Obama’s stuck with his Gitmo promises
Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Monday, June 01, 2009
US PRESIDENT Obama is in a jam and wants Australians to help him out. Like our own Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Obama ran an election campaign big on promises that he is having difficulty keeping.
One of those big promises was a pledge to close Guantanamo Bay in the first 100 days of his presidency. But first Obama has to find somewhere to place its remaining 250 or so inmates, most of whom are unlikely to face prosecution.
Among those who won’t face court action are 17 Uighur people. The US would like Australia to accept them.
The Uighur are Muslims from northern China. They want a separate Muslim homeland; there is little doubt they are persecuted by the Chinese, just as are the Tibetans. There is little doubt that they would not be safe from the Chinese, if they were returned to their homes.
But Obama wasn’t thinking about the Uighur when he vowed to close the Guantanamo. He was playing domestic politics, appealing to people like his married friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, a pair of America’s worst urban terrorists, in whose living room he is said to have decided on a political career.
Ayers and Dohrn were members of the Weathermen, a group of terrorists who blew up government buildings around the US in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, fortunately killing no-one but three of their own members.
Obama has learnt that the views of Ayers and Dohrn are not representative of many other Americans, most of whom realise that Gitmo houses some very bad people. No matter how small-L liberal Obama’s supporters are, they are not liberal enough to want Gitmo-quality people living in their neighbourhood.
Obama didn’t see this coming. Nor was he aware of a Pentagon report recently obtained by The New York Times which found that one in seven of the 534 prisoners transferred abroad from Guantanamo Bay returned to terrorism or militant activity.
Even Obama’s own Democrat Party colleagues are baulking at resettling Guantanamo Bay inmates in the US, which is why Obama has asked Australia to take at least some of the Uighur prisoners who have been held there for the past seven years.
This is the third request the US has made to Australia to accept Uighur detainees, the first two being made by the Bush administration.
This request differs, however, from those made by the Bushies, as former president Bush made no pledge to close Guantanamo and the approach to Australia was a resettlement issue, rather than the domestic US political problem it has now become.
Australia is essentially being asked to take the 10 Uighur to help Obama out of a political jam of his own making.
According to Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Australian Uighur Association and member of the executive committee of the World Uighur Congress, the Uighur have been found not to be enemy combatants by the US courts and the US now has a moral responsibility to offer them homes in the US.
“It is primarily a US problem,” Ala told me. “But the American government fears creating outrage and unexpected repercussions if they permitted those Uighur to resettle in the US.”
Ala, a human rights activist who was granted an Australian protection visa last year and now has permanent residency here, previously lived in Brussels where he studied at a Belgian university for his masters in philosophy.
He argues that because Australia was a partner in the war on terror, it should accept a degree of responsibility for the Guantanamo inmates, if the US will not resettle them.
That argument is a little weak.
Australia needs migrants who want to be Australians, not migrants who see their future as hyphenated-Australians, owing a shared allegiance to another nation, and supporting foreign militants.
We already have difficulty dealing with groups who refuse to embrace the clearly recognisable Australian identity, preferring to fight ethnic and religious wars either by proxy though fund-raising exercises or through violence at sporting events and other opportunistic moments.
This is a difficult call as we have about 5000 Uighur living here now, and according to all accounts, quite peaceably, just as we have a small number of Tibetans.
There is no doubt that China would not like America or Australia to accept the Guantanamo Uighur.
China is a bully and China requires its diplomats to organise its expatriate communities to intervene in our domestic politics and make its views felt but that should not be a concern.
What is clear here is that Guantanamo, and the fall-out from Obama’s domestic policies, is not a matter for Australia.
When he led the triumphal chant, “Yes, we can,” Obama should have realised there were a few things that blind optimism could not achieve.
He didn’t think things through and we should not be there now to save his political goals. If he thinks he can convince Australians and Australian politicians that the Uighur pose no threat, he can convince his own electors of the same thing.
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