World won't rally to help lost cause of Uyghurs

World won't rally to help lost cause of Uyghurs
Posted By PETER WORTHINTON, SUN MEDIA
Posted 13 hours ago


Until a naturalized Canadian, Huseyin Celil, was "kidnapped" while visiting his family in Uzbekistan in 2006 and turned over to the Chinese, most Canadians hadn't a clue what a "Uyghur" was.

We learned a bit more when it was revealed 22 Uyghurs were being held by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay, rounded up with Taliban and al-Qaida "illegal combatants" in Afghanistan.

Some of the Uyghurs were turned over by bounty hunters --even though none fit the definition of "terrorist," none were anti-American or anti- West.

Just the opposite, in fact.

Confused about what to do with them, in 2006 the Americans flew five Guantanamo Uyghurs to Albania(!) and released them. Why Albania? Well, returning them to China would be a death warrant.

Last month, four more Uyghurs were freed in

Bermuda, where they seem to be thriving. The remainder are to be freed whenever a country (other than China) offers to take them in.

Uyghurs hit the front pages last week, when reports and photos came out of China of 156 killed and more than a thousand injured in riots in northwestern China. Riot police and paramilitary forces have restored calm, but now ethnic Chinese are apparently wreaking havoc against Uyghurs, who resent Beijing's policy of moving Chinese into dissident ethnic areas -- witness the influx of Chinese to dominate Tibet.

Most Uyghurs live in the remote Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which used to be Easter Turkistan, bordering Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Tibet.

Ever since 9/11, the Beijing regime has categorized Uyghurs as "terrorists," which is how they classify Tibetans who resist cultural genocide and ethnic oppression.

Initially the Americans and others were sympathetic to Beijing's spin that Uyghurs were another faction of militant Muslim terrorism. Wrong, and grossly unfair -- but for a time it may have influenced Canada's hands-off attitude towards Celil.

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When Celil was grabbed by the Uzbeks, Canada raised not a murmur so he was extradited to China, from which he'd escaped. In 2006 he was charged with terrorism and sentenced to 15 years at a secret trial.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has since protested to the Chinese, but to little avail. Our government now concurs that Celil is another victim of Beijing's xenophobic paranoia.

As for the Uyghurs, they are light-skinned Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia, dominated by China. Once Buddhist- oriented, they switched to Islam, but with a pro-western flavour.

Their militancy, such as it is, seems to focus on being treated equally and fairly. As far as outsiders can tell, it's not special treatment they want, but equal treatment.

There's a hunger for independence, which some feel could be satisfied if China were not so intent on forcibly blending everyone. The riots in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi --about as far west of Beijing as Vancouver is from Toronto --hinge on a couple of Uyghur workers being killed in a brawl at a toy factory in southern China, 2,000 kilometres away. For their part, the Chinese claim Uyghurs raped a couple of Chinese co-workers.

In any event, many have died violently. Were it not for the Internet, the outside world would know nothing of these "peaceful" demonstrations turning ugly and bloody -- all in the name of "freedom."

The Uyghurs held at Guantanamo Bay were supposedly being trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan -- not to fight Americans, or to be suicide bombers, but to learn how to resist continuing Chinese oppression in Xinjiang province (which translates as "New Frontier").

It's another lost cause that captures the outside world's attention for a few headlines, and then will disappear until the next time.