Nury A Turkel

Nury Turkel: Why Western leaders have failed the Uighurs

2009-07-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

Nury Turkel: Why Western leaders have failed the Uighurs

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

When I was growing up, we Uighurs were discriminated against because of our race, of course. But at least back then the Beijing government didn't try to portray us as terrorists. At least the Han Chinese weren't made to believe that we were evil. I went from East Turkistan to China proper for my university education, and nobody made me learn Chinese. We might not have been politically free, but we had some level of religious and cultural choice. And it's not like that now. These days, you have to learn about Uighur history in Chinese.

So the way events have unfolded is not surprising – but the scale of it is. The government has a history of brutal crackdowns, but nothing like this: what's happening in Urumqi is at another level. It's horrifying. And one thing has to be made clear: the people who have taken to the streets are not separatists. They are not terrorists. They were carrying a Chinese flag. It takes a lot for a Uighur to carry a Chinese flag, but they knew what the consequences of stepping outside of the legal framework could be. They are law-abiding Chinese citizens demanding justice. And yet they were labelled separatists, and ruthlessly punished. After another protest in 1997, we saw mass arrests, disappearances, torture, draconian prison sentences and executions. My fear is that the same could happen to those locked up after the demonstrations now. And no Chinese lawyer will dare to defend them.

In such dire circumstances, Uighurs living abroad are, of course, desperate to contact their friends and relatives at home. But my friends say to me that they don't dare to call or email, because they are scared that they could make their family subject to action from the government, and so they're sitting on their hands. It's terrible to be cut off like that.

In the face of such repression, such a limited reaction from the international community is incredibly disappointing. Powerful leaders around the world have assured the Uighurs that they will come to their aid when they make peaceful, legitimate demands – and now that has happened, and all the White House can manage is to call on all parties to restrain themselves. And the European leaders have remained silent.

In Iran, where their national security is at stake, Western leaders have jumped at the chance to condemn the actions of a repressive regime; but in China, the value of human rights has been trumped by considerations of national interest. We expected statesmen to speak up, and they have failed us. Meanwhile, the international media, which is sceptical of Chinese claims on every issue from Tibet to Taiwan, takes the government's claims at face value.

The truth is that whatever they claim, this crackdown doesn't bring peace and security closer: it pushes them further away. What the Uighurs want is not unreasonable. If the provincial government had done their job and brought to justice the criminals who beat up Uighur workers in a toy factory, none of this would have happened.

But there are larger issues at stake. Since I left, life in China for the Uighurs has gotten worse on all fronts. All the things we used to value, like our own language, our religious freedom, have been taken away. But those are the things we draw are identity from. If they are taken away with violence, what else is left?

Of course the Uighurs are fed up: they are living in an open prison. In theory, at least, you shouldn't have to be Han Chinese to live freely in China. The Uighurs have the same rights as everyone else.

The author is a Uighur-American lawyer and activist living in Washington

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...s-1736225.html

Free the Gitmo 60

2009-05-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

Free the Gitmo 60

By Sabin Willett
Special to NYDailyNews.com

Wednesday, May 20th 2009, 9:17 AM

This month my Uighur clients began their eighth year in the Guantanamo Bay prison. Long ago they were cleared by both the military and our courts. They are neither our enemies, nor terrorists, nor criminals. But when press accounts surfaced that they might at long last be released, hysteria came over the Congress, and last week the House passed a bill that would bar their release here.

That would amount to a life sentence. They are dissident refugees from Communist China, and cannot be returned because of real fears of torture. In almost five years of trying, no other country will take them.

These men won their cases in court, and they were cleared by the military as nondangerous. That didn't matter. On news that they might at last be released, the most astonishing stories began to circulate about the men. That the men were Al Qaeda, for example. (They had never heard of Al Qaeda, and no one even alleged that before.) That they were part of something called the "East Turkestan Islamic Movement," a libel the courts rejected more than a year ago. That they were nevertheless dangerous, even though under President George Bush, the Justice Department told a federal judge that they had no evidence of dangerousness, and the military in 2004-05 approved the Uighurs for release to the civilian populations of our allies. That they advocated "Jihadism," "Sharia law," and so on, which was pure fiction, never before alleged, not true, just, as the President once said, "making stuff up."

This week Newt Gingrich weighed in, saying these men had "smashed a television" because it depicted "women with bare arms." Another lie. Just a flat-out falsehood, based on air. It never happened.

The truth is that five Uighur companions from Afghanistan have lived peacefully among civilian populations in the capitals of Albania and Sweden for three years now. But facts don't seem to matter when demagogues are whipping up hysteria.

In a larger sense, the Uighurs are beside the point. What this is really about is whether we Americans are serious when we boast that we care about freedom, or whether we are a small, narrow-chested people, easily panicked by demagogues like Gingrich.

There are about 60 men at Gitmo, like the Uighurs, who are neither enemies nor criminals in anyone's estimation. No law justifies their imprisonment. They have been held in a military prison for longer than any real enemy of the country was ever held before. So what are we going to do about them?

One answer is, free them. Because in this country we just don't capture and imprison people without a legal reason. If that is what we Americans believe, then we have to free 60 or so stateless people. We cannot expect that some other country is going to provide all the asylum grants. That is just not adult behavior. (Although reasonable adults would also conclude that if we would take some, allies would help with others. That's also how adult behavior works.)

The other answer is, the hell with them. They stay there forever. And I really do mean forever. The U.S. has pitched the Uighurs to allies for five years now, and China's influence is not exactly shrinking. We don't seriously think that a hysterical smear campaign about jihadism, Sharia law, and ETIM is going to persuade some other country that they are just peachy for its civilian populations, do we? "The hell with them," is what the House bill says.

If that's our view, we need to be honest with ourselves about our American values. We are fine with holding people in a prison forever, without any legal basis. That's who the 111th Congress thinks we are.

We talk a lot in this country about freedom. But talk is cheap. If we follow the House's actions, then we may care about security, but we don't give a damn about freedom.

Willett is a partner at Bingham McCutchen, which represents six Uighur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Meet the real Uyghurs

2009-05-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Meet the real Uyghurs

Foreign Policy Magazine

By Nury A. Turkel

Wed, 05/20/2009 - 6:29pm

Newt Gingrich needs to read up before he defames my entire ethnic group.

Writing in the Washington Examiner last week, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned the Obama administration that a group of 17 Uyghurs, held in Guantánamo Bay since 2002, would be a threat to U.S. national security if transferred to American soil. "[T]hey are trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001," he wrote. "They have no place in American communities."

These claims are irresponsible and untrue. And the title of his work, "Let's NOT meet the Uyghurs" extends the accusation to all Uyghur people. Uyghurs are not terrorists; nor are they a threat. In fact, Uyghurs could be a natural U.S. ally.

Uyghurs are the Tibetans you haven't heard about. Ethnic Turkic people from the Chinese Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Uyghurs have long faced discrimination and persecution as a minority -- a fact recognized repeatedly by the U.S. Congress and State Department, which has noted China's insidious strategy of using the U.S. war on terror as pretext to oppress independent religious leaders and peaceful political dissenters. Uyghurs' struggle for self-rule is one against dictatorship and communism, not one to establish a sharia state through violence (as Gingrich claims, in a curious echo of Chinese government propaganda).

Nothing about the Uyghur cause involves hostility toward the United States or association with terrorist groups. In the case of the detained Uyghurs, this too has been recognized by the United States. In June 2008, a D.C. Circuit Court unanimously ruled that the U.S. government's designation of Huzaifa Parhat, one of the 17 Uyghurs at Guantánamo, as an enemy combatant was invalid. The U.S. government's case, they concluded, was insufficient, unreliable, and based on attenuated guilt-by-association reasoning. The panel found no evidence that Parhat was a member of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), that ETIM was associated with either al Qaeda or the Taliban, or that ETIM had ever fought against the United States. Supposed proof that detainees had undergone "terrorist training" is dubious at best. The detainees were able to break down and reassemble a single Kalashnikov rifle. To classify this experience as "terrorist training" would require a radical logic leap.

Every one of the 17 Uyghur detainees at Guantánamo has repeatedly denied being part of ETIM, or of being sympathizers of al Qaeda or the Taliban. They should remain innocent -- both legally and in public discourse -- unless proven guilty.

As the discussion about the fate of these men goes forward, it is not the danger that the Uyghur detainees pose to the United States that is of greatest concern, but the danger China poses to detainees. Were it not for the grave threat of persecution that these men face from the Chinese government, they would have been returned home years ago. In just one example from 2002, a U.S. Department of Justice report cites claims that U.S. agents at Guantánamo collaborated with Chinese counterparts in the rough treatment of Uyghur detainees prior to scheduled interviews with the Chinese agents.

Finding a new home for the displaced Uyghurs is the U.S. government's duty. Gingrich finds preposterous the idea of relocating them to a place like, as he put it, "Fairfax Country Virginia, where there is already a sizable (non-terrorist) Uighur community." But why is the idea so preposterous? The Uyghurs are not a threat to U.S. communities. Just look at the five Uyghur companions who were released from Guantánamo in 2006 and have lived peaceably and productively in Europe for three years now.

I am a new citizen of the United States, but I know enough about the shining ideals that brought me -- and millions of other immigrants -- here to know that fearmongering rhetoric like Gingrich's is the real threat to America.

Nury A. Turkel is a Uyghur-American attorney in Washington.

Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images for Comedy Central

Uighur Justice

2008-06-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA

OPINION

Uighur Justice
By NURY A. TURKEL

June 26, 2008

The controversy over the right of habeas corpus for U.S. terror detainees has obscured the fact that the legal process put in place by Congress for settling other detainee appeals has been quietly at work. On Monday, an appeals court hearing one such case found that Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur from China, was not an "enemy combatant." The court ordered the military to release him, transfer him to another prison or hold a new hearing.

Mr. Parhat and the 16 other Uighurs currently detained in Guantánamo have all been cleared for release by the U.S. military. Congress is also supportive. On June 4, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D., MA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R., CA) proposed resettlement for them in the U.S. The two Congressmen have also petitioned Defense Secretary Robert Gates for assistance.

Resettling these detainees might not be simple, but after their six years of detention, it is the right thing to do. Uighurs are an ethnic Turkic people who live in China's vast northwest regions. The 17 Guantánamo Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many were snared by bounty hunters and sold to the U.S. military. Some of these Uighurs may admittedly be fighters. But they have no beef with the U.S. or its allies -- their fight is against China.

Like Tibetans, Uighurs have endured decades of discrimination and brutal oppression under Chinese rule. A religious and ethnic minority, they are routinely denied basic civil, religious and political rights. Uighurs are -- almost without exception -- the only ethnic group in China to be routinely executed for political offenses. Since 9/11, China has used the U.S.-led "war on terror" as an excuse to oppress Uighurs with impunity, persecuting many who have peacefully protested their treatment. China regularly dubs Uighur historians, poets and writers "intellectual terrorists" and sends them to jail. In 2005, a young intellectual, Nurmemet Yasin, was sentenced to a decade in prison for writing an allegory likening the Uighur predicament to that of a pigeon in a cage.

To its credit, the Bush administration has refused China's requests to repatriate the Guantánamo Uighurs, recognizing that such an action would effectively condemn them to prolonged torture, imprisonment or death once they reached China. In 2006, however, the U.S. sent five Uighurs to Albania, without notifying their attorneys. Today, four of them reside there in a kind of permanent limbo, unable to reconstitute their families or to work, while the fifth is seeking asylum in Sweden.

Until Communist China recognizes Uighurs' democratic freedoms, U.S. resettlement is a far better solution. Uighurs constitute perhaps the most pro-American and pro-Western Muslims in the world. In the early 20th century, the Uighurs' homeland of East Turkistan was the first secular and democratic republic in the Muslim world, outside of Turkey. The Uighurs want to re-establish this republic, complete with guarantees of religious freedom and peaceful enjoyment of their human rights. Many Uighurs fully agree when America professes the need to end tyranny in the world. They maintain that democracy and respect for human rights is the best defense against terrorism.

Americans, the most welcoming of people, certainly have a right to ask why they should welcome the Guantánamo Uighurs. Many probably don't realize that they are already living amongst Uighur-Americans. Uighurs have fled Chinese communist persecution since 1950s. Most of us were granted asylum by the U.S. government and are now contributing members of American society as scientists, professors and doctors, among other professions. Uighurs have one of the highest percentages of asylum approval in the U.S.

Opening America's doors to the Uighurs would be a constructive step toward regaining the respect of American allies who have been critical of the Bush administration's detention policies. Remember: Uighurs remain in Guantánamo not for the danger they pose to the U.S., but for the danger China poses to them. According to media accounts, American diplomats have reached out to over 100 countries to seek resettlement for the Uighurs. But these efforts have largely failed. A number of countries have reportedly been threatened with economic and political repercussions by China, should they accept any of the Guantánamo Uighurs.

China's reaction to a U.S. resettlement of Uighurs would be fiercely negative. But the U.S. can explain that it is acting in accordance with the rule of law. Further, none have been judged to a threat to the U.S. If the U.S. resettled the 17 Guantánamo Uighurs, the over 10 million Uighurs inside China would learn of this decision via America's Radio Free Asia broadcasts -- as they have learned of so many others of American efforts to promote human rights inside China. They would understand that American society will not assist China in crushing the Uighurs and their secular democratic aspirations.

Mr. Turkel is a lawyer and former president of the Uyghur American Association.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1214...googlenews_wsj

City on the Hill or Prison on the Bay? The Mistakes of Guantanamo and the Decline of America's Image

2008-06-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

Testimony of Sabin Willett

Good Afternoon, Chairman Delahunt, and members of the subcommittee.
Thank you for holding this hearing.

I am a lawyer from Boston. At Bingham McCutchen LLP, most of our clients are America's corporate mainstream: banks, bondholders and businesses. But we also represent Uighur prisoners at Guantanamo. I do this work for a simple reason. When I go to see my clients in the Guantanamo prison, I have to walk beneath my flag. I'm not happy about it being there. I want it back.

This subcommittee has already heard about the Uighur dissidents from Communist China who were caught up in the so-called War on Terror.
This Spring you read reports from China's state news agency describing Tibetan monks as "terrorists." That is the word the Communists have used for the Uighurs too. Ever since 9/11.

One of my clients is Huzaifa Parhat. He's never been charged with anything. He never will be. In fact, he's been cleared for release for years. Two weeks ago he began his seventh year at Guantanamo.

He believes in freedom of worship and denounces state-enforced abortion. He doesn't care for communism. In China, beliefs like Huzaifa's are called "intellectual terrorism." Uighurs are regularly tortured for it. Some are put to death. I can remember when we Americans admired people who stood up for such beliefs in the face of tyranny. Now we offer them -- what do they call it? -- a "single occupancy" cell in Camp Six.

Interrogators advised in 2003 that his capture was a mistake. State has been trying to find a country to which to send him. But our allies read the same shrill rhetoric about Guantanamo that you have read. And the shadow of the communists falls over all the capitals of Europe. Nobody else wants Huzaifa. I used to think of us Americans, Mr. Chairman, as broad-shouldered, able to admit mistakes and put them right, but my government thinks we are a small people, so panicked by real enemies that we lock up imaginary ones. Forever.

When did we become such a small people?

Huzaifa lives in a place called Camp Six. My information, which dates from March, is that all the Uighurs but one are kept there. The men call it the dungeon above the ground. Each lives alone in an isolation cell. There is no natural light or air. There is no way to tell whether it is day or night. Outside the cell is a noisy bedlam of banging doors and the indistinct shouts of desperate men crouching at door cracks. A mad-house. Inside the cell, nothing.

Mr. Chairman, can you remember the last time you were alone -- I mean really alone? Nothing to read, no phone, music, computer, television, radio, activity; no companion, no one to talk to. That's been Huzaifa's life for most of the time since December, 2006.

For two hours in twenty four, the MPs shackle and lead Huzaifa to the rec area. This is a two-story chimney, about four meters square. It is his only chance to talk to another human being, or see the sun.
But his rec time might be night; it might be after midnight. Weeks go by during which he never sees the sun at all. Mr. Chairman, you try talking to a man who only wants to see the sun. You will never forget the experience.

In the cell he can crouch at the door, and yell through the crack at the bottom. The fellow in the next cell may respond, or he might be curled in the fetal position, staring at the wall. Another Uighur told us of the voices in his head. The voices were getting the better of him. His foot was tapping on the floor. I don't know what's happened to him: he doesn't come out of the cell to see us any more.

A letter from a third was released last December. He wondered, did someone need to commit suicide before anyone notices? A friend has a client who used to be thought of by the command as a model prisoner, well grounded, level headed. Now he has lost hope; he has lost control; he seethes with anger. His mind is wrecked by isolation.

Huzaifa believes he will die in Guantanamo. Last year he asked us to pass a message to his wife that she should remarry.

The Uighurs are not the enemy. Under Article I of our Constitution, Mr. Chairman, you in Congress, and you in Congress alone, have the power to name the enemy. The President is the chief general and admiral, but you are the "deciders." It is your job to say who the enemy is; his to snap a salute. And you never declared war on the Uighurs. Nor on "terror," for that matter.

But suppose, for a moment, that the Uighurs were the enemy. Would you leave them in Camp Six? In a prison? In isolation? Not if you've read the service Field Manuals. Not if you were Generals Ridgway, Westmoreland, Schwartzkopf or Powell, you wouldn't. Yet this afternoon in Camp Six, we Americans are applying the same isolation techniques that North Korea used on our own airmen in 1952. The cells are shinier, and the paint fresher, but the cruel destruction of the human soul is the same. In 1952, our ambassador went to the General Assembly of the United Nations to denounce this kind of thing as barbaric. How quaint of him.

The worst prison in America, holding the absolute worst, convicted, violent criminals, does not treat them this way. Even the Unabomber has more human contact.

Perhaps the camp commandant would say Huzaifa has misbehaved in some way. The command hasn't told me. In the grinding, endless heat of Guantanamo, tensions simmer. MPs wanting any post but GTMO -- guards who were twelve years old when Huzaifa was brought there -- handle, or mishandle a Koran, or gawk at a prisoner on the toilet, who, caged like an animal, behaves like one. Or someone thinks so. After six years, it hardly matters. The tensions boil over.

Have the Uighurs boiled over, in their seventh year? Five years after being told they were innocent and would be released? Would I boil over? Would you? In the service Field Manuals you will find provisions for disciplining those who disobey camp rules. The maximum period for solitary is two weeks.

I'd like to tell you about another detainee during wartime. In 1944, he was held at Fort Mackay, near where I go to work in Boston. He had served a Fascist tyrant in league with the most dangerous madman in this history of Europe; he had shot to kill Americans during a desperate world war we feared might change our civilization forever.

Still, the commandant did not throw the Italian prisoner away in a camp six. He lived communally. When hostilities with Italy ended in 1944, he couldn't be repatriated -- Italy was still in flames -- so we Americans did the next best thing. Leave was given to visit the North End. He went to Mass. He played bocci along the Esplanade. He was given a job, and earned pay. At Carson's beach, girls passed him notes through the fence. There were no proposals of torture, and not a few of marriage.

Do Uighurs in 2008 frighten us more than the Axis forces frightened Navy Captain Errol Willett in 1944, or are we just a smaller people than our grandparents were?

When Congress stripped the Uighurs' habeas rights in 2005, my clients filed under the new Detainee Treatment Act. I know something about that Act, having litigated one of the lead cases. It is a train wreck. It took us a year and three rounds of briefing just to establish what the record is, and the government has filed another appeal. So we are nowhere. Another DTA case, Paracha, is two and a half years old. The courts haven't done a thing with it. One court waits for a second to decide the habeas appeal; the government runs to the second to say, let's wait and see how the first court plays out the DTA.

The Uighurs -- those who will still see me -- nod politely when I tell them about the courts. But they long ago concluded that American courts are merely a debating society. Nothing ever comes of them. A sign at Guantanamo says, "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." It would take a better advocate than me to persuade the Uighurs we Americans are serious about that.

Mr. Chairman, what will you do about Guantanamo? You have fifty or sixty stateless people there cleared for release. That is, for freedom. Are we Americans honor bound to defend that value, or are we just talking? The rest of the world won't take them unless we take some too. Will you make that happen? Even Mr. Casey has acknowledged that after six years, some should be paroled to the United States.
The Uighurs are one place to start.

That will take some gumption. The administration's propaganda is effective, and most of your constituents think that anyone at Guantanamo must be a terrorist. But our flag asks a little gumption of us sometimes. Generally where the Congress shows the courage of leadership, the people come around. This seems like the right time for it.

Because outside, the world is turning. My client's wife has remarried. Inside the wire, nothing every changes. Huzaifa Parhat has been a prisoner at Guantanamo from the attack on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, straight through to the signing of the surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, and almost back again. He's in his cell in Camp Six this afternoon.

Thank you.

You can also watch Sabin's testimony on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sabin+willett&search_type=

ESCAPE TO HELL: Fleeing China, Landing in Guantanamo

2006-09-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Der Spiegel

July 14, 2006

ESCAPE TO HELL

Fleeing China, Landing in Guantanamo

By Hauke Goos

In 2000, five men left their homes in northern China to escape the prospect of torture and imprisonment. They dreamed of a future in the United States. Caught up in America's war on terror along the way, they instead ended up in Guantanamo. It's been six years since they last saw their families.

They sit on their beds in a barracks on the outskirts of the city, waiting. The door is ajar, revealing a cloudless late spring day in Tirana, Albania, where it promises to be a hot day. None of the five men says a word. They've been waiting -- not just the entire morning, not just the entire day before, but the past five years -- for some country, any country, to agree to grant them political asylum.

They want to move on with their lives.

Through the window they see a white United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) Toyota pull into the courtyard. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting China today, where she'll meet with President Hu Jintao. They'll be discussing human rights, or so they say. Every politician who visits China these days is supposedly there to talk about human rights. But true or not, the news represents a shred of hope for the five men.

They're wearing short-sleeved shirts and brand-new sneakers. Abu Bakker Qassim, the oldest, has taken on the role of the group's leader. Adel Abdulhehim has three children back home in China. Akhdar Qasem Basit rarely speaks. Ahmed Adil was so frustrated with the endless wait that he finally wrote a letter to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ayub Haji Mohammed, the youngest, left his parents' home at 18 to study in the United States.

They look as if this weren't the first time they had dressed up in anticipation of finally beginning their new lives.

The men are Uighurs, members of a Turkic minority in China's far northwest Xinjiang Uygur region bordering Mongolia. The Uighurs dream of having their own country one day, East Turkestan. In the eyes of the Chinese government, that makes them potential terrorists.

A road to nowhere

The five men left their home six years ago, hoping to escape repression at the hands of Chinese authorities, hoping to find a better, freer life abroad. But then came September 11, and the men became entangled in the machinery of world politics. They were bombed and beaten, betrayed, accused and humiliated. They finally ended up in Guantanamo.

The driver of the white Toyota walks toward the office. The five men watch. They share three sleeping rooms and one toilet. The walls are painted a swimming pool green, the windows are barred and bare light bulbs hang from the ceiling. Albania's national refugee camp was once a military barracks. A uniformed guard stands at the door.

Human rights activists were still interested in the five Uighurs when they were prisoners of the Americans. But now that they have been released, they are more a practical problem than a moral one. The United States doesn't want them, they can't go back to China, and many other countries -- Germany included -- have refused to grant them asylum. Everyone, it seems, is worried about offending China, a powerful trading partner.

Ayub, the youngest, walks to the window, which frames a view of shimmering mountains in the distance. He is thin, wears his black shirt over his belt and sports the beginnings of a traditional Uighur man's black moustache. He points outside.

The camp is surrounded by a high wall, topped by rolls of barbed wire glinting in the sun. The men are free, but they remain prisoners -- five young men unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, five men who went to war without knowing it.

Abu Bakker Qassim, the eldest, used to think it was all a big misunderstanding. Back in Xinjiang, which he and the others call East Turkestan, he was trained as an upholsterer. After working in a state-owned leather factory, he started his own business. He is a quiet, affable man with large glasses. The inscription on his T-shirt reads "Athletic 76 - Boys of Europe."

Abu Bakker says his parents were nationalists, but their nationalism was impotent and silent. They were at odds with Chinese policies and dreamed of independence, but they never dared do anything about it.

Until February 1997, that is. That was when the Uighurs took to the streets in Yining, Abu Bakker's home town, demanding social and religious freedom. Abu Bakker, 28 at the time, didn't participate. He had married three years earlier and his new wife had given birth to a son a short time later. At the time, he preferred caution over nationalism.

Instead of marching, he witnessed how the police broke up the protests. "They were shooting at children and they used water cannons at temperatures of twenty below zero," he says. "They arrested tens of thousands." At least 10 people were killed and more than 190 injured.

For Abu Bakker, husband, father, small businessman, this demonstration was an eye-opening experience. He decided to express his views in the future, even publicly. Like others in Yining, he knew that the Uighurs had their own country once, between 1944 and 1949, and that they only wanted what they believed was rightfully theirs.

"Suddenly we began openly criticizing China. We didn't think it was a crime to be an Uighur, to earn money and to work for a better life."

Tortured in China

Abu Bakker was arrested in 1998, one year after the protests. He was tortured with electroshocks until he was finally willing to confess to practically any accusations. After seven months he was released, but his fears stayed with him. He was afraid for his family and his own life, constantly anticipating an ominous, nighttime knock at the door.

He decided to leave China. In January 2000, Abu Bakker went to Kyrgyzstan, where he sold Russian watches, ropes and bags in a local market. His plan was to earn enough money to bring his wife and child to Kyrgyzstan, so that they could continue on to Turkey, where many Uighurs live. And perhaps, he thought, they would move to America one day.

The United States is a promised land of sorts for most Uighurs. It has a few Uighur communities, Radio Free Asia is based there and even an Uighur-American Association, founded in Washington in 1998. The US is seen as tolerant, and many Uighurs believe that those who make it there can fight for the Uighur cause without having to risk their lives in China.

Abu Bakker met Adel Abdulhehim -- the man with three children back home -- in Kyrgyzstan. Six years younger than Abu Bakker, Adel had already been imprisoned a number of times. His brother-in-law was one of the organizers of the February 1997 demonstration and was later executed. The two men decided to go to Turkey, where they had an Uighur acquaintance who owned a leather goods factory.

In mid-2001 they traveled through Tajikistan, then crossed the border into Pakistan. To save money, they decided to travel by bus, which meant they would need a visa for Iran. Because Pakistan often sends Uighur refugees back to China, the two men decided to wait for the visa in neighboring Afghanistan. They had heard about a group of Uighurs who lived in a camp not far from the Afghan city of Jalalabad, just across the border, where they hoped to stay until their visas arrived.

There are two opinions about this camp. Abu Bakker and the other men describe it as little more than a collection of run-down huts. But for the US government, it's an al-Qaida camp where Muslim terrorists are trained to do battle against America.

The two men met two other Uighurs in the camp, Akhdar Qasem Basit and Ahmed Adil. Ahmed, 26 at the time, had come to Afghanistan via Kazakhstan and Pakistan. He had hoped to earn money for his visa in Pakistan, but life there was more expensive than he had anticipated, and his funds ran out after a year. He wanted to go to Germany or Canada. Like Abu Bakker, Akhdar, 27, comes from Yining. He left when he ran into trouble with Chinese intelligence.

A man in the camp had a radio. But to avoid further dampening an already gloomy mood, he only reported good news, which meant that the men didn't find out what had happened in the United States on September 11, 2001. But the man with the radio did tell Adel that al-Qaida had attacked America, and that the US wanted the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, who was allegedly hiding in Afghanistan. The two men were convinced that this conflict had nothing to do with them. They were merely guests in Afghanistan, and America was their ally.

But their certainty ended abruptly when American troops bombed the camp in October, forcing them to flee into the mountains. They had almost no food and sought shelter from the cold in caves. Ayub Haji Mohammed, the youngest in the group, had joined them shortly before they left the camp. His father had become modestly affluent with his clothing and textile business. The family planned to send Ayub to school in the United States, where they had distant relatives. But first they sent him to friends in Pakistan, from where he was to travel to the promised land.

What the men didn't know was that they were hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora, where the Americans believed bin Laden was also hiding. After persevering for two months, they decided to return to Pakistan, in a grueling, three-day trek across a landscape of snow-capped peaks.

The set-up

They received a warm welcome -- unusually warm, as they later realized -- in a village on Pakistani soil. But when they arrived they were exhausted, hungry and naïve, and gratified that the villagers had even slaughtered a lamb in their honor. After the meal they were taken to the local mosque. They were told that the police were searching the village and that they would be taken -- on Toyota pickup trucks -- to a safe place. "It was a trap, but how were we to know?" says Abu Bakker today, standing with the other men in the courtyard of the Albanian refugee camp. They may be safe now, but they have trouble understanding why every step along the way was a step in the wrong direction.

That night they were first taken to a Pakistani police station and then to a Pakistani prison. The Americans had offered a ransom for Muslims suspected of supporting al-Qaida.

"We were surprised," says Abu Bakker, "but we were also hopeful. We thought that if we identified ourselves as Chinese Uighurs, the Pakistanis would send us back to China. So we told them we were Uzbeki Afghans, hoping that they would turn us over to the Americans." China, they believed, was their enemy, and America their friend and ally.

"We were blindfolded and our hands were tied," says Ahmed. The captured Uighurs were then loaded into buses and taken to Kandahar. "Kandahar was worse than the Chinese prison," says Abu Bakker. "Soldiers in Kandahar beat up Ayub, the youngest in our group. They forced his arms behind his back and beat him on the knees."

The men were interrogated, yelled at, beaten and then interrogated again.

"Do you speak English?"

"No."

"Why don't you motherfuckers speak English?"

If they answered "yes," the soldiers would shout: "Where did you motherfuckers learn to speak English?"

After a week, one of the Uighurs noticed the US flag on a soldier's uniform. "We're in the hands of the Americans!" he told the others, clearly relieved. "We are safe!" They told the American soldiers about the Uighurs' struggle for freedom. "You have the wrong men," they kept telling their captors. "We don't have a problem with you. In fact, we have a common enemy: China."

After six months in Kandahar, the five Uighurs -- gagged, bound, blindfolded and hooded -- were taken to the airport, where they were given earplugs and loaded onto a plane.

Lost in Cuba

When they landed in Guantanamo in mid-2002, the men were given prisoner numbers 260, 276, 279, 283 and 293. By then they were considered terrorism suspects, but they had no idea why. The men had landed at a US naval base, but it was essentially a no-man's land where foreign citizens were ineligible to file legal complaints in US courts. The closer the men came to the promised land, the more they perceived it slipping beyond their reach.

They were neither prisoners-of-war nor criminals, but "enemy combatants." There were no charges, no hearings, no defense attorneys. According to US President George W. Bush, they could be held indefinitely, or for the duration of his "War on Terror." They were repeatedly interrogated. Are you associated with the "Islamic Movement of East Turkestan?" they asked. The Chinese government claims the Uighurs have connections to bin Laden, who it claims supports and directs the Uighurs' struggle for independence. The "Islamic Movement of East Turkestan," say Chinese authorities, is essentially an arm of al-Qaida.

To this day, Abu Bakker and the others deny having been members of the group. They are upholsterers, students, small businessmen, but not terrorists, they say. In fact, they believe that the "Islamic Movement of East Turkestan" is a phantom organization, invented and kept alive by the Chinese secret police.

Ayub, the youngest, suffered the most at the hands of the Americans. He has a food allergy and had been told to avoid eggs, bread and fish. After a doctor at Guantanamo confirmed the allergy, guards adhered to Ayub's dietary requirements by simply withholding the foods to which he is allergic. On some days they would place an empty plate into his cell. When Ayub asked why they had brought him an empty plate, they told him that it was his special diet -- doctor's orders. Why couldn't they bring him something else, he asked? No idea, the guards replied, suggesting he take up the matter with their superiors.

Ayub became very thin, at times weighing as little as 52 kilograms (115 lbs.). "When I sat down I was sitting on bones," he says. "I had no fat left and hardly any muscles." He began a hunger strike at least six times, "but it really didn't make any difference."

Once a few soldiers took pity on Ayub and brought him an apple. Ayub took it into his cell. Guards found the apple a short time later, but the stem was missing.

"Where's the stem?" they asked. "Where did you hide it?"

He said he didn't know. He asked them if they thought he had wanted to make a skeleton key with the stem. Ayub spent the next 28 days in solitary confinement.

In late 2004, a few months after the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo are entitled to have their cases heard in a US court, the prisoners had their first opportunity to appear before a military tribunal and respond to the charges that had been brought against them. At issue was their status as "enemy combatants" -- and their future.

Ayub, emaciated and worn down from months in solitary confinement, was suspicious. He was taken to a small room and told to sit on a white plastic chair. The chairman of the tribunal entered the room and sat down on a slightly raised, black leather chair in front of Ayub, whose feet were chained to a bolt set into the floor.

The tribunal accused him of traveling to Afghanistan to learn how to use weapons, and then fleeing to Pakistan with a group of armed Arabs. The minutes of the hearing show that, throughout the interrogation, Ayub believed that the Guantanamo tribunal was operating in the same way as a normal court.

"You said that you went to Afghanistan, but not for weapons training," says the clerk. "In that case, what was the reason?"

"I already said all that two and a half years ago," Ayub replies. "It's all in the records. I've already told you everything."

Ayub, Abu Bakker, Adel, Ahmed and Akhdar were given the status "no longer enemy combatant," which meant they were no longer considered dangerous. It was good news, but no one told the prisoners, who by then had been in Guantanamo for two and a half years.

They were also unaware that there was growing criticism in the United States of interrogation methods, the treatment of detainees and of Guantanamo in general. By then, human rights organizations had begun acting as intermediaries for lawyers eager to represent the prisoners.

Boston attorney Sabin Willett signed up because, as he says, he refused to allow the Bush administration to undermine the basic tenets of the US constitution. In March 2005, Willet filed a petition on behalf of Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdulhehim, hoping to force the government to finally allow his clients to stand trial.

The plight of the Uighurs

With his prominent jaw and forelock, Willett, a Harvard graduate and partner in a respected Boston law firm, bears a passing resemblance to the young John F. Kennedy. A crime novelist in his spare time, Willett has a refined sense of timing and dramatics. "There is probably no group of Muslims anywhere in the world more pro-American than the Uighurs," he told a court. "The Uighurs have always suffered under religious and political persecution by the Chinese communists. I can remember the days when, in this country, we had a great deal of sympathy for someone with that kind of history." Willett wanted to protect his country's constitution against his government. And he was the first person who truly wanted to help the five Uighurs since they had left China.

Four months later, Willett was allowed to visit his clients in Guantanamo for the first time. When he discovered that they had long since been cleared of charges, he filed an emergency petition with the US Supreme Court. But no country was willing to accept the Uighurs. US officials say they spent two years searching for a suitable country to grant the men asylum, but that every one of the more than a hundred governments they contacted turned down their request.

On January 19, 2006, Ahmed wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "I find it difficult to imagine how a country like the United States, which claims that it promotes and protects the democratic rights of oppressed peoples, can treat someone the way I have been treated. I wonder whether the American government will keep me imprisoned here forever if it is unable to find a country that will accept me. Is this justice?"

A hearing was scheduled in Washington for May 8. It was a potentially precarious trial for the US government. Faced with the prospect of the court ordering the Uighurs to appear in person, which, by bringing them onto US soil, would have given the men the right to apply for political asylum, the government was suddenly in a hurry to take action.

An officer visited the five Uighurs in early May. "The US government has finally found a country that will accept you," he announced.

"Which country?" they asked, hoping it would be Germany. Munich has Europe's largest Uighur community, and the prospect of being sent there appealed to the men.

The officer said he had no information about that.

The Albanian abyss

Throughout the twelve-hour flight, the Uighurs were terrified that they were being returned to China. At approximately 9 p.m. local time, they landed at Mother Theresa Airport in Tirana, the capital of Albania, one of Europe's poorest countries. It was three days before the scheduled hearing in Washington.

The men had never been to Albania. They had no idea the country even existed, and they are now probably the only Uighurs in the entire country.

Sabin Willett, their attorney, received an email informing him of their release, but by then the Uighurs had already landed in Tirana.

In the country's national refugee camp, the five men were housed in a building next to the toilets. The camp has a volleyball net, a laundry and a small library. An Arab-English dictionary lies on Ayub's night table. "I am an experienced diver," Ayub reads, and smiles.

A bus is available to take them to downtown Tirana whenever they wish. But they have no money and no contacts here, so they walk aimlessly around the city -- five aliens in Albanian rush-hour traffic. They try to get a sense of what it feels like to be free, but it isn't easy.

A few days after arriving in Albania, Ahmed calls his mother in China. He hasn't seen her in seven years.

His aunt answers the telephone. "Salam alaikum," Ahmed says. She passes the phone to his mother.

"Is that you, mother?" Ahmed asks.

Then the two weep.

Ahmed asks about the family. They both know that Chinese intelligence is probably listening in on the conversation.

Abu Bakker saw his wife again two days earlier -- on a DVD. His family had managed to get the disc sent to Guantanamo, where he wasn't permitted to watch it because camp officials were unable to find a translator who could confirm that the contents were harmless. In the end, the DVD was sent to Tirana with the five Uighurs.

Abu Bakker stared at the screen. The recording shows his family and some friends sitting around a table, praying to God to protect Abu Bakker. He saw his father, who is since dead, and he saw his wife and his brother playing soccer in the snow with Abu Bakker's children. The children are twins, and his wife was pregnant with them when he left China. The two are now six years old. Abu Bakker has never seen them.

Ahmed, Ayub, Abu Bakker and the other former Guantanamo prisoners are calm and patient and without hatred. They still hope to see their wives and children again.

But their greatest wish, they say, is to live in the United States.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Lack of evidence continues to undermine China’s claims of ‘terrorism’ in East Turkistan

2006-09-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

In late August 2006, the Chinese authorities claimed that security forces in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), also known as East Turkistan, have seized over 41 metric tons (45 tons) of explosives “from the hands of terrorists” since 1990.

The claim was made by Wang Lexiang, deputy director of the regional department of public security, during a conference on improving regulations covering civilian-use explosives in East Turkistan. Explosives are readily available throughout most parts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and are used extensively in construction, mining and in road building and maintenance.

Wang Lexiang further claimed that around four tons of materials used for manufacturing explosives were also seized over the same period, along with large quantities of detonators, hand grenades and other military paraphernalia, all supposedly to be used by ‘terrorists’ against Chinese government targets.

However, Wang offered no evidence to support these claims, nor the claim during the same conference that security forces had foiled several plots by ‘separatists’ to sabotage oilfields, power plants and highways in East Turkistan.

“We’ve seen these kinds of statements before, but we’ve never seen any evidence to support them,” said Alim Seytoff, director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). “If I knew a diplomatic way of saying ‘put up or shut up’, I’d say it,” he added.

Mr. Seytoff pointed out that in the absence of any independent verification, it is plausible that all explosives seized in East Turkistan – whether from farmers or miners – could conveniently be claimed by Chinese officials as originally intended for ‘terrorist’ use.

“It’s on the basis of these unsubstantiated claims – especially since 9/11 – that the Chinese government attempts to justify its crackdown on Uyghur political opposition to Chinese rule,” continued Mr. Seytoff. “The Chinese government wants the rest of the world to view the Uyghur people with the same disdain, suspicion and distrust as they themselves do; and post-9/11, repeatedly accusing Uyghurs of being terrorists can apparently be an effective way of achieving that – incredibly, we’ve started seeing the western press repeating these accusations with no caveat whatsoever.”

In light of the Chinese authorities’ extremely tight controls on information in East Turkistan, it is impossible to give an independent and accurate impression of the true scale and nature of political violence in the region. UHRP has compiled this short backgrounder not to analyze and discuss political violence in East Turkistan – about which very little is known – but rather to analyze and discuss the Chinese authorities’ claims on the nature and extent of political violence in the region.

It is hoped that this briefing will encourage a necessary and greater degree of skepticism towards the Chinese authorities’ statements on the situation in East Turkistan. This briefing is also intended to guide readers towards independently researched information and analysis which would be useful to the general reader wishing to try and assess for themselves the reality of the security situation in East Turkistan. Footnotes are provided throughout, and additional suggested reading is provided at the end of this backgrounder.

The figures

Even the most casual examination of Chinese government figures for armed and politically motivated violence against government and civilian targets in East Turkistan reveals glaring inconsistencies.

For example, in March 1999, the then-governor of the region, Abdulahat Abdurishit, claimed there had been “thousands” of explosions and assassinations throughout the 1990s. But by early September 2001, barely 18 months later, Abdulahat Abdurishit claimed that the situation in East Turkistan was actually “better then ever in history”.[1]

In the immediate wake of 9/11 the Chinese government again reversed its position, once more claiming an imminent threat of terrorism in East Turkistan while expressing an intention to stand “side by side with the United States in the war on terror”. At the time, skepticism towards China’s stance was so high that U.S. president George W. Bush saw it necessary to caution the Chinese government against using the war on terror as “an excuse to persecute minorities”.[2]

Nevertheless, the central Chinese government released a document in January 2002 called “‘East Turkistan’ terrorist forces cannot get away with impunity”, which claimed on the basis of “incomplete statistics” there had been “at least 200 incidents of terrorist violence, causing 162 deaths and more than 440 injuries” between 1990 and 2001.[3] However, the document’s vague language and incomplete tabulation of alleged incidents and casualties – as well as mention of alleged terrorist groups in East Turkistan never heard of before or since – inevitably undermined the document’s credibility.

The document was further undermined in 2004 when Ismael Tiliwaldi, the successor to Abdulahat Abdurishit, said, “In Xinjiang, not one incident of explosion or assassination took place in the last few years. […] Last year Xinjiang’s public security situation was very good.”[4] But in September 2005, Zhao Yongchen, deputy director of the counter-terrorism bureau under the ministry of public security, said that, “under the influence of many complex international and domestic factors, violent acts of terrorism in Xinjiang have been escalating seriously.”[5] He provided no details.

And then on August 30, 2006, Wang Lexiang stated at the conference where he presented the figures on the amount of explosives seized since 1990, that there had been a “successful” terrorist attack on a People’s Armed Police barracks and a railway line in 2004 – without giving any further evidence or details – and added that there remained a “grave social situation” in East Turkistan.[6] Again, this is despite a claim made in the People’s Daily just four days earlier that record levels of investment are pouring into the region.[7]

“Record levels of investment in a region aren’t usually an indicator of a grave threat of terrorism,” Mr. Seytoff pointed out. “It seems the Chinese authorities want it both ways: they’d have us believe that they’re fighting terrorism in a region where they’re also leading an economic miracle – well, which is it? What do they want us to believe? If it weren’t for the fact that Uyghurs are paying for this farce with their human rights and their future as a people, the Chinese government’s chopping and changing of the facts would be laughable.”

Other inaccuracies and accusations

Another central feature of the Chinese authorities’ claims on the levels and nature of terrorism in East Turkistan, particularly since 9/11, is that individuals and organizations in the region are closely affiliated with groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban – even receiving training and funding from them. On the basis of these claims, the Chinese authorities have attempted to portray East Turkistan as a ‘battleground’ in the ‘international war on terrorism’ – claims also made in the document “‘East Turkistan’ terrorists cannot get away with impunity”.

However, aside from the fact that – as usual – no corroborating evidence has ever been released to support this claim of a broader international jihad being fought in East Turkistan, it is notable also that the Uyghur people, East Turkistan and even Xinjiang have never been mentioned in the public pronouncements attributed to Osama bin-Laden and other al-Qaeda figures.

Although this detail is far from being conclusive evidence of no involvement by al-Qaeda in East Turkistan, the burden of proof of any involvement should be on the Chinese authorities. For its part, the Uyghur diaspora points out that the Uyghur people – unlike supporters of jihad – look to the United States as a model of human rights and democracy in contrast to the current regime in East Turkistan, and regard the United States as a natural ally of the Uyghur people. In addition, Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in the region refer to the fact that the first East Turkistan Republic in 1931-1934 was the first democratic Islamic republic in the world outside Turkey.

The Chinese authorities’ tendency to associate Uyghur political opponents in East Turkistan with al-Qaeda was exposed in August 2005 when members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) conducted a mission to the region. Commission members and their staff were told by Chinese authorities that “elements of al-Qaeda” were targeting the mission during its visit to East Turkistan. The threat was found “not to be credible”, and according to the Commission, “seemed to have been issued to restrict Commission activities and to monitor its contact with local people not approved by government officials.”[8]

The Chinese authorities also accuse Uyghur political opponents abroad of engaging in terrorism, again without releasing any corroborating details or evidence. In August 2005, while the Chinese authorities in East Turkistan were preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the XUAR, Wang Lequan, the most senior Chinese official in the region, publicly accused Ms. Rebiya Kadeer of plotting a terrorist attack on official celebrations in the regional capital of Urumchi.

Since her release from a Chinese prison in March 2005, Ms Rebiya Kadeer, a human rights activist and former prisoner of conscience, has worked to highlight the extremely poor human rights situation of the Uyghur people in East Turkistan. When she was released from prison, Ms. Kadeer was warned by Chinese officials not to speak out about the plight of the Uyghur people when she reached exile.

“It appears that Ms. Kadeer’s work has been such a cause of annoyance and embarrassment to the Chinese authorities that accusing her of plotting terrorist attacks is regarded in Beijing as an appropriate counter-strategy,” said Mr. Seytoff.

Conclusion

An obvious problem when attempting to discuss terrorism in East Turkistan is the definition of ‘terrorism’ itself. Indeed, even in international law a conclusive definition has yet to be agreed upon.

The Chinese authorities are very selective in their choice of which incidents and which people and organizations are defined as ‘terrorist’ and which are ‘criminal’. In recent testimony to the US government, Professor Dru Gladney, a prominent scholar on Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim peoples in China and Central Asia, referred to a study which showed that “[…] of 140 publicly reported ‘terrorist’ incidents in China between 1990-2000, only 25 can be connected to political causes or separatism, and only 17 events can be connected to Xinjiang or Uyghur separatists. The vast majority of incidents are best described as isolated cases of worker discontent and civil unrest, in a country that reported nearly 84,000 incidents of civil unrest in 2005 alone.”[9]

Another comprehensive study claims that there have been no acts of political violence in East Turkistan attributable to Uyghurs since 1998.[10] There may indeed have been other acts of violence perpetrated by Uyghurs against the Chinese government prior to and since 1998, but observers must be more careful than the Chinese authorities in deciding which of these acts constitutes ‘terrorism’ while similar acts are perpetrated throughout all of China.

While condemning without hesitation or reservation all acts of violence in East Turkistan, it is important to nevertheless consider the reasons why such violence may have occurred in the past and why it may have reason to occur again in the future. While the Chinese government claims political violence originates and is funded from jihadists abroad, there is a far more plausible explanation. Professor Gladney quotes from Oxford Analytica in his testimony:

“Distinguishing between genuine counter-terrorism and repression of minority rights is difficult and the Uyghur case points to a lack of international guidelines for doing so. In any case, Chinese policies, not foreign-sponsored terrorism, are the cause of Uyghur unrest. China’s development and control policy in Xinjiang is unlikely to stabilize the region as long as development benefits remain so unevenly distributed.”[11]

“The Uyghur people in East Turkistan face a daily chorus of half-truths, ‘propaganda’ and bare-faced lies from the Chinese authorities,” said Mr. Seytoff. “Uyghurs can’t argue back though, and it’s reached the stage now where if the government says ‘up is down’, Uyghurs in East Turkistan don’t dare disagree. So what we are saying now, and what we’d like to see everyone say to the Chinese authorities when they talk about all of these explosives and incidents and everything else, is ‘prove it’. That’s all.”

[1] “Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment”, James Milward, East-West Center Washington, 2004, p. 11, available at www.eastwestcenterwashington.org.

[2] “China is with us, Bush insists”, Associated Press, October 19, 2001.
[3] “‘East Turkistan’ Terrorist Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity”, January 21, 2002, Information Office of the State Council, available at www.people.com.cn.

[4] “Governor says China’s Xinjiang has seen no terrorist attacks for years,” Xinhua, 12 April 2004.

[5] “Over 260 Acts of Terrorist Violence In and Outside China as 'East Turkistan' Becomes Main Terrorist Threat to China”, China Youth Daily, September 6, 2005, FBIS translated text.

[6] [Xinjiang da qingcha, shouji zhayao 41 dun duo] “Xinjiang great exposé, more than 41 tonnes of explosives captured”, August 30, 2006, Takung Pao, available (in Chinese) at www.takungpao.com.

[7] “Xinjiang enters a golden age as investment capital pours in”, August 26, 2006, People’s Daily, available at http://english.people.com.cn/.

[8] “Policy Focus: China”, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, September 2005, available at www.uscirf.gov.

[9] “China’s ‘Uyghur Problem’ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization”, August 3, 2006, available at www.uscc.gov.

[10] “Criminalising Ethnicity: Political repression in Xinjiang”, Nicolas Becquelin, China Rights Forum, Issue 1, 2004, available at www.hrichina.org.

[11] “China’s ‘Uyghur Problem’ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization”, August 3, 2006, available at www.uscc.gov.

Suggested reading

Autonomy in Xinjiang: Han Nationalist Imperatives and Uyghur Discontent, BOVINGDON, Gardner, East-West Center Policy Studies 11, 2004.
See: www.eastwestcenter.org/stored/pdfs/PS011.pdf

Blow Up: Internal and External Challenges of Uyghur Separatism and Islamic Radicalism to Chinese Rule in Xinjiang, SHICHOR, Yitzhak, Asian Affairs: An American Review, June 22, 2005.
Available (to subscribers) via: www.heldref.org

China and Xinjiang after September 11, SWANSTROM, Niklas, Asia Insights, No. 3 (2002).
See: www.pcr.uu.se/publications/other_pub/Swanstrom_china_and_xinjiang_after_sept_11.pdf

China’s Anti-terrorism Legislation and Repression in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, Amnesty International, AI Index: ASA 17/010/2002, March 2002.
See: http://web.amnesty.org/library/pdf/ASA170102002ENGLISH/$File/ASA1701002.pdf

The Not-So-Silent Majority: Uyghur Resistance to Han Rule in Xinjiang, BOVINGDON, Gardner, Modern China, Vol. 28, No. 1, January 2002, pp. 39-78.
Available (to subscribers) via: www.sagepub.com

The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse, DWYER, Arienne M., East-West Center Policy Studies 15, 2005.
See: www.eastwestcenter.org/res-rp-publicationdetails.asp?pub_ID=1589&SearchString=

The Xinjiang Problem, STARR, S. Frederick and FULLER, Graham E., Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, January 2004.
See: www.cornellcaspian.com/pub2/xinjiang_final.pdf

Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment, MILLWARD, James, East-West Center Policy Studies 6, 2004.
See: www.eastwestcenter.org/res-rp-publicationdetails.asp?pub_ID=1479&SearchString=

Xinjiang at the turn of the century: the causes of separatism, MACKERRAS, Colin, Central Asian Survey (2001), 20(3), pp. 289-303.
Available (to subscribers) via: www.taylorandfrancisgroup.com

The view from Guantánamo

2006-09-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

By Abu Bakker Qassim

The New York Times

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2006

TIRANA, Albania I have been greatly saddened to hear that the Congress of the United States, a country I deeply admire, is considering new laws that would deny prisoners at Guantánamo Bay the right to challenge their detentions in federal court.

I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America's war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantánamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the U.S. military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only America's centuries- old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right - or began to. In May, on the eve of a court hearing in my case, the military relented, and I was sent to Albania along with four other Uighurs. But 12 of my Uighur brothers remain in Guantánamo today. Will they be stranded there forever?

Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name - and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the U.S. Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantánamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well.

I am from East Turkestan on the northwest edge of China. Communist China cynically calls my homeland "Xinjiang," which means "new dominion" or "new frontier." My people want only to be treated with respect and dignity. But China uses the American war on terrorism as a pretext to punish those who peacefully dissent from its oppressive policies. They brand as "terrorism" all political opposition from the Uighurs.

Amnesty International reports that East Turkistan is the only province in China where people may face the death penalty for political offenses. Chinese leaders brag about the number of Uighur political prisoners shot in the head. I was punished for speaking against China's unjust policies, and I left because of the threat to my life. My search for work and refuge took me from Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I heard about the Sept. 11 attacks for the first time in Guantánamo. I was not aware of their magnitude until after my release, when a reporter showed me images online at an Internet café in Tirana. It was a terrible thing. But I, too, was its victim. I would never have experienced the ordeal and humiliation of Guantánamo if this horrific event had not taken place.

I feel great sadness for the families who lost their loved ones on that horrible day five years ago. And I would be sadder still to see the freedom-loving American people walk away from their respect for the rule of law. I want America to be a strong and respected nation in the world. Only then can it continue to be the source of hope for the hopeless - like my people.

Abu Bakker Qassim was imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2002 until May 2006. This article was translated from the Uighur by Nury Turkel.

Nury A Turkel

2006-09-12T23:04:00.000-07:00

Nury A Turkel

Tale of 5 Muslims:Out of Guantanamo And Into Limbo

2006-09-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal, Page One

Free and Uneasy

Tale of 5 Muslims:Out of Guantanamo And Into Limbo

Cleared by U.S. of Terror Ties,
They Won't Return Home
Due to Fear of Punishment
China Demands Repatriation

By ANDREW HIGGINS
June 2, 2006; Page A1

TIRANA, Albania -- After four years in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Bakker Qassim, a former terror suspect cleared last year of having ties to al Qaeda, got word last month that he finally would be set free.

He and four fellow Muslims from China were loaded onto a U.S. military transport plane in the middle of the night, shackled to the floor and flown for 12 hours to their new home: a converted military barracks in Tirana, the capital of Albania.

The compound is located on a potholed road strewn with garbage. It has high walls, bars on the windows and a guard at the gate. The five men occasionally leave but don't venture far. They've found no one in this small Balkan country who knows their native language, a Turkic tongue spoken by the Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) people of China.

"I think Allah must be testing our patience," says Mr. Qassim, a 37-year-old father of three from Xinjiang, a historically Muslim region of deserts and mountains in western China. Pointing to strands of rusty barbed wire outside his window, he rolls his eyes. Freedom, he says, "is not what we expected."

The U.S. is also in a predicament it never expected: What should it do with Guantanamo inmates who have been found deserving of release but who face jail or execution if returned to their homelands?

It's a question that has grown urgent in recent weeks as the United Nations and even stalwart ally Britain have turned up the heat on Washington over Guantanamo prison. Critics say the camp stains America's reputation, upends the Geneva Convention governing treatment of prisoners and fuels Muslim anger. Eighty-nine inmates are now staging a hunger strike, drawing further attention to their plight.

Washington's hesitation to repatriate some detainees reflects its growing unease with authoritarian states it initially enlisted as partners in the post-9/11 war on terror. U.S. forces used an air base in Uzbekistan during the war in Afghanistan, but Washington strongly criticized the former Soviet republic last year when Uzbek security forces killed scores of unarmed protesters. Uzbekistan then evicted the U.S. military.

Fear of being sent home is so strong that an exonerated Egyptian detainee, Ala Abdel Maqsud Muhammad Salim, had his U.S. lawyers ask a federal court in January to block his release to avoid his being sent to Egypt, where he expected harm. The U.S. dropped a plan to return the sickly and nearly blind prisoner. He's still in Guantanamo.

Uighurs, formerly U.S. prisoners, are now in Albania. Back row, left to right: Abu Bakker Qassim, Ahtar Qassim, Adel Abdu Al-Hakim. Front row: Ahmet Adil, Ayup Hajimemet.
U.S. officials say they scouted for two years for a country ready to take Mr. Qassim and his companions, beginning the search even before their exoneration. The U.S. was wary of sending them to China. Beijing severely punishes Muslims from the far west who criticize the Communist government or advocate independence. Unwilling to let the men live in the U.S., American officials say they approached more than 100 countries. All said no or waffled, fearful of upsetting China and reluctant to take on America's problem. Then Albania, an impoverished land with a large Muslim populace and a brutal communist past, said yes in April.

Messy Struggle

The decision pushed the country of some 3.5 million into a messy big-power struggle. Soon after the five Uighurs reached Tirana, China accused Washington of hypocrisy for letting them go. Beijing demanded that Albania hand over the men, whom it calls terror suspects. Prime Minister Sali Berisha says he was harangued by China's ambassador. Mr. Berisha says he's glad he gave the five Uighurs a haven, but regrets that it "has become very noisy around here." The Chinese Embassy in Tirana declined to comment.

Guantanamo Bay now holds around 460 detainees. These include four who have been declared "no longer enemy combatants" -- bureaucratic jargon for innocent. About 116 others, though not exonerated, are no longer considered a serious threat or valuable to U.S. intelligence.

Among those who have been cleared but remain at Guantanamo is Zakirjan Hassam, an Uzbek dissident desperate to avoid going back to Uzbekistan. Like China, Uzbekistan rallied early to the "war on terror," viewing it as a vindication of its own harsh measures against restive Muslims.

Before sending detainees home, U.S. officials seek guarantees they will be treated humanely and prevented from causing trouble for America in the future. Those issues have slowed U.S. negotiations with Saudi Arabia over the repatriation of Saudi nationals at Guantanamo, although 15 Saudis there were sent home last month.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has cited such complications in explaining why the Guantanamo prison can't simply be closed. The U.S. is working "almost daily" with foreign governments to reduce the number of prisoners, she has said. On a visit to Britain in April, Ms. Rice said: "We don't want to be the world's jailer."

Guantanamo critics blame the dilemma on the Bush administration's refusal to adopt swift and transparent procedures for judging guilt or innocence. They say lengthy incarceration leaves people with the stigma of terrorism even if they eventually get cleared. Lawyers for Mr. Qassim and other absolved detainees say those who are found innocent should be allowed to settle in America.

"The U.S. made this mistake," says Sabin Willett, a Boston corporate lawyer who early last year volunteered to defend Mr. Qassim and another Uighur detainee. "After four years at the Guantanamo prison, America owes them better than to be swept under an Albanian rug."

Unlike many of the world's Muslims, China's Uighurs often like America. Chafing at rule by Beijing and a flood of ethnic Chinese into their region, many Uighurs look to the U.S. for help. Calls for outright independence from China have faded but anger at police heavy-handedness and restrictions on religious worship have triggered sporadic bouts of unrest.

Mr. Qassim says that before leaving China in 2000 he used to listen to U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts news in Uighur and other Asian languages. "It was very sad and disappointing to have a country we respect treat us in the way we've been treated," he says.

A native of Yining, a town near China's border with Kazakhstan, he used to work in a state leather factory and as a small-time trader. He ran into trouble after anti-Chinese riots in his hometown in 1997. Mr. Qassim says he didn't take part in the turmoil, which left at least nine dead, but he began to speak out against Chinese rule. Mr. Qassim says he also grew more interested in Islam, and was jailed for seven months on suspicion of anti-Chinese activities.

In 2000 he moved to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, hustling for work in a big bazaar. There he met a fellow Uighur from Yining, Adel Abdu Al-Hakim, now with him in Albania. The two later decided to move to Turkey, hoping to work at a leather-jacket factory run by a ethnic Uighur living there.

With no money for air tickets, they headed overland for Pakistan, where they say they intended to get visas for Iran. Discovering this would take months -- and fearful of staying on in Chinese ally Pakistan -- they opted to wait in Afghanistan.

The two men say they left Pakistan in the summer of 2001 to join some 30 anti-Chinese Uighurs living near the Afghan city of Jalalabad. The U.S. would subsequently describe their settlement as a "training camp."

The Uighurs in Guantanamo strongly denied that description in their tribunals. According to transcripts, each insisted the place was just a cluster of ramshackle buildings. Mr. Qassim says he studied the Quran and occasionally took pot shots with a Kalashnikov rifle, but received no "terrorist" training. Both he and Mr. Abdu Al-Hakim say they had never heard of the Afghan-based Osama bin Laden and had no intention of joining him.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Abdu Al-Hakim heard reports of a likely U.S. attack on Afghanistan from a Uighur who listened to Radio Free Asia. He says he didn't expect any trouble, as the Uighurs had no quarrel with America.

Late at night a few days later, U.S. planes bombed their settlement. Ayup Hajimemet, now 23 and the youngest of the five Uighurs in Albania, says he arrived at the village just as the bombing started. He joined a group of fleeing residents, including Mr. Qassim, and headed for the mountains. They later discovered their destination was called Tora Bora, the focus of a failed U.S. hunt for Mr. bin Laden.

Hungry and frightened, they say they sought shelter in a cave, only to be driven out by wild monkeys throwing stones. "We don't fit in anywhere in the world. Even monkeys don't want us," says Mr. Qassim.

Betrayed by Locals

After some two months of foraging and begging for food, Mr. Qassim and other Uighurs decided to get out of Afghanistan. They made a three-day trek across snow-covered peaks into Pakistan. Upon arriving, they say, local tribesmen gave them a warm welcome -- and then betrayed them.

After a lamb feast, the 18 Uighurs were taken to a mosque, herded into vehicles, driven to a jail and handed over to U.S. forces, who flew them to an American prison in Afghanistan. Mr. Abdu Al-Hakim says the 18 were captured by Pakistani bounty hunters. He overheard people saying the hunters received $5,000 each for the captives from the U.S. A Pentagon spokesman said he couldn't discuss "tactics, techniques and procedures" used to combat terrorism.

After some six months of interrogation in Afghanistan, the 18 Uighurs captured in Pakistan were put on a plane to Guantanamo, their heads hooded, their arms and legs tethered. Upon arrival in Cuba, they say they were each given an orange jumpsuit, a copy of the Quran and an "internment serial number." Mr. Qassim became ISN #283.

China cheered the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, linking it to its own crackdown in Xinjiang. Beijing soon issued a report claiming the Uighur activists were "supported and directed by Osama bin Laden." It named as an al Qaeda affiliate a small Uighur group called the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.

At Guantanamo, much of the interrogation of the Uighurs focused on the movement, which the U.S. in late 2002 declared a terrorist organization. The Uighurs in Guantanamo denied any involvement with the group.

The U.S. let Chinese interrogators interview Mr. Qassim and other Chinese nationals at Guantanamo, according to the men and court documents. Most refused to talk, but they were rattled: Mr. Qassim says the Chinese made veiled threats against their families back in Xinjiang and appeared to have had access to information the Uighurs had given U.S. interrogators. A Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. "works with a variety of nations to try and determine the status of detainees."

Out of 22 Uighurs with Chinese nationality sent to Guantanamo, U.S. officials concluded early on that Mr. Qassim and the four now with him in Albania weren't terrorists. But for reasons that remain unclear, U.S. authorities failed to inform the five Uighurs of that. In early 2004, the Pentagon asked the State Department to start looking for a possible home for them abroad.

Later that year, the Uighurs and hundreds of others got their first chance to formally contest their status as "enemy combatants." This followed a 2004 Supreme Court decision that prompted the Pentagon to set up so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Detainees appeared before the secret panels shackled and without lawyers, but were allowed to defend themselves. Remarks in declassified transcripts suggest the Uighurs' hearings took place in late 2004.

"Treating a person like me this way is not fair," Mr. Qassim told the tribunal, claiming that he opposed China, not America. The U.S., he complained, "was to help young Uighur people, and now they are saying we are the enemy.... We Uighurs have more than one billion enemies and that is enough for us."

Mr. Hajimemet, the young man who reached Afghanistan just as bombs were falling, was the only one of the five Uighurs to learn much English. While in prison, he says, he sometimes lashed out in response to taunts from American guards and to the daily humiliations of "being treated like an animal." He spat at a guard. "Even a donkey kicks back," he says. He wasn't tortured, he says, but on one occasion was thrown against a metal bed, leaving him with a lingering back injury.

The review tribunals set up in 2004 examined 558 cases in all and ruled that 38 detainees should be reclassified as "no longer enemy combatants." Among them were the five Uighurs now in Albania. The 13 other Uighurs who had been seized with them in Pakistan are all still "enemy combatants" and remain in Guantanamo.

In March 2005, Mr. Willett, the Boston lawyer, filed a petition in the U.S. to force the government to bring Mr. Qassim and Mr. Abdu Al-Hakim to court. U.S. officials declined to inform him that his clients already had been cleared. "The whole approach has been to keep Guantanamo a great big secret," says Mr. Willett, a partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP. "In the fog of war, mistakes are made," he adds. "The dishonor comes of hiding them."

Four months later, in July, Mr. Willett got permission to visit Mr. Qassim and Mr. Abdu Al-Hakim in Cuba. The two men were chained to the floor in a tiny plywood hut, the lawyer says. Only at this meeting was he finally told they had been exonerated. Mr. Willett returned to the U.S. and filed an emergency motion demanding their immediate release.

About a month later, Mr. Qassim and the other exonerated Uighurs were moved to less-severe quarters in nearby Camp Iguana. They could walk around without chains and were allowed to watch nature videos. News broadcasts were banned. Mr. Willett requested permission to send a Uighur-English dictionary and other language materials but was told this was forbidden. Defense Department rules bar inmates from developing any skill, even English, that might be used against the U.S.

At a U.S. court hearing last August on Mr. Willett's call for the prisoners' release, a federal judge denounced the term "no longer enemy combatant" as "Kafkaesque." When assured by a government lawyer that the case would be resolved "soon," the judge snapped, "Define soon." In a December ruling, he declared the continued detention of Mr. Qassim and Mr. Abdu Al-Hakim was "unlawful" but said he couldn't order the release of the innocent men because this would involve immigration issues outside of his purview.

Mr. Willett appealed, and a hearing was set for May 8. With the legal pressure mounting, the government stepped up previously fruitless efforts to find the Uighurs a home. U.S. officials at one time considered letting the Uighurs into America, but that option was rejected "at a senior policy level" out of concerns over possible litigation and security, says a senior State Department official.

Sending the Uighurs back to China was never an option, say U.S. officials. The State Department's annual report on global human rights, released in March, concluded that China had "used counter-terrorism as an excuse for religious repression of Uighur Muslims." It also reported that a Uighur sent back to China from Nepal against his will had been executed. The State Department's latest report on global terrorism, issued in April, now lists the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a group of "concern."

Albania was first approached about taking the Uighurs late last year, and initially balked. In April, the U.S. ambassador to Tirana went to see Prime Minister Berisha. Mr. Berisha had assisted the U.S. in the 1990s, helping the Central Intelligence Agency hunt down alleged Islamic militants in Albania. The militants were later expelled to Egypt and, in two cases, hanged. Albania was also seeking U.S. backing to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Mr. Berisha says he told the ambassador that Albania would take the Uighurs as a "favor to a friend," so long as America was sure they weren't terrorists. The U.S. agreed to cover the costs of their resettlement. Albania, he says, owes a lot to America, most recently for its 1999 military intervention in Kosovo, populated largely by ethnic Albanians.

China, which under Mao Zedong was a close ally of Albania, heard of the plan and was livid. A scheduled visit in May to Beijing by Albania's foreign minister was called off.

Three days before the May 8 U.S. court hearing on the Uighurs, Mr. Qassim and the four others were bundled onto the transport plane. Though told they were going to Albania, they were terrified the flight might end in China. Mr. Qassim says he calmed down only when the door of the plane opened and he saw European faces.

'Pay Any Price'

Local newspapers splashed their arrival across the front pages. The opposition blasted the government for upsetting China. Two days after the Uighurs landed, Prime Minister Berisha met with Vice President Dick Cheney in Croatia at a gathering of three countries hoping to join NATO. The prime minister said Albania was ready to "pay any price" to join the alliance. Mr. Cheney said he endorsed the entry of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia.

In Tirana last week, Mr. Berisha said he was baffled that so many major nations declined to take the Uighurs, including the U.S. itself and the European countries that call for Guantanamo's closure. "Big countries don't like to deal with small problems," he said.

Mr. Qassim and his companions, meanwhile, have shaved off the long beards they had grown in jail to fit in with zealously devout Arab inmates. They now have a driver to take them around Tirana, and have found a Turkish restaurant where Turkish-speaking waiters can just about make out their orders. China's official news agency, Xinhua, says the five men are "faring poorer than rats crossing the street."

On a visit last week to an Internet cafe, the five men searched for news about their case in their native tongue. Then they watched footage from the 9/11 attacks in New York. They'd never seen the images of hijacked planes flying into the World Trade Center before, and they wanted to know what got America so angry.

Mr. Qassim groaned as he saw the jets slam into the towers. "This is awful, really awful," he said. "If this hadn't happened, we would never have gone to Guantanamo."

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com1

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Adel's anniversary is coming up

2006-03-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

Adel's anniversary is coming up

By P. Sabin Willett

JURIST news | MArch 09, 2006

I met him one day last July, when he was chained to the floor of a hut in Guantanamo. Four months before, my firm had filed his habeas case, but I'd never seen or spoken to him before. Was he a terrorist? One of the worst of the worst?

You might be excused for thinking so. Vice President Dick Cheney says, "The people that are there [at Guantanamo] are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They’re bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They’re members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

But last July I discovered what the Bush Administration had kept secret about Adel. They'd concluded he was not a terrorist, not an enemy soldier, not Al Qaeda, not Taliban, had never been on a battlefield or fired a shot in anger. He'd been sold to U.S. forces by bounty hunters from Pakistan.

On December 22, 2005, a federal judge ruled that the President's imprisonment of Adel is unlawful. Then he dismissed Adel's case. Adel is a "Uighur," a Turkic Muslim from the far western reaches of Communist China. A dissident, he cannot be returned to China because the Chinese would torture him, or worse. The judge concluded he could not order Adel's release within the continental US because that would be to infringe on the President's control of immigration. His lawyers think that was incorrect, but does it matter? The core function of a judge in a free society – remedying illegal imprisonment – is undone by immigration law?

I used to think Adel was the exception. My guess now is that History will show he's the rule. Last month, Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux published a study analyzing the Military’s own “combatant status review tribunal” records. He ignored what we lawyers say, and relied exclusively on military allegations. Here’s what he found.

The Vice President says they men are Al Qaeda fighters. What does the military say? Eight percent are al Qaeda fighters. Ninety two percent are not. The Vice President says these men were picked up on the battlefield. The military data show that five percent were picked up on the battlefield. How did we get the others? US forces distributed leaflets. One says, in Pashto:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams …
You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Eighty-six percent were sold to us by people who got the leaflets.

Vice President Cheney says they committed hostile acts against Americans or their allies. What do the data show? Fifty-five percent of the detainees committed no hostile act against the US or its allies or any one else. By the way, wearing a Casio watch is a "hostile act." So is fleeing from US bombing.

Who’s at Guantanamo? Privates, orphans, the poor, conscripts, cooks, drivers, persons who "associated with the Taliban" by inhabiting its prisons as enemies of its regime. The Taliban generals aren’t there. Some are busy in the Afghan parliament we helped construct. A former Taliban spokesman isn't there either. He’s a freshman at Yale.

The central lie of Guantanamo is the whopper: that as a general proposition it holds terrorists. The President, the Vice President, their amen chorus in Congress tell us so relentlessly. But if one searches the military’s findings for an act of violence against persons or property, for bombing or bombmaking or the teaching of bombmaking or planning or conspiring for it, fundraising, cheerleading – anything -- when one searches hundreds and hundreds of military records, one finds that this is, most of all, who isn't at Guantanamo.

When the history of all this is written no branch of our government will fare very well. The President will be remembered for the shabby inhumanity of this exercise, as well as the pointless ineptitude of imprisoning chicken farmers, stroke victims, and former prisoners of the Taliban. He bowed to theorists who lacked life experience or judgment. Or decency. On his watch they brought their fanciful notions out of the academy and into Guantanamo, where men were beaten, and Bagram and Abu Ghraib, where men were murdered. History will not be kind to him.

Nor to Congress, either. Last year, with trumpets blaring, Congress declared a ban on torture, voting sotto voce to abolish the only remedy that might bring torture to light: habeas corpus at Guantanamo. Not so long ago, America's chief law enforcement officer blandly testified that the President is free to offend an act of Congress when he deems it necessary. The legislators clucked and scolded for a few hours -- then hastened to amend the act. The Republicans scramble to protect the President, while the Democrats are up on the roof with a windsock, trying to figure out what to believe in. History will not be kind to them either.

But I wonder if History will save its sternest verdict for the judicial branch. We like to think our judges are on the watch tower. In times of panic and folly, we rely on them for judgment and courage. Yet when our judges' moment came, they flinched.

It came on June 28, 2004. On that day, in the plainest possible words the Supreme Court of the United States ordered one court -- the United States District Court for the District of Columbia -- to hold factual hearings on the habeas cases. It ordered the judges to decide who was an 'enemy combatan'” and who a chicken farmer. "We ... remand these cases for the District Court to consider in the first instance the merits of petitioners’ claims," the Court said in Rasul v. Bush. The Court did not remand to a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and it did not, after two years of litigation, remand for a test of the pleadings. It sent the case to a federal judge to hear the merits. Thus far only one has done so, and he found the imprisonment unlawful.

Through eighteen months, all the other district judges have begged someone -- Congress, the Court of Appeals, anyone -- to take the cup from them. The Executive filed motions challenging jurisdiction (again); appeals were taken; the district judges breathed a sigh of thanks and granted stays. The appeals grind on, and many of those stays are now more than a year old. Zadvydas v. Davis teaches that indefinite imprisonment of aliens is illegal, but the district judges decreed an indefinite imprisonment in the habeas litigation nonetheless, and at last Congress let them all off the hook by voting to abolish habeas review at Guantanamo. Or not: now we are into a new round of briefs about whether the Detainee Treatment Act is retroactive. Another appellate exercise – well, that's a mercy. It should keep the cup of judgment away for at least another year.

Do we have a judicial branch in this country, or Kabuki theatre? We can wait for History’s verdict, or we might just ask Adel. On March 26, 2006, he'll reach a milestone: one year since the military completed its determination that he is not an enemy combatant. He'll be celebrating that date behind concertina wire, at Camp Iguana, JTF Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

P. Sabin Willett is a partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP in Boston.

March 9, 2006

Nury A Turkel

2006-03-10T23:05:00.000-08:00

Nury A Turkel

Broken China: President Bush can give voice to the oppressed

2005-12-16T12:38:00.000-08:00

Broken China
President Bush can give voice to the oppressed.

By Nury Turkel

Democratic leaders who recently met the wholly un-democratic Chinese president, Hu Jintao, on his tour of western Europe, have been heavily criticized for not putting the issue of human rights higher on their agendas.

Initial fears that President Bush would be accused of the same failing prior to his upcoming visit to Beijing were allayed by his speech in Japan calling for democratic reform in China. Bush's message to Beijing was clear and forthright, and the mere fact he has so publicly prodded China should make leaders in Europe squirm — if not those in Beijing.

The problem is, external calls for political reform in China are always going to fall on ears deafened by the roar of an economic boom. All domestic problems faced by China — from growing rural unrest to catastrophic environmental degradation — are not matters to be solved by democratic reform as far as Beijing in concerned because to do so would muffle the economic boom. China's domestic problems are evidently regarded as problems to be solved by a tighter political grip.

Beijing is haunted still by the demise of the Soviet Union, pulled apart by the forces unleashed when Moscow loosened the reins on its satellite states. The "color revolutions" in the former Soviet states are yet more reason for Beijing to be flexing its grip. So China is tightening the reins and flogging the horse as hard as it can in the direction of economic and diplomatic might. Beijing is desperate to become a modern and respected society in the international community — at whatever the cost. And anyway, China is convinced that the only game in D.C. is to make China fail and fail badly, and so any call for Beijing to treat its own people with a bit more respect is seen as an attempt to undermine China.

But crucially, Bush's call for political reform must be seen in Beijing as an exhortation for its leaders to stop burning their bridges, for the sake of China and everyone and everything connected with China.

China's 900 million farmers are being cut adrift from Beijing's dreams, and every village attacked by club-wielding thugs in the pay of officials and every community left destitute by corrupt land-grabs is yet another bridge burnt. Unless a solution to the Tibet problem is found which includes the Dalai Lama another crucial bridge will be burnt. It's already too late with the Falun Gong and swathes of China's intellectuals. History will not be kind, and nor should it be.

Slowly and inexorably, China's leaders are becoming ever more stranded and vulnerable, all the while stoking the rage and indignation of the people of China.

Of prime concern must be the Uyghur people in their far northwestern homeland of East Turkistan, referred to by the Chinese authorities as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Beijing is not only lighting fires under the bridge to these people, it is widening the valley.

These ten million or more Uyghurs are in the deeply unfortunate position of sharing a homeland with a quarter of the PRC's inland oil and gas reserves and 40 percent of its coal reserves. The Chinese government plans to mold East Turkistan into a commercial hub — a bridge — between China and markets in Central Asia, Russia, and even Europe.

But Uyghurs, with their permissive and moderate form of Islam, are regarded as a problem as far as Beijing's plans go. Post 9/11, long-standing Uyghur opposition to Chinese administration is now described as "terrorist," and the Chinese authorities deliberately link their crackdown on Uyghurs to the U.S.-led War on Terror.

The "trickle-down" theory of economic development improving civil and political rights has failed catastrophically for the Uyghur people. The more people and money Beijing pours into East Turkistan, the more marginalized and desperate the Uyghur people are becoming.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Uyghurs who protest face personal disaster. Last week an editor of a literary journal was jailed for three years having published a piece of fiction comparing the plight of Uyghurs to a caged dove; the story's author is already serving ten years in prison for writing it. Detention centers, labor camps, prisons, and execution grounds in East Turkistan are full beyond capacity with Uyghurs who have peacefully expressed opposition to Chinese administration.

China gave up the fight to win the Uyghurs' hearts and minds long ago. Now it's just a fight to keep them down and to stop them from interfering with business that doesn't concern them — China's business. Bush's call for China to "get your house in order" is sound and timely advice, and Beijing must wake up to it before it burns a bridge too far.

— Nury Turkel is president of the Uyghur American Association.

Saving the Uyghurs

2005-08-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

Saving the Uyghurs
China has intensified repression under the guise of a war on terror.

By Nury Turkel

Over the past few weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Europe, Asia, and Latin America, in large part to promote President Bush's vision of democracy and freedom. During her trip, she met with local dissidents from Belarus and Brazil. Not so during her trip to China.

Yet that trip was possibly the most fruitful — or at least eventful — with regard to democracy and human rights, for it yielded the release of Rebiya Kadeer, a nominee for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, who has been in prison since 1999. As Muslims face tyranny across the globe, President Bush's vision of freedom and democracy has a special resonance.

Like Rebiya Kadeer, I am a Uyghur. We are a Turkic Muslim people who live in what is now northwest China. China calls our homeland the "New Frontier," but we call it East Turkistan. As the protectors of the fabled Silk Road, my people have known and honored a diversity of ideas. Indeed, before converting to Islam, Uyghurs were Buddhists, Shaman, and Nestorian Christians. In addition to material goods, our central location led to an exchange of religions and cultures; we benefited from interactions with those from the West as well as the East.

Now we know only darkness. My homeland has been under Chinese Communist rule for the past 56 years. Uyghurs, like Buddhists in Tibet, are forbidden to pray or speak freely. When Western reporters talk about how China's political situation is improving alongside rapid economic growth, I know they have not visited East Turkistan. Where I grew up, people today are still being executed for speaking out against injustice. East Turkistan is the only province in the People's Republic of China where people are still being executed for political reasons. Of course, China no longer labels us "counter-revolutionaries" or "American running dogs." Now Beijing calls us terrorists, hoping to legitimize their oppression by describing it as part of China's war on terror.

President Bush is a man whose strongly held personal views are reflected in his policies. He knows about the plight of Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan, and Tibetan Buddhists in Tibet, and his own religious beliefs lead us to believe that he is particularly sensitive to religious repression everywhere. It was significant that in October 2001, just a month after 9/11, he specifically warned China not to use the fight against terrorism as an excuse to persecute its minorities.

But China's ruling elite wasn't listening. Instead, the government seized the opportunity to advance its campaign to assimilate forcefully Uyghurs into the Chinese culture. Uyghur books were burned, and now we Uyghurs can no longer speak our language in universities (and an increasing number of high schools). It is hard to describe to someone who lives in a free society, particularly in America, which has never been occupied, how it feels not to be able to own and speak your language. Our freedom to practice religion has turned into a privilege regulated by the CCP. Chinese officials recently bragged that three million births in East Turkistan were avoided, meaning that that unborn Uyghur children have been forcibly aborted. In short, the Chinese Communist Party's assault on the existence of the Uyghur nation has been intensified under the banner of China's own war on terror.

Uyghurs who peacefully oppose this injustice are labeled as terrorists. Many who escaped to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were returned to China and executed. Uyghurs want peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights, including the right to be Muslim. That is why President Bush's message strikes a chord with Uyghurs.

There are a few glimmers of hope for Uyghurs. In early 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy, the American lifeline for dissidents worldwide, gave my organization, the Uyghur American Association, a grant to begin human-rights research to document human-rights abuses against Uyghurs. In November 2004, Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur businesswoman, was awarded the Rafto prize, a prestigious human-rights award. Kadeer was arrested in 1997 while on her way to brief a U.S. congressional delegation on Uyghur human rights. She was finally released by the Chinese authorities on March 17, 2005, on "medical parole," but it was the continued pressure exerted on the Chinese government by the United States and international human-rights organizations — culminating in Secretary of State Rice's visit to Beijing — that truly led to Kadeer's release.

In the past few weeks, the resignation of Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev — one of China's main allies in the persecution of Uyghurs — in the "Tulip Revolution" became the most significant source of hope in recent years for Uyghurs suffering under the oppression of the PRC.

These developments send a message not only to China, but also to Uyghurs. As news of these developments, including the Bush's approach to spreading democracy and freedom around the world, reach Uyghurs in East Turkistan through the congressionally-funded Radio Free Asia, my fellow Uyghurs are offered not only hope, but a connection to the free world.

— Nury Turkel is president of the Uyghur American Association.

A 'Period of Emergency and Darkness': A Growing New Alliance Threatens Beijing

2005-08-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

A 'Period of Emergency and Darkness': A Growing New Alliance Threatens Beijing

By Nury Turkel

When I was at college in China, I formed strong friendships with several Tibetans, and there was an intimacy and natural trust in these friendships that was simply not there with Chinese students. These personal friendships emerged from a shared experience under Chinese oppression. In the last few years, stronger alliances have been forged between the Tibetan and Uyghur people as a whole, because the fundamental issues facing both people under Chinese occupation – the loss of cultural identity, religious freedoms, political autonomy, and economic marginalization and dominance, are the same.

Party officials in Beijing are profoundly threatened by any ties between its 'minority nationality' peoples that might undermine the Party. The vast Tibetan plateau and the desert oases of Xinjiang, formerly East Turkistan, make up approximately half of the territory of the PRC. They are both of immense strategic significance - Tibet is known as the 'south-western frontier of the motherland' while my homeland shares borders with several former Soviet states as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Both Tibet and East Turkistan are also rich in mineral and natural resources – East Turkistan is reputed to have as much oil as Kuwait.

China controlled most of my homeland, known as East Turkistan since 1949; however China maintained a weak grip until the foundation of Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1955, under the People's Republic of China, and took complete control after Mao Zedong brought the East Turkistan army under the authority of the People's Liberation Army in 1962. Since 1949 the Chinese population in East Turkistan has increased from around 7% to more than 40%. The same has happened in Tibet, and the Dalai Lama has said that the influx of Chinese people is the single biggest threat to Tibet's cultural survival.

For both Tibetans and Uyghurs – a Turkic-speaking people who converted to Islam in the 1300s – this threat has increased dramatically since Beijing's accelerated drive to develop the Western regions of the PRC, including Tibet and East Turkistan. The Chinese domination of the economy in both East Turkistan and Tibet is linked to Beijing's policies of control over its 'minority nationalities'. China's Premier Wen Jiabao said this week that the western development strategy is still one of China's top priorities.

The late Yulo Dawa Tsering, a senior religious teacher in Tibet who served 20 years in prison for the peaceful expression of his views, could have been speaking for Uyghurs too when he referred to the drive to develop the Western regions as representing 'a period of emergency and darkness.'

Since 11 September 2001, Beijing has continued to use the international 'war against terror' to justify harsh repression in East Turkistan, which continues to result in serious human rights violations against the ethnic Uyghur community. The authorities make little distinction between acts of violence and acts of peaceful resistance. There are thousands of political prisoners in East Turkistan, and it is currently the only province in the PRC that continues to execute people for political offences. Repression is targeted at the heart of Uyghur identity, involving the closure of mosques, restrictions on the use of the Uyghur language and the banning of certain Uyghur books and journals. A policy that, since the mid-1990s, has been seen to be effective in silencing many dissenting voices in East Turkistan and Tibet.

Like Tibetans, Uyghurs have been demoralized and undermined by hardline security policies and crackdowns on their culture, language and religion. But equally, for many of us, Chinese rule has intensified our sense of national pride and identity. Uyghurs stand alongside Tibetans by expressing their continued resistance to the Party and government through their language, culture and jokes. It happens everyday; at Uyghur gatherings, over the dinner table. In the Uyghur language, there are so many nuances of expression to convey the subtleties of what is happening. This is one of the reasons for China's ongoing persecution of Uyghur artists, writers and comedians.

There's a well-known joke about the appointment of the new chairman of the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Jiang Zemin (China's former Party Secretary and President) locks up four Uyghurs in a dark room and touches their heads. He then picks the one with the softest skull. It's a reference to the fact that the Chinese don't care how skilful, talented or knowledgeable Uyghurs are; the most important virtue in a leader is their 'soft head'; their submissiveness to Beijing.

Chinese propaganda depicts Uyghur resistance against the Chinese as 'violent separatism', and the international press has sometimes taken up this theme too, often in contrast to the peaceful resistance of Tibetans. The real picture is much more complex. It is true that there was some reported violent anti-government and anti-Chinese activity in East Turkistan before the mid-1990s. But it is next to impossible to connect known Uyghur separatist organizations with most of the violent incidents inside East Turkistan in recent years, and the frequency of violent activity associated with Uyghur separatism has declined dramatically since the late 1990s. All of the underground networks have been largely broken up and the people disempowered by the coercive mechanisms of the state, which has all served to make any form of overt resistance less likely.

Uyghur political prisoners don't have the same profile as Tibetan political prisoners, partly because security measures are so ruthless and so sophisticated that this information is not reaching the West. In general, it seems that China is much more careful about how it handles the Tibet issue because it remains high on the international political agenda and the situation there is monitored by lobbying organizations and activists all over the world who take every opportunity to make representations on behalf of the Tibetan people.

It is also because the Tibetans, both those who continue to resist and those choose to conform to the ways of the Chinese regime, have the leadership of the Dalai Lama. Even though we don't have any religious attachment to the Dalai Lama, I know that Uyghur people admire him greatly. On an international level, he has unified Tibetans both in Tibet and in exile. We admire his dedication and the sacrifices he has made for his people, in the way he lives his life. He has provided the noblest example of peaceful resistance.

The future for the Uyghur people, and indeed Tibetans, is very much linked to the international climate. As an emerging global economic power, China has an increasing need for energy resources and is challenging the only world superpower, the US, with its developing influence in Asia, the Islamic world, Europe. There is simply no precedent in world history for the Chinese state today. But it is becoming clearer that even as the Party leadership tightens its grip, its legitimacy is under challenge from its own people, and its political system is ultimately fragile. Today, it is ever more important for Uyghur people to strengthen their political and economic ties with Tibetans facing the same threat from China. We need to hold fast to our language and our culture during this darkest time of our history.

-ends-

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in 'Incomparable Warriors: Non-violent resistance in Tibet today' published by the International Campaign for Tibet, www.savetibet.org

Nury Turkel, who was born in Kashgar, is a lawyer and President of the Uyghur American Association in Washington DC. www.uyghuramerican.org

People Power Sends a Message To Oppressive Regimes

2005-08-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

April 21, 2005
Wall Street Journal
By NURY TURKEL

China watched nervously as Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev was toppled from power by a disenchanted populace last month. The resurgence of people power in the sequence of "colored revolutions" in the post-Soviet states -- Kyrgyzstan's tulip revolution followed the orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the rose revolution in Georgia in 2003 -- has brought unprecedented hope to the more than 10 million strong Uighur population of East Turkistan. Now called Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the province lies on China's northwestern frontier and is an area of immense geopolitical and strategic significance.

As demonstrators stormed Mr. Akayev's offices in Bishkek and he fled to Moscow, Uighur people in East Turkistan listened to news of the unfolding of events on clandestine Radio Free Asia broadcasts. Mr. Akayev's resignation became the only significant source of hope in recent years for Uighurs suffering under the oppression of the Beijing, and also for hundreds of thousands of Uighurs facing persecution in exile in China's neighbors among the former Soviet republics of Central Asia -- in particular Kyrgyzstan, one of the most important centers of the Uighur diaspora.

Uighurs, a Turkic, Sunni Muslim people, have close cultural, historical and linguistic ties to other ethnic groups in the Eurasian continent, including the Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Turkish, Azeri and Tatar people. The most high-profile Uighur dissident, Rebiya Kadeer, was released last month from political imprisonment in China. Now in Washington, D.C. on medical parole after serving five years of an eight year sentence in East Turkistan's capital, Urumchi, she said: "When I heard the news about what happened in Kyrgyzstan, I was so excited that I couldn't sleep. Whatever happens to our brothers and sisters in Kyrgyzstan affects people in East Turkistan."

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Beijing has used the international war on terror to justify harsh repression in East Turkistan. The authorities make little distinction between acts of violence and acts of peaceful resistance and frequently brand Uighurs as "separatists, terrorists and religious extremists." According to Amnesty International, thousands of Uighurs have been detained for political reasons, and many have suffered severe torture. It continues to execute people for political offences. Repression is targeted at the heart of Uighur identity, involving the closure of mosques, restrictions on the use of the Uighur language and the banning of certain Uighur books and journals. Even Uighurs in the government or working for the Communist Party have been disturbed by the intensification of repression since Sept. 11.

Central Asian governments, and in particular Kyrgyzstan, have sought to increase economic cooperation and strategic ties with Beijing by conspiring in the crackdown on Uighurs -- an alliance that is legitimized through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Under Mr. Akayev, Kyrgyzstan had arguably been the most cooperative with Beijing of all the SCO countries. Beijing's aim is to maintain firm control over East Turkistan, and to strengthen China's influence in the important Central Asian region, vital in terms of access to energy resources and as a counter-balance to Washington and Moscow's interests.

Under Mr. Akayev's leadership, Uighurs who had fled oppression in China "disappeared" in Kyrgyzstan and were often forcibly returned to China, where some were executed. Key Uighur leaders have been assassinated in suspicious circumstances, and many Uighur prisoners are held in prison in Bishkek and elsewhere in the region, serving long sentences for offences known to be political.

These efforts have duly been acknowledged by Beijing. During an official visit to Bishkek last September, China's Premier Wen Jiabao expressed thanks for Mr. Akayev's assistance in Beijing's efforts against so-called "East Turkistani separatism and terrorism."

Under Mr. Akayev, the activities of the main Uighur cultural organization in Kyrgyzstan, Ittipak (meaning "unity") were restricted. But already there are signs of change. Within weeks of his fall from power, my organization, the Uighur American Association, which advocates democracy for Uighurs, was invited to meet the new government by a Kyrgyz human-rights organization based in Vienna, Austria and we hope to travel to Bishkek shortly. This is part of an effort to encourage the new leaders to establish alliances with members of civil society and non-governmental organizations.

We hope that not only will a democratic Kyrgyz society provide protection to citizens' rights, but that it will also allow Uighur citizens to participate in government -- the involvement of people of different ethnicities in their governments is a litmus-test of emerging democracies that we are witnessing in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Members of the new leadership have stated publicly that Kyrgyzstan will continue to develop its foreign policy in line with the status quo and that China is an important economic partner and friend. Even so, while in opposition, many of these leaders had an anti-China platform. Some of them even took the risk of criticizing Mr. Akayev's government, while he was in power, for violating international law by forcibly deporting Uighur political activists to China.

While it is too soon to predict the consequences of Mr. Akayev's fall from power for the people of Kyrgyzstan and East Turkistan, it is certain that the most critical test for the new Kyrgyz government in reconfiguring their political future is its relationship with Beijing. The new leaders of the tulip revolution must be acutely aware that events of the past month in Kyrgyzstan send a strong message to the oppressive regimes in the region with zero tolerance for political dissent -- particularly China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Mr. Turkel is a lawyer and president of the Uighur American Association in Washington, D.C.

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