Guantanamo Uighurs start new life in Palau
Originally Published by BBC, 14 January 2010
At 0300 on 1 November 2009, the roar of a C17 US military transport plane shattered the silence at an airport in Palau, its landing lights off, invisible against the night sky.
Waiting anxiously on the tarmac was Johnson Toribiong, president of the tiny Pacific island state with a population of just 20,000 people.
Six more residents were about to be added. All of them were Muslim Uighurs from western China, who 20 hours earlier had been detainees at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Now they walked off the plane as free men, to begin a new life.
Palau is a country with an umbilical cord to the United States. More than a third of its revenue comes from there, one side of a deal which allows the US to use the islands as military bases.
The US has struck another deal with Palau, getting them to provide a temporary home for up to a dozen Uighurs who were captured during the US-led war in Afghanistan, but not later classified as “enemy combatants”.
China wants them to be returned there, but the US says it cannot repatriate them due to the risk of mistreatment.
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