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5 Men Leave Guantánamo for a Bleak,
Uncertain Future
By NEIL A. LEWIS
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — Early on May 5, five Asian
men who had been detained at the prison camp in
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for years as dangerous
terrorists, boarded a military transport plane at the
United States naval base there.
The men had just exchanged their prison garb for jeans,
T-shirts and slip-on sneakers but were still in
handcuffs as they boarded the plane, where they were
shackled to bolts in the floor and surrounded by more
than 20 armed soldiers. About 14 hours later, the
plane landed in Albania, a poor Balkan nation eager to
please Washington.
Interviews with lawyers and several officials in the
United States and abroad showed that the flight, to a
freedom of sorts for the five men, involved intense
behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity in Washington;
Ottawa; Tirana, Albania; Beijing; and elsewhere.
It also held implications for a United States Appeals
Court, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the
relations of several European countries with China.
And it underlined the Bush administration’s
difficulties in reducing the population at Guantánamo
as international calls for it to be closed increased.
The five men were Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who
had been captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks. They had traveled there from their
homeland in the Xinjiang province of China, where the
Uighur people, most of whom are Muslims, have fought a
low-level insurgency against Beijing’s rule for years.
For the five Uighurs, the transfer to Albania meant
exchanging a military prison camp on the southeastern
tip of Cuba for a bleak and unpromising future in one
of Europe’s poorest countries where no one spoke their
language. One of them, Abu Bakker Qassim, said in an
interview, “I would rather be in a society where I can
be with some of my countrymen, but where we are is
better than Guantánamo.”
For the Bush administration, one of the immediate
results of the transfer was an opportunity to sidestep
yet another court challenge to its detention policies.
Shortly after the five men landed in Tirana, Albania’s
capital and largest city, and only minutes before the
close of business in Washington on a Friday, the
Justice Department filed a brief with a federal
appeals court there. The brief asked the court to
cancel a hearing the next Monday on the Uighurs’
challenge to their continued detention in Guantánamo
Bay. They had been held there for more than a year
after the military’s special tribunal system had
determined they were not “enemy combatants,” the
ostensible reason for their imprisonment.
A federal judge had ruled that the Uighurs’ continued
detention at Guantánamo was illegal and disgraceful,
but he said he could not order them admitted to the
United States, as their lawyers had requested. The
appeals court was considering that issue. The Bush
administration has opposed allowing Guantánamo
detainees into the United States.
Upon learning the Uighurs were no longer at Guantánamo,
the appeals court canceled the hearing.
A senior State Department official said in an
interview that more than 100 countries had been
approached about accepting the Uighurs but that only
Albania did. Even though they were innocent, the
official said, the five Uighurs could not be
repatriated to China because Beijing regarded them as
terrorists, and the law prohibited sending prisoners
to places where they might be persecuted.
The countries that declined, including Washington’s
best European allies, did not want to antagonize
China, officials and analysts said.
The State Department official said the timing of their
departure and the scheduled court argument was a
coincidence. But a senior Justice Department official
said there had been an intense push to avoid a
situation in which the appeals court could order the
Uighurs admitted into the United States. Both
officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of
the delicacy of diplomatic relations.
For Albania, the willingness to accept the Uighurs
solidified that nation’s standing with the United
States and brought it a confrontation with China,
which had been its patron during Albania’s split from
the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
On the weekend of the Uighurs’ arrival in Tirana, the
Chinese ambassador there protested to the Albanian
prime minister, insisting they be returned to China.
The ambassador repeated the demand on Monday.
But the following day, May 7, Vice President Dick
Cheney publicly endorsed Albania’s much-hoped-for bid
to join NATO. Charles Gati, an authority on Eastern
Europe and a professor of European studies at the
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of
Johns Hopkins University, said that Albania had
courted Washington in recent years.
“They’re very eager to get into NATO, and to do this
they have offered their services in a variety of ways,”
Professor Gati said. “This is clearly what happened
here.”
Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who was at Mr.
Cheney’s side when he announced United States support
for Albania’s NATO bid, along with the bids of Croatia
and Macedonia, said in a statement later that week
that he trusted Washington’s assurances that the men
were not terrorists and that he was proud to provide a
humanitarian favor to Washington.
China remained unappeased and seemingly went beyond
diplomatic pronouncements. In the first week of June,
a Chinese delegation arrived unannounced at the
barbed-wire-enclosed refugee camp on the outskirts of
Tirana and demanded access to the Uighurs. Their
intentions were unclear, but Albanian officials denied
them entry.
Early this month, the Albanian government granted
asylum to the Uighurs. The Albanian ambassador to
Washington, Aleksander Sallabanda, said in a statement,
“Our government is proud of its cooperation with the
United States in the war on terror.”
For the five Uighurs, the consequences of the move to
Albania were more prosaic and dispiriting. At the time
of their transfer, their lawyers had been making
progress in negotiating with the Canadian government
for them to settle there. Canada has a thriving Uighur
community, largely in Toronto.
But that possibility stalled when they were sent to
Albania, their lawyers said.
More than 100 prisoners at Guantánamo were initially
found to be enemy combatants and then ruled eligible
to be freed but were not because it was impracticable
to return them to their home countries, and no other
country would accept them.
That group includes a few other Uighur prisoners at
Guantánamo who have not been transferred to Albania
because, their lawyers say, they have no scheduled
court argument that the administration hopes to avoid.
The freed Uighurs now spend most of their days in the
refugee camp in a poor slum of Tirana, according to
Sabin Willett, a lawyer in Boston who represents two
of the men. Mr. Willett said he had learned of the
transfer only after it happened, and he went to Tirana
that Monday.
Michael Sternhell, a New York lawyer who represents
the other three Uighurs, said the men “are still
effectively behind bars.” Mr. Sternhell says they have
difficulty even traveling to the center of Tirana, and
they use most of their monthly allowance of 40 Euros
to call their families in China. The Albanian
government provides room and meals at the center, for
which it is reimbursed by the United States.
Although the Uighurs feel marooned in Albania, they
are grateful to the government there. “Given that no
other country is taking us, we’re all right with this,”
said Mr. Qassim, a 37-year-old father of four who acts
as the group’s spokesman. Speaking by telephone from
the refugee center through a translator retained by
The New York Times, Mr. Qassim said that the problems
had begun when he and several fellow Uighurs had left
their home to find a place to study the Koran, a
practice he said was forbidden in China.
They went to Pakistan and then to Jalalabad,
Afghanistan, he said. After the Sept. 11 attacks, a
group of 17 Uighurs returned to Pakistan, where local
tribesmen welcomed them warmly. After a lamb feast,
the villagers betrayed them. They were taken to a
mosque ostensibly to worship, but instead, Mr. Qassim
and his lawyers said, they were sold to United States
forces.
According to the transcripts of tribunals held at
Guantánamo, they were accused of engaging in guerrilla
training, but officials would not tell them on what
basis they had made the accusations because the
information was classified. Mr. Qassim said the
Uighurs had indeed learned to use rifles while in
Jalalabad, but he said weapons training was common in
Afghanistan, and he had never heard of Osama bin Laden
or Al Qaeda.
Mr. Qassim and the four other men who would wind up in
Albania were deemed not to have been enemy combatants.
The 12 others in their group were classified as such.
“It’s a mystery as to why we were released and the
others are still languishing behind bars,” he said. He
said the United States had made a “mistake” in
believing the Uighurs were radical Islamists opposed
to the United States. Mr. Qassim said his people had
always admired the United States and had hoped that
one day America would rally to the Uighurs’ cause for
freedom.
“We still believe the U.S. is a good country with good
people,” he said. “But the government has made a
mistake and is still making it.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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