Early on May 5, five Asian men who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay for years as dangerous terrorists, boarded a military transport plane at the US naval base there.
The men had just exchanged their prison garb for jeans, T-shirts and slip-on sneakers but were still in handcuffs as they boarded the plane, where they were shackled to bolts in the floor and surrounded by more than 20 armed soldiers. About 14 hours later, the plane landed in Albania, a poor Balkan nation eager to please Washington.
Interviews with lawyers and several officials in the US and elsewhere showed that the flight, to a freedom of sorts for the five men, involved intense behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity in Washington; Ottawa; Tirana, Albania; Beijing and elsewhere. It also held implications for a US Appeals Court, NATO and the relations of several European countries with China. And it underlined the difficulties the administration of US President George W. Bush has reducing the population of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp as international calls for it to be closed increased.
The five men were Uighurs who had been captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They had traveled there from their homeland in Xinjiang Province, China, where the Uighur people, most of whom are Muslims, have fought a low-level insurgency against Beijing's rule for years.
For the group of five Uighurs, the transfer to Albania meant exchanging a military prison camp for a bleak and unpromising future in one of Europe's poorest countries where no one spoke their language. One of the men, Abu Bakker Qassim, said in an interview that, "I would rather be in a society where I can be with some of my countrymen, but where we are is better than Guantanamo."
For the Bush administration, one of the immediate results of the transfer was an opportunity to sidestep yet another court challenge to its detention policies.
Shortly after the five men landed in Albania's capital, and only minutes before the close of business in Washington on a Friday, the Justice Department filed a brief with a federal appeals court there. The brief asked the court to cancel a hearing on the next Monday on the Uighurs' challenge to their continued detention in Guantanamo Bay. They had been held there for more than a year after the military's special tribunal system had determined they were not "enemy combatants," the ostensible reason for their imprisonment.
A federal judge had ruled that the Uighurs' continued detention at Guantanamo was illegal and disgraceful, but he said he could not order them admitted to the US, as their lawyers had requested. The appeals court was considering that issue. The Bush administration has opposed allowing Guantanamo detainees into the US.
Upon learning the Uighurs were no longer at Guantanamo, the appeals court canceled the hearing.
A senior State Department official said in an interview that more than 100 countries had been approached about accepting the Uighurs but that only Albania did. Even though they were innocent, the official said, the five Uighurs could not be repatriated to China because Beijing regarded them as terrorists and the law prohibited sending prisoners to places where they might be persecuted.
The countries that had declined, including Washington's best European allies, did not want to antagonize China, officials said.
The State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the timing of their flight to Albania and the scheduled court argument was a coincidence. But a senior Justice Department official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been an intense push to avoid a situation in which the appeals court could order the Uighurs admitted into the US.
For Albania, the willingness to accept the Uighurs solidified that nation's standing with the US and brought it a confrontation with China, which had been its patron during Albania's split from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
On the weekend of the Uighurs' arrival in Tirana, the Chinese ambassador there protested to the Albanian prime minister, insisting they be returned to China. The ambassador repeated the demand on Monday.
But the following day, May 7, US Vice President Dick Cheney publicly endorsed Albania's much-hoped-for bid to join NATO. Charles Gati, an authority on Central Europe and professor of European studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, said that Albania has courted Washington in recent years.
"They're very eager to get into NATO, and to do this they have offered their services in a variety of ways," he said. "This is clearly what happened here."
Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who was at Cheney's side when he announced US support for Albania's NATO bid, along with the bids of Croatia and Macedonia, said in a statement later that week that he trusted Washington's assurances that the men were not terrorists and that he was proud to provide a humanitarian favor to Washington.
China remained unappeased and seemingly went beyond diplomatic pronouncements. In June, a Chinese delegation showed up unannounced at the refugee camp on the outskirts of Tirana and demanded access to the Uighurs. It was unclear what they had planned to do if they got in, but Albanian officials denied them entry.
Early this month, the Albanian government granted asylum to the Uighurs. The Albanian ambassador to Washington, Aleksander Sallabanda, said in a statement, "Our government is proud of its cooperation with the United States in the war on terror."
For the five Uighurs, the consequences of the move to Albania were more prosaic and dispiriting. At the time of their transfer, their lawyers had been making progress in negotiating with the Canadian government for them to settle there.
But that possibility stalled when they were sent to Albania, their lawyers say.
There are more than a hundred prisoners at Guantanamo who were initially found to be enemy combatants then ruled eligible to be freed but were not because it was impracticable to return them to their home countries and no other country has agreed to accept them.
That group includes a few other Uighur prisoners at Guantanamo who have not been transferred to Albania because, their lawyers say, they have no scheduled court argument that the administration hopes to avoid.
The freed Uighurs now spend most of their days in the refugee camp in a Tirana slum, according to Sabin Willett, a lawyer in Boston who represents two of the men. Willett said he had learned of the transfer only after it happened and he went to Tirana that Monday.
Michael Sternhell, a New York lawyer who represents the other three Uighurs, said that the men "are still effectively behind bars." He said they have difficulty even traveling to the center of Tirana and they use most of their monthly allowance of 40 euros (US$51) to call their families in China.
Although the Uighurs feel marooned in Albania, they are grateful to the government there.
"Given that no other country is taking us, we're all right with this," said Qassim, a 37-year-old father of four who acts as the group's spokesman.
Qassim said that the problems had begun when he and several fellow Uighurs left their home to find a place to study the Koran, a practice he said was forbidden in China.
They went to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, he related. After the Sept. 11 attacks, a group of 17 Uighurs returned to Pakistan, where local tribesmen welcomed them warmly. After a lamb feast, the villagers betrayed them. They were taken to a mosque ostensibly to worship, but instead, Qassim said, they were sold to US forces.
According to the transcripts of tribunals held at Guantanamo, they were accused of engaging in guerrilla training, but officials would not tell them on what basis they made the accusations because the information was classified. Qassim said the Uighurs had indeed learned to use rifles while in Afghanistan, but he said weapons training was common there and he had never heard of Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.
Qassim and the four other men who would wind up in Albania were deemed not to have been enemy combatants, while the 12 others in their group were ruled to have been.
"It's a mystery as to why we were released and the others are still languishing behind bars," he said.
He said the US had made a "mistake" in believing the Uighurs were radical Islamists opposed to the US. Qassim said his people had always admired the US and had hoped that one day the US would rally to the Uighurs' cause for freedom.
"We still believe the US is a good country with good people," he said. "But the government has made a mistake and is still making it."
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