Albania Takes 5 Ethnic Chinese From Gitmo

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON - The plight of five Chinese detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has come to an end, the State Department disclosed Friday. Albania has agreed to take in the detainees and is considering their applications for asylum.

The five are among a number of Chinese detainees who have languished at Guantanamo Bay for several years after being picked up during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The U.S. military concluded the Uighurs — members of a Turkic ethnic group — presented no terrorist threat to the United States, but they continued to be held at the prison because they faced persecution if they were returned to their home country.

The Bush administration refused to allow their release into the United States and had been unable to find a country willing to accept them.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060506/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_detainees;_ylt=AieITmOKEjBkz4Mu3DxbrssD5gcF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--

[GrumpyGreg]

1. And now the poor guys are going to be stuck in Albania.

[Kagemusha]

2. "Ethnic Chinese" is a rather poor word choice

Ethnic Uighurs from territory claimed by the People's Republic of China. Certainly not Ethnic Han ("Chinese"/ Taiwanese elite from the Chinese mainland originally)

[Crunchy Frog]

3. It's like calling a Tibetan an "ethnic Chinese".

It's like calling a Chechen an "ethnic Russian". This looks like an inexcusable level of ignorance on the part of "journalists".

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Two reasons why this isn't as weird as it sounds:

1) The Uighurs are Muslims, and Albania has the highest percentage of Muslims of any European country.

2) Albania and China have ties going way back to the days after the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, when Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator, decided that the USSR had gone soft on capitalism by repudiating Stalin. The Maoists still revered Stalin, so the Chinese and Albanians had that in common and considered each other allies.

Even though the Uighurs are not ethnic Chinese, they probably went through the Chinese school system if they went to school anywhere, and there are probably some Albanians left over from the days of Chinese-Albanian friendship who speak Mandarin.