We told you about how the former prisoners were presto-chango turned into refugees by the US State Department, here, in December.
This news could not come at a more opportune time (for a little chuckle), just as State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf tells us that jihadists or wannabe jihadists just need a job and some upward mobility.
That is what Uruguay has offered and now we hear that the “refugees” have rejected their offer of work, a roof over their heads and cultural and language lessons as not being enough!
President Mujica says of them—these are not gritty, hardworking immigrants like the earlier ones who came to Uruguay. If they were humble people of the desert they would be stronger!
From the Associated Press at Epoch Times (hat tip: Robin):
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay—Controversy is flaring over the six Guantanamo detainees taken in by Uruguay for resettlement, with even the man who pushed through the plan, President Jose Mujica, seeming to criticize them for lacking a work ethic.
The men were locked up for more than a dozen years at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba before they were brought to Montevideo in December. Mujica agreed to accept them as a humanitarian gesture and said they would be given help getting established in a country of 3.3 million people with a total Muslim population of perhaps 300.
The government has offered them a residential facility to study Spanish, learn about Uruguayan culture and integrate to their new home.
But Syrian refugee Abu Wa’el Dhiab recently complained that the men have “walked out of a prison to enter another one.”
In a TV interview, Dhiab expressed thanks to Uruguay, but said it needs a plan for helping the ex-detainees, who need “their families, a home, a job and some sort of income that allows them to build a future.”
A labor union that has been helping the men says, however, that they have turned down job offers.
Mujica recently visited the home where five of the six men are staying and asked them to start working. After his visit, the president said on his radio program that the former detainees are far from the ancestors of Uruguayans, who he said were gritty, hard-working immigrants.
“If these people were humble people of the desert, poor people, they’d surely be stronger and more primitive, but they’re not,” Mujica said of the former prisoners. “Through their hands, features and family histories, it seems to me that they’re middle class.”
We have a little archive growing on Uruguay here and just this morning created a new category—South America—for increasing refugee news from there.