Freed Uighur Praises Obama, Slams China On Guantanamo

Freed Uighur Praises Obama, Slams China On Guantanamo

Guantanamo-4 Abu Bakker Qassim, a Chinese Muslim freed from Guantanamo, says his joy at Barack Obama's prompt decision to close the US prison has been soured by Beijing's insistence that he's a "terrorist."
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US President "Obama has understood that Guantanamo was a huge mistake which should be corrected, but China still considers us as terrorists," Qassim said in an interview with AFP.

Qassim is one of five Chinese ethnic Uighurs resettled in Albania after being released from the Cuban detention camp in 2006. He was among several Uighurs captured in Pakistan when the US launched its "war on terror."

Beijing has demanded all Chinese nationals from Guantanamo be returned but Washington held them back for fear the Beijing government would persecute or torture them.

US authorities asked nearly two dozen nations to provide asylum for the Uighurs, with all but Albania apparently refusing partly because they did not want to anger the Chinese.

Qassim still hopes that, with US assistance, he could one day be able to rejoin his family in China, whom he has not seen for nine years.

"Neither the United Nations were able to help us, nor Albania," he said.

"We cannot return to China because it accuses us of being linked with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)," said the 39-year-old, who has been trying to start a new life in Albania's capital Tirana.

ETIM has been fighting to re-establish the independent state of East Turkestan in Xinjiang since the province became an autonomous region of China in 1955.

At the time of their release to Albania, China demanded the handover of the five, describing them as members of a grouping the United Nations listed as a terrorist organisation.

Albanian authorities indicated they "would enquire seriously into the activities of these people" after their release from Guantanamo.

Ajup Muhamet, 25, the youngest in the group, has enrolled in a Tirana university and said he would like to marry an Albanian woman.

Two other Uighurs have given permission to their wives in China to remarry, but Qassim does not want to do so.

He has a family, a wife and three children whose photos cover almost all the walls in his tiny Tirana flat.
In Tirana, he said, he lives "under threats and prejudices because of being a former Guantanamo prisoner, and still unjustified terrorist claims by China."

"In Guantanamo, we kept our beards as this was a part of our customs, but after coming to Tirana, I had it shaved because there are still people like everywhere else who think all those with beards are terrorists," said Qassim, dressed in a well-tailored Western suit.

Like the four other Uighurs, he spent four and a half years in Guantanamo, which he described as a place where "laws do not exist, and people are nothing but numbers."

He is still haunted by the days spent in a cage-like cell of only two square metres, with thick iron bars.
"I still have nightmares, sometimes it seems that I again hear the screams and cries of the prisoners, some of whom have gone insane after torture and psychological pressure," said Qassim, known in Guantanamo as prisoner 283.

During his three years in Albania, he has been working as a pizza maker, regularly goes to the mosque and often prepares traditional Uighur dishes in a Turkish friend's restaurant.

Qassim and his friends say they are mostly at home in Albania, which has also welcomed three other former Guantanamo detainees from Egypt, Algeria and Uzbekistan.

"But there are still 17 other Uighurs who are in Guantanamo and no one wants to accept them," said Qassim.

However he also worries about his future in Albania, whose government is to halt its financial assistance for the five by the end of this year, meaning an end to accommodation payments.

"It is necessary for Obama to intervene, to use his influence with the Albanian authorities for us to be able to continue living here," he said.

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