Accused by the United States army of being a terrorist with ties to the Taliban, a religious Muslim man from western China spent 4 years earlier than being imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay after which thrown into Albania 15 years earlier.
Still stranded in a rustic he was not deported to, 51-year-old Abu Bakr Qasim has a phrase of warning for the tons of of Afghans who’ve fled their nation over the previous month and their following the trail. As Europe’s poorest however most welcoming international locations they await entry into the United States.
“The Americans,” he stated, recalling how he and 4 different wrongly imprisoned Uighurs had been deported from Guantanamo, Cuba to Albania, and guaranteed they’d not be round for lengthy, “quickly lost interest.” Give – they threw us.”
Qasim has been supplied “humanitarian security” in Albania, a rustic that, regardless of opposition from China, was ready to take him on factors requested by the State Department. They obtain a month-to-month stipend of about $400, however haven’t acquired a visa or passport, which makes it troublesome to journey wherever. The solely nation that basically desires him is China, which considers him a terrorist due to his advocacy of independence for his dwelling area of Xinjiang, which it calls Turkestan.
If he ever returns, China will certainly arrest him.
I first met Qasim in 2006, just a few days after his arrival within the Albanian capital, Tirana. He was unhappy at the moment. China was demanding that Albania describe it and its fellow Uighurs as a part of a “terrorist force” with “close ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban” from Guantanamo.
He was additionally very confused, not likely positive the place the Americans had despatched him. He and his fellow Uighurs had been confined to a transformed military barracks, which had rusty barbed wire on its home windows and felt like one other jail. Speaking solely Uyghur and Chinese, he couldn’t talk with anybody in his host nation and didn’t know what the Albanians wished to do with him.
His spirits have elevated lots now. Albania, a former communist dictatorship and a detailed buddy of China within the Mao Zedong period, however now a member of NATO and a steadfast US ally, declined Beijing’s requests to ship it to China. Instead, he gave her cash to hire an residence, in addition to a month-to-month allowance for meals. They discovered work at a pizza parlor, made mates at a Tirana mosque, and began a brand new household.
He now speaks fluent Albanian and has forgotten a lot of the Chinese that he was obliged to study rising up in Xinjiang.
He was taken in by the small Balkan nation, which just lately dedicated to admitting 4,000 Afghans in want of shelter “has a tradition of hosting people in need,” stated the nation’s international minister, Olta Xhaka.
“We are proud to be hospitable,” she stated.
About 700 Afghans have already arrived and are housed in seaside resorts alongside the Adriatic coast.
Qasim, nevertheless, is disenchanted that so many Afghans are fleeing, pushed by the Taliban’s worry of fleeing and the hope of coming to the United States.
Unlike the Uighurs, dominated by an more and more repressive Chinese authorities and imprisoned in giant numbers in an unlimited community of Xinjiang internment camps, the Afghans, Qasim stated, are their very own nation and irrespective of how oppressive the Taliban are, it could be higher to remain at dwelling. Is.
“I don’t understand why they left. It would be better to stay in their own country,” he stated. “I do know what it’s wish to go to jail, however even when they go to jail, they’ll nonetheless be near their households. “
Qasim has not seen his household in Xinjiang for greater than 20 years, as he units out with a buddy from western China on an unlucky try and journey to Turkey, the place the language is just like the Turkic tongue spoken by Uyghurs. And the place he anticipated to seek out work. He solely traveled on a Chinese passport legitimate for 2 years.
Stranded in Afghanistan with out cash or papers on the time of the September 11, 2001 assaults, he was captured by tribal poaching tribesmen on the Pakistan-Afghan border and handed over to the Americans, who had been providing money to suspected terrorists. They thought of him an “enemy fighter” and President George W. He was despatched to jail in Guantanamo Bay to hitch different Muslims engulfed in Bush’s “global war on terror”.
After being acquitted by a army tribunal in 2006, Qasim was chained to a army transport airplane and flown in a single day from Cuba to Tirana. Since then repeated makes an attempt to acquire visas to the United States and Canada have failed, and Guantanamo remains to be in Albania excluding one in 5. The one who dropped out went to Sweden, the place he works as a taxi driver.
Qasim stated he laughed when he heard final month that US officers had been negotiating with the Taliban for entry to Kabul’s worldwide airport after the US-backed authorities fell on August 15 and handed management of the Afghan capital to rebels.
During his detention in Guantanamo, he stated, “They kept telling me that the Taliban were terrorists and accused me of collaborating with the Taliban, but now they are cooperating with the Taliban.”
“The world has certainly changed a lot in 20 years,” he stated.
One change that comforts him, he stated, is the evolution of attitudes in direction of China. When they had been first despatched to Guantanamo, the Bush administration embraced China’s view that the Uighurs had been harmful extremists in search of independence and even higher autonomy. In 2002, Washington changed a largely phantom Uighur group named the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as an ally of al-Qaeda, a transfer that coated Chinese claims that Uighurs who opposed his remedy had been terrorists.
Last yr, the Trump administration eliminated the Uighur group from the United States terrorism listing, saying there was no proof of it.
“We talked about China’s risk 20 years ago and constantly told everyone: ‘Beware of China,'” Qasim stated. “But only now are they beginning to understand what kind of country the Chinese Communist Party has created.”
He final communicated together with his spouse and three youngsters in China in 2016, when the Communist Party appointed a brand new hard-line boss in Xinjiang and launched a program of mass detention, which has since raised 1 million or extra. Uighurs and different Muslims had been imprisoned. “Re-education” camp. He worries that his family members, tainted by his standing as a harmful extremist in China, have turn into victims of what the State Department described as a “genocide” in Xinjiang this yr.
The final time he heard of his 21-year-old daughter in Xinjiang, he stated, she had not been arrested and was working in a store, however was being pressured into marrying a Han Chinese in order that Beijing to show his loyalty to him. and keep away from detention.
Cut off from his household in Xinjiang, Qasim took a second spouse in Albania, a Uighur girl with whom he has three youngsters. He stated that he informed his first spouse by phone that he had remarried, and “she was a little annoyed,” however she understood that because of Chinese insurance policies in Xinjiang, they had been much less prone to ever get again collectively.
He stated he was very grateful for not deporting Albanians again to China and giving them cash, however he was disenchanted that they had been barred from offering formal asylum or Albanian journey paperwork regardless of having resided for greater than 15 years.
The Albanian Interior Ministry stated Qasim had not utilized for a passport. Qasim stated his lawyer had requested the ministry and was informed that the Uighurs’ “humanitarian security” standing precluded the opportunity of a passport.
Angry within the United States throughout his years at Guantanamo and since his 15 years in Albania, he nonetheless sees America as the one actual hope of the Uighurs.
Qasim stated, ‘If Turkistan ever will get independence, will probably be due to America. “Every country makes mistakes, but I can’t stop believing in the United States because they did injustice to the five Uighurs sent to Albania.”
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
