China

A cross-post, with my own introduction, of a recent CNN article looking at how US support for the Chinese government’s assertion that the Uyghur prisoners held at Guantánamo were terrorists not only continues to dog the men released from the prison between 2006 and 2013, but has also reinforced the Chinese government’s rationale for its brutal and horrendous “re-education” camps in Xinjiang province, where at least a million Uyghurs have been detained arbitrarily and have been subjected to human rights abuses.

An update on a long-running story of obstruction by the Canadian government, which is refusing to allow three Uighur men and former Guantánamo prisoners, who were resettled in Albania and Bermuda, and who are married to Canadian citizens and with children who are also Canadian citizens, to be reunited with their families in Canada, citing long-discredited security concerns.

A cross-post, with my own detailed introduction, of an article for the Atlantic by Richard Bernstein about the Uighurs, an oppressed minority in China, and how the Bush administration sided with the Chinese government to falsely assess 22 Uighurs who ended up at Guantánamo as terrorists.

On Radio Australia’s show “Pacific Beat,” reporter Sean Dorney traveled to the small Pacific island nation of Palau to discuss an appeal to the Australian government, made by Palau’s President Johnson Toribiong, asking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to accept for permanent resettlement six Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who were cleared for release […]

In the first interview with one of the six Uighurs recently released from Guantánamo to the Pacific nation of Palau, Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C. spoke by phone to Anwar Hassan, who revealed that, although the men were enjoying their new-found freedom, they were all concerned that they were unable to contact their families. […]

Last Thursday, while most US media outlets were focused relentlessly on the marathon endurance test that was Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights And Oversight held a hearing to investigate why the Bush administration had allowed Chinese interrogators to visit Guantánamo to interrogate the […]

These accounts, from three Uighur prisoners released from Guantánamo, were submitted to a hearing last Thursday of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight. For a report on the hearing, see “House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo.” Statement of Abu Bakker Qassim I would like […]

I have just received disturbing information from several Uighur correspondents in the United States, regarding the “riots” that began just nine days ago in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China. When the unrest began, the world’s media suddenly discovered the story of the Uighurs, who describe their situation as […]