KOROR, PALAU — When asked by the United States to accept a group of hard-to-place Guantanamo inmates, Palauan President Johnson Toribiong mulled over the request as both a head of state and a criminal defense lawyer.
The 62-year-old politician says he considered the plight of the 13 Chinese men as he had countless other defendants during two decades as one of this tiny Pacific island nation's top litigators.
The men, ethnic Uighurs, had gotten a raw deal, he said, jailed for years without trial. Now, they weren't considered dangerous terrorists after all. No country had been willing to take the Muslims -- before Palau.
"These people are not monsters," said Toribiong, who, with graying hair and glasses, looks pensive, even professorial. "They should be presumed innocent because no one has proven them guilty."
The last two weeks have been tsunami-like for Toribiong.
Barely 120 days in office as leader of the isolated republic of 20,000 citizens -- a job not unlike being mayor of a small town -- he's now in the international diplomatic spotlight.
By offering the detainees refuge, Toribiong, like any other potential host, runs the risk of offending Beijing, which has demanded the men be returned to China to be tried as political criminals on charges of insurgency.
He has also angered some islanders, who say he's bringing trouble to their piece of paradise. But Toribiong waves off his critics.
As a former U.S. territory, Palau must come to America's aid, he says. And Palauan culture has long embraced castaways and drifters who wash up on the island's shores.
Friends aren't surprised at Toribiong's sense of calm amid the crisis.
"He believes in giving people a second chance," said Johnny Gibbons, a grade-school friend of Toribiong's who now serves as Palau's justice minister. "Often appointed by the court, he defended alleged drug dealers and murderers, people with no resources.
"He didn't judge them. He defended them."
Toribiong, the son of a Seventh-day Adventist minister, was born in 1946, after the U.S. had freed Palau from Japanese rule in World War II. Like many newborns of the day, he was given an American first name -- there are many Roosevelts, Trumans and Eisenhowers.
Toribiong was raised by his grandmother and his step-grandfather, a village chief he recalls as a "historian, magician and medicine man."
