Germany uneasy over Gitmo inmates

BERLIN, May 12 (UPI) -- Because of security concerns and diplomatic anxieties, German politicians are increasingly uneasy about accepting inmates from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Washington has asked Germany to take in nine inmates belonging to a Muslim minority from China. The request came after German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had signaled a general willingness to help the United States with the closure of its military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by possibly granting asylum to individual inmates.

President Barack Obama wants to close Guantanamo by the end of the year. He has asked America's allies to take in inmates who are deemed innocent but can't return to their home countries because they could face abuse or torture there or because their governments are unwilling to take them back. Roughly 60 people from countries like Libya, China and Algeria fall under this category. Washington hopes to resettle most of them in Europe.

Britain has already accepted eight inmates; France recently agreed to take in one inmate. The German proposal had caused Daniel Fried, the U.S. diplomat tasked with finding host countries for the inmates, to send a list with the names of nine Uighurs to the German Foreign Ministry.

The Uighurs are an Turkic ethnic group living mainly in China, in Xinjiang province in the country's northwest. Forming a separatist group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, some of the Uighurs have responded to Chinese religious oppression with armed attacks. ETIM is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

Beijing says that it does not oppress the Uighur minority but instead is trying to crack down on religious fanatics. Observers say Beijing convinced the United States to list ETIM as a terrorist organization in return for less opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

While Germany's conservatives had always been uneasy about Steinmeier's offer, they are now explicitly speaking out against taking in the Uighurs.

"It's not evident why it has to be Germany that should take them in," the German Interior Ministry, led by Wolfgang Schaeuble from Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, wrote in a letter to Steinmeier's Foreign Ministry, the weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reports.

Schaeuble told the Sunday edition of German newspaper Bild that Washington had not informed Germany properly on the background of the inmates.

"The information Washington has given us is not yet sufficient" to decide whether to take the Uighurs in or not, he said.

Several state interior ministers are opposed to helping the United States with the closure of Guantanamo.

"The Americans have created this problem themselves," Holger Hoevelmann, the interior minister of Saxony-Anhalt told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "Given the size of their country, it should not be a problem to give the innocent inmates a perspective inside the United States."

There are three main reasons why German politicians are opposed to taking in Guantanamo prisoners.

There are those officials who don't think Germany has the moral obligation to help the United States. (Others say Berlin does because its spies had visited the detention center to interrogate suspects and in some cases allegedly cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency in extraordinary rendition cases.)

Second, officials are uneasy about the diplomatic tensions that may be imported with the inmates. China wouldn't be happy at all if Berlin gave shelter to a group of people Beijing considers terrorists.

And finally, many people fear that Germany may invite in not harmless prisoners but a security threat. This latter concern may be crucial.

Eight of the Uighurs apparently were members of or had ties to ETIM, with some of them having received weapons training in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the German media reports.

Non-governmental organizations have argued that the Uighurs are harmless and that Beijing has sent false information to the West to legitimize its domestic crackdown on the minority, but officials in Germany are nevertheless uneasy about the inmates' potential terrorist past.

"Such people should not be allowed into Germany," said Joachim Hermann, Bavaria's interior minister and a member of Merkel's conservatives.

And even if the Uighurs didn't belong to ETIM in the first place, interior ministers are worried that their years of plight in Guantanamo have radicalized them.

The current row reflects the fragile power situation in Berlin. Steinmeier and Merkel are opponents in the race to become -- or remain -- Germany's chancellor, and that means their unlikely government team-up is set to undergo a few more tension tests before that race is decided by the general elections this fall. Observers say the Interior Ministry might try to buy time for a decision to be made only after the elections.

Not everyone in Germany agrees that delaying the decision is such a good idea.

During its party conference this past weekend, the German Green Party said Germany should take in the Uighurs. The planned closure of Guantanamo should not be hindered "by refusal or by protracted consideration," the party said.