From Gitmo to the US.

[Troglodyte]

Granted I'm a newb and haven't posted much - don't plan to - but some of you may have noticed my mention of the Uighurs. I'd spent a summer in 2002teaching ESL (English as a Second Language - basically conversational English if you're not familiar with ESL... there's a huge demand for learning English in China) in Hami, Xianjiang at a college. So, when I hear about the people in the news, my interest is piqued.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gitmo-release24-2009apr24,0,7979465.story

What I find interesting is that this article counters the statements made by some of the Uighurs in a PBS Frontline episode I watched a couple of months ago.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/albania801/video/video_index.html

The Uighurs are an ethnic minority in their own ancestral homeland. Imagine the Western region of China as the American West was during the 1800s. And instead of native Americans, Uighurs and Tibetans. The ruling, eastern, Han chinese encouraged and maybe even forced settlement of Han chinese into the Western regions. The Uighurs are now effectively second class citizens.

At the college where I stayed, there were a couple of Uighurs on the "school board" but the school President was Han and placed by the Communist government. I was told - not by the Chinese - that the Uighur governmental placements were really nothing more than titular appeasements by the Chinese government.

As the first article notes, were we to release these Uighurs back to China, they'd not have it good. I'd give an educated guess and say you'd never hear from them again. You get the idea. The sad thing is, many of them will probably never see their families again, as mentioned in the Frontline episode.

[Troglodyte]

Similar to the Shiites in southern Iraq following Desert Storm, many Uighurs especially following 9-11 thought that the US might support their cause for freedom from China. Many have felt hung out to dry by the US.

[BioBeing]

What were those people even doing in Guantanamo? If they were not fighting the US, did they just happen to get picked up by random?

[Troglodyte]

Well, according to their interview on Frontline, they were down in Afghanistan looking for work and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Furthermore, they stated that once US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan that often people (Afghanis) would go to the soldiers and say "This man is a terrorist." or "I know where there are some terrorists", etc. The thought then being that the informing was purely monetarily based and thus not necessarily based in truth. That said, if an Afghani saw foreigners (Uighurs speak Mandarin chinese and their native Turkic Uighur language whereas Afghanis speak Urdu, Pashtun and probably several other languages) and considering how tribal and regionally confrontational they are to each other, they may have just had a level of distrust and uncertainty. And while many Afghanis weren't keen on the Taliban, many share similar fundie Islamic beliefs. Removing the Taliban allowed the tribal undercurrents that the Taliban and others had managed to keep under wraps, to burble to the surface.

According to the LA Times article, the Uighurs in question were in fact in Afghanistan for weapons training. And while the Uighurs in recent history had little interest (rather they had hope and love for the US... looking to us as potential "liberators" or assistors) in US, our policy was/is, grab them all up first, ask questions later.

So, I don't think they were picked up "randomly". But the sad thing is, even if in reality they never posed any direct threat to the US, by us taking them, we made their life harder and safer at the same time.

Who knows. Had they never been taken, they may well have gone back to Xinjiang and perpetrated acts against the Chinese government and they'd never have been heard from again were they then caught by the Chinese government.