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US Fails to Find Homes
for Uighur Detainees
October 28 2004
Demetri Sevastopulo -Washington
Germany and other European countries have refused US
requests to accept Chinese prisoners being held at
Guantánamo Bay as refugees, complicating US efforts to
avoid sending them back to China.
The Pentagon wants to release more than half of some
two dozen Uighur Chinese being held at Guantánamo
because they have no intelligence value, according to
a senior State Department official. The US has not
sent them back to China for fear they could be
executed. But Washington has so far been unable to
persuade other countries to take them.
US officials and foreign diplomats confirmed that
Switzerland, Finland and Norway had also refused.
Johanna Suurpaa, director for human rights at the
Finnish ministry of foreign affairs, said: “We took
the position that we would expect UNHCR [United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] to be actively
involved.”
Another US official said UNHCR was reluctant to get
involved because of possible repercussions for its
activities related to North Korean refugees in China.
The State Department official said the US has provided
the UNHCR with information about the detainees and was
considering the possibilty that the agency could
interview the Uighurs.
Ron Redmond, UNHCR spokesman, denied that the agency
was concerned about antagonising China. He said UNHCR
was holding ongoing discussions with the US, but added
that the US had not provided much of the information
needed to consider the issue.
The US has also approached Italy, France, Portugal,
Austria and Turkey to accept some of the Uighurs, who
were captured in Afghanistan. They come from Xinjiang
province in north-west China, where Muslim separatists
have long fought a low-level insurgency against
Beijing.
China says Uighur separatists should be treated like
any other terrorists targeted by the US. But human
rights groups fear Beijing is using the US-led war on
terror as an excuse to crack down on nonviolent Uighur
activists.
Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in
Washington, said Beijing considers the Uighurs at
Guantánamo to be “East Turkmenstan terrorists” who
should be returned to China. He urged the US not to
have “double standards” on the issue of terrorists.
“The most principled answer would be for the US to
take some of these people and for other countries to
take some,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.
“Most European countries are very willing to openly
criticise the US over its excesses involving holding
detainees at Guantánamo. But I sometimes wonder
whether the same European countries are happy that the
US has taken this problem off their hands.”
US efforts to persuade other countries to accept the
Uighurs have been hindered by its own reluctance to
take any. Washington is concerned that allowing the
Uighurs into the US would jeopardise relations with
Beijing.
The State Department official said the US was trying
to determine whether its immigration laws would allow
it to accept some of the Uighurs. But he added that
the Uighurs have asked to be sent to a country with a
substantial Uighur population, such as Germany.
In August, Colin Powell, secretary of state, said the
US would not return the Uighurs to China, prompting
concern among some administration officials that he
had gone too far. But in a recent interview with the
Far East Economic Review, Mr Powell said only that the
US had not yet found a solution consistent with its
obligations under international law.
The State Department official said that one country
had signalled interest in taking the Uighurs. But he
said the US would have to consider sending the Uighurs
back to China if the US and other countries could not
take them. But he said the administration would
require “ironclad” guarantees from the Chinese that
they would not be persecuted.
The Uighurs are not the only problem the Pentagon has
faced in trying to release prisoners from Guantánamo.
The FT reported in June that the Pentagon freed more
than two dozen prisoners from Guantánamo in January
after some were found to have been wrongly imprisoned.
Four detainees, including a Syrian and an Iranian,
were sent to a US-run prison at Baghram, Afghanistan,
because they could not be repatriated.
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2004.
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