Rebiya Kadeer, the 62-year-old leader-in-exile of China's Uyghur muslim minority, faced a few supporters and friendly journalists on the stairs of a federal courthouse in Washington DC last November. The Circuit Court had just ruled that 17 Uyghur muslims would remain in American military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, despite a district court ruling six weeks earlier that had found they were not terrorists.
"They are innocent men," she said. "When you compare them with terrorists, it's very unfair. That's why I think America will let them stay [in the country]."
Kadeer, who is about five feet tall and favours girlish salt and pepper pigtails crowned with a traditional kufi-like hat, had good reason to have faith in her adopted homeland. In 2005, after she had spent six years in a Chinese prison, the US State Department and John Kamm, a former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, negotiated her release. The US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy provides a US$249,000 annual grant to her Uyghur American Association (UAA).
From a cramped, bland office space a couple of blocks from the White House - the firm next door speculates on multifamily real estate - she struggles to uphold the rights of more than 10 million Uyghurs, who inhabit China's far western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area they prefer to call East Turkistan.
The US State Department has recently decried Beijing's policy towards the Uyghurs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated that judgment during her first visit to China, in February. Nonetheless, the US has not pressed the issue, preferring not to antagonise Beijing.
When Kadeer talks about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, her voice rises.
"I was treated as an enemy of the state because I asked the Chinese government, `Why won't you allow the Uyghur people and the Chinese people to live in peace and harmony? And why don't you respect the Uyghur people's rights to their education and culture.' But the government doesn't want to hear that."
Kadeer's struggle has been at times lonely and difficult. There are about 1,000 Uyghurs in America but the post September 11 phobia about Muslims has not helped their cause.
"Tibetans are treated well in the west because they are Buddhist and considered peaceful," says Alim Seytoff, who runs UAA sister organisation Uyghur Human Rights Project. "The Tibetans are victims and we are victims, too."
In a year of milestones in the mainland - the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, 10 years since repression of the Falun Gong began and the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's exile - few people are aware that it is 60 years since the Communist Party annexed Xinjiang.
Like that of many of the peoples of Central Asia, the Uyghur experience has been shaped by war and conquest. The two brief periods in the 20th century when they weren't under the thumb of the Russians or the Han Chinese - the first East Turkistan Republic lasted nine months in 1933 and the second lasted for five years, between 1944 and 1949 - loom large in the Uyghur consciousness.
In August 1949, after the Communists had all but defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, Mao Zedong planned to meet with seven leaders of the Second East Turkistan Republic and negotiate their role within the country. The plane carrying the seven Uyghurs crashed, an event that wasn't reported until four months later.
"There were rumours about a plot from Beijing; a plot from Moscow," says Gardner Bovingdon, an Indiana University professor and Xinjiang expert. "There is a popular Uyghur notion that the Uyghur were going to negotiate [a self-determining role in China]," Bovingdon continues. "The bodies were never found, the plane itself was never found and there remains a controversy."
"The Soviets and the Chinese [used the plane crash] basically to deceive the Uyghur people," claims Kadeer. "And then they selected a puppet to represent us - that's how we became part of China. They had the Bingtuan, [also known as] the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, strategically located near Uyghur communities to monitor them and suppress them if necessary. We're not able to get out and get our message out."
According to the Han narrative, Xinjiang is traditionally part of China and the meeting was just a formality. The Bingtuan, an economic, semi-military organisation that has built roads and infrastructure, has brought opportunity and desperately needed development to an area that in 1955, like its neighbour Tibet, became an autonomous region.
Common to people who consider themselves stateless, the struggle for self-determination is all-consuming. "We have so many heroes who rose up against Chinese rule," says Kadeer, who was two years old when the plane crashed. "All of them were imprisoned or executed."
Kadeer's father, a respected community leader, battled the Nationalists and her grandfather helped burn down a Manchu dynasty palace.
In her 2007 German-language autobiography, Dragon Fighter, which has recently been translated into English, Kadeer describes a childhood marked by profound fear and dislocation. She was born in Altai prefecture, in the far north of Xinjiang; the borders of Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia form an X across the Altai mountain range. In the village where she was raised, Uyghurs lived in the centre and ethnic Kazakhs in the surrounding mountains.
Han Chinese were an abstraction until she was 13, when the Bingtuan entered her village. They ordered her family to leave, destroyed their house and confiscated her dogs. Her father remained in Altai. Her mother, Kadeer and four siblings drove for weeks to Aksu, near the Kyrgyzstan border.
Two years later, she married Abdirim, a Uyghur 13 years her senior. He was an abusive husband and theirs was a loveless marriage. At 15, she became a mother and she went on to have five more with Abdirim, who was a manager in a state bank.
The hardship of her early years contrasts with Kadeer's later success. As the Asian Wall Street Journal noted in a 1994 profile, it was literally "a rags to riches story". After leaving Abdirim, she used the money she made as a washerwoman to trade in commodities. She eventually made enough to open a shopping mall in downtown Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. By the early 1990s, Kadeer ran an import-export empire that bridged China and Central Asia.
She had remarried, her second husband being a Uyghur professor and government critic named Sidik Rouzi. During the Cultural Revolution, Rouzi served a decade in prison for counter-revolutionary activities. The marriage set up a complicated balancing act for Kadeer; her business success was held up as an example of Uyghur progress in Chinese society but it also afforded her a platform for advocacy.
As a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultive Conference (CPPCC), she travelled to Beijing, where she protested against the mass migration into Xinjiang of Han, sent to fill energy and agriculture jobs. In 1996, the still-outspoken Rouzi fled to Washington. And on February 5, 1997, demonstrations in the city of Gulja (also known as Yining) turned brutal. An Amnesty International report on the incident concluded that "hundreds, possibly thousands, lost their lives or were seriously injured". An estimated 50 Uyghurs, detained in bitterly cold cells, suffered frostbite.
After the Gulja incident, Kadeer publicised the testimony of witnesses of the repression.
"My situation became extremely bad," Kadeer recalls. "Basically, the Chinese authorities severely disrupted my import-export business. My passport and my colleagues' passports were confiscated." She'd also angered the most powerful man in the region, Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan.
By 1998, the government had stripped her of her position in the CPPCC and Wang had began publicly denigrating her.
"Her commercial activities have been very poor over the last few years," Wang told reporters at a Beijing press conference that year. "Her reputation in business circles isn't very good either ... Moreover, her husband, Sidik, has engaged in activities to split the state from outside our borders."
Things soon grew worse. On August 11, 1999, en route to meet a US congressional delegation investigating human rights abuses, Kadeer was arrested. She was convicted of revealing state secrets: mailing widely-available newspaper clippings to Rouzi.
During her six years in prison, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the US State Department made pleas for her release. She was treated better than the other prisoners, she says.
"When I describe the treatment of the Uyghur prisoners, it sounds like an outrageous claim," she says. "I have witnessed the kind of torture you would see during the second world war."
In prison, she writes in Dragon Fighter, her jailers encouraged her Han cellmate, a convicted killer, to drive her crazy.
Kadeer's situation improved when Kamm intervened. The American stepped down as president of AmCham in 1990 and now runs San Francisco-based NGO Dui Hua, which has been instrumental in winning the release or improving the treatment of more than 250 political prisoners in the mainland. Kamm negotiated a sentence reduction for Kadeer. He then secured an early release by convincing the US to drop a United Nations resolution critical of mainland human rights abuses.
"It was more difficult than most transactions I've been involved with," Kamm recalls. "There were several high-ranking Chinese officials who opposed releasing Rebiya Kadeer, including the party secretary in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan."
Kadeer landed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on March 17, 2005. She was greeted by five of her children and Rouzi, who was waving both the US and the East Turkistan flags. Her children had grown up and Rouzi's thick black hair and eyebrows had turned white. For her part, she'd gained international renown - garnering the attention of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and earning Norway's Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize for Human Rights.
The political landscape had changed, too. In the uncertainty following September 11, Beijing conflated all Uyghur independence groups with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which has been inconclusively linked to terrorist group al-Qaeda. Chinese agents were even allowed into Guantanamo to interrogate the Uyghur detainees, who had been captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas.
What is not often mentioned in the media is that for Uyghurs fleeing Xinjiang, the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders are the safest places to exit because their ethnic cousins in the other border states - Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - are dependent on China's voracious energy consumption and have signed up to Beijing's "war on Uyghur terror" through the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.
China's soft power extends even further into the region. Beijing is building a pipeline through Xinjiang to the oil and gas fields of Central Asia and connecting it to the mainland-funded Arabian Sea port in Gwadar, Pakistan.
Observers such as pro-democracy NGO Freedom House believe that nine Uyghur "terrorists" recently captured in Pakistan's tribal areas were extradited to the mainland on April 27 to appease Beijing.
Few countries want to risk arousing the wrath of China. Since the 2006 release of six Uyghur prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Albania, the US has reportedly approached many countries to find sanctuary for the remaining 17. None has dared take them in - not even Albania - although Australia is now considering a request to accept 10, having denied two previous requests.
"My hope is that these Uyghurs - if not all of them, some of them - can be released into the US and the others can be released into European democracies," says Kadeer. "Of course, the ideal situation is for all the Uyghurs to come [to the US]. It would be good for us to assist them." And there is a secondary reason.
"[It] would make illegitimate the Chinese government's use of the terrorist label," she says.
But the mere suggestion of Islamic terror is enough to make even the most sympathetic politician think twice. When reports surfaced early last month that six of the Guantanamo Uyghurs might be released in the US, Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman representing Virginia who Kadeer had counted as an ally a few months earlier and who has supported pro-Uyghur resolutions, grew nervous. Wolf sent Attorney-General Eric Holder a letter protesting any plan to release them in the US. Since most of the Uyghurs in the greater Washington area live in his district, the detainees would probably have ended up on Wolf's doorstep.
"We're feeling betrayed by Congressman Frank Wolf," says Nury Turkel, the Washington-based aviation lawyer who founded UAA. "It's unclear why he is turning his back on us now. Congressman Wolf should know that these men are victims of communism and prisoners of politics. They harbour no ill-intent or hostility towards America."
In large Xinjiang cities, such as Kashgar and Urumqi, people have learned to be cautious.
"If you are a Uyghur there are rules about congregating," says Nick Zaller, an American epidemiologist who worked on Xinjiang's HIV problem in an Urumqi clinic between 2002 and 2004. "No more than three people can congregate.
"I never directly had any conversations about [Kadeer]," he says. "People are careful about what they say. A lot of times they will [only] talk in general. In my experience, a lot of people are not talking overtly about this."
Seytoff - a former divorce lawyer who came to America as a student in 1996, became politically active in Uyghur causes and can't return to his homeland - is less delicate when describing the situation in Xinjiang. "You can imagine the Jews in Germany before the second world war, how terrified they were," he says. "The only difference is the Chinese government has not required Uyghurs to wear a Star of David because Uyghurs don't look like Han Chinese."
In the run up to the Beijing Olympics, tensions in Xinjiang again boiled over. As many as 33 people are believed to have been killed in uprisings and attacks, which Beijing blamed on the ETIM. (With the mainland's media restrictions, accurate numbers and reports are hard to obtain.) Once the attention died down, Beijing launched a vicious crackdown during the religious month of Ramadan that banned fasting, beards and veils, according to the US State Department.
She may have escaped to America but the long arm of the Chinese state still reaches Kadeer. Despite a US House of Representatives non-binding resolution passed last September urging their release, two of her sons are in mainland prisons: Ablikim Abdiriyim is serving a nine-year sentence for secessionism; Alim Abdiriyim a seven-year sentence for tax evasion. Two daughters are trapped under virtual house arrest in Xinjiang.
Amnesty International believes the mainland government is harassing and jailing her family to silence her. Kadeer says even her grandchildren have been targeted and forced out of school. She says a working group has been created to dismantle the business empire she built and allegations of tax evasion and financial irregularities have been made. Little is left. But Kadeer has no plans to hold her tongue.
"I believe I should continue what I'm doing because the world should know our situation," she says.
"Somebody has to speak up on behalf of the Uyghur people.
"[The Han Chinese in Xinjiang] enjoy a great life; we enjoy hell," she says, showing a rare flash of anger.
Down the hall from the conference room where she receives guests, inside her small office, there is a decade-old picture of Kadeer. She wears a flowing, lacy white dress. A white headscarf covers half her head. She is perfectly made up, has smooth skin and immaculate jet-black hair that is swept up into a peak. Her dark eyes burn with intensity.
Rebiya Kadeer looks very different today. Her hair is flecked with strands of grey; her face seems permanently creased with worry. When asked whether she regrets trading luxury for struggle, she doesn't hesitate.
"Not very much. I am doing what I want to do so I consider that big wealth. For me, freedom is a very important thing. I don't want to compare my life then with my life now."
On the wall beside her, the goal and the cost are on view. There is a bright blue East Turkistan flag on one side of the room while the other side features pictures of two handsome Uyghur men: her imprisoned sons.
