China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own

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China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own


By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 22, 2009

It is the awkward fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.
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China is also just beginning to grapple with the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the welfare state.

Most anachronistic of all, though, is the country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.

In this memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent dissident.

Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders; gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and harsh repression.

Even Westerners who pay relatively little attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by the Nobel committee and received at the White House.

Such is not the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.

One thing the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”

Nor, she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.

In the end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs, including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors. Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a powerful China.

On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically prominent member of the National People’s Congress.

Here, though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong, indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.

By the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that “after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”

Years, several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under such horrible conditions?”

If not the first time she had spoken truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six years and exiled to the United States.

This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.

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Uyghurs Targeted Over Prayers

Uyghurs Targeted Over Prayers
2009-04-02

Members of a mostly Muslim ethnic group in China are detained and fined for worshiping outside their own villages.

AFP Photo

A Chinese policeman (R) watches as ethnic Uyghurs line the street for an official ceremony in Kashgar, in China's northwestern Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Aug. 7, 2008.

HONG KONG—Local authorities in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region are detaining and fining members of the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority for conducting prayers outside their home villages, residents and officials say.

Several hundred Uyghurs who gathered to pray at a Qariqash county shrine in Khotan prefecture, south of Kashgar, were surrounded by local police and detained for hours on March 26, one of the detained villagers said.

Village authorities, contacted by telephone, confirmed that “cross-village worship” was considered a "social crime."

It is a social crime."

Hebibullah, Ilchi village chief

Emin Niyaz, 65, who is retired and lives in Ilchi village, said that because he no longer works he had decided to travel to the Qariqash county shrine.

“Since my childhood, we have had a custom of worshiping at that shrine, so I thought there was nothing wrong with worshiping there,” Niyaz said.

“While we were worshiping, suddenly the police surrounded us. They gathered us in the shrine and then they brought us to Zawa village police station,” he said, adding that the worshipers were questioned and photographed individually.

Fined for worship

“After that they called our village chiefs and sent us back into their custody. The village chiefs brought us to the government buildings in each of our villages and detained us there,” Niyaz said.

His village chief, Niyaz said, accused the group of planning an “illegal gathering.”

“If you worship in your own village it might be all right, but if you engage in cross-village worship they say it is illegal. The village chief said that if so many people are gathering in the desert, they must have some secret motive,” Niyaz said.

They were also required to pay a fine or face being returned to the village police station for detention, he said.

“They told each of us to pay a 500 yuan (U.S. $70) fine … In the beginning, we begged not to pay the fine because we couldn’t afford it. But in the end, each of us had to pay to be released,” he said.

The average yearly income for an Ilchi village resident is 3,000 yuan (U.S. $440).

Niyaz said that the group was held for a total of 12 hours until all fines had been collected.

“We had no choice. Our village chiefs went to our families and relatives during the middle of the night and collected the money from them,” Niyaz said. “They detained us at 2 p.m. and we didn’t get home until 2 a.m.”

Official response

The Ilchi village chief, Hebibullah, who gave only his first name, confirmed that he had fined the group for worshiping at the shrine.

“It is a social crime. Last year 10 people died on their way to worship at a shrine. Since then, the Prefectural Party Committee has forbidden cross-village worshiping,” Hebibullah said, adding that an agreement between villagers and the government required him to impose the fine.

“The agreement includes laws about birth control, work production, social stability, and other items. Based on this agreement, I fined them 500 yuan each,” Hebibullah said.

Party Secretary Jur’et, in charge of politics and law in Ilchi village, called the incident a “sensitive political event.”

“The shrine is located 5 kms (3.1 miles) from the nearest village in the desert. Nobody used to go there to worship, but in the last two years more and more people have been going there,” Jur’et said.

Asked about a man who took villagers to the shrine in his vehicle and said he was fined 5,000 yuan (U.S. $730), Jur’et said: “His name is Metrozi. We fined him for providing transportation for an illegal gathering.”

Self-criticism

Two days after being released, the 13 members of the Ilchi group were called in front of the rest of their village and criticized, Niyaz said.

“One of us gave a speech on behalf of the rest of us and acknowledged our crime, expressing that other people should learn their lesson from us,” he said.

But when asked if he felt guilty for committing a crime, Niyaz said he didn’t know.

“There is a stone in front of the shrine that says you can worship there. It says you cannot gamble there,” he said.

“They accused us of an illegal gathering, but how was I supposed to know that there were already so many people there?”

Uyghurs targeted

Social stability campaigns are frequently launched in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in a bid to stop petitioners from going public with their complaints and quash potential unrest, experts say.

In July last year, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, police launched a house-to-house search campaign in Gulja [in Chinese, Yining], a Uyghur city in Ili prefecture known as a traditional center of opposition to Beijing’s rule.

Uyghurs whose homes had been raided reported that their copies of the Quran had been confiscated by police.

Many Uyghurs, who twice enjoyed short-lived independence as the state of East Turkestan during the 1930s and 40s, oppose Beijing’s rule in Xinjiang.

Beijing blames Uyghur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence in the Xinjiang region. But diplomats and foreign experts are skeptical.

International rights groups have accused Beijing of using the U.S. “war on terror” to crack down on nonviolent supporters of Uyghur independence.

In an April 2005 report, Human Rights Watch accused authorities of maintaining a "multi-tiered system of surveillance, control, and suppression of religious activity aimed at Xinjiang’s Uyghurs."

At its most extreme, peaceful activists who practice their religion in a manner deemed unacceptable by state or party authorities are arrested, tortured, and at times executed, the report said, while more routinely many Uyghurs experience harassment in their daily lives.

Original reporting in Uyghur by Shohret Hoshur. Translated by Dolkun Kamberi. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

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