KOROR, PALAU — Sipping guava juice under cover from a steamy tropical downpour, Tommy Remengesau Jr. says he's always considered his Pacific island home a refuge from the troubles of the outside world.
"While the rest of the planet was in conflict, waging its wars, we remained a little piece of paradise," the former Palauan president said as his pet fruit bat swayed upside down in a nearby cage. "Now, the world's headaches have come home to roost in Palau."
This isolated republic of more than 300 scattered islands, set amid a vast stretch of aquamarine ocean 4,500 miles southwest of Hawaii, had its reverie rocked last week when officials here announced that they would accept several Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Palau's decision to offer refuge to more than a dozen ethnic Uighurs once suspected of terrorism was hailed by the Obama administration, which is eager to disperse Guantanamo detainees as part of a plan to close the notorious prison early next year.
But the "humanitarian gesture" by Palauan President Johnson Toribiong has rattled cocktail glasses and scuba tanks across this nation of 20,000 year-round residents, a former U.S. territory whose economy is heavily dependent on eco-tourism.
With its sparkling waters, world-class diving and small-town charm, lush Palau is about as far away as you can get from the forced confines of a Guantanamo prison cell.
The republic is one of the world's smallest nations, a little more than twice the size of Washington, D.C. Gaining its independence in 1994 from a United Nations trusteeship, it also ranks among the newest.
Its largest town and cultural center, Koror, is so low-key that its only two stoplights were switched off because people thought they weren't needed. It's a throwback world where chickens and stray dogs run free along the nation's 100 miles of paved roads.
Some say island lore includes the age-old habit of nourishing the human driftwood that washes up here. Others aren't so sure.
If the U.S. no longer considers the Uighurs a threat, why doesn't it take them, they ask? Why dump them on some far-flung island republic with a tightknit, everyone-knows-his-neighbor culture that could soon make them feel like they were right back in prison?
As she scrubbed floor mats at a community carwash Saturday, Chandis Cooper said Toribiong was flat-out wrong to turn the Uighurs loose on Palau.
