Offer of permission of entry for the prisoners by Palau is tantamount to "life-long banishment"

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has criticised plans of the US government to place temporarily 17 imprisoned Uighurs from China at present being held at the US Guantanamo prison camp on the remote island republic of Palau in the Pacific Ocean . The US government is attempting quite ruthlessly to evade responsibility for these innocent victims of the battle against terror in order to avoid a conviction by the Supreme Court of the USA on the release of the Uighurs, said the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius, on Wednesday in Göttingen. Palau is also very satisfied with the deal since by way of return it will be then receiving considerable development aid. "This deal is however of no use to the Uighurs”, warned Delius. It is tantamount to life-long banishment because no third country will be prepared to take in these Uighurs on a permanent basis once they have been removed from the immediate sphere of US power in Guantanamo .” There is no guarantee of their safety in the small island state and there is no Uighur community which could take up the matter of their integration.

The GfbV has received information of the terms of the deal. In gratitude for taking in the prisoners Palau is to receive from the US government 200 million US dollars for development aid, economic subsidies and other forms of aid. This country of only 20,000 inhabitants, lying 800 km east of the Philippines in the North Pacific, is acutely threatened by the consequences of the climate change and desperately needs international help. As a state dependent on foreign aid funds Palau is not suitable as a reception country because it cannot guarantee th safety of the former Guantanamo inmates against China, which has great power in the region. Palau is a former trus teeship territory of the USA and part of a former colony of the German Empire. The young state received its independence in 1994.

"The Guantanamo Uighurs are once again being instrumentalised”, said Delius. "They were used in the run-up to the German elections by the party strategists and Albania used them before that to buy its way into NATO.” At the request of the USA Albania granted asylum in the autumn of 2006 to five other Uighurs being held at Guantanamo. They eke out there an isolated and traumatised existence. Albania is faced by heavy pressure from the Chinese government, which wants to make sure at all cost of their deportation to China.