Originally published by AFP, 14 June 2010

By Bernadette Carreon  

KOROR — A group of former Guantanamo detainees from a Chinese Muslim ethnic minority have pleaded for a permanent home seven months after being given temporary refuge in the Pacific nation of Palau.

 “We are asking President Johnson Toribiong to help us leave Palau. Help us, we need to go out, we hope he will help us,” said Adel Noori, one of the six Uighur men from China’s remote northwestern region of Xinjiang.

 They were transferred to Koror, the capital of the tropical island group, from the US prison in November but there is no Uighur community in Palau and the men — some of whom have married — are keen to move to Australia.

 They spent more than seven years in detention after a group of 22 Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan in the US invasion of 2001 following the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

 Although cleared of any wrongdoing in 2005, the Uighurs were not returned to China because of fears they would be persecuted by Chinese authorities, and the US has struggled to find countries which would take them.

 Palau, which was under US administration until independence in 1994, agreed to take six of the men, who have since been living in the Northern Pacific nation of about 20,000 people, spending much of their days taking English lessons.

 One of the men, Edham Mamet, recently married a Uighur woman who had been living with her two children in Australia, where her previous husband drowned.

 Another, Abdul Ghappar Abdul Rahman, last week married a Uighur woman who travelled to Palau for the wedding.

 Asked if getting married to women living in other countries was a way for the men to find new permanent homes, Noori said: “Even if we do not get married, we still want to leave Palau.”

 “We need a country who will give us passports,” he said in an interview.

 Mamet has already prepared an application to move to Australia, and the other five are also keen to move there.

 Toribiong has supported their bid and has asked the Australian government to take the six men.

 “I hope Australia will accept them. I think Palau is a stepping stone to a country where they can really be free,” Toribiong said.

 “Not only free, but to enjoy the freedom that we all enjoy to live in the free world — to marry, to have friends, to work, to socialise,” the president said.

 Despite their desire to move, the six men are grateful to Palau for taking them in.

 “Since we arrived in Palau there has been no big problem,” Noori said.

 The Uighurs spend six hours, five days a week, at a community college where they learn English.

 The classes end in August but the men are unsure about their prospects of finding work.

 “I think to me it is not enough. We need some more time to understand grammar and practise,” Noori said.

 The six men are among 17 Uighurs from Guantanamo who were resettled in places as diverse as Albania, Switzerland, and Bermuda, as well as Palau.

 The five Uighur men who remain in Guantanamo have rejected offers of resettlement in Palau, and are taking court action to be allowed to settle in the US.

 There are about eight million Uighurs in China. They accuse Beijing of political, cultural and religious repression.

 The resettlement of the Uighurs was part of efforts by US President Barack Obama to shut down the controversial Guantanamo prison in Cuba, after it became a symbol for many of excesses in the “war on terror” under former president George W. Bush.

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