accept any of the Guantanamo Uighurs, even not accepting the asylum application from one of the Albanian Uighurs who eventually came here about a year ago. We are many Swedes who oppose the government on this issue and a number of articles and pleas have been published and sent to the government. We still have hopes that they will change their mind!
Posted 16 Dec 2008 at 9:20 pm ¶I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Bellinger just worded things poorly. Despite what Bush would probably prefer, the criteria for releasing detainees is whether or not they can be convicted of something, not whether or not they are a threat to anyone. Who the Uyghurs want to fight is basically irrelevant, but as they were initially accused of fighting Americans, their argument has been that, unlike many of the other detainees, they have no quarrel with the US and would not have attacked the US even if they had the opportunity.
Another factor to consider is that the US gov’t probably isn’t that concerned about whether or not some of these guys pose a threat to China. After all, there are plenty of detainees that have been released despite US intelligence services warning that they would be a threat to the US, and quite a few of them (3 dozen out of about 500 released detainees says DIA) have simply returned to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Abdullah al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti, is an interesting example because he was apparently captured escaping to Pakistan from Tora Bora as were many of the Uyghur detainees. He also unsurprisingly said that he’d never fought with the Taliban, he would never fight against Americans, he didn’t hold any ill will towards the Americans for capturing him, and after his release he would devote himself to promoting peace. Al-Ajmi died carrying out a suicide attack in Iraq earlier this year.
The US gov’t has accepted that this is the unavoidable risk of releasing detainees, but it’s pretty understandable that other countries are unwilling to take the risk that one of the Uyghur detainees might turn out to be an actual terrorist. It’s also pretty understandable that the Chinese gov’t would be really suspicious of all of these guys. Really, even if you discount any evidence presented by the US, moving to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and living at a camp in Tora Bora is pretty shady. Doesn’t mean they’re guilty, isn’t a good enough reason to lock them up or send them to China to be locked up, but it’s definitely suspicious.
I wish the military would have just interrogated them and released them back in Afghanistan years ago. At this point we should probably release them in the US and just create some more work for the FBI, but apparently that’s not possible. That’s seems a bit too convenient to me, “Oh, our silly laws prohibit us from settling these guys here, but don’t worry, they’re not terrorists or anything. Well, they might aspire to shoot up a Chinese police station or something, but probably not. Anyway, like we were saying, these guys are great. You should take them…Please?”
Posted 17 Dec 2008 at 2:32 pm ¶Post a Comment