Escape to Hell: Fleeing China, Landing in Guantanamo

They want to move on with their lives.

The five men left their home six years ago, hoping to escape repression at the hands of Chinese authorities, hoping to find a better, freer life abroad. But then came September 11, and the men became entangled in the machinery of world politics. They were bombed and beaten, betrayed, accused and humiliated. They finally ended up in Guantanamo.

The driver of the white Toyota walks toward the office. The five men watch. They share three sleeping rooms and one toilet. The walls are painted a swimming pool green, the windows are barred and bare light bulbs hang from the ceiling. Albania’s national refugee camp was once a military barracks. A uniformed guard stands at the door.

Human rights activists were still interested in the five Uighurs when they were prisoners of the Americans. But now that they have been released, they are more a practical problem than a moral one. The United States doesn’t want them, they can’t go back to China, and many other countries -- Germany included -- have refused to grant them asylum. Everyone, it seems, is worried about offending China, a powerful trading partner.

Ayub, the youngest, walks to the window, which frames a view of shimmering mountains in the distance. He is thin, wears his black shirt over his belt and sports the beginnings of a traditional Uighur man’s black moustache. He points outside.

The camp is surrounded by a high wall, topped by rolls of barbed wire glinting in the sun. The men are free, but they remain prisoners -- five young men unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, five men who went to war without knowing it.

Abu Bakker Qassim, the eldest, used to think it was all a big misunderstanding. Back in Xinjiang, which he and the others call East Turkestan, he was trained as an upholsterer. After working in a state-owned leather factory, he started his own business. He is a quiet, affable man with large glasses. The inscription on his T-shirt reads “Athletic 76 - Boys of Europe.”

They received a warm welcome -- unusually warm, as they later realized -- in a village on Pakistani soil. But when they arrived they were exhausted, hungry and naïve, and gratified that the villagers had even slaughtered a lamb in their honor. After the meal they were taken to the local mosque. They were told that the police were searching the village and that they would be taken -- on Toyota pickup trucks -- to a safe place. “It was a trap, but how were we to know?” says Abu Bakker today, standing with the other men in the courtyard of the Albanian refugee camp. They may be safe now, but they have trouble understanding why every step along the way was a step in the wrong direction.

That night they were first taken to a Pakistani police station and then to a Pakistani prison. The Americans had offered a ransom for Muslims suspected of supporting al-Qaida.

“We were surprised,” says Abu Bakker, “but we were also hopeful. We thought that if we identified ourselves as Chinese Uighurs, the Pakistanis would send us back to China. So we told them we were Uzbeki Afghans, hoping that they would turn us over to the Americans.” China, they believed, was their enemy, and America their friend and ally.

“We were blindfolded and our hands were tied,” says Ahmed. The captured Uighurs were then loaded into buses and taken to Kandahar. “Kandahar was worse than the Chinese prison,” says Abu Bakker. “Soldiers in Kandahar beat up Ayub, the youngest in our group. They forced his arms behind his back and beat him on the knees.”

The men were interrogated, yelled at, beaten and then interrogated again.

“Do you speak English?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you motherfuckers speak English?”

If they answered “yes,” the soldiers would shout: “Where did you motherfuckers learn to speak English?”

After a week, one of the Uighurs noticed the US flag on a soldier’s uniform. “We’re in the hands of the Americans!” he told the others, clearly relieved. “We are safe!” They told the American soldiers about the Uighurs’ struggle for freedom. “You have the wrong men,” they kept telling their captors. “We don’t have a problem with you. In fact, we have a common enemy: China.”

After six months in Kandahar, the five Uighurs -- gagged, bound, blindfolded and hooded -- were taken to the airport, where they were given earplugs and loaded onto a plane.

When they landed in Guantanamo in mid-2002, the men were given prisoner numbers 260, 276, 279, 283 and 293. By then they were considered terrorism suspects, but they had no idea why. The men had landed at a US naval base, but it was essentially a no-man’s land where foreign citizens were ineligible to file legal complaints in US courts. The closer the men came to the promised land, the more they perceived it slipping beyond their reach.

They were neither prisoners-of-war nor criminals, but “enemy combatants.” There were no charges, no hearings, no defense attorneys. According to US President George W. Bush, they could be held indefinitely, or for the duration of his “War on Terror.” They were repeatedly interrogated. Are you associated with the “Islamic Movement of East Turkestan?” they asked. The Chinese government claims the Uighurs have connections to bin Laden, who it claims supports and directs the Uighurs’ struggle for independence. The “Islamic Movement of East Turkestan,” say Chinese authorities, is essentially an arm of al-Qaida.

To this day, Abu Bakker and the others deny having been members of the group. They are upholsterers, students, small businessmen, but not terrorists, they say. In fact, they believe that the “Islamic Movement of East Turkestan” is a phantom organization, invented and kept alive by the Chinese secret police.

Ayub, the youngest, suffered the most at the hands of the Americans. He has a food allergy and had been told to avoid eggs, bread and fish. After a doctor at Guantanamo confirmed the allergy, guards adhered to Ayub’s dietary requirements by simply withholding the foods to which he is allergic. On some days they would place an empty plate into his cell. When Ayub asked why they had brought him an empty plate, they told him that it was his special diet -- doctor’s orders. Why couldn’t they bring him something else, he asked? No idea, the guards replied, suggesting he take up the matter with their superiors.

Ayub became very thin, at times weighing as little as 52 kilograms (115 lbs.). “When I sat down I was sitting on bones,” he says. “I had no fat left and hardly any muscles.” He began a hunger strike at least six times, “but it really didn’t make any difference.”

Once a few soldiers took pity on Ayub and brought him an apple. Ayub took it into his cell. Guards found the apple a short time later, but the stem was missing.

“Where’s the stem?” they asked. “Where did you hide it?”

He said he didn’t know. He asked them if they thought he had wanted to make a skeleton key with the stem. Ayub spent the next 28 days in solitary confinement.

In late 2004, a few months after the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo are entitled to have their cases heard in a US court, the prisoners had their first opportunity to appear before a military tribunal and respond to the charges that had been brought against them. At issue was their status as “enemy combatants” -- and their future.

Ayub, emaciated and worn down from months in solitary confinement, was suspicious. He was taken to a small room and told to sit on a white plastic chair. The chairman of the tribunal entered the room and sat down on a slightly raised, black leather chair in front of Ayub, whose feet were chained to a bolt set into the floor.

The tribunal accused him of traveling to Afghanistan to learn how to use weapons, and then fleeing to Pakistan with a group of armed Arabs. The minutes of the hearing show that, throughout the interrogation, Ayub believed that the Guantanamo tribunal was operating in the same way as a normal court.

“You said that you went to Afghanistan, but not for weapons training,” says the clerk. “In that case, what was the reason?”

With his prominent jaw and forelock, Willett, a Harvard graduate and partner in a respected Boston law firm, bears a passing resemblance to the young John F. Kennedy. A crime novelist in his spare time, Willett has a refined sense of timing and dramatics. “There is probably no group of Muslims anywhere in the world more pro-American than the Uighurs,” he told a court. “The Uighurs have always suffered under religious and political persecution by the Chinese communists. I can remember the days when, in this country, we had a great deal of sympathy for someone with that kind of history.” Willett wanted to protect his country’s constitution against his government. And he was the first person who truly wanted to help the five Uighurs since they had left China.

Four months later, Willett was allowed to visit his clients in Guantanamo for the first time. When he discovered that they had long since been cleared of charges, he filed an emergency petition with the US Supreme Court. But no country was willing to accept the Uighurs. US officials say they spent two years searching for a suitable country to grant the men asylum, but that every one of the more than a hundred governments they contacted turned down their request.

On January 19, 2006, Ahmed wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “I find it difficult to imagine how a country like the United States, which claims that it promotes and protects the democratic rights of oppressed peoples, can treat someone the way I have been treated. I wonder whether the American government will keep me imprisoned here forever if it is unable to find a country that will accept me. Is this justice?”

A hearing was scheduled in Washington for May 8. It was a potentially precarious trial for the US government. Faced with the prospect of the court ordering the Uighurs to appear in person, which, by bringing them onto US soil, would have given the men the right to apply for political asylum, the government was suddenly in a hurry to take action.

An officer visited the five Uighurs in early May. “The US government has finally found a country that will accept you,” he announced.

“Which country?” they asked, hoping it would be Germany. Munich has Europe’s largest Uighur community, and the prospect of being sent there appealed to the men.

The officer said he had no information about that.

Throughout the twelve-hour flight, the Uighurs were terrified that they were being returned to China. At approximately 9 p.m. local time, they landed at Mother Theresa Airport in Tirana, the capital of Albania, one of Europe’s poorest countries. It was three days before the scheduled hearing in Washington.

The men had never been to Albania. They had no idea the country even existed, and they are now probably the only Uighurs in the entire country.

Sabin Willett, their attorney, received an email informing him of their release, but by then the Uighurs had already landed in Tirana.

In the country’s national refugee camp, the five men were housed in a building next to the toilets. The camp has a volleyball net, a laundry and a small library. An Arab-English dictionary lies on Ayub’s night table. “I am an experienced diver,” Ayub reads, and smiles.

A bus is available to take them to downtown Tirana whenever they wish. But they have no money and no contacts here, so they walk aimlessly around the city -- five aliens in Albanian rush-hour traffic. They try to get a sense of what it feels like to be free, but it isn’t easy.

A few days after arriving in Albania, Ahmed calls his mother in China. He hasn’t seen her in seven years.

His aunt answers the telephone. “Salam alaikum,” Ahmed says. She passes the phone to his mother.

“Is that you, mother?” Ahmed asks.

Then the two weep.

Ahmed asks about the family. They both know that Chinese intelligence is probably listening in on the conversation.

Abu Bakker saw his wife again two days earlier -- on a DVD. His family had managed to get the disc sent to Guantanamo, where he wasn’t permitted to watch it because camp officials were unable to find a translator who could confirm that the contents were harmless. In the end, the DVD was sent to Tirana with the five Uighurs.

Abu Bakker stared at the screen. The recording shows his family and some friends sitting around a table, praying to God to protect Abu Bakker. He saw his father, who is since dead, and he saw his wife and his brother playing soccer in the snow with Abu Bakker’s children. The children are twins, and his wife was pregnant with them when he left China. The two are now six years old. Abu Bakker has never seen them.

Ahmed, Ayub, Abu Bakker and the other former Guantanamo prisoners are calm and patient and without hatred. They still hope to see their wives and children again.

But their greatest wish, they say, is to live in the United States.

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