Basking in Bermuda

Bermuda

Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos, the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbours, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

“I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life,” said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

They praised Bermuda for showing courage in the face of potential Chinese pressures that, in their view, powerful European countries had failed to muster. The men were among a larger group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who had fled what they called Chinese persecution of Muslims in western China and spent part of 2001 in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan. They fled when the Americans bombed the camp, and were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty.

The four brought here had been cleared by American officials and courts of taking up arms against the United States or ties to global terrorism. But proposals to resettle them in the United States caused a political furor that the Obama administration did not want to aggravate.

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