Uighurs

In one of the stranger stories of the year, Reuters reports:

BERLIN, April 14 - The U.S. government wants to deport a group of Chinese Muslims held at the Guantanamo prison camp to Germany and is pressuring Chancellor Angela Merkel to take in the ethnic Uighurs, a newspaper reported on Friday.

The German daily Die Welt quoted diplomatic sources saying Merkel's government has resisted the U.S. pressure to accept the 15 Uighurs from the restive, predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang in China's northwest.

How did 15 Uighurs, whose main beef is with the government of China, come to end up at Gitmo? And why are we pressuring Germany to take them?

The Uighurs are a repressed minority living in a remote area of China, and the Peking government has been trying to swamp their exotic and singular culture by encouraging large numbers of ethnic Chinese Han to emigrate to faraway and mountainous Xinjiang, but mainly all they've succeeded in doing is creating a kind of ersatz Uighur liberation movement.

Uighurs are also referred to as the Uigurs, Uygurs, Weiwuers, Sarts, Taranchis, or Kashgarliks. They live in that part of northern China is known as Eastern Turkestan, Ughuristan, Uyghuria, Chinese Turkistan, Xinjiang, or Singkiang, a remote mountainous region surrounded by Mongolia, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, India, Tibet, Chinhai, and Gansu.

Sounds to me like they're Chinese Muslim hillbillies, and would feel right at home in Bakersfield.