A year ago, June 10, 2007 the NYT ran a story on five Uighur men who had been released from Guantanamo and resettled in Albania. 

(Uighur language is written in the same script used for Arabic.  When tranliterated into Roman letters it is spelled several ways, another common spelling is Uyghur.  This is the spelling used by the Uyghur American Association, located in Washington DC.  The New York Times uses the spelling Uighur.) 

Uighurs at Guantanamo released to Albania

They were freed and sent to Albania after they were found to pose no threat to the United States.  The Uighur community in America asked for them to be released in America, but because they had been arrested as combatants -- though this proved to be false -- they could not be released to America. 

Personally, I suspect the Bush administration may have sent them to Albania as a way to hide this administration's mistakes.

Albania.  A country in which the men had no connection except that they are cultural Muslims (they'd never been allowed religious practice in China, where they had lived all their lives) and Albania is predominantly Muslim.  The men did not speak the language nor understand the customs.  They had no friends or relatives in Albania.  Their American lawyers were not told they were being released to Albania until after the men had been moved to Albania.  

The men are Chinese citizens and because of the harsh discrimination underwhich Uigher people live in China, had left Xinjiang province in China hoping to earn money somewhere in Central Asia.  As the article says, they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries, and heard that the Uighur hamlet was a place where they could get free food and shelter while trying to figure out where to go next.

International human rights groups have long accused the Chinese authorities of oppressing the roughly nine million Uighurs in Xinjiang, where there have been occasional acts of separatist violence. The State Department’s own 2006 human rights report for China describes ethnic discrimination, the suppression of Muslim religious freedom and the persecution of those thought to be separatists, many of whom have been executed.

Often while I was in China, I would find Uigher men far from home selling kabobs or homemade candy on streets.  Like poor people in any country, they went wherever they could to find work to support their families.  These five Uighur men found really bad luck.