The tiny South Pacific nation of Palau has offered to give some of the remaining Uighurs currently being held at Guantanamo asylum. It comes as no real surprise given that a recent protest that was caught by visiting journalists recently made headlines. Given Palau’s extremely close relationship with the US – the official currency of Palau is the US dollar, as it was a US administered UN trusteeship until 1994 – I would imagine that the State Department applied a little pressure to have the situation resolved.
Five Uighurs were granted asylum by Albania in 2006, but the rest, though innocent, have remained in US custody at Guantanamo because, until now, no nation wanted them. For those of you unfamiliar with their plight…
“The Uighurs are members of a mostly Turkic-speaking and Muslim ethnic minority from China’s far western region, and many say they have long been repressed by the Chinese government.
China says Uighur nationalists are leading a separatist movement and are responsible for a series of “terrorist” attacks.
The men were seized in Pakistan in the months after the invasion of Afghanistan and handed over to the US military.
US authorities were at that time offering cash bounties for any foreign nationals captured in the region, assuming they had links to al-Qaeda.
Once they had been taken to Guantanamo, the Uighurs were determined not to be a threat to US security, while a military tribunal declared they were not to be considered enemy combatants.
But the US would not send them back to China, for fear the Chinese would execute them as separatists.
So the Uighurs languished, year after year, in a bizarre legal limbo…”
Interestingly, the United States has also conveniently offered the government of Palau $200 million dollars in development aid, though deny that the offer has anything to do with acceptance of the Uighurs.
Of course, were an individual in a US prison to have been falsely imprisoned for seven years the punitive damages that they could seek through civil litigation would be considerable. In this case, the Uighurs have no such luxury. I suppose it could be said that the US is doing them a favour by not returning them to China. But the irony should be lost on no one that while the US has claimed that their reasons for not doing so is to protect the Uighurs from what they view as possible human rights violations, they themselves are guilty of the exact same thing.