Lucky for the four Uighur fellows long stuck in Guantánamo’s dungeons that the United States doesn’t have a large Chinese-Muslim population chafing under ethnic discrimination and engineered settlement by an imported elite. [Here they are having an ice cream--aren’t they skeery?] If that were the case, they would never have been released to go live in Bermuda as their fellow Uighurs riot in what is apparently a very serious manner.
We now have the precedent, set by Bush and ratified by Obama, that such violent acts justify imprisonment without trial and that the accused can rot in jail pretty much forever because ‘protecting the American people’ takes priority over minor details like civil protections and the rule of law.
The Chinese dictatorship couldn’t agree more, just substituting ‘Han Chinese’ and the ‘People’s Republic’ where appropriate. No doubt the Politburo will be organizing show trials soon to focus the blame on ‘hooligans’ and ‘anti-state elements’ complete with forced confessions and kangaroo courts pre-set to send the automatically convicted off to prison camps.
Or maybe they’ll just pack a few hundred of the suspects away somewhere out of reach of lawyers and relatives and sit on them for a decade, telling anyone who asks that it’s none of their business and that public order has been restored successfully—end of discussion. A few innocents swept up in the campaign is a small price to pay in the thinking of autocratic states—and most of their biped citizens.
As usual, the knee-jerk repressive approach, so popular with the masses and so easy to sell, obscures any underlying social problems. So it is ironic that while the release of the four Uighur prisoners from Guantánamo had the Chinese overlords asphyxiating from the knots in their knickers, the worst riots in decades were brewing in their country’s western outposts.
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