Uighurs

You may be familiar with the Uighur people as a result of our years-long detention (and recent deportation to Bermuda) of Uighur separatists held at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of terrorism. It appears that, just as in Tibet, China's heavy-handed policy of cultural assimilation of minorities has sparked violent protests and riots in Xinjian province, half of whose population is Uighur:

As northwest China’s Xinjiang Province settled into tense stillness on Wednesday after three days of deadly ethnic violence, a Communist Party leader from the region pledged to seek the death penalty for anyone behind the strife that state news reports say claimed at least 156 lives.

Li Zhi, the party boss in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital where the violence was centered, said that many suspected instigators of the riots had been arrested, and that most were students. His promise to seek the death sentence for those responsible came as China’s president Hu Jintao cut short his stay in Italy, where he had planned to attend a Group of Eight summit meeting, to return home and deal with aftermath of the riots, the worst ethnic violence in China in decades.

Mr. Hu had planned to meet with President Obama at the Italy summit to discuss climate change and other issues. China’s foreign ministry said in a written statement that he was returning to Beijing “given the current situation in Xinjiang,” where Sunday’s riots by ethnic Uighurs were followed Monday and Tuesday by reprisal attacks on the part of ethnic Hans.

The Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group, once were the majority in Xinjiang but now comprise only about half of the province’s 20 million people. In Urumqi, the provincial capital of more than two million where the violence has been centered, Uighurs are greatly outnumbered by the Han, who make up some 90 percent of China’s population.

The immediate cause of the riots appears to have been rumors that Uighur men had raped Han Chinese women at a factory far from Urumqi, rumors that led Han Chinese to attack Uighurs, which in turn prompted attacks on Han Chinese by Uighurs, kicking off a cycle of ethnic violence. The proximate cause however, is China's policy of cultural annihilation, affected by the repression of the practice of Islam by Uighurs, as well as a state policy of encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang and so overwhelm the Uighur population. As in Tibet, China has expressed a policy of economic advancement, but the rising tide fails to lift all boats, as most of the benefits of the rapid economic growth go to the Han Chinese who have moved to the province. As in Tibet, Chinese leaders have responded to the violence by pouring troops into the region, and by rounding up those who they suspect of participating in or organizing the riots. As is always the case, there is no excuse for the killing of innocent men, women and children, no matter how grievous the injury inflicted upon your people. But Chinese leaders are well aware that their policies are the cause of this latest round of violence. So far the White House has only expressed "concern" about the rioting.

As a slight aside, here's the typical right-wing take on the violence in Xinjiang:

As with military coups, not all protests are created equal. Chinese officials have begun to blame foreign agitators for fomenting the violence in Urumqi and throughout the Xinjiang region, as did Iran with their unrest over the rigged presidential election. Unlike Iran, however, China has some factual basis for this claim. Al-Qaeda has recruited and trained Uighur radical Islamists, who want independence for Xinjiang in order to establish a Turkic theocratic state, just as the Taliban created in Afghanistan.

That doesn’t mean that other Uighurs don’t have legitimate claims on democratic reform and independence for better reasons, of course. The AQ-Taliban connection to the Uighurs makes it difficult to determine which forces are in play in Xinjiang at the moment, though. Broad assumptions in either direction would be a mistake, especially since the “freedom fighters” causing most of the trouble in that region don’t support freedom at all — just a change of tyrants.

Like a typical right-winger, Morrissey judges the validity of the Uighur's desire for freedom on what sort of freedom they'd like to have, and who they associate themselves with to get it (not what acts they perpetrate though; terrorism is okay, if it's perpetrated against a regime hostile to the United States.) Because the Uighurs desire a "Turkic theocratic state" (Morrissey demonstrating his command of Wikipedia with a reference to the Uighur's ethnic grouping) where the religious preference would be Islam, and because Uighur's are strongly suspected of having trained at Al Qaeda facilities (though only to return to China to fight the government there) their desire for freedom is not as legitimate as the desire of say, the Tibetans, whose religious preferences don't trigger pants-wetting on the part of right-wingers, and who do not affiliate with religious terrorists. Morrissey's judgement is not unusual in it's obtuseness, but it remains disappointing that right-wingers judge all matters in the world of foreign policy through their own peculiar lens. The Iranian dissidents are approved of, because they are opposed to a leader both feared and hated by the right. The dissidents in Honduras are not approved of, because they support a leader viewed with suspicion and disdain by the right. The rioters in Xinjian are not approved of because their separatists have mingled with Al Qaeda and because they are Muslim. None of this has anything to do with validity or invalidity of claims of religious or political oppression; it's all merely an ad hoc judgement based on who right-wingers do and do not approve of in the world. As an approach to foreign policy this is neither principled nor coherant (nor workable), but it makes perfect sense to a right-wing authoritarian who quivers under their sheets at night at the thought of Latin American electing quasi-socialist leaders, or Muslim terrorists slipping into their room at night to force them to wear burkas and pray to Allah.

UPDATE: Oh dear. Via Local Crank, more right-wing idiocy on the Uighurs. Honestly, who could have predicted that 9/11 would make right-wingers suckers for Chinese propaganda?

UPDATE II: And this post from Glenn Greenwald, who plays the thought exercise "What if the Uighurs were Christian?" You can probably guess his conclusion.

D.C. Circuit Overturns Uighur Decision

Yesterday the D.C. Circuit ruled that a federal district judge had exceeded his authority in ordering the release of seventeen Uighur detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay:

Only the political branches — the President and Congress — have the authority to decide when aliens may enter the U.S., the Circuit Court concluded by a 2-1 vote. A third judge on the panel found that the judge’s release order was premature, but did not join in the ruling against release at this time.

The majority concluded that “it is not within the province of any court, unless expressly authorized by law, to review the determination of the political branch of the government to exclude a given alien. With respect to these seventeen petitioners, the Executive Branch has determined not to allow them to enter the United States.”

[...]

The Circuit Court said it was not deciding at this point whether the President “may ignore the immigration laws and release [the Uighurs] into the United States without the consent of Congress.”

[...]

Circuit Judge Judith W. Rogers, while voting to overturn the judge’s release order, denounced the majority’s reasoning. She said the majority’s analysis “is not faithful” to the Supreme Court’s ruling last June in Boumediene v. Bush on detainees’ rights, and “would compromise both the Great Writ as a check on arbitrary detention and the balance of powers over exclusion and admission and release of aliens into the United States recognized by the Supreme Court to reside in the Congress, the Executive and the habeas court.” She also said the ruling’s analysis was unnecessary because the court could not yet know whether detention was justified under immigration law.

The Circuit Court decision appeared to be confined closely to the single issue of whether a federal judge may order release into the U.S. of non-citizens being held outside U.S. territory. The majority noted that the only claim by detainees that was before it was not “simple release” from Guantanamo, but whether a court could order the Executive Branch “to release them into the United States outside the framework of the immigration laws….The question here is not whether petitioners should be released, but where.”

The extent of the victory for the Bush administration's detention policies depends on which side you're one I suppose. From one angle, the appellate decision checks the authority of the judiciary to order the release of detainees. The majority tries to confine the issue merely to whether the judiciary has the authority to order the release of detainees into the United States against the wishes of the executive and outside the scope of immigration law, but the dissenting judge seems to think that the ruling is in the vein of prior rulings that have upheld executive authority to hold detainees without reason indefinitely. Either way they demurred on the question of whether the Uighurs could be released into the United States under present immigration laws were they to apply for admission.

Fellow Republican puts Gingrich in "hall of shame" over Uighur remarks

Tell us something we don't know:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich got into a public spat with fellow Republicans this week after he denounced the 17 Chinese Muslims who're being released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison as "terrorists" who should be sent back to China, where they're likely to face persecution.

Gingrich, the Republican party's most prominent spokesman, is "in the Hall of Shame" for his remarks, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., said in his opening statement during a Tuesday hearing of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Human Rights. Democrats and other Republicans also piled on Gingrich for "fear-mongering" and allegedly peddling Chinese propaganda.

The Uighurs are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in the northwest part of China. According to the 2008 State Department Human Right's report, they've been the target of human rights abuses in China.

Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., the committee's chairman, said that Gingrich is either misinformed or intentionally circulating false information about the 17 Uighurs to "appease the Communist Chinese," who've repeatedly asked the U.S. to return the Uighurs to China. He said the Chinese "brutally persecute and oppress the Uighur minority."

And this guy's supposed to be the "intellectual" of the Republican Party? This is worse than saying Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. Either he's completely ignorant about the Uighurs or he's fear-mongering to those who are. In any case, he's a shining example of what's wrong with the Republican Party. But how ridiculous is it to look to someone who was Speaker of the House for 4 years in the 90s and left in disgrace for your future electoral hopes anyway? If that's your savior, you're in pretty sad shape.

Four of the Uighurs Released in Bermuda

Just yesterday I blogged about a report that American officials were attempting to resettle the 17 Uighur detainees who have been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2001 in Palau, in the South Pacific. Well, it looks like four of them have been resettled a little closer to home:

Four Guantanamo Bay detainees have been released and resettled in Bermuda, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The four are part of a group of 17 Chinese Muslims who have been in legal limbo at the military detention center in Cuba.

Abdul Nasser, one of the four detainees who landed in Bermuda early Thursday morning, issued a statement through his lawyers, saying: ''Growing up under communism we always dreamed of living in peace and working in free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring.''

Why four and not all of them? And is the plan still to resettle the rest in Palau? No clue yet. However, somebody should probably tell Ed Morissey to scratch Bermuda off the list of future vacation spots.

United States: Intervention or Empire?

Tony Judt, in a review entitled "The New World Order", writes in the most recent edition of the New Review of Books about the dilemma facing the United States in light of the world situation, post-Iraq.

Interestingly, in the first part of his review he compares the war in Iraq with the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo(and the failure to intervene in Rwanda), and challenges those on the left to see the similarities between those previous humanitarian interventions and the positive humanitarian consequences of the invasion of Iraq, which are undeniable. This leads to a discussion of the difficulties of humanitarian intervention in the fact of the "new world order", and the general inability of the United Nations to reliably convene any international effort to deal with humanitarian crisis.

The alternative to the United Nations is, of course, the United States. In fact without the United States, there would have no intervention in either Bosnia or Kosovo. Of course without the United States there also would have been no invasion of Iraq. But war in Iraq, and the larger "war on terror", has led the United States to engage in questionable, illegal and frequently immoral tactics.

"The unrepublican veneration of our presidential 'leader' has made it uniquely difficult for Americans to see their country's behavior as others see it. The latest report from Amnesty International—which says nothing that the rest of the world doesn't already know or believe but which has been denied and ridiculed by President Bush —is a case in point. The United States 'renders' (i.e., kidnaps and hands over) targeted suspects to third-party states for interrogation and torture beyond the reach of US law and the press. The countries to whom we outsource this task include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria (!), Pakistan— and Uzbekistan. Where outsourcing is impractical, we import qualified interrogators from abroad: in September 2002 a visiting Chinese 'delegation' was invited to participate in the 'interrogation' of ethnic Uighur detainees held at Guantánamo."

All of this is of course well known to those who have followed the progress of the "war on terror" and the war in Iraq. But Judt has a larger point to make about the corrupting influence of these tactics:

"Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially—brutally, contemptuously, illegally—abroad while preserving republican values at home. For it is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country's political class have failed. Congress appears helpless to impede the concentration of power in the executive branch; indeed, with few exceptions it has contributed actively and even enthusiastically to the process."

I think what Judt is discussing is clearly the worst case scenario. And yet it is clear that the potentially unending "war on terror" has had a profound effect on our domestic politics, with Republicans more then willing to use the issue of terrorism and national security to pound Democrats at the polls. How profound has the effect been on our nation? Could an uneding war threaten our very democracy? Judt says yes.

"For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national "values"; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not 'democracy.'"

It's quite obvious what "precedent" he's referring to. While the historical circumstances are almost completely different, the principles he's referring to, such as the use of or threat of war to influence politics at home, remain the same. And the similarities to much of what is happening in America today are troubling. Is our democracy threatened? I think the ideals of American democracy are considerably stronger then many on the left or the right believe, and yet it's hard to not worry about the willingness of those on the right who would divide the American public on something as crucial as our own security for their personal political gain. To what lengths will they go for political gain? Certainly even the most staunchly Republican politicians believe whole-heartedly in American democracy. Yet democracy is undermined one small step at a time, and can't each step be justified by the need to defend the American people from an outside danger?

I can't say for sure what, if any, threat there is to American democracy right now. I don't believe such a thing can be known except in hindsight, unfortunately. But the topic is worth considerably more discussion, and I'll return to again another time.

Seventeen Uighurs Freed

District Judge Ricardo Urbina of the Federal District has ordered the release of Seventeen Uighurs who have been held at Guantanamo Bay since they were handed over to the U.S. military by Afghanistan in 2001:

The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area.

“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said.

Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal.

The ruling was a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, arguing a broad executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions.

The government recently conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants, the classification it uses to detain people at Guantánamo, where 255 men are now held. But it has fought efforts by lawyers for the men to have them released into the United States, saying the Uighurs admitted to receiving weapons training in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The government abandoned it's efforts to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants as a result of a ruling this summer by a Federal Appeals Court in Parhat v. Gates, where the court held that one of the Uighurs could not be considered an enemy combatant by the Bush administration because he could not be proven by the administration's own standards to have engaged in hostilities against the United States. Unable to prove even that the men were enemy combatants, unable to prove even that they posed a security risk to the United States (relying instead on the fact that they perhaps posed a risk to China) Judge Urbina, with evident impatience ordered their release at the end of the week. A quote from the opinion (via Marty Lederman):

Normally, . . . the Court would have no reason to insinuate itself into a field normally dominated by the political branches; however, the circumstances now pending before the Court are exceptional. The Government captured the Petitioners and transported them to a detention facility where they will remain indefinitely. The Government has not charged these petitioners with a crime and has presented no reliable evidence that they would pose a threat to U.S. interests. Moreover, the Government has stymied its own efforts to resettle the Petitioners by insisting, until recently, that they were enemy combatants, the same designation given to terrorists willing to detonate themselves amongst crowds of civilians.

The administration even implied that the damage the men's release might have on U.S.-China relations was justification for their detention:

Several pages later in the transcript of today's hearing, the truth seeps out: On page 26 of the transcript, the DOJ lawyer says: "Certainly there would be concerns about our relationship . . . with other countries, say, for example, China, if the Court put the Government in a position of not being able to speak with one voice."

That is to say, allowing the Uighurs to live freely in the U.S. will upset China.

And perhaps it will. But as the Uighurs' counsel Sabin Willett noted, it's one thing to deny someone entry into the U.S. on the basis of such diplomatic considerations where they are voluntarily seeking such entry. But "I'd never heard anyone suggest before that our relationships with other nations are a lawful basis to hold somebody in a prison." Or as the judge simply put it, "an alternative legal justification has not been provided for continued detention."

Of course, it is completely obvious to you and I that the case of these men was never about justice. We have no objection, moral or otherwise, to those who wish to engage in armed insurrection against a dictatorial and totalitarian government (and in fact are quick to support such insurrections when they match our interests.) These men committed no crimes against our nation, pose no threat to our nation, and pose little threat even to the nation that they were at war with. Rather, the Bush administration has merely sought, time and time again, to establish the precedent that it can detain anyone it sees fit for as long as it likes with any justification they may or may not choose to provide, and that judicial (or any) review of their purpose and methods is completely inappropriate (a viewpoint that federal courts have steadily eroded.) If that includes locking up men innocent of a crime until the Bush administration sees fit to release them, or not, then so be it so long as this precedent for dictatorial executive authority is established. I'm sure Vice President Cheney and others would argue (in private, certainly) that the establishment of this authority, even at the cost of a gross miscarriage of justice, is vital to our national security. But there is no security worth the abrogation of our own Constitution, the ideal of which (if not the practice of) is the only thing that presently distinguishes us from self-interested powers of the past centuries.