How China Uses Guantánamo’s Former Uyghur Prisoners to Justify the Mass Imprisonment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province
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CNN is to be congratulated for recently publishing a detailed article about one of lingering injustices of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, involving the Uyghurs, a predominantly Turkic-speaking ethnic group from Xinjiang province, in the north west of China, whose cases I have reported on ever since I first began researching and writing about Guantánamo in 2006.
22 Uyghurs, captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, ended up at Guantánamo, where the Bush administration, seeking cooperation from the Chinese authorities in the global “war on terror” that the US declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, obligingly designated the Uyghur prisoners as members of a largely non-existent terrorist organization, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
This decision not only continues to blight the lives of the former Guantánamo prisoners, who were all resettled in third countries between 2006 and 2013, having been cleared of all wrongdoing by the US, but has also been used by the Chinese government to justify its ruthless imprisonment, since 2017, of at least a million Uyghurs in “re-education” camps, where credible allegations have been repeatedly made about how, as well as attempting to eradicate Uyghur culture, religion and identity through “re-education,” the camps also involve the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, and the forced separation of children from their parents. There have also been numerous credible reports about Uyghur women being subjected to rape and torture.
How the US Fell for Chinese Lies Regarding the Uighurs at Guantánamo, and Why the Uighurs Need Our Support
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Thanks to the Atlantic, and Richard Bernstein, former foreign correspondent for Time and the New York Times, for revisiting the story of Guantánamo’s Uighurs, the ethnic group in the prison who were most transparently unconnected to the anti-American activities of Al-Qaeda.
The timing of Bernstein’s article, ‘When China Convinced the U.S. That Uighurs Were Waging Jihad,’ is evidently intended — and with good reason — to highlight the terrible situation faced by the UIghurs, a Turkic group from Xinjiang province in north western China, who are currently facing the harshest clampdown by the Chinese government in a long history of oppression, with at least a million Uighurs “arbitrarily detained in internment camps in Xinjiang, where they are forced to undergo political indoctrination,” as the Guardian explained in November 2018, after the United Nations’ Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (the first to study China since 2013) had condemned China for its deteriorating human rights record. As Vox explained, Western governments “had the harshest words for China,” with the US chargé d’affaires Mark Cassayre demanding that China “abolish all forms of arbitrary detention” for Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, and calling on the government to “release the ‘possibly millions’ of individuals detained there.”
Bernstein’s article focuses on how the Bush administration — shamefully — reversed its opinion about the Chinese government’s oppression of the Uighurs in 2002, to justify its imprisonment of 22 Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, some of whom spent a total of 12 years in US custody, despite it having been obvious to anyone actually paying attention to their cases that, as many of the Uighurs themselves explained, they had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had no animosity whatsoever towards the US.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
