Ahktar’s Not So Excellent Adventure
A story in the Sunday New York Times highlights the absurdity, not to mention immorality, of the Bush administration’s detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Ahktar Qassim Basit and a group of four other Muslim men who are ethnic Uighurs from western China were held in Guantanmo detention for four years, after being handed over to the Americans by Pakistan. They had been camped near Tora Bora in Afghanistan, as part of a separatist group whom the Chinese government view as terrorists. When the Americans attacked the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001, the Uighurs fled to Pakistan, only to be arrested and wind up in Guantanamo.
After finally determining that the men posed no threat to the United States, the Americans asked scores of countries to accept them as refugees, since returning them to China meant a likelihood of torture and death. The only taker was – wait for it – Albania. So these five guys are plucked from four years of Uncle Sam’s harsh treatment at Guantanamo and dumped in Albania, their heads spinning, wondering” “What the…?”.
Now there’s a good chance they picked up some English at Guantanamo. They may even have learned a few words of Arabic or Urdu. But Albanian? Not likely. These bewildered souls are now trying to make sense of their lives, separated as they are from their families, unable to get work among people whose language they don’t speak and whose society is completely alien to them. Unbelievably they are the lucky ones; almost twenty others remain in limbo in Guantanamo because the Chinese government has scared off other countries, including Albania, from providing refuge.
Which begs the obvious question: why won’t we Americans take them? Well conveniently, the Department of Homeland Security has deemed them inadmissible to the US because of their association with an organization that has engaged in terrorism – even though their separatist group grew out of resistance to the harsh oppression of the Chinese authorities and had only a very loose connection to the Taliban.
Congress needs to take a hand legislatively, if necessary, to right the wrong we have inflicted on these people and provide a safe haven for them and their families in the US. And while we’re at it, how about welcoming to our shores a heck of a lot more of those Iraqis who have risked everything by serving with US civilian and military authorities in their country?
UPDATE: More Uighurs released to Bermuda and Palau in 2009.
This is the kind of mess we have developed a body of law to prevent. Of course the military needs the right to haphazardly arrest people in a chaotic time of war. But the treatment of those detainees until a time when they can be sorted into “combatants” and “non-combatants” and the rights they are afforded during detention can either create or prevent such issues. No system is going to be perfect, but ANY system is better than none. Unfortunately we abandoned time honored convention in favor of wholesale improvisation.