SUNDBYBERG, Sweden — It’s been a long journey: from China to Afghanistan to the U.S. lockup for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Adel Abdu al-Hakim hopes it ends in his sister’s tidy apartment in a suburb of the Swedish capital.
“I was in prison for 4½ years, and during that time, I thought to myself that maybe this is my life,” al-Hakim, 33, said in an interview. “Now, I just want to live the life of a normal person.”
Last week, he arrived in Sweden to reunite with relatives he thought he would never see again.
Al-Hakim was released last year from Guantanamo along with four other Uighurs, a minority group of Turkic-speaking Chinese Muslims, after the U.S. admitted that they were not terrorists. Authorities believed they might face persecution if returned to China, so they were sent instead to Albania, the only country that would receive them.
Isolated in Albania
But the Uighurs found themselves isolated and jobless in a nation where no one spoke their language.
Al-Hakim took advantage of an invitation to attend a human-rights conference in Sweden, where his sister had sought shelter in 2002. He applied for asylum on Nov. 20 after arriving on a four-day visa.
The chances for approval were uncertain. Al-Hakim probably will be allowed to stay pending a decision, although authorities could deport him immediately if they determine his case has no merit.
“We have fought for a very long time, and now we are very happy to be together,” he said, surrounded by his sister, Kav ser, and her daughters in the living room of the apartment in Sundbyberg.
Al-Hakim left China in 1999, fed up with what he said was harassment and discrimination by Chinese authorities. Two years earlier, he said, he had been detained and beaten after attending a protest over the mistreatment of Uighurs in his hometown.
Targeting “terrorists”
Critics accuse China of using claims of terrorism as an excuse to crack down on peaceful pro-independence sentiment among Uighurs.
After spending a year as a refugee in Kyrgyzstan, al-Hakim and fellow Uighur Abu Bakker Qassim decided to move to Turkey. Their journey took them through Afghanistan and then to Pakistan — where they were detained and handed over to U.S. authorities for $5,000 each, al-Hakim said.
“It was all about money.”
Shackled and hooded, they were transferred to a prison camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where they spent six months before being moved to Guantanamo. At that point, the Americans knew they were not terrorists, al-Hakim maintains.
“In the last interrogation in Afghanistan, the Americans acknowledged that they had arrested us by mistake but said they could not let us go so easily,” he said.
The formal acknowledgment came only after a lengthy legal battle when a military tribunal ruled that al-Hakim and other Uighurs were not enemy combatants.
“Of course I was angry. I tried to hide my emotions, but I still cried a lot,” al-Hakim said.
Beijing wanted the Uighurs sent back to China, saying they were part of a violent Muslim separatist movement fighting for an independent state of “East Turkistan.” Washington resisted but declined to let them into the United States. Appeals went out to other countries, and finally, Albania agreed.
Lawyers in the U.S. and Sweden, as well as human-rights groups, helped al-Hakim obtain his visa for Sweden.
Now, as he awaits a decision on asylum, the joy of being reunited with his sister and her family is tempered by the absence of his wife and children, who remain in China.
“I don’t have the possibility to get them from over there. The Chinese authorities won’t allow it,” he said. “My children keep asking when I will come back, why I don’t want to come and get them, why all children have fathers and they don’t.”
