Six More Uyghurs Freed

2009-10-31

Another cohort of Uyghur detainees is freed from Guantanamo to a Pacific island.

WASHINGTON—Six Uyghur men held for seven years in U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay have been released and have now reached the tiny Pacific island of Palau, authoritative sources have told Radio Free Asia (RFA).

The men were identified as Adel Nury, 40; Ahmed Tursun, 38; Abdulghappar Abdulrahman, 36; Anwar Hasan, 35; Edhem Mohammed, 31; and Dawud Abdulrehim, 35.

They landed in Palau in the early hours of Sunday after a 17-hour direct military flight, along with three U.S. lawyers, Rushan Abbas, a longtime translator for the Uyghur detainees at Guantanamo Bay, said in a telephone interview, citing contacts with the men and their lawyers.

A new Uyghur translator was flown in from Australia and was to remain indefinitely, she said in an interview.

No comment was immediately available from the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.

They were among a larger group of 22 ethnic Uyghurs captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan and sold for bounty to U.S. forces after fleeing the mountains in the wake of U.S.-led raids, following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

They say they were living as refugees in Afghanistan, having faced religious persecution in China.

Four were transferred to Bermuda in June 2009 while five others were resettled in Albania in 2006. One man in that group has since resettled in Sweden.

Seven men left

The transfer of these six men leaves seven in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, who say they cannot return to China for fear of persecution.

The United States maintained that the men had attended terror-training camps, and they were flown to Guantanamo Bay in June 2002.

The Republic of Palau is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, some 500 miles (800 kms) east of the Philippines and 2,000 miles (3,200 kms) south of Tokyo.

After a series of military tribunals and courtroom battles, they were cleared of links to global terrorism—but most governments refused to take them in for fear of angering Beijing, which regards them as terrorists.

The U.S. Supreme Court this month agreed to review the cases of all remaining Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

The group was originally ordered released into the States in October last year by U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina here.

But his decision was overturned after an appeals court ruled that District Court judges don’t have the authority to order the transfer of ­foreigners into the U.S.; only Congress and the executive branch do.

Uyghurs in China

Millions of Uyghurs—a distinct, Turkic minority who are predominantly Muslim—populate Central Asia and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of northwestern China.

Ethnic tensions between Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese settlers have simmered for years, and they erupted in rioting in July that left some 200 people dead, according to the government’s tally.

The six men may have difficulty reaching their relatives in the XUAR because Chinese authorities have imposed a telephone and Internet blackout over the whole region in an apparent bid to avoid further ethnic violence.

Twelve people have since been sentenced to death in connection with the violence, which was the worst the country has experienced in decades.

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China's ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Chinese authorities blame Uyghur separatists for a series of deadly attacks in recent years and accuse one group in particular of maintaining links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.