Vol. 73/No. 9      March 9, 2009

The U.S. government had “determined” that 17 Uyghur inmates at its Guantánamo prison camp were not “enemy combatants” and cleared them for release. But, like dozens of other prisoners there, they continue to languish with no release date and face further imprisonment and torture at the hands of the only government willing to accept them—Beijing.

The Uyghurs are an oppressed nationality in China, and the Chinese government has stepped up its repression against them in recent years. Beijing alleges the 17 Guantánamo prisoners are members of a terrorist separatist organization and has demanded their extradition to China.

Civil libertarian groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have campaigned for release of the Uyghurs from Guantánamo and against their repatriation to China, where they say they face torture.

In August 2003, then-secretary of state Colin Powell announced Washington would not release any Uyghur prisoners to China.

In 2006, five Uyghur prisoners were released to Albania, but government officials there have refused to accept more.

In September 2008 the U.S. government admitted it had no reason to keep the 17 remaining Uyghurs locked up. The following month, a federal judge ordered the government to release them into the United States. But the Justice Department appealed the decision on the basis that they are too dangerous. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled February 18 in favor of the Justice Department.

The Uyghur prisoners have been locked up in Guantánamo for the last seven years without charges in conditions of extreme isolation.

Supporters and attorneys for the Uyghurs are working to get the German or Canadian governments to accept them. The city council of Munich, Germany—home to the largest Uyghur population outside China—has offered to take them, but this has not been approved by German chancellor Angela Merkel.

President Barack Obama issued an order January 22 that the Guantánamo prison camp be closed within the next year. The Obama administration also suspended all military tribunals and requested the courts suspend some 200 pending legal challenges to the prisoners’ indefinite incarceration, while the government conducts its own “comprehensive interagency review.”

The executive order applies only to the 242 U.S. prisoners at Guantánamo. Washington holds more than 600 “terrorism” suspects from around the world at its air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. That prison is being expanded to double capacity. Based on a 2001 presidential order authorizing indefinite detentions for “terror” suspects, tens of thousands more are held without charges by the U.S. military elsewhere, particularly in Iraq.

Unlike Washington’s other military prisons, the Guantánamo camp has become a political liability for U.S. rulers.

Like many other “suspicious foreigners,” the Uyghurs were captured and sold to the U.S. military by bounty hunters in Pakistan following the launching of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. All of the prisoners have denied any connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Chinese government armed and trained its own Islamist force among the Uyghurs to fight as part of the Mujahideen against the occupying Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Mujahideen was a rightist Islamist military coalition backed by Washington to wage a holy jihad in order to reestablish political control by the country’s traditional landlord-based rulers.

Coming out of the small Uyghur section of the Mujahideen, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) was formed. The Chinese government has used the existence of this group, with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, as an excuse for its repression against the Uyghur people and their fight against discrimination—branding movements against Beijing’s domination as Islamist terrorism.

Chinese soldiers opened fire Feb. 5, 1997, on a peaceful demonstration by Uyghurs against discriminatory practices and the closing down of their soccer arena for military training purposes.

The U.S. government alleges the Uyghur prisoners have links to ETIM. Washington included the group, at Beijing’s request, on its list of “terrorist organizations” in 2002.

The Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Region in Western China is a sparsely populated area comprising about one-sixth of China’s territory. The Chinese government lays its claim to the territory based on the region’s historic subjugation by Han dynasties. The Han people are the dominant nationality in China.

Before the Chinese revolution, independent Uyghur governments were briefly established in 1933-34 and 1944-49. The bureaucratic caste headed by Mao Zedong that was brought to power with the Chinese revolution maintained the second-class status of the Uyghurs. In 1955 the region was classified as an “autonomous region” of the People’s Republic of China.

Today there is at least 8.7 million Uyghurs out of a population of 18 million. The province’s population of Hans has grown from 6 percent in 1949 to about 40 percent today, a result of the Chinese government’s “Hanification” policy in the region.
 
 
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