Uighurs will be relocated to Switzerland

By Mary E. O’Leary, Register Topics Editor

Two Chinese Uighurs, imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for eight years after being turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters, will soon be learning French in their new home in Switzerland thanks to the efforts of a New Haven attorney.

Elizabeth Gilson, whose practice was mainly environmental issues until she volunteered to represent the brothers, got the word this week that they will be relocated in about 60 days.

“It took millions of dollars of attorney costs, eight years and two innocent people before it all came together,” Gilson said of her long fight as part of a team of attorneys.

She worked with lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, who donated their services on behalf of the Uighurs and others held at Guantanamo.

The siblings were among 22 Uighurs swept up in the chaos in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic minority in China, who often flee that country in response to oppression, according to congressional testimony.

Never charged with a crime and eventually found not to be a threat to the U.S., the brothers are part of a group of prisoners who have languished for years at Guantanamo when the U.S. could not find a country willing to grant them asylum. They could not send them back to China for fear they would be tortured.

Bahtiar Mahnut, 32, had an opportunity earlier to leave for Palau, a tiny island in the Pacific, but Gilson said he turned it down when his brother, Arkin Mahnut, 45, did not want to go there because it was temporary and they feared Chinese intervention.

Gilson said the men’s mother in 2001 sent the older brother after Bahtiar to bring him home when he ended up in Afghanistan on his way to Turkey. She said Arkin Mahnut developed a mental illness from his detention, basically post traumatic stress syndrome, but has been doing better lately.

Gilson recently spent a week in Switzerland lobbying on behalf of her clients as the Swiss Federal Council and the Canton Jura agreed to admit them.

“There was intense interest in the case in Switzerland, which was getting pounded by the Chinese” and threatened with loss of a trade agreement if they accepted them, Gilson said. “The Swiss don’t like being threatened by anyone,” she said. Those in opposition argued the U.S. should take in the men.

Imprisoned in solitary confinement for 18 months, the brothers recently have been in a less restricted area at Guantanamo, Gilson said.

She said the Swiss “have a very good system of resettlement. This is a great place to go.” The immersion program includes job training, which they are eager to embrace, she said.

Arkin Mahnut, who was married with two children, is now divorced. “They can never go back to China,” she said.

The advocates have won several court battles in their long fight over habeas corpus rights, but as many reversals. Gilson will stay involved, including working on Supreme Court appeal briefs due March 23.

Source: New Haven Register.
Link: http://newhavenregister.com/articles/2010/02/06/news/a3-neuighurs.txt.