Local Uighurs set to help detainees

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By Matthew Barakat ASSOCIATED PRESS

For centuries, hospitality to weary travelers has been part of the Uighur culture. The Uighur land in what is now the far western province of China carried merchants traversing the famed Silk Road.

So in many ways, it was only natural for Elshat Hassan, 46, of McLean, to open his home to the most weary of his countrymen. He plans to host one of 17 Uighurs who have been detained by the United States for nearly seven years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"They will be free, finally," Mr. Hassan said of the detainees. He described plans to prepare the traditional meal of polo for Uighur guests: a pilaf consisting of rice, lamb, carrots and onions.

The tiny Uighur (WEE-gur) community in the Washington area has been largely anonymous but is suddenly in the spotlight. A federal judge this week brushed aside White House objections and ordered the 17 Uighurs to be freed inside the United States.

Under the judge's order, the detainees will live in the Washington area with Uighur-Americans who have agreed to take them in. The detainees were to have arrived on Friday, but the judge's ruling has been put on hold while an appeals court reviews the ruling.

Mr. Hassan said he does not anticipate neighbors reacting fearfully to the presence of a Guantanamo detainee. When his co-workers at McLean-based CIA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton learned of his plans to sponsor a detainee, several extended dinner invitations when the time comes.

Nury Turkel, a past president of the Uyghur American Association, frequently gets blank stares from Americans when he identifies himself as a Uighur-American. But he has a ready answer.

"We're just like Tibet," Mr. Turkel, 38, said. "Just like the Tibetans, Uighurs face discrimination ... and brutal oppression under Chinese rule."

With no Dalai Lama to promote their cause, the Uighurs' bid for autonomy and cultural survival in their Central Asian homeland north of Tibet has largely been anonymous. China's Xinjiang province, which the Uighurs call home, shares a narrow, mountainous frontier with Afghanistan's eastern extreme, which juts like a finger between Pakistan and Tajikistan.

Mr. Turkel guessed that only 1,000 or so Uighurs live in the United States, with the largest concentration near the nation's capital. Most have come as refugees or to seek higher education, and he said Uighurs have one of the highest approval rates in the U.S. for asylum applications.

The Uighurs are Turkic ethnically and linguistically. They are Muslims, generally regarded as moderate in their beliefs. Human rights groups say the Chinese government has been brutal in its suppression of Uighur culture and religion.

The Chinese government says the Uighur detainees are part of a dangerous international Islamic terrorist group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and has demanded the detainees' extradition.

The Bush administration concedes that the Uighurs never intended to fight the United States but insists that the detainees are still a danger because they trained with radical Islamic militants in Afghanistan.

The detainees' supporters in the Uighur-American community say Uighurs are staunchly pro-American.

Mr. Hassan said that despite the unfair treatment the detainees have received, the fact that the United States is refusing Chinese demands for extradition will go a long way toward damping anti-American sentiments that may have festered among the detainees during their detention.

"If they go to China, their destiny is death," Mr. Hassan said. "They have suffered for seven years in Guantanamo, and it's unfair. ... But compared with death, they're still alive."

An American university professor who has studied the Uighurs and traveled frequently to Xinjiang province, or East Turkistan as it's called by Uighurs, said the comparisons of the political situations in Tibet and Xinjiang are generally valid.

The professor, who requested anonymity because he fears speaking on the record about the Uighurs could prompt Chinese authorities to bar him from traveling there, said the Uighurs' struggles with Beijing have largely been nationalistic and secular, rather than part of a broad international Islamic terror group like al Qaeda.

Still, while the Chinese have exaggerated the Uighurs' links to Islamic terror groups, he said they are not entirely fabricated, either.