China says Swiss decision to grant asylum for Uighurs will harm relations
By APThursday, February 4, 2010
China says Swiss asylum for Uighurs will harm ties
BEIJING — China said Thursday that a Swiss government decision to approve the resettlement of two Chinese inmates at the Guantanamo Bay detention center would harm relations between the countries.
The Swiss government on Wednesday approved the resettlement of the two, who are brothers from the ethnic Uighur minority, as part of its commitment to help President Barack Obama’s administration close the much-criticized detention center that holds “enemy combatants” captured in the war on terrorism.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told a regular news conference Thursday that the decision “will surely undermine Chinese-Swiss relations.”
Ma said the brothers were members of a group called the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which China has called a terrorist outfit.
Beijing has demanded that the brothers, and other Uighurs held in Guantanamo, be sent back to China. However, the Obama administration has sought to resettle them in third countries out of worry that Uighurs might be persecuted back home.
Ma did not say what action, if any, China would take against Switzerland.
Switzerland’s justice minister said the decision to take in the Uighur brothers was guided by humanitarian principles and should not be interpreted as giving preference to one country over another.
“We have stable, good relations with China and we want to keep them that way,” Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told reporters in the Swiss capital, Bern.
China’s western region of Xinjiang has been tense in recent years. Nearly 200 people were killed last July in China’s worst ethnic riots in decades. Beijing accuses overseas Uighur groups of being behind the violence, while Uighurs say they have faced discrimination by China’s majority Han population.
The brothers, who have been held in Guantanamo since being captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, will probably be transferred to Switzerland within a month, she said. In January, an Uzbek became the first former inmate of the U.S. detention center to be resettled in Switzerland.
Six other Uighurs went to the Pacific island nation of Palau last year. Another four were resettled in Bermuda.
