“They are enrolled for one full school year at their expense, and they’re studying English language, history, and the culture of Palau and Micronesia,” President Johnson Toribiong said in an interview on Saturday.
“They are not radicals,” he added. “They are very spiritual. They pray five times a day. In fact, the college has to build a special bathroom for them because they have to wash their hands and faces before they pray. They seem to have been accepted by the Palauan community very well.”
Toribiong doesn’t believe that the former detainees are anti-Americans.
They were victims of circumstances, he said.
The six Uighurs arrived in Palau on Nov. 11, 2009. Their relocation was upon the request of the U.S.
The six were among the 34 Uighurs captured nine years ago in Afghanistan and Pakistan on suspicion that they had undergone weapons training with the Taliban.
The U.S. brought them to the Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and held them there.
Later, the U.S. military determined they were noncombatants, but the federal government refused to turn them over to China where they face persecution.
Toribiong said Palau accepted the Uighurs for humanitarian reasons.
“They are foreigners and unless they can find a community where they can socialize, find wives and families then they are not completely free,” said Toribiong who is a lawyer by profession.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said any host country of detainees is given a “routine resettlement reimbursement.”
The presence of the Uighurs in Palau has sparked interest in the Arab world.
Toribiong said the son of the emir of Qatar, a rich Arab nation in the Middle East, visited Palau recently with his seven-man delegation for a diving expedition
The son of the emir of Qatar, whom Toribiong met in New York, flew to Palau aboard a royal jet.
Next month, Palau is welcoming one of the sheiks of the United Arab Emirates.
Malaysia, a Muslim nation in Southeast Asia, is also establishing a diplomatic office in Palau.
Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, has also begun establishing ties with Palau.
Palau invited 13 Uighurs to live in the island nation, but only six accepted the invitation.
The rest of the 34 are now in the British Commonwealth of Bermuda and Albania.
Two more Uighur detainees, who are brothers, are still without a host country.
