Former Guantánamo detainees lament their banishment to Albania

TIRANA, Albania — Ahktar Qassim Basit says he is not angry about the four years he spent as a U.S. prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before his captors mumbled a brief apology and flew him to this drab Balkan capital to begin a new life as a refugee.

It is this new life in Albania, Basit and other former Guantánamo detainees say, that is driving them to desperation.

The men, Muslims from western China's Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

The men have been told they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy on macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on quick telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.

"We suffered very much at Guantánamo, but we continue to suffer here," Basit said. "The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: We have no place to go."

Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China's Communist government, which demands their return. Only Albania's pro-U.S. government would grant them asylum, but Albanian officials have since told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantánamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them — and neither will the United States.

U.S. diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that China has warned some of the same countries not to accept them.

Many U.S. officials privately describe the Uighurs' plight as one of the more troubling episodes of the Bush administration's detention program. The case also provides a view of the remarkable difficulties Washington has encountered in trying to winnow the detainee population at Guantánamo in response to domestic and international criticism.

The refugees in Tirana mostly spend their days behind the refugee center's high cinderblock walls, reading the Quran, praying, studying Albanian and waiting for a turn on the center's lone desktop computer. With President Bush scheduled to visit Albania today, the Uighurs and three other former Guantánamo detainees here are also asking whether the United States, having flown them here in shackles, might do anything to help get them the housing, jobs and other support they have been told to expect.

One morning in mid-May, the five Uighurs got permission to leave the refugee center, rode buses downtown and trooped to the offices of the Albanian prime minister, Sali Berisha. An aide said Berisha was too busy to see them, but promised to pass along their entreaties.

Through a government spokesman, officials of the Albanian Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the refugees, declined to comment on their treatment.

The 22 Uighurs who ended up at Guantánamo were part of a group of about three dozen Uighur men who were staying at a hamlet in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, not far from Tora Bora, when U.S. forces began bombing the area in October 2001.

Most of the five Uighurs in Tirana said they had left their homes in China's far-western Xinjiang province, an area the Uighurs call East Turkestan, to earn more money for their families and escape government harassment. They said they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries.

International human-rights groups have long accused the Chinese authorities of oppressing the roughly 9 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, where there have been occasional acts of separatist violence.

The State Department's own 2006 human-rights report for China describes ethnic discrimination, the suppression of Muslim religious freedom and the persecution of those thought to be separatists, many of whom have been executed.

"The government's war on terror continued to be used as a pretext for cracking down harshly on Uighurs expressing peaceful political dissent and on independent Muslim religious leaders," the report states.

Pentagon officials have described the Uighur hamlet in Afghanistan as a separatist training camp that was at least loosely aligned with the Taliban. Lawyers for the men dispute that characterization.

But in interviews, the Uighurs in Albania described a tiny, primitive outpost run by secretive members of some sort of Uighur liberation group.

The men who arrived there were given chores to do and beans to eat. Most of them were assigned aliases and shown how to fire an old AK-47 assault rifle, the only weapon they saw.

In mid-October of 2001, U.S. planes bombed the Uighur hamlet, killing at least one man and sending the rest fleeing over the mountains into Pakistan. Villagers there sheltered and fed the Uighurs but then betrayed them to local security forces, which turned them over to the U.S. military.

By June 2002, nearly all the Uighurs had been sent from military detention centers in Afghanistan to Guantánamo. They said that they had been treated harshly in Cuba and that the guards often had been disrespectful of their Qurans, but that they had not been beaten or tortured.

Several of the Uighurs said their most traumatic experience at Guantánamo was their interrogation by a team of Chinese security officials in September 2002. The Chinese threatened them repeatedly and insisted that the prisoners return with them to China, Qassim said. They refused.

By late 2003, senior national security officials in Washington cleared most of the Uighurs for release — 14, by one official's count.

The State Department began approaching Muslim countries such as Turkey and those with Uighur communities, like Germany and Sweden.

However, the search was interrupted in September 2004 when the Pentagon set up panels at Guantánamo to decide whether the prisoners there, including the 22 Uighurs, were being rightfully held. Although most of the Uighurs had already been cleared for release, the review panels found that all but six were in fact enemy combatants.

The boards were told to review the Uighur cases again, officials said. This time, they found that only five could be freed. (Subsequent annual reviews have cleared 15 of the 17 remaining detainees.)

Since then, several administration officials said, they have contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.

"The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships," said one administration official.

A spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said her government would not discuss its specific diplomatic efforts regarding the Uighurs. But in a statement, the embassy described the Uighurs at Guantánamo as "suspects of the 'East Turkestan' terrorist forces which constitute part of international terrorist forces," and said they should face justice in China.

Beijing's ambassador to Albania has met at least three times with Berisha, the prime minister, to demand the Uighurs' repatriation, Albanian officials said. Albania has since told Washington it cannot accept any more of the Uighur detainees.

"One of the problems we've encountered is that they say, 'Why doesn't the U.S. take some of these people?' " said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who has lobbied European governments to accept some of the Uighurs and other Guantánamo detainees.

U.S. officials said they considered that possibility. But two officials said the idea was shot down in 2005 by the Department of Homeland Security, which argued that the men would be barred from entering the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act because they had been linked to a terrorist group or received "military-type training" from a group engaged in terrorism.

U.S. officials said they had provided what one of them called generous compensation to the Albanian government for taking the refugees. But U.S. diplomats in Tirana have paid scant attention to the fate of the five Uighurs and the three other former Guantánamo detainees here — an Egyptian, an Algerian and an Uzbek.

"We've never talked to them," said a U.S. official who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the matter. "We don't monitor them. They're not our citizens, and there is no reason for us to."

The detainees have tried to fend for themselves. They study their Albanian-language workbooks and fill out form after form to request vocational training that has yet to begin.

After what the men said have been endless promises from Albanian officials, they asked late last year to be moved to another country. They were told that because Albania was a "safe" country, the United Nations could not relocate them. And anyway, no other country would have them.