What to do with these Chinse Muslims detained at Gitmo?

[AskNott]

Not that any part of our current government ever listens to me, but I think they should be granted immediate asylum. The asylum process has become very difficult under Mr. Bush’s system.

The Uighurs’ plight is made even worse by an accident of language. One of the ways to pronounce Uighur sounds like “wigger,” a derogatory slang term. “Wiggers,” in slang, are white people who choose to wear black-styled clothes and speak in black American English.
When people hear Uighur, they think of Eminem, one of our most irritating people. :smack:

For some reason, my country has little sympathy for endangered people who have neither white skin nor oil.

[Johanna]

I prefer the spelling Uyghur because that’s actually what their name is in their language. Most Americans still have never heard that this ethnic group exists, so there’s still time to change the spelling. The actual pronunciation is nothing at all like “wigger,” it’s ooy-GHOOR.

[BrainGlutton]

@Johanna

I prefer the spelling Uyghur because that’s actually what their name is in their language.

Hmm? They write their language in Roman letters?

[Johanna]

Yes. Both the Arabic (kona yeziq ‘old writing’) and Roman (yengi yeziq 'new writing) are used there, although the Arabic writing is much more popular. The Romanized orthography was made official in China from 1973 until 1989, I think. It was unpopular, so the Arabic alphabet came back into official use.

The Uyghur way of writing in Arabic letters is quite different from how Arabic uses the same letters. Uyghur spells out all the vowels in full with letters of the alphabet, just as in English; Arabic doesn’t. So whether the writing system used there is Arabic or Roman, the name Uyghur is spelled the same: with <y>, not <i>. The letter <y> in Uyghur always indicates a semiconsonant sound, not a vowel.

[Pjen]

And it gets worse.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060421/pl_nm/security_guantanamo_dc_2

*Nearly 30 percent of the Guantanamo detainees have been cleared to leave the prison but remain jailed because the U.S. government has been unable to arrange for their return to their home countries, the
Pentagon said on Friday.
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The Pentagon refused to identify these 141 men despite having released on Wednesday its first comprehensive list of detainees held at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Of these 141 detainees among the 490 still at Guantanamo, various military reviews have cleared 22 to be freed in their home countries and the remaining 119 for transfer to the control of their home governments.*

So, 22 definitely seen as innocent even by warped standards, and 119 that by those warped standards the USA thinks that it can enforce on other countries to detain these people. Only ithe US continues to detain them as either the recipient countries won’t comply with detention, or they are too worried about transferring them to regimes where they are likely to be killed or tortured- countries including our allies Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

What a mess.

How to get out of this hole.

[Johanna]

What do you expect when cowboys feel free to fuck around with international law? Now everything is getting fucked up.

[jjimm]

@Ravenman

Would it be okay to give asylum in the US to someone linked to the Colombian terrorist group the ELN, or the Spanish group ETA, or the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, simply because the individuals did not actually target the US in their support of a cause that features indiscriminant violence? I would say no.

It wouldn’t be “okay”, but if those ETA, ELN or Tiger affiliates were illegally detained by the US, then the US has a responsibility to rehouse them in a manner consistent with US and the international treaties to which it is a signatory. IOW, the US’s SNAFU, so suck it up.

[New_Iskander]

@SteveG1

Give them asylum. To “borrow” from others, We broke it, we fix it. They have no where else to go, thanks to us. We’ve done enough TO them, now let’s do something FOR them.

No Simple Solution Exists

Washington cannot return the detainees to China for two reasons: their repatriation would be seen as a justification of China’s policy toward its Uighur citizens, which would make it more difficult for Washington to promote the peaceful instability it favors in the Xinjiang region, and there are genuine concerns for the detainees’ safety if they return to China.

…Sending the detainees to a country in which it can be reasonably assumed that they would be tortured or persecuted would also be a violation of international law. There is little reason to believe that the U.S. will change its opposition to China’s human rights record to repatriate the Uighur detainees.

It is also unlikely that Washington will grant the detainees asylum in the United States, even if the detainees are deemed as no threat to the country’s national security. This would risk creating a rift between Beijing and Washington that the U.S. cannot allow when it is relying on Beijing’s cooperation in nuclear arms negotiations with North Korea. If Washington is serious about freeing the detainees, and it does appear that this is the case, then there is only one workable solution to the problem – finding a third party with an acceptable human rights record to accept the detainees.

The Financial Times reported that Washington has approached Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, Austria and Turkey to accept the detainees. So far, none of the countries have been willing to accept them. Many of these countries are attempting to increase their economic ties to China, and accepting the detainees may make this more difficult. One way around this would be for the U.S. to allow the United Nations to negotiate the repatriation, but this is unlikely to happen. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is concerned that U.N. involvement would threaten China’s cooperation on North Korean refugees.