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AUSTRALIA: Refusing to Resettle Gitmo Inmates

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Jan 19 2009 (IPS) - Australia’s rejection of Bush administration requests to accept a number of detainees currently held at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, although supported in some quarters, is also being opposed in others.

In early January, then-acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard revealed that the Kevin Rudd government has twice been asked by United States officials to allow a “small group” of Guantánamo detainees to resettle in Australia.

The first request occurred in early 2008 and the second in December last year. Both have now been rejected.

“Assessing those requests from a case-by-case basis, they had not met our stringent national security and immigration criteria,” Gillard told journalists on Jan.3.

The outgoing U.S. administration of George W. Bush had expressed its desire in recent times to close the controversial detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, where some 250 men are still being held, and Barack Obama is expected to announce plans for its closure shortly after he is inaugurated as the 44th president of the U.S. on Jan.20.

Persistent allegations of torture used against detainees have dogged the facility since it was opened more than seven years ago, and the U.S. has received widespread condemnation from the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as regional blocs including the European Union and the Organisation of American States, for alleged human rights abuses inflicted upon detainees in the name of the “war on terror.”

But while the conservative opposition here has called on the government to rule out any possibility that detainees could be accepted by Australia – Gillard confirmed that any future requests would be considered on the same criteria as the previous cases – there has also been a chorus of voices calling for prisoners to be resettled here, among them the small but influential Australian Greens party.

Despite maintaining that the U.S. is ultimately responsible for repatriating the detainees following their incarceration – “Guantánamo is President Bush’s creation,” said Greens leader Bob Brown in a statement on Jan.15 – the party believes that Australia should step in if, as appears to be the case, the United States is not willing to take all the men being held at the facility.

“If the new [Obama] administration refuses to give inmates, for example the Uighurs from East Turkestan in China, who have never been charged, a home, Australia should take them. The alternative is horrible to contemplate,” said Brown.

There has been speculation in Australian media that the U.S. requests to the Rudd government were in regard to 17 Muslim Uighurs currently interned at Guantánamo – speculation that the foreign affairs department has refused to confirm or deny to IPS – who have been cleared for release.

The men might have already been released, but a ruling in October in a U.S. federal court allowing the men to settle in the United States has so far been stalled by appeals.

The Uyghurs are believed to have been captured in Pakistan after fleeing the bombing during the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 of Afghanistan, where they were thought to have been training to fight for independence for what they call East Turkestan – the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China – a region of the country’s far west which stretches into Central Asia.

Chinese officials regard the detained men as suspected terrorists – China believes that the group contains members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – and have demanded that the men be sent back to China, which the U.S. has refused to do, purportedly on the grounds of human rights concerns.

“The Chinese government has always called for the early repatriation of Chinese terrorist suspects and opposed other nations taking those prisoners,” said foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang at a December press conference, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Mamtimin Ala, general secretary of the Australian Uighur Association – Australia contains the world’s third-largest Uighur community outside China, with around two thousand having settled here – believes that Australia should accept his compatriots.

“Australia has been very active in fighting against terrorism, so Australia should also take a shared responsibility for taking these remnants or debris of the war against terrorism,” says Ala.

Albania accepted five Uighurs in 2006, the only country so far to take foreign nationals from Guantánamo. Portugal also recently offered to accept detainees from the detention centre and has called on other countries to follow its lead.

The ‘Weekend Australian’ newspaper recently reported that Australia had been warned by China not to take the group on at least two occasions. Mirroring China’s spectacular resurgence as a major player on the world stage, Australia’s relationship with China has become increasingly vital to the nation’s economy.

“The Chinese government right now is being very aggressive in persuading Australia not to take the Guantánamo Uighurs,” Ala told IPS, adding that Australia has a “moral obligation” to accept them.

Susan Harris-Rimmer, president of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights (ALHR), says that any “burden sharing obligation” on the part of Australia is up to the discretion of the Australian government.

Harris-Rimmer says that although Australia is not legally obligated to render assistance there are valid reasons why the Rudd government should play a role and accept some detainees.

The ALHR president explains that these include the need for a quick closure of the detention facility, Australia’s ability to assist the United States’ “international obligation to not return people to torture,” and the country’s tacit support of U.S. policies in the war on terror.

“Australia was an ally in Afghanistan and Iraq, where most of the people [held at Guantánamo] were taken from.you could say that there’s a complicity or implied assumption that we agreed with Guantánamo Bay,” she told IPS.

Harris-Rimmer argues that the U.S. has become a victim of its own success in circumventing international rules to suit its own agenda. “It’s a really difficult situation that the U.S. has created because these people fall into a legal black hole, which was always the point of Guantánamo Bay,” she says.