After Guantanamo, a new limbo begins

TIRANA, Albania -- Ahktar Qassim Basit says he is not angry about the four years he spent as a US prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before his captors mumbled a brief apology and flew him to this drab Balkan capital to begin a new life as a refugee.

It is this new life in Albania, Basit and other former Guantanamo detainees say, that is driving them to desperation.

The men, Muslims from western China's Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed police.

The men have been told that they will have to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy on macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on quick telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have lost hope of seeing their wives and children again.

"We suffered very much at Guantanamo, but we continue to suffer here," Basit said. "The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: We have no place to go."

Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China's government, which demands their return. Only Albania's pro-US government would grant them asylum, but Albanian officials have told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantanamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them -- and neither will the United States.

US diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that China has warned some of the countries not to accept them.

"The United States has made extensive and high-level efforts over a period of four years to try to resettle the Uighurs in countries around the world," the State Department's legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, said in an interview. Its lack of success, he added, "has not been for lack of trying."

Many US officials privately describe the Uighurs's plight as one of the more troubling aspects of the Bush administration's detention program. The case also provides a view of the difficulties Washington has encountered in trying to winnow the detainee population at Guantanamo in response to domestic and international criticism.

The refugees in Tirana seem to have little sense of how to influence the global chess game in which they have become involved. They mostly spend their days behind the refugee center's high cinderblock walls, reading the Koran, praying, studying Albanian, and waiting for a turn on the center's lone desktop computer. They avoid the gravelly soccer field, they say, because it reminds them of one they looked out on at Guantanamo.

With President Bush scheduled to visit Albania today, the Uighurs and three other former Guantanamo detainees here are asking whether the United States, having flown them here in shackles, might do anything to help get them the housing, jobs, and other support they were told to expect.

One morning in mid-May, the five Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) got permission to leave the refugee center, rode buses downtown, and went to the offices of the Albanian prime minister, Sali Berisha. An aide said Berisha was too busy to see them, but promised to pass along their entreaties.

"We said, 'If you can't deliver what you have promised, please ask George W. Bush to find another country for us,' " another of the former prisoners, Abu Bakker Qassim, recalled.