CounterVortex

NYT notes Albania’s Uighur exiles
And how have those Uighurs been faring in Albania? From the New York Times, June 10, via UNPO:

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again…

[Ahktar Qassim] Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China’s Communist government. Only Albania’s pro-American government would give them asylum, but Albanian officials have since told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantánamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them — and neither will the United States. Instead, American diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that Chinese officials have warned some of the same countries not to accept them.

“The United States has made extensive and high-level efforts over a period of four years to try to resettle the Uighurs in countries around the world,” the State Department’s legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, said in an interview. Its lack of success, he added, “has not been for lack of trying.”

[…]

The refugees in Tirana seem to have little sense of how to influence the global chess game in which they have become involved. They spend most of their days behind the refugee center’s high, cinderblock walls, reading the Koran, studying Albanian and waiting for a turn on the center’s lone desktop computer. They avoid the gravelly soccer field because it reminds them of one they looked out on at Guantánamo.

With President Bush scheduled to visit Albania on Sunday [10 June 2007], the Uighurs and three other former Guantánamo detainees here are also asking whether the United States, having flown them here in shackles, might do anything to help get them the housing, jobs and other support they have been told to expect.

A particularly telling passage:

Several of the Uighurs said their most traumatic experience at Guantánamo was their interrogation by a team of Chinese security officials in September 2002. The Chinese “had all of our files from the Americans,” Mr. Qassim said, threatened them repeatedly and insisted that the prisoners return with them to China. They refused.

But American intelligence personnel at Guantánamo soon began to doubt that most of the Uighurs represented a real terrorist threat, officials who served there said. By late 2003, senior national security officials in Washington cleared most of the Uighurs for release — 14, by one official’s count.

Some officials at the Pentagon advocated sending the Uighurs back to China, and the State Department eventually sought and received assurances from the Chinese that they would treat the men humanely. But senior officials finally decided not to repatriate them, citing China’s past treatment of the Uighur minority.

The State Department began approaching both Muslim countries like Turkey and those with small Uighur communities, like Germany and Sweden. However, the search was interrupted in September 2004, when the Pentagon set up panels at Guantánamo to decide whether the prisoners there, including the 22 Uighurs, were being rightfully held. Although most of the Uighurs had already been cleared for release, the review panels found that all but six were in fact enemy combatants.

The boards were told to review the Uighur cases again, officials said. This time, they found that only five could be freed. (Subsequent annual reviews have cleared 15 of the 17 remaining detainees.)