Uighur detainees at Guantanamo pose a problem for Obama

BEIJING — Hozaifa Parhat, a fruit seller from China's Muslim west, spoke passionately before a Guantanamo tribunal about his love for America and swore he never planned to fight the United States.

The Chinese, however, were another matter.

"I left my country to try to get something, get back and liberate my people and get our country independence," the ethnic Uighur testified in November 2004.

Seven years after he was detained near Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains and sent to Guantanamo Bay, Parhat and 16 fellow Chinese Uighurs appear likely to be the first of the 245 prisoners still at the U.S. military prison in Cuba to be set free under the Obama administration.

President Obama has made closing the camp a priority, and federal courts have so far ruled that the Uighur detainees present no threat to the United States.

But freed to where? China is insisting that the Uighurs be sent home to face trial for separatist activities. It has further intimated that any country that offers them political asylum will in effect be harboring dangerous terrorists.

"On the issue of the Chinese terrorist suspects detained in Guantanamo, we have repeatedly stated that we oppose any country receiving these people," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said this month.

How the Uighurs are handled could play a role in defining what kind of relationship the Obama administration forges with Beijing in its early months. China has made it clear that it wants to be considered an ally in the battle against terrorism, which is coming closer to China's borders as the administration shifts focus from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The fate of the Uighurs also creates a sticky situation for Washington's Western allies, which have applauded Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo prison but don't want to jeopardize their trade ties with China. Germany, Canada and Sweden have been mentioned as possibly offering asylum to the Uighurs.

"Nobody is going to want to take the Uighurs because of the Chinese pressure," said Parhat's Boston-based attorney, Sabin Willitt. "Every time we got an audience with the third deputy assistant minister of [any country], we always found the Chinese minister was ahead of us, having had a full lunch with the foreign minister."

The Uighurs live primarily on the wild northwestern steppes of China in a region officially known as Xinjiang but called Turkestan by the Uighurs. Beijing has come under widespread criticism from the United States and others for its repression of rights and religious freedom there.