Closing time

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* Last Updated: February 06. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 6. 2009 5:30AM GMT

Obama has announced plans to shut down Guantanamo. But what will happen to the men inside? Joshua Kurlantzick on the plight of 22 Uighur detainees trapped in a legal limbo.

As I wandered through a twisting back alley, I nearly got lost in a maze of brick homes. Stumbling into an interior courtyard, I saw two elderly men with skullcaps and stringy white beards dipping nan into tea at a tiny table. Nearby, two women, their faces covered except for the eyes, wielded long knives to pluck the rind from sweet melons.

The call to prayer rang out, and the older men roused themselves. I followed them back into the alley, and saw hundreds of men pushing toward the mosque. I went with the crowd, shoved past carpet sellers, knife-sharpeners and a man getting a precarious-looking straight razor shave in the middle of the surging mob. Then I exited the alley and, with a shock, came to a wide boulevard policed by stern-looking Chinese security officials standing ramrod-straight.

It is easy to forget you are in China in the backstreets of Kashgar, the westernmost major city in the country. Indeed, for centuries the vast western part of China, known today as Xinjiang, was linked more to Central Asia and the Middle East than to the Middle Kingdom. A hub on the Silk Road, Xinjiang was populated primarily by Muslim Turkic peoples known as Uighurs, who spoke a language similar to Turkish. Several times in the past two hundred years, the Uighurs had their own independent country, but after the Communist takeover of Beijing, Xinjiang fell under Chinese rule.

It has not been an easy marriage. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese officials housed pigs in the region’s mosques just to insult the Uighurs and forbade any traditional religious or cultural celebrations; sometimes they simply burnt mosques to the ground.

Even as the government loosened its hand in other parts of the country in the 1980s and 1990s, control remained tight in Xinjiang, since Beijing always feared separatist sentiment in the province. Even today, Uighurs told me, government officials make it almost impossible for them to go on pilgrimage abroad and security forces monitor activity at every mosque. Beijing has also created incentives for Han Chinese to migrate to the province, changing the ethnic balance and making it harder for Uighurs to find work.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, China commits even worse atrocities: it alleges that, in Xinjiang, “peaceful activists who practice their religion in a manner deemed unacceptable by state authorities or Chinese Communist Party officials are arrested, tortured and at times executed”.

Given this sour history, perhaps it should not have been surprising that, in their post-September 11 sweep of Afghanistan, American forces discovered a group of Uighur men in the Afghan mountains. The US troops immediately assumed the Uighurs had travelled to Afghanistan to attend terrorist training camps, allegedly in the Tora Bora region. Contending they were members of a terror group operating in Xinjiang, US forces shipped 22 of the Uighurs to Guantanamo Bay. But there was one problem: America could not prove the men had done anything wrong.

By 2005, in fact, the Pentagon had decided that most of the Uighurs posed no threat to the United States. Today these same men, declared innocent, still sit inside Guantanamo, where, according to one affidavit, the Uighurs were held round-the-clock in almost total isolation, a condition that could drive anyone insane.

They remained there because, in those intervening years, Washington realised the real problem with the Uighurs, one that will confront Barack Obama as he tries to figure out how to close Guantanamo Bay: What do you do with men you’ve branded as terrorists, once you realised they’re not?

The story of the Uighurs in Guantanamo, which is now being heard in America’s highest courts, might have been the tale of many young men in Xinjiang chafing at Chinese rule and searching for work in a province increasingly dominated by Chinese migrants. On several trips through the province, I found an almost totally balkanised society.

In cities like Kashgar and Urumqi, the capital, thousands of Chinese migrants have arrived, lured by an influx of state money ploughed into new infrastructure projects, like upgraded road and rail systems. The Chinese cluster in their own part of town; one area of Kashgar has been entirely made up of cheap hotels and restaurants catering to migrants from Sichuan province. The Uighurs, meanwhile, keep to their own areas. “I didn’t really speak with many of the Chinese students at my school,” one Uighur girl told me.

Under the surface, anger simmers across Xinjiang. On an average summer Sunday, I visited Kashgar’s famed weekend market, which draws thousands of traders from across Central Asia. Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Uighurs and Pakistanis haggled over long knives from southern Xinjiang, thick woven carpets from Afghanistan and flashy mobile phones from eastern China. Commerce seemed the order of the day. But later that Sunday afternoon, I stopped for a meal at the courtyard home of a Uighur family. After only a few minutes of chatting over slices of the candy-sweet local hami melon, the family’s true feelings emerged. “Uighurs cannot get any jobs – anything good is reserved for Chinese,” one girl said. “We’re just left here, and now we’ll lose our houses” in the Chinese reconstruction of Kashgar, which is levelling many old neighbourhoods.

In recent years some Uighurs have begun acting upon this hatred. To be sure, most live in a cold peace with China, and the region is known for its moderate Islam, which mixed over the years with local folk customs. But in the early 1990s, large anti-China riots broke out in several cities, killing several Chinese officials. More recently, in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, militants allegedly targeted a police post in Kashgar, tossing explosives at the policemen and then attacking them with knives, killing 16. Beijing claims that militant Uighurs have formed several terrorist groups, including one called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. Uighur terror groups have also allegedly claimed responsibility for other recent attacks, including bombings in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2008.

Abu Bakr Qassim could easily have been one of those angry young men. In China, he had slowly become more and more opposed to Beijing’s rule. After joining a series of demonstrations against China in the late 1990s, he wound up in the hands of Chinese security forces, who tortured him with electric shocks before eventually releasing him. Several years later, Abu Bakr journeyed to Afghanistan and Pakistan – possibly to receive militant training, or, as he claims, for completely benign reasons.

Picked up by American forces near the mountains of Tora Bora, Abu Bakr claimed that he’d never had contact with any terror group. He also claimed to have nothing against the United States. In fact, as I learned in Xinjiang, many Uighurs have historically looked up to America, which has consistently highlighted Beijing’s abuses against Chinese Muslims; the Uighurs are among the most pro-America Muslims on earth. “The US is traditionally viewed positively in Xinjiang – a beacon for freedom of expression and religion,” says Nicholas Becquelin, a Uighur expert at Human Rights Watch.

In the furious pace of the Afghan war, of course, American forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan had little time to sort out such stories. Along with 21 other Uighurs, including many captured in Pakistan by bounty hunters eager for reward, Abu Bakr was shipped to a holding centre in Kandahar and packed onto a military flight. The Uighurs thought they were being flown to America, and despite the travelling conditions – blindfolds, shackles – they were overjoyed. As one Uighur human rights activist told me, many of the detainees were thrilled: they expected to be released into the United States.

But instead of arriving in America the Uighurs entered a world of nightmarish and bewildering confinement. As foreign citizens facing charges on US soil, the detainees still did not have the right to file a complaint in an American court. Many learned about al Qa’eda and the war in Afghanistan for the first time after they arrived at Guantanamo. “Al Qa’eda’s name we heard in here,” one detainee told a military tribunal, according to his transcript. “This is the first time I have ever heard of them,” another detainee said when asked about the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

The Uighurs could not even see the evidence against them. One exchange between a Uighur prisoner and the military tribunal perfectly captured this absurdity: “When you accuse me as an enemy combatant, do you have any evidence?” one Uighur detainee asked at a tribunal hearing. “You have all the information you may see now. We will see more information but you are not permitted to see it,” the tribunal president responded. In other hearings, the Uighur detainees showed their ignorance of Islamism in general and Al Qa’eda specifically, confounding their jailers. Many had not even heard about September 11 in Afghanistan.

Like most of the Guantanamo detainees, the Uighurs endured extremely repressive and isolating conditions. One of the Uighurs, who had severe food allergies, found that the guards’ response was simply to feed him nothing. Others started hearing voices after spending years without significant human contact. In a court filing, one of the Uighurs’ lawyers described the men as feeling an intense “abandonment by the world” and living in a constant state of despair. In an unusual letter released to the public, a Uighur detainee named Abdulghappar Turkistani complains that he is “surrounded with a metal box all around” and allowed virtually no light or fresh air. The conditions, he laments, “are not suitable for a human being.”

The Uighurs soon became pawns in a much larger game of US-China relations. Before September 11, the Bush administration, dominated by hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney, vowed to take a hard line with Beijing. But the White House rapidly shifted course after the attacks, realising it couldn’t launch a global war on terror and confront China at the same time. So, even as most American officials quietly doubted whether any real Uighur terrorist groups existed, in 2002 the State Department placed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement on its watchlist of international terror groups, alongside real global threats like al Qa’eda. “The entire mood toward China changed” in the White House, one former Bush administration official told me. “You had no appetite for taking on China now.”

One court filing by the Uighurs’ lawyers suggests the White House went much farther in trying to please China. In the brief, the lawyers suggest that the administration agreed in 2002 to keep the Uighurs locked up in Guantanamo for a lengthy period of time, and in exchange Beijing, a member of the UN Security Council, would not oppose the US invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the White House allowed the very Chinese security services accused of widespread abuses in the State Department’s annual human rights reports to visit Guantanamo and question the Uighur detainees. The US handed files on the Uighur detainees – containing details like the names and addresses of their family members – over to Chinese security forces.

Worst of all, according to one report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, US forces at Guantanamo took part in the questioning of prisoners alongside Chinese interrogators. According to the report, the Americans went so far as to deprive the Uighurs of sleep, heat, and food before Chinese security forces came to their Guantanamo cells, presumably to soften them up for questioning. In testimony to Congress, the Inspector General, Glenn Fine, confirmed as much, saying that US forces utilised sleep deprivation “to put the Uighurs in a position to be interrogated by the Chinese government” and then forcibly restrained the Uighurs so they could be interrogated by the Chinese.

As with many of the other prisoners held at Guantanamo, though, the case against the Uighurs was far from clear. Were they terrorists? Had they actually targeted the US on the field of combat? After all, Guantanamo was designed to hold enemy combatants, not just any militant with separatist aims – the US was not locking up Tamil Tigers or Zapatistas there. Most of the Uighur detainees professed respect for the United States. “America never hurt me; why would I join against them? If I wanted military training it would have been to fight the Chinese government. There have never been problems between the Americans and the Uighurs,” one Uighur detainee said at his tribunal hearing.

Similar to Abu Bakr Qassim, most of the men claimed to be traders who had been travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan on the way to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where they peddled cheap Chinese goods. “When I was in my country the Chinese government tortured our people. We suffered much and I can’t take it … I was in Pakistan and tried to do business, but it didn’t work out,” one detainee said, according to a transcript of his tribunal. (Some transcripts have been publicly released, but others have not; I was able to obtain unreleased and unclassified documents from human rights activists and lawyers.)

One of the younger captives, Ayoub Haji Mamet, 18, said he had been on a long journey with one ultimate goal: trying to get to America to go to school. Some of the Uighurs did admit they’d received limited military training in Afghanistan in order to oppose Beijing in the future, but that they had no plans to commit terrorist attacks, and had nothing against America. Others expressed a decidedly moderate view of Islam. Pressed by the military tribunal to admit he was an Islamic militant who wanted to convert the whole world to his faith, one detainee answered: “People have a choice. You cannot ask people to join; it’s the person’s choice.”

By 2003, many in the Pentagon already had doubts that the Uighurs posed any danger to the US. And by 2005, its review boards formally said the same. Finally, the Uighur captives thought their journey was over. As I learned from several Uighur activists in the US, the detainees, still sympathetic to the US despite their ordeal, believed America might take them as refugees. After all, America had already welcomed Rabeeya Kadeer, probably the most famous Uighur political activist, jailed in China before personal appeals by President Bush helped win her freedom.

In reality, though, the Uighurs’ saga was only beginning. Once they had been determined to be no threat to the US, the White House wanted to get them out of Guantanamo, sensing the potential embarrassment of holding men now essentially deemed innocent. In 2005, a District Court Judge ruled that the White House was breaking US law in continuing to imprison Uighurs who were not enemy combatants. By the end of the following year, Pentagon Administrative Review Boards had approved 21 of the 22 Uighur captives for release.

But the Bush administration – which had loudly proclaimed the Guantanamo detainees to be “the worst of the worst” – had made the men persona non grata everywhere else. “We know that these are dangerous terrorists being kept at Guantá=namo Bay. They are people determined to harm innocent civilians,” the former White House spokesman Scott McClellan once told reporters. Now, the White House wanted to dump these “dangerous terrorists” on another country. A return to China appeared out of the question, for fear the men would be locked up again and tortured back in the People’s Republic, so the administration sought a third country.
Quietly, for fear of offending China, administration officials told me, the White House approached several European countries and Canada, seeking to place the Uighurs. But few countries wanted to take a chance on men tainted by their time in Guantanamo: after all, Washington wouldn’t take them in either. As Becquelin, of Human Rights Watch says: “The US government lost all leverage with third countries by refusing to take on its soil Uighur detainees cleared for release. Many EU countries did not see why they should help the US.”

At the same time, I learned, Beijing was twisting the screws on Berlin, Paris and many other European capitals, where trade with China has become far more important over the past decade – Chinese firms in recent years have bought up European brands such as Britain’s MG Rover and essentially bailed out a range of European financial houses. No country wants to alienate China – and taking in Uighurs as refugees would be a massive slap in the face, a tacit acknowledgement that Beijing’s rule over Xinjiang is harsh and repressive. At one point, the White House thought Canada might take some of the Uighurs, but at the last second Ottawa backed off, thanks to intense pressure from China. Ultimately, several US officials say, the White House tried to get nearly 100 nations to take in the Uighurs, with no takers, due to intense Chinese pressure behind the scenes.

Only two decades removed from a brutal, isolationist dictatorship, the streets of Tirana, capital of the tiny country of Albania, remain dominated by squat, drab Soviet-style apartment blocks that look like oversized rabbit hutches. Many of the apartment blocks are rotting from years of neglect and poverty, their tiny balconies rusting away.

But lonely Albania became the Uighurs’ hope. Deeply indebted to the United States, which helped rescue Albanians’ ethnic brethren in Kosovo in the late 1990s and pushed Albania’s case for joining the European Union, the country had to listen to a Bush administration request. (When President Bush visited the country in 2007, Albanians mobbed him like he was a rock star.)

Shortly before an appeals court hearing to consider the Uighurs’ request for admission to the United States, a military plane brought five of them to Albania. On their way out, according to one account, the guards offered them a brief apology for their poor stay, as if they’d been in a shabby hotel and the room service order got screwed up. Some human rights activists in the US believe that Washington sent them to Albania to prevent them from winning their release into the US and, potentially, telling all about conditions at Guantanamo.

Living on stipends worth less than $100 per month, they struggled to find work or local contacts, since Albania, unlike other European nations such as Germany, has virtually no Uighur community. Mostly, according to people who’ve followed their case, the Uighur refugees studied the Quran all day and worried about their friends back in Guantanamo. Under pressure from China, even Albania eventually decided it would take no more Uighurs, leaving 17 at Guantanamo.

In October 2008, US District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina declared that since the remaining Uighurs had been cleared, they could no longer be jailed at Guantanamo while the White House sought a new home for them; instead, it would have to bring them to America. Inside the courtroom, packed with human rights activists and some Uighurs living in the US, a crowd broke into cheers. In the Washington, DC area, local Uighurs started making plans to take in the refugees and acclimate them to life in America.

Following the ruling, the White House issued a most extraordinary appeal. Admitting the Uighurs were not enemy combatants, the administration still asked a higher court to stay the federal judge’s decision and keep the Uighurs locked up. “The district court’s ruling, if allowed to stand, could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantánamo, including sworn enemies of the US suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

The Uighurs’ bizarre saga is sadly not a unique one: despite declaring that a majority of the detainees at Guantanamo are no longer enemy combatants, the White House still holds some 250 men there – not only Uighurs but also most probably Saudis, Syrians, Egyptians and men from other countries with weak rule of law, for fear of the treatment they will receive if returned home. (The Pentagon keeps the exact national breakdown of Guantanamo detainees secret.) One Tunisian detainee was reportedly forced to sign a document back in Tunisia confessing to being a terrorist – after security forces threatened to rape his wife and daughter. Prisoners released to Tajikistan were quickly sentenced to jail time when they returned home. In another case, documented by Human Rights Watch, the administration released seven Russian detainees back to their home country, despite having little assurance they would be treated humanely. (The State Department’s human rights report chronicles numerous abuses by the Russian security forces.)

Upon arriving at the airport in Russia, Human Rights Watch found, the detainees were immediately beaten in a kind of perverse welcome home, and then thrown in jail without due process and tortured. Their Guantanamo sojourn, apparently, had marked them for life. “I was told many times that after my time in Guantanamo, it wasn’t necessary to prove I was a terrorist,” one of the Russian detainees said.
“The current administration hasn’t taken the problem of torture upon return seriously enough,” says Joanne Mariner, who follows detainee issues at Human Rights Watch. But, she says, she is hopeful that the Obama administration will “resettle some detainees itself” – in America.

Obama has now signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay within a year and banned torture by American forces, making a sharp break from Bush. But closing the prison camp may be easier said than done: within days of Obama’s executive order, the New York Times revealed that a former Guantanamo detainee, Said Ali al Shihri, who had been returned to Saudi Arabia to be rehabilitated, had re-emerged as the number two in al Qa’eda Yemen. Saudi authorities reportedly worry that other former detainees, who have dropped out of their view, have also rejoined militant groups. Even some Democrats worry privately, in light of stories like al Shihri’s, that closing the prison camp too soon may be a mistake.

Obama has not made any major comment on the risk of releasing dangerous men, but one experienced Washington counterterror expert believes he may have to devise some compromise to hold detainees who appear to be genuine militants even if the US lacks sufficient evidence to make a case against them in American courts.

Despite the executive order, Obama’s approach still “keeps all options on the table,” according to the Brookings Institution legal scholar Benjamin Wittes, who says the new administration retains “wide latitude to make policy” if it believes some detainees are too dangerous to be released. “[The executive order] is careful to preserve all options for each detainee. It does not require any detainee’s release or transfer. It does not require any detainee’s prosecution. It does not preclude the eventual use of military commissions or some other alternative trial venue.”
“Even without passing legislation,” Joanne Mariner says, “the new administration might rely de facto on preventive detention to continue to hold some number of Guantanamo detainees without prosecuting them” – just as the Bush administration did.

Indeed, if Obama takes in some of the detainees as refugees to America, he risks losing a huge political battle, since opponents could claim that he is allowing terrorists into the country. (Already, several prominent GOP leaders have attacked Obama over his plans to close the prison.) If he tries to find third countries to take in detainees from valued US allies like Saudi Arabia because of fears of torture and illegal detention back home, he risks offending their governments. And as he releases more men from Guantanamo, Obama may be left with the few detainees who are truly terrorists, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – as well as men who are probably violent jihadists but cannot be prosecuted for lack of admissible evidence.

So the Uighurs wait in Guantanamo. These court decisions did not ease the conditions of their captivity. The Pentagon kept most of the Uighurs, now cleared charges that they fought against the US, in solitary confinement. According to the Washington Post, many remained shackled to the floor.

Back in Xinjiang, some Uighurs seem shockingly placid about America, despite the treatment of their brethren. “Uighurs’ reaction has been both relief and disappointment,” says Nury Turkel, a prominent Uighur activist and lawyer in Washington, DC, who has been in touch with the families of many of the detainees. “They’re relieved because the [US] government has refused to hand the men over to the Chinese.” Or as one Uighur girl told me in 2007, in the ultimate sign of America’s enduring appeal. “I may try to go to Malaysia if I can get a passport [to leave China] … but I hope to come study in America one day at least.”

Eventually, if they wait long enough, the Uighurs in Guantanamo might get so lucky. Perhaps pressure by US courts and human rights activists will force the Obama administration to take a political risk and accept some of the Uighurs still in Cuba. In the past, Uighurs have found the US welcoming, and fit in relatively well; as Turkel notes, before the Guantanamo detentions, the Uighurs had one of the highest rates of refugee acceptance, per capita, into America.

Or, as the world’s anger at the Bush administration and Guantanamo begins to fade, other countries might prove more willing to accept detainees. Portugal has publicly agreed to take in some men and urged other European nations to follow suit; some of them have begun to consider doing so, though it remains to be seen if their generosity will extend to the Uighurs, for fear of angering China.

Yet for some of the Uighurs still at Guantanamo, seven years of captivity, confusion and isolation has soured them irreparably – America has come to remind them, sadly, of their homeland. “Our country does not give us a chance to learn the Quran,” one detainee said, in the midst of his military tribunal, after he realised some of the evidence presented against him was that he’d travelled to Afghanistan to study. “If the US reads the Quran and [says] it is a crime [to read it], what is the difference between the US and China?”

Joshua Kurlantzick is the author of Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World.

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