[Ppnews] Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington11232007.html

November 23, 2007


The Ordeal of Adel Abdul Hakim


Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

On Tuesday November 20, Adel Abdul Hakim, a 
former Guantánamo detainee from Xinjiang province 
in the People's Republic of China, took another 
step towards reconstructing his shattered life by 
applying for asylum in Sweden.

The 33-year old, an ethnic Uyghur from a state 
where the repression of his people is widespread, 
made his claim for permanent resident status 
during a visit from Tirana, the capital of 
Albania, where he had been living, in a UN 
refugee camp, since his release from Guantánamo 
with four other Uyghurs in May 2006. After 
negotiations conducted by his US lawyers, various 
NGOs and lawyers in Sweden, he had been granted a 
four-day visa, to attend a human rights 
conference, and, finally, to be reunited with his 
sister and her family, who are part of a large 
Uyghur community in Sweden, one of the leading 
countries in the world in fulfilling 
international obligations to accept refugees.

The five men -- and 13 of the other 17 Uyghurs, 
who are all still in Guantánamo, despite having 
been cleared for release -- had fled the 
well-chronicled oppression in their homeland, and 
were living in a ruined village in Afghanistan's 
Tora Bora mountains, when the US-led invasion of 
Afghanistan began in October 2001. Although they 
indulged in nothing more sinister than renovating 
the settlement's ruined buildings, and 
occasionally firing a bullet from their only 
weapon, an aging AK-47, while dreaming of rising 
up against their oppressors, they were targeted 
in a US bombing raid (in which several of their 
companions died) and were then captured by 
enterprising Pakistani villagers after making 
their way to the Pakistani border.

They were subsequently sold to the Americans, who 
soon realized that they were not involved with 
al-Qaeda, but who decided to hold them for their 
supposed intelligence value. In The 
Interrogator's War, a book written by a former 
military interrogator at the US-run prisons in 
Afghanistan, the author, writing under the 
pseudonym of Chris Mackey, explained that the 
arrival of the Uyghurs triggered a frenzy of 
activity in the upper echelons of the 
administration. "[T]he requests for follow-up 
questions flooded in from Washington," Mackey 
wrote, "and every query that came in made it 
clear that US intelligence was starting from practically zero with this group."

After their transfer to Guantánamo, the US 
authorities obligingly allowed Chinese 
intelligence operatives to visit the prison to 
question the men, which was, understandably, an 
experience that some of them found disturbing. 
Dawut Abdurehim, one of those still held at 
Guantánamo, said after the visit that he was 
vaguely threatened, but reported that "some other 
Uyghurs had conversations with bad, dirty 
language," in which they were told by the Chinese 
delegation that, "when we go back to the country, 
we'd be killed or sentenced to prison for a long 
time." It later became clear that the US 
administration's cooperation with the Chinese 
authorities, which included branding the Uyghur 
separatist movement (the East Turkistan Islamic 
Movement) as a terrorist organization, was 
intimately tied to securing China's support -- or 
lack of opposition -- to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Despite this arrangement, it was the very real 
threat that the men would be tortured or even 
killed if they were returned to China that led to 
the US administration seeking out a third country 
that would accept the men after they had been 
cleared of all wrong-doing in the tribunals at 
Guantánamo -- the Combatant Status Review 
Tribunals -- which were established to determine 
whether, on capture, they had been correctly 
designated as "enemy combatants." Despite the US 
administration's best efforts at cajoling or 
bribing other countries to accept the men, 
however, Albania -- a Muslim country, but one of 
the poorest states in Europe -- was the only 
country that could be prevailed upon to accept them.

Although Adel and his companions found their new 
life in Albania frustrating, as there are no 
other Uyghur speakers and there was also no 
prospect of work, they were fortunate to have 
been cleared and released. Their 13 companions 
not only remain in Guantánamo, but some were also 
subjected to multiple tribunals, as the 
administration revealed another facet of 
Guantánamo's prevailing injustice by reconvening 
tribunals when they produced what was regarded as the wrong result.

For Adel, at least, the opportunity to rebuild 
his life in earnest is now a possibility. It is, 
for the moment, the one bright light in the 
stories not only of the Uyghurs, but of all the 
other dispossessed men, captured and imprisoned 
through chronic failures of intelligence, many of 
whom are, sadly, still languishing in Guantánamo. 
It remains to be seen whether this development 
will open a new avenue for the release of some of 
the other innocent men (as many as 70, according 
to some estimates), who are also fearful of 
returning to their home countries, and whose 
continued presence in Guantánamo provides a major 
obstacle to the administration's stated plans to 
wind down much of the prison's operation.

[Note: I am immensely grateful to Sabin Willett, 
one of Adel's lawyers, for informing me about his visit to Sweden].

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be 
published by Pluto Press in October 2007). Visit 
his website at: <http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk




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