Uyghur Blog

UIGHUR WRITERS SILENCED

2010-08-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

China's Uighur Oppression Continues
Beijing hands down a 15-year sentence for speaking to foreign journalists.

By REBIYA KADEER

The sentencing on July 23 of Uighur journalist Gheyret Niyaz to 15 years in prison for endangering state security came as a shock to people around the world. Mr. Niyaz's "crime" was to speak to foreign journalists. His unusually long sentence, along with other harsh sentences for three Uighur webmasters on July 23 or 24, highlights the Chinese government's practice of giving lip service to ethnic harmony while implementing policies that undermine it.

Attacks on Uighur writers, journalists and webmasters are nothing new. Far too many are languishing in jails for revealing the darker side of the Communist Party administration in East Turkestan, also known as Xinjiang. They include Mehbube Ablesh, a journalist who uncovered the inequities of "bilingual" education; Abdulghani Memetemin, a journalist who exposed human-rights abuses against Uighurs; Nurmemet Yasin, a writer who penned an allegorical story articulating the Uighur yearning for freedom; Gulmire Imin, a website administrator who helped run a online forum for Uighurs; and many more.

The four journalists sentenced last month—Mr. Niyaz, Nureli, Dilshat Perhat and Nijat Azat—were imprisoned simply for exercising freedom of speech. The Chinese government hides behind charges of "endangering state security," "splittism" or "terrorism" when punishing Uighur voices, but the simple truth is that whenever Uighurs contradict the official narrative of the benevolence of the Chinese Communist Party, they are severely punished.

View Full Image

Getty Images
A Muslim Uighur woman begs as armed Chinese paramilitary policemen march past on a street in Urumqi on July 5, 2010.

In Mr. Niyaz's case, even expressing views consistent with those of the Chinese government was not enough to keep him out of jail. In an interview with a local Chinese publication on Aug. 2, 2009, less than a month after the outbreak of unrest in Urumqi, Mr. Niyaz not only openly sided with much of the Chinese government version of the unrest, but also dismissed my contribution to the Uighur people. I welcome Mr. Niyaz's considered critique and resolutely defend his right to speak openly and freely. Without the expression of dissimilar voices there is little validity to any political process.

Most of what the Chinese government actually does in East Turkestan is not discussed in public. The unrest in Urumqi in July 2009 should have been a wakeup call for the Chinese Communist Party to end six decades of repressive policies. Instead, the government has used the unrest as an opportunity to intensify its forced assimilation of the Uighur people.

The most recent assault on civil liberties came when authorities installed 40,000 cameras in Urumqi to surveil the local population. In February, the draconian "Law on Education for Ethnic Unity in Xinjiang," took effect, which criminalizes speech harmful to a vague definition of "ethnic unity." The government also announced this year the demolition of Uighur neighborhoods in cities across East Turkestan, including Kashgar, Urumqi, Karamay and Ghulja.

On top of all of this, Beijing is encouraging large numbers of Han Chinese to migrate to East Turkestan—a policy that aims to make Uighur identity a thing of the past and adds to local tensions as citizens compete for economic and social resources. The government is not forthcoming about the extent of this migration, nor does it disclose civil-service hiring policies that actively discriminate against Uighurs and women.

With Han Chinese favored in the competitive job market, mass migration into the region only fuels resentment. The result of this aggressive assimilation has been exacerbated tensions between Han Chinese and Uighurs.

China's policies toward its ethnic minorities are clearly failing to resolve local tensions. In East Turkestan, the Chinese government has not only ignored the voices of the Uighur people crying out for change, it has also actively moved to silence them. Unless international pressure is brought to bear, the Uighur people will quietly slip into the history books.

Ms. Kadeer is the president of the World Uighur Congress and the Uighur American Association.

Internet Restored, But the Evils of Han Chauvinism, Party-State Despotism and Bankrupt Communism Remain

2010-05-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

Rebiya KadeerPresident, World Uyghur Congress
Posted: May 19, 2010 01:29 PM

Internet Restored, But the Evils of Han Chauvinism, Party-State Despotism and Bankrupt Communism Remain

On May 14, residents of East Turkestan rediscovered the Internet -- not the Internet of unfettered access that is enjoyed the world over, but a lifting of the most draconian Internet restrictions ever seen so that people could finally access China's censored version. For 10 months, starting from the July 2009 unrest in Urumchi, the Chinese government kept the people of East Turkestan isolated from the rest of the world with a comprehensive communications lockdown that not only blocked the Internet, but also affected telecommunications. During those 10 months, a great deal of information about the events of July 2009 were never allowed to surface and the world was left with a Chinese government account that in no way can be considered impartial.

The communications lockdown was an illustration of the chilling ideology of power that guides the decisions of power brokers in the Chinese Communist Party. In those 10 months, the Chinese government conducted a brutal crackdown on Uyghurs largely unseen by the outside world. The "stable conditions" required to restore the Internet were established through indiscriminate detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, sham trials and swift executions of Uyghurs. Human Rights Watch described the 43 enforced disappearances it recorded in a report, We Are Afraid to Even Look for Them, as the tip of the iceberg. In addition, the reports that managed to leak out of torture and death in custody of Uyghurs, such as that of Shohret Tursun, only hint at the depth of repression that happened during those 10 months.

Now the Chinese government is attempting to show a benevolent face with announcements of large-scale investment, comprehensive work forums, the removal of reviled officials, such as Wang Lequan, and most recently the restoration of the Internet. This benevolence must be taken with a degree of skepticism not only because the decisions are not being made for the welfare of the Uyghur people, but also because they show a lack of original thinking among Chinese officials.

Since 2000, large injections of capital into East Turkestan through the central government's Western Development initiative merely exaggerated the economic inequality between Uyghurs and Han Chinese rather than benefit impoverished Uyghurs. Future investment, as far as it can be gleaned, will come once more in the form of more money for mineral extraction that does not aim to employ the local Uyghur workforce or engage Uyghur businesses.

The appointment of Zhang Chunxian as Party Secretary has been interpreted as a break from the hard-line policies of former Party chief, Wang Lequan; however, in recent comments it appears that Zhang will bring nothing to the table but the same tired rhetoric on smashing the three evils of separatism, extremism and terrorism. What true introspection on the performance of the Chinese Communist Party in East Turkestan reveals is that the real three evils in the region are Han chauvinism, party-state despotism and bankrupt communism.

Old ideas of the Chinese communists towards East Turkestan have merely been repackaged and recycled and do not address the economic and political tensions that underpinned the unrest in Urumchi. There is much work to do and many grievances to address. I am willing to help the Chinese government resolve them.

A genuine new approach to resolving the numerous economic, social and political issues in East Turkestan involves meaningful dialogue and consultation with the Uyghur people. This means all Uyghurs- in exile and in East Turkestan, and conducted in an open atmosphere of equality without the fear of imprisonment for merely expressing a view. I doubt if the upcoming work form will be held under such conditions.

I believe the Chinese government should end its aggressive policy of monolingual education, and give students and their parents a choice about their language of instruction. Chinese government policies ensuring equal employment opportunities for Uyghurs should be put in place, in which employment inside of East Turkestan is available to Uyghurs, instead of just sending them outside of East Turkestan to work. All Uyghurs should be allowed to attend the mosque without fear of suspicion and imams should be allowed to speak freely. The Chinese government should stop imprisoning peaceful dissenters and make them partners in a robust dialogue on the development of the region. Uyghurs will welcome these policies, and they will help to reduce tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese.

If the Chinese government wants to make an immediate impact and demonstrate a sincere change in approach to build trust among the Uyghur people, it could do no better than to release all those Uyghur bloggers and web administrators it detained in the wake of the unrest. This includes Memet Turghun Abdulla, a photographer who published an article online about an attack on Uyghur factory workers believed to have sparked the July 2009 unrest; Gheyret Niyaz, a journalist who was detained after talking to foreign media about the unrest; Dilshat Parhat, who co-founded the Uyghur-run website Diyarim; Obulkasim, an employee of Diyarim; Nureli, who founded the Uyghur website Selkin; and website supervisor Muhemmet. All of these individuals have disappeared into the murky depths of the Chinese criminal justice system. No one knows where they are being held or of their current condition.

The Internet is admired as a tool for freedom of speech and citizen participation the world over -- in China, and particularly in East Turkestan, it is used to root out critics of government policies. Uyghur participation and freedom of speech are fundamental overarching conditions in achieving a resolution to the East Turkestan issue. Without it the cycle of old policies of repression repackaged as new policies of repression will continue unabated.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebiya-kadeer/internet-restored-but-the_b_581992.html

U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue: America Must Lead by Example

2010-05-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue: America Must Lead by Example
Published on May 24, 2010 by Derek Scissors, Ph.D.
On May 24, the United States and People’s Republic of China will start the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) in Beijing. In the economic track, the U.S. Department of the Treasury indicates that the American side will focus primarily on three areas, probably in this order of priority:
President Obama’s goal of doubling U.S. exports and the role of the RMB’s value against the dollar;
Policies that harm foreign business in China, now described as “indigenous innovation”; and
Greater balance in the bilateral economic relationship and the global economy.
The S&ED will make little progress on these issues and less still to bring China into the international economic order. Instead, the U.S. is heading in China’s policy direction.
The S&ED’s Limitations
The S&ED serves as a useful way for America and China to exchange information, which helps avoid economic disputes before they materialize. But it has produced modest cooperation even where the two sides have shared interests, such as energy. It has not, and will not, address severe problems in the American, Chinese, or world economies.
At first glance, it appears an RMB appreciation against the dollar would support the President’s goal of doubling exports. An appreciation, though, will have little effect. The connection between the RMB and the bilateral trade imbalance is uncertain at best, and the coming shift in Chinese currency policy will again be very tentative, not enough to affect much of anything.[1]
Worse, the drive to double exports clashes with what should be the American goal for the RMB. The Obama Administration seeks to promote exports largely through government support, while the U.S. should be pressing China for less government control of its exchange rate. This is only one example of America warping its own policy due in part to its relationship with the PRC.
There are also reasons to expect that nothing material will come from discussing “indigenous innovation.” Putting aside the overly broad use of the term, indigenous innovation is part of a concerted effort by the central government to promote state enterprises. Recently discovered by the press, the effort is at least seven years old.[2] It is part of a much broader and well-established mercantilist Chinese approach to commerce. Modifications of a few recent regulations will do nothing to alter China’s course.
The U.S. continues to shy from an even more important issue: global rebalancing. Washington is right to exhort Beijing to move toward an economy led by consumption, not investment. However, discussing the issue yet further will accomplish nothing new—the State Council itself endorsed rebalancing in 2004, but the gap between investment and consumption then widened dramatically.[3] The change China must ultimately make will be painful, hardly one to be accomplished by another year of chatter.

Nonetheless, the U.S. can contribute to this change and help its own economy immensely at the same time by going forward instead of backward with American rebalancing. Rather than talking, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress can take the biggest single action to actually rebalance by quickly slashing the gigantic federal budget deficit.
Who’s Changing Whom?
Part of the original reason for the S&ED and other bilateral dialogues was to encourage Chinese economic and security policies to fit better with American ones. It appears, though, the U.S. is becoming more like the PRC instead of the reverse.
That the U.S. could help transform China gained credence during the first Clinton Administration. It was argued that there was political value in economic engagement: engagement and resultant prosperity would facilitate greater freedom in the PRC. The process, however, has yet to begin. Despite greater economic opportunities for most Chinese citizens, the grip of the Communist Party has not loosened. To be fair, realistic advocates of engagement acknowledged that the process would take time; 15 years may not be enough to alter the way 1.3 billion Chinese live.
Apparently, however, 15 years is enough to alter the way 300 million Americans live. The U.S. seems to be the country that is changing—following the Chinese example in extending the reach of government.
This transformation starts with ever-expanding federal spending assisted by Chinese financing. President Clinton’s engagement policy was laid out in May 1994. That year the deficit was 2.9 percent of GDP and falling toward zero; this year it will be 10.6 percent of GDP. In the interim, Chinese holdings of American bonds soared from barely $100 billion in March 2000 to more than $1.5 trillion now.[4]
More and more economic resources are controlled by Washington, with federal spending surpassing 25 percent of GDP, the highest since World War II. That level is projected to skyrocket due to the impending tsunami of entitlement spending.[5] Unsatisfied with a federal budget near its historical levels of 20 percent of GDP, the President and Congress continue to seek foreign money, especially from the PRC. Rather than encouraging Chinese society to change for the better, the economic interaction has given rein to the U.S. to change for the worse.
Part of the federal expansion is the demand that someone else’s money must fund another new program. This old game has a new flavor: taxpayers should fork over more so America can keep pace with China. Billions should be spent on wind turbines that generate relatively little energy, because China is doing the same. Massive high speed rail lines that few will use must be built, because China is doing so.[6]
The PRC is not making these comparisons—they are made in the U.S. by those seeking a share of the flood of government spending. And they are almost always deeply flawed.
Thankfully, many secrets of China’s success are not transportable, such as the ability to forcibly clear people from land desired by the state. There are largely unnoticed fault lines in the Chinese model, such as children of Party members making up 90 percent of the wealthiest Chinese, though Party membership is less than 5 percent of the population.[7] There is no dictatorial Party to enrich in the U.S., but the hungry acquisition of resources by the federal government is a long step in the wrong direction.
Recommendations: Start Here
The PRC is not moving toward more political freedom. Instead, many American politicians have taken engagement with China as a prod to move this country toward less economic freedom. Prior to discussions with China, America should reverse economic course.
Starting with the FY 2011 budget, the Administration and Congress should cut federal spending more decisively than implied by the targeted 3 percent of GDP by FY 2015. Even more pressing, they should wrench the major entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—back to a sustainable course.
As a byproduct of fixing its own house, America’s relationship with China can be much more effectively addressed. By recommitting to the market, the U.S. can more credibly press the PRC on statist policies that harm American companies and the world economy.
The dialogue aspect of the S&ED should give way in part to focused negotiations on one or two economic issues (only) for each round. The exchange rate has proven a minor factor and should not be the focus. Instead, the spotlight should be on the full set of policies, not just indigenous innovation, that support Chinese state enterprises at everyone else’s expense.
Derek Scissors, Ph.D., is Research Fellow in Asia Economic Policy in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

US ASEAN ambassador ends Cambodia trip, slams Uighur expulsions

2010-02-09T10:39:00.000-08:00

9/02/2010
Asia-Pacific News

Phnom Penh – A senior US envoy to South-East Asia wrapped up a brief visit to Cambodia Tuesday saying he had reiterated to Phnom Penh that Washington remained ‘very disappointed’ with its December expulsion of 20 Uighur asylum-seekers to China.

The US still had no news on the fate of the Uighurs, said Scot Marciel, the US ambassador for ASEAN Affairs, in charge of relations with the 10 members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations.

‘We’ve made it clear a number of times both publicly and privately how concerned and disappointed we were by Cambodia’s decision,’ he said.

‘We had urged the Cambodian government before they deported the people not to go that route because they had not gone through the [UN refugee agency] process to determine whether they had a legitimate claim to asylum.’

Marciel, who is on a five-nation visit as part of US President Barack Obama’s strategy of greater engagement with the region, said he hoped the Cambodian government would resume its previously held ‘more positive’ approach to refugee issues.

Referring to China’s involvement in Cambodia – it is the country’s largest investor and had demanded the return of the Uighur refugees – Marciel said the US did not see the process of increasing Chinese influence in the region as ‘a zero-sum game.’

‘We would like to see South-East Asia achieve the goals that it has set for itself and the ASEAN movement, which is more integration, political stability, progress towards increased democracy and human rights, and certainly economic prosperity,’ Marciel said. ‘So we’ll continue to support those.’

Referring to the ongoing tensions between Cambodia and Thailand, Marciel said the US – which he described as ‘good friends’ with both nations – remained concerned and hoped both countries’ leaders would work to reduce tensions and find a solution.

During his visit Marciel also met with representatives from Cambodia’s political opposition and with members of civil society.

His Cambodia trip follows a visit to Vietnam and Laos. He is scheduled to head to Thailand later Tuesday before flying to Indonesia to work on President Obama’s visit to that country in March.

http://culture.obtain.ws/us-asean-ambassador-ends-cambodia-trip-slams-uighur-expulsions.html

Uyghurs Could Get Asylum

2009-12-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

Uyghurs Could Get Asylum
Author: Jew Mark | Posted at: 19:33 | Filed Under: Government, Politic |
Cambodian authorities say they won't repatriate a group of asylum-seekers if they could be mistreated.

AFP
A Uyghur man walks past armed Chinese security forces in Urumqi, July 17, 2009.
PHNOM PENH—Cambodia may not repatriate a group of asylum-seekers if they are to face capital punishment or torture back in China, a Cambodian spokesman said.
Khieu Kanharith, government spokesman and minister of information, said in an interview that the fate of the 22 ethnic Uyghurs hinges on whether and how the Chinese government intends to punish them in connction with deadly ethnic riots in July.
“There are several issues [to consider],” Khieu Kanharith said.
“For a criminal issue we would send them back. But for a political issue we would consider differently,” he said. “For a criminal issue, if it is serious to the point that they would have to be executed, we might not send them back because we don’t have capital punishment [in Cambodia],” he said.
The minister said that no decision had been made because the Cambodian government has yet to be contacted by the Chinese Embassy.
Smuggled into Cambodia
Twenty-two Uyghurs—a predominantly Muslim minority concentrated in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)—have sought protection from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, according to Uyghur sources in Asia, who asked not be to named.
The Uyghurs are currently in the care of international Catholic organization the Jesuit Refugee Service, which declined to comment on the status of the group.
They fear being returned to China, which has close ties with Cambodia, Uyghur sources said.
This group, which includes two young children, was smuggled across the border from Vietnam into Cambodia, they said.
Only four members of the asylum-seekers agreed to be named.
They are Mutellip Mamut, who was born on July 10, 1980, Islam Urayim, born July 16, 1980, Hazirti ali Umar, born June 7, 1990, and Aikebaierjiang Tuniyazi, born Feb. 13, 1982.
Seeking asylum
The UNHCR has no offices in Vietnam, so anyone seeking asylum as a refugee must find a way into Cambodia, where it does operate.
UNHCR and Cambodian officials in Phnom Penh declined to comment on the case, although it has been learned that the UNHCR has met with the Uyghurs several times in small groups.
Repeated calls to the U.S. Embassy during working hours went unanswered.
According to a statement by the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer and the organization’s general secretary Dolkun Isa are to meet officials at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva to discuss the Uyghur case in Cambodia.
Beijing accuses Kadeer of fomenting the July 5 violence in the XUAR capital, Urumqi, which was sparked after a peaceful protest about the deaths of Uyghur migrants in a factory in southern China turned into clashes with police.
Kadeer has accused the authorities of firing on unarmed protesters in Urumqi, sparking days of retaliatory rioting, burning, and mob violence from both Uyghur and Han Chinese ethnic groups in the city.
Uyghur detentions
Clashes first erupted between Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs on July 5, and at least 200 people were killed, by the government’s tally.
According to Uyghur sources in Asia, China has tightened its southeastern border after several groups of Uyghurs managed to bribe their way into Vietnam and then Cambodia to avoid possible detention for allegedly taking part in July 5 ethnic riots.
The sources said Chinese authorities have detained 31 Uyghurs since Sept. 15 in the southern cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou and in the central city of Kunming, either for trying to flee the country or for allegedly aiding others in fleeing China.
A Chinese court sentenced three Uyghurs to death Friday for their alleged involvement during the rioting, bringing the number of death sentences in connection with the incident to 17.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said it has documented the disappearances of 43 men and boys in the Xinjiang region, but that the actual number of disappearances is likely far higher.
Police have meanwhile detained more than 700 people in connection with the unrest, according to earlier state news reports.
Uyghurs, a distinct and mostly Muslim ethnic group, have long complained of religious, political, and cultural oppression by Chinese authorities, and tensions have simmered in the Xinjiang region for years.
Original reporting by Chea Sotheacheat, Vuthy Huot and Chung Ravuth for RFA’s Khmer service. Khmer service director: Sos Kem. Translated by Sos Kem. Additional reporting by RFA's Uyghur service. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

by http://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambodia/faceexecution-12042009171220.html

Mississauga youth host families in transition

2009-12-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Mississauga youth host families in transition
Friday, 04 December 2009
Written by Natasha Milavec, Youth Speak News,
Views : 23

Alimu and Aliya Abulimiti, a Uyghur couple currently residing in the transitional housing program at Sojourn House, pose during the performance of their wedding dance, which is a part of Uyghur culture. (Photo by Natashya Caleon)
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - When asked about the conflicts she faced in her home country of Nigeria, J.P., who did not wish to disclose her full name, was shaken up in discussing an unjust past she has worked hard to put behind her. Hers is a story of courage and determination shared by 135 refugees who attended the seventh annual Family Faith Night dinner and talent show at St. Marcellinus Catholic Secondary School Nov. 26.

J.P. came to Canada in 2001, a process that was far from easy. Along with her two sons, Kenny, seven, and Alex, 12, J.P. found support and comfort in Sojourn House, a “short-term shelter for refugees who have no option to stay somewhere decent, and a transitional house that provides a longer-time stay for refugees who have experienced trauma,” said Everton Gordon, the shelter manager.

J.P. is very grateful for the shelter.

“I feel safe,” she said. “They helped me a lot. I am so happy there. I have two boys; they are happy in Sojourn House.”

Nashwa Tawfiq, a Sojourn House staff member, said there are “a whole wide variety of people at Sojourn House who come for a wide range of reasons; political, religious, domestic violence or sexual orientation,” to name a few. “Everybody is grateful and appreciative of the time, effort, and generosity that go into planning this event and putting it together,” Tawfiq said. “It is a good way to celebrate the season and has become a tradition.”

The talent show included a blend of student and guest performances. A crowd favourite was Alimu and Aliya Abulimiti, a Uyghur couple who performed their wedding dance and a cultural belly dance. The couple is from an area in East Turkestan, but are currently residents of the transitional housing program at Sojourn House.

After the show, a dinner of chicken, rice, vegetables and salad was served, prepared by the school’s hospitality class and teacher Michael Begin.

Student volunteers at the event are members of the chaplaincy team at St. Marcellinus and were seated among the refugees, listening to their stories. Grade 10 student Huda Hajjaj, who moved recently from Kuwait but is originally from Palestine, said she volunteered to “get to know people from different places.” Monika Sidhu, also a Grade 10 student, volunteered at the event in order to “help out your community,” she said.

S.C., who also does not wish to disclose his full name, sat beside Hajjaj and shared his story. He has been in Canada for one-and- a-half years and left Pakistan because of “religious problems,” he said. His journey to Canada was difficult. “Adjustment is hard,” said S.C., who misses Pakistan.

“The night gives refugees a glimpse of beautiful people and Christ-like love in their lives that they have not experienced in a long time. Catholic schools can teach the Gospel in their classrooms but events like these show how the Gospel should be taught, by action,” said Shane Byrne, chaplain at St. Marcellinus.

Family Faith Night was an immersion of people once separated by borders, geographical, political and spiritual. The Christ-like love shared between guests and students was a testament to family and faith.

(Milavec, 16, is a Grade 11 student at Father John Redmond Catholic Secondary School.)

http://www.catholicregister.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3664&Itemid=857

Tories declare diplomatic victory despite China's rebuke

2009-12-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

Tories declare diplomatic victory despite China's rebuke

Government says tourism deal will pave the way for a big increase in Chinese visitors to Canada. Though Harper didn't garner a major breakthrough, his visit raises hope that the relationship can be mended
Share with friends

Campbell Clark
Ottawa — From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published on Thursday, Dec. 03, 2009 9:31PM EST
Last updated on Friday, Dec. 04, 2009 8:31AM EST
The federal Tories insisted Thursday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper scored a diplomatic victory in his first visit to China, despite an embarrassing exchange in which China's Premier rebuked him for neglecting relations between the two countries.

Mr. Harper walked away from the meeting with several small agreements and one sought-after prize: Canada's long-standing request to be granted approved destination status, a designation that will pave the way for a projected 50-per-cent increase in Chinese tourism here by 2015. But before China granted this status, its Premier, Wen Jiabao, admonished Mr. Harper for taking so long to visit, noting that a Canadian leader hadn't made a trip to China in five years.

“Five years is too long a time for China-Canada relations and that's why there are comments in the media that your visit is one that should have taken place earlier,” Mr. Wen said.

In Mr. Harper's first few years in power, the Chinese were annoyed by his complaints about the secret trial of Uyghur-Canadian dissident Huseyin Celil; his assertion that he would not sell out human rights to the “almighty dollar”; and especially the reception of the Dalai Lama.

Diplomats in the Foreign Affairs Department who pushed for a friendlier tone were mistrusted, but Mr. Harper also faced internal pressure to make a visit from former trade minister David Emerson, former public works and trade minister Michael Fortier, and his former top civil servant, clerk of the Privy Council Kevin Lynch.

“I've been pushing for it endlessly and with great frustration, but now it's there,” Mr. Emerson said Thursday. “He has been afforded the opportunity to start to engage, and I think a symbolic and substantive signal is that we're getting approved destination status. I think that's a huge signal that the relationship is going to be re-energized.”

Over the past year, Mr. Harper has dramatically changed approach: He avoided criticism of China, his Foreign Minister said Beijing had progressed on human rights, and a long list of ministers visited to thaw ties.

Listen to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's statement
Download (.mp3)
The approved destination status allows Canada to market tourism in China, and for Canadian tour operators to do business there, opening the door for the projected increase in Chinese tourism here. It is not the billion-dollar deals the Chinese have signed with other leaders, but still resolves what Gordon Houlden, director of the University of Alberta's China Institute, said was a persistently knotty problem when he served as a diplomat in Beijing from 2001 to 2004.

Mr. Martin's Liberal government struck an agreement in principle to get the status, but didn't complete the details before losing power.

“I think Canada is the last nation in the whole globe to get this. There's no other country left,” remarked Tommy Yuan, president of the Canada-Asia Business Network.

While opposition politicians contended that the awkward rebuke to Mr. Harper showed that relations remain frosty because of him, Conservatives dismissed the public friction as meaningless when weighed against the tourism agreement.

“The reality is that our government has managed to achieve what previous Liberal governments couldn't and I don't know how many visits there were between prime ministers Chrétien and Martin,” said Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

John Ibbitson on the Chinese Premier's rebukeThe Globe's Ottawa Bureau Chief on the public scolding of Canada's Prime Minister
Download (.mp3)
Veteran China watchers, however, landed somewhere in the middle. They said Mr. Harper has not made a massive breakthrough, but also played down fears that the Sino-Canadian relationship is irreparably damaged.

The net message, said Peter Harder, president of the Canada China Business Council and former deputy minister of foreign affairs, is straightforward: “You have to work at this relationship.”

In Vancouver, political commentator Gabriel Yiu pointed out that there is a contingent of Canada's Chinese-language media on the trip, and said the Chinese rebuke to Mr. Harper is unlikely to hurt the Conservatives' effort to make electoral inroads into the traditionally Liberal Chinese-Canadian community.

“Every day, he's getting two to three pages of coverage in those papers. Yes, there might be a slight negative impact [from Mr. Wen's criticism], but compared to the big wave of coverage in the Chinese-language media, I think the spin will be praise for this historic trip.”

With reports from Jane Taber in Ottawa and Rod Mickleburgh in Vancouver

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-declare-diplomatic-victory-despite-chinas-rebuke/article1388003/

PM doesn't shy away from human rights in China

2009-12-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

PM doesn't shy away from human rights in China

CTV News Video
CTV News: Robert Fife in Shanghai

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's speech to Chinese business leaders in Shanghai focused mainly on promoting investment in Canada's energy industries. The speech also touched on China's human rights issues.
Power Play: Warren Kinsella and Tim Powers

A Liberal strategist says Harper's trip to China is not going very well because Canada has had China in the 'deep freeze' over the last four years, while a Conservative strategist says Harper has not shied away from human rights talks.
Canada AM: Elliot Tepper, Carleton University
A politics professor explains why with diplomatic scolding behind them, China's leaders are sending signals it now considers perceived slights by Canada a thing of the past with the hope the two countries can re-establish mutual trust.
Power Play: PM scolded by Chinese officials
Former Conservative foreign affairs minister David Emerson and former Canadian ambassador to the EU Jeremy Kinsman discuss the importance of Canadian-Chinese relations.
Power Play: MPs discuss Harper's visit
NDP MP Paul Dewar, Conservative MP Diane Ablonczy and Liberal MP Scott Brison talk about whether or not Prime Minister Stephen Harper's trip to China has been a success so far.
CTV News Channel: Paul Evans, University of B.C.
The director of UBC's Institute of Asian Research explains why the chiding of Prime Minister Stephen Harper by Chinese officials was to be expected.
CTV News Channel: Pierre Pettigrew
A former foreign affairs minister reacts to Harper being publically shamed for waiting too long to make his high-profile trip to China.
Watch: See all Videos in the Player

Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes a speech at the Canada-China Business Council and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, China on Friday, December 4, 2009. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)
View Larger Image

More on this topic
In Pictures: Harper in China
CTV.ca News Staff
Date: Fri. Dec. 4 2009 7:11 PM ET
Prime Minister Stephen Harper received silence from Chinese business leaders when he told them Canada would continue to bring up human rights issues and not stay quiet in exchange for stronger economic ties between the two countries.

"In relations between China and Canada, we will continue to raise issues of freedom and human rights," he in a speech in Shanghai Friday.

"Our government believes and has always believed that a mutually-beneficial economic relationship is not incompatible with a good and frank dialogue on fundamental values like freedom, human rights and the rule of law," Harper said.

This part of the speech, part of Harper's first-ever visit to China, was greeted with silence from the businessmen, who had applauded his earlier focus on trade progress and an announcement Canada would open up four new trade consulates.

Former Conservative MP John Reynolds, now a businessman who spends three months a year in China, told The Canadian Press that the Chinese would not be put off by the comments.

"They understand Canada is a friend, they understand we have resources they need and that we can do business both ways," he said.

"Every country says that (about human rights). Fact is, trade has not suffered and this visit will be like a rocket shot to everybody."

NDP leader Jack Layton said Harper should not lecture China on its human rights record, considering the questions raised over whether Canada transferred prisoners to Afghan authorities where they were tortured.

"I think you always have to be careful when you live in a glass house when it comes to throwing stones," Layton told reporters in Winnipeg Friday.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Harper should have visited China earlier, saying the prime minister has a lot of "repair work" to do on Canada's relationship with China.

"We've all had a wake up call in Canada about how important China is and Mr. Harper has taken a very long time to wake up," Ignatieff said.

In the rest of his speech, Harper said Canada and China both have much to gain from a stronger economic partnership, especially in the energy business.

He told the business leaders that Canada is rich in oil, natural gas and uranium that China can use to fuel its own economic growth.

He also said Canadian businesses can help China shift toward green energy.

He told the leaders that investing in Canada is good business, because of falling taxes and low government debt.

Earlier in the day, Harper met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday and trumpeted several diplomatic victories, despite a couple of awkward moments.

Harper, who is travelling with his with Laureen, was scolded by Wen for the fact that five years have passed since a Canadian prime minister has visited China.

Wen later gave Chinese media and a TV station interviews where he blamed the Harper government for the damaged relations.

"We are reluctant to see Canada alienate us in recent years," Wen was quoted as saying by the official China Daily. "That has hampered our trade and personal exchanges."

"I hope the visit can solve the problem of mutual trust."

In return, Harper noted that no Chinese leader had visited Canada over the same period of time.

Despite Wen's upbraiding, Harper managed to achieve Canada's longstanding desire for approved destination status from Beijing -- a shift that is expected to substantially boost Chinese tourism to Canada. He also achieved several other small victories, such as the lifting of the Chinese ban on Canadian pork products.

Canada-China relations have been tense in recent years. Beijing has also been frustrated by Ottawa's complaints about the treatment of Uygher-Canadian dissident Huseyin Celil.

Official newspapers say Harper slighted the Chinese government by refusing to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in addition to embracing the Dalai Lama's criticism of the treatment of people in Tibet.

The China Daily did acknowledge that Harper was making headway in trying to "warm up cool to icy ties."

China's show of pique

2009-12-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

China's show of pique

Published On Fri Dec 04 2009

If Prime Minister Stephen Harper was taken aback by China's jab at him yesterday for waiting "too long" to visit, he shouldn't have been. As Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae noted, Harper invited an "unprecedented public rebuke" by letting relations "fester" for four years. The Chinese felt neglected. Yesterday, they paraded their pique.

While Harper brought this awkwardness on himself by obtusely neglecting a $53 billion trade partner, our second largest, Beijing won't win friends among ordinary Canadians by taking an undiplomatic poke at our PM during an official visit. That will just get a hockey-playing nation's elbows up. China's leaders are no saints themselves.

The best that can be said of their chiding welcome is that it legitimizes some blunt talking from the Canadian side the next time our interests diverge. That's a useful take-away for a Prime Minister who is still on a steep learning curve in foreign affairs. China's leaders speak loudly, even hector, when their interests are at stake. They have now licensed us to be no less forceful.

Even so, it would be wrong to exaggerate this show of irritation.

Apart from some bad Chinese press reviews, Harper got a red-carpet reception. And the leader who matters most, President Hu Jintao, the head of state, was nothing but the gracious host. While he noted, twice, that this was Harper's first visit, he welcomed it as "of great significance." And he promised that "China is ready to work with Canada" to strengthen our 40-year record of friendly and cooperative ties. Officials will meet in the new year to discuss, among other issues, trade and investment, energy and resources, infrastructure, telecoms, transport, high tech and financial services.

It fell to Premier Wen Jiabao, China's number two leader, to put its irritation on the record. "Five years (between high contacts) is too long a time for China/Canada relations," he chided. "And that is why there are comments in the media that your visit is one that should have taken place earlier." That would be the state-controlled media.

Yet Wen then softened the jab by expressing the hope that "the China/Canada relationship will turn a new page" despite friction over fugitive Lai Changxing, Huseyin Celil, the Dalai Lama and human rights.

And knowing that Canada is worth courting, China's leaders made sure Harper doesn't head home with nothing but lost face in tow.

They announced that they finally are making Canada an "approved destination" for business, tourism and students. That could be worth $100 million to our tourism sector, Ottawa says. The Chinese are also opening a new consulate in Montreal to foster stronger "people to people" contacts. They have eased an import ban on Canadian pork worth $50 million. And both sides have agreed to beef up exchanges of green technologies, to work out a deal to better protect Canadian investors and to step up cooperation in science and agriculture.

Despite the touch of frost, this makes for a productive trip. It pales beside former Liberal leader Jean Chrétien's energetic Team Canada missions, which produced billions of dollars in deals. But it gets the relationship moving in the right direction again.

Harper, Chinese leader both complain of too lengthy absence

2009-12-03T14:23:00.000-08:00

Harper, Chinese leader both complain of too lengthy absence

PM's boyhood dream to visit China

BY DAVID AKIN, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE DECEMBER 3, 2009 1:40 PM

STORYPHOTOS ( 4 )VIDEO ( 2 )

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife Laureen pose as they tour the Badaling section of the Great Wall in Beijing December 3, 2009.
Photograph by: Jason Lee, Reuters
BEIJING — China's most popular politician publicly rebuked Prime Minister Stephen Harper for long ignoring China while Harper privately challenged China's top leaders on their human rights record.

But after discussions that Harper described as "frank and respectful," the leaders of both countries issued a joint statement that they say heralds "a significant new era" in relations between China and Canada.

As a tangible sign of renewed goodwill towards Canada, China announced it will open a new consulate in Montreal and it gave Canada approved destination status, something Ottawa had been seeking for more than a decade, that will make it easier for Chinese tourists to visit Canada.

That decision alone could mean more than $100 million annually in new business for Canada's ailing tourism industry and is particularly timely ahead of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

"The public rebuke shows that there's work to do on Canada's part," said NDP Leader Jack Layton. "The new tourist designation and the consulate in Montreal are an important gesture by the Chinese, now it's our turn."

Liberal MP Bob Rae, his party's foreign affairs critic, says a tourism deal is long overdue.

"We've paid a price," Rae told reporters outside the House of Commons. "The fact is we've paid a price for four years of not just living on the margins but actually deliberately disregarding china. This was not benign neglect.

"This was a deliberate decision on (Harper's) part to ignore the relationship and to assert that it had no particular importance for him."

More than 134 countries already have China's approved destination status and are reaping the Chinese tourism windfall because of it. Tourism industry associations estimate that by 2020, there will be more than 100 million international Chinese tourists. Only 159,000 Chinese tourists visited Canada in 2008.

But that decision surprised some observers here who believed that Harper's visit to China — the first by a Canadian prime minister since Paul Martin's in 2005 — would only be a first step towards an agreement on approved destination status.

Martin initialed exactly the same ADS agreement with China during a visit to Beijing in 2005 and also trumpeted it to the media travelling with him, but political problems ensued and it was never implemented. Canada is the last major western nation to be granted ADS.

The Chinese government, through the state-controlled media here, ran articles and editorials as Harper arrived noting with disapproval that, although he was elected in 2006, he had never visited China and was the last G8 leader to do so.

Indeed, that sore spot was Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's starting point for his hour-long meeting with Harper.

"This is your first trip to China and this is the first meeting between the Chinese premier and the Canadian prime minister in almost five years. Five years is too long a time for China-Canada relations and that is why there are comments in the media that your visit is one that should have taken place earlier," said Wen, who is the country's second most powerful politician after President Hu Jintao.

The premier's words were unusually strong for the man who is considered to be the "nice guy" in the Chinese government and is often referred to as Grandfather Wen.

Both the state-owned media in China, as well as independent media in Canada, had criticized Harper for waiting until he was nearly four years into his term before visiting Canada's second-largest trading partner after the United States.

But Harper replied that no Chinese leader has visited Canada in five years, either.

Harper did say he has enjoyed his brief time in China.

"I've been wanting to visit China since I was a small boy," Harper told Hu.

Before his meetings with Hu and Wen, Harper and his wife Laureen visited the Great Wall, an experience he said was "unbelievable."

In separate private talks with both Wen and Hu, Harper pressed the case of Huseyincan Celil, a Uyghur imam of dual Chinese and Canadian citizenship, Canwest News Service has learned.

Celil was arrested in 2006 while visiting Uzbekistan and subsequently deported to China, where he had been convicted in absentia of terrorism and sentenced to life in prison. Canadian officials believe that, not only did he not receive a fair trial but that the Chinese have mistaken him for someone else and that he should be returned to Canada.

No Canadian consular official has yet been able to visit Celil.

"I brought up some of our more general concerns, also our specific cases as well," Harper told reporters after his meetings. "We always make sure that when we bring up these matters — whether they refer to particular cases you're aware of that have been discussed from time to time or whether they are broader questions such as the situation in Tibet, we always bring these up in a way that is frank and is at the same time respectful of Chinese sovereignty."

The joint 14-point statement issued by both countries included a section on human rights.

"Both sides acknowledged that differing histories and national conditions can create some distinct points of view on issues such as human rights," the statement said. "The two sides agreed to increased dialogue and exchanges on human rights, on the basis of equality and mutual respect, to promote and protect human rights consistent with international human rights instruments."

A top issue for China is the repatriation of its "most wanted man," Lai Changxing, who is currently living in Vancouver. Lai became implicated in a smuggling and corruption scandal in the late 1990s, although he maintains he is innocent.

Some of those convicted in China in connection with the same scandal have been executed.

China has promised not to execute Lai if he is deported.

"The government of Canada has been seeking his extradition," Harper said. "I know this has been an irritant in some circles of the Chinese government but, of course, we do have an independent court system and the courts so far have not been accepting of our desire to have him extradited but both we and the government would like to see Mr. Lai extradited and we will keep up our efforts in that regard."

In the joint statement, both countries "reaffirmed their intention to strengthen co-operation on combating transnational crime and repatriating fugitives in accordance with their respective laws."

Harper and Hu also agreed to being a series of meetings between high-level bureaucrats — deputy ministers in Canada — to discuss a broad range of topics including trade and investment, energy and environment, health and governance.

On Friday, Harper will visit the Forbidden City here before flying to Shanghai where he is scheduled to deliver a major speech to a business audience there.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

2/3 Canadians urge PM to focus on China’s human rights, not trade: poll

2009-12-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

2/3 Canadians urge PM to focus on China’s human rights, not trade: poll

Posted on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 · 2 Comments

PMO release
Sigh… what can I say? Sometimes I really don’t understand my fellow Canadians. Why are Canadians always one step behind the rest of the world? Is it because our country is too cold so our people don’t travel outside of North America to see the rest of the world?
With an obvious shift of western media obsession on the “China threat” theory and the retrieve of the once mainstream China-bashing rhetoric, I can only hope that over time, Canadians will slowly come to understand the modern China better-informedly.
Canadians Urge for Focus on Human Rights as Prime Minister Visits China
Angus Reid release – Two-thirds of respondents think Canada should not seek free trade agreements with countries that have dubious human rights records.
As Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrives in China for a four-day visit, a large majority of Canadians believe the federal government should concentrate on human rights when it comes to bilateral ties, a new Angus Reid Public Opinion poll has found.
In the online survey of a representative national sample of 1,006 Canadian adults, 63% of respondents believe Canada should put more emphasis on human rights and minority rights, regardless of the economic implications.
Just over a third of respondents (37%) believe Canada’s long-term policy with China should focus on the trading relationship, regardless of the human rights situation in China.
While those concerned primarily with human rights in China continue to outnumber the proponents of trade, this month’s survey does show a 13-point shift towards trade since an Angus Reid poll conducted in April 2007, when the trial and sentence of Chinese Canadian Huseyin Celil dominated the airwaves.
Two-thirds of Canadians (68%) believe Canada should not seek free trade agreements with developing countries that have dubious human rights records. The level of agreement with this notion has dropped by five points since July 2007, when Canada was discussing a free trade agreement with Colombia.
The prospect of a free trade deal with China is not an overwhelmingly popular idea for Canadians, with 42% perceiving this possibility as a threat to the Canadian economy from foreign imports, and 37% believing it would be an opportunity for economic growth through increased Canadian exports.
Albertans are more likely to perceive free trade with China as an opportunity (52%) while Quebecers (48%) are more likely to regard it as a threat.
Analysis
While trade with China has become a more important issue in the past two years, a majority of Canadians continue to advocate for an emphasis on human rights. China, at this point, is seen as more of a threat in the field of international commerce, a perception that is very different from the perceived benefits a free trade deal with India would bring to Canada.

Harper says human rights remain a concern with China

2009-12-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

Harper says human rights remain a concern with China
(CP) – 2 hours ago
BEIJING — Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he is not backing off on human rights while in China, although he insists the relationship between the two countries is sound.
Making his first visit in four years as prime minister, Harper arrived in China late Wednesday afternoon confronted with a front-page headline and story in an official newspaper declaring the relationship was in urgent need of repair.
The English-language China Daily carried a second story that bluntly declares the behaviour of the Harper government since being elected in 2006 as causing the political trust between the two governments to "hit rock bottom, adversely affecting the development of bilateral ties. "
The article lists a series of what the Chinese regard as provocations, including the tardiness of the visit, Harper's failure to attend the Beijing Olympics in 2008, as well his party making a "big fuss" over "the Falun Gong, the Taiwan question, the Tibet issue, "China's espionage threat" and "China's investment threat."
In his first year in office, the prime minister famously declared that he would not sacrifice human rights for "the almighty dollar."
An editorial in the Global Times, an organ of the Communist party, accused Harper of "appeasing his electoral base" and having turned "a cold shoulder to China."
The papers, however, cited the visit as a golden opportunity to set the relationship back on track.
In a meeting with reporters shortly after landing, Harper said he wanted to strengthen relations between the two countries and particularly expand trade and business opportunities.
But he said he believes he can achieve the goal while still staying true to what he called Canadian values.
"Canadian values are part and parcel of who we are," he said.
"Those are the things we live by, those are the things that give us the prosperity and peaceful and pluralistic society that we enjoy. So we never check those things at the door."
He added that Canada has a "good and frank" relationship with China and believes the trip will be productive.
Several human rights organizations in Canada have called on Harper to not back off on human rights while in China.
David Kilgour, a former Liberal minister for Asia-Pacific and a leading critic of China's human rights record, said in an earlier interview that the record shows that even after Harper's "almighty dollar" remark, trade between the two countries did not suffer.
In fact, it has growth to the point that it is now Canada's second largest trading relationship with a value of $53 billion.
It remains to be seen, however, how high on the agenda human rights will come during Harper's private meetings with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
Given China's growing important to Canada as an economic counter-balance to the struggling U.S., as well as emergence as a political power, many believe Harper will tread lighter than in the past on tweaking the giant's nose on human rights.
"We need the Chinese more than we needed then five or six years ago," said Robert Bothwell, an historian with the international section at the University of Toronto.
Copyright © 2009 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Harper stance on human rights scrutinized as China visit begins

2009-12-01T18:02:00.000-08:00

Harper stance on human rights scrutinized as China visit begins

BY DAVID AKIN, CANWEST NEWS SERVICEDECEMBER 1, 2009 7:02 PM

STORYPHOTOS ( 1 )

Stephen Harper is in China. He'll meet all the top Chinese leaders. Is he going to 'vocally and publicly' stand up for human rights? A coalition of Canadian human rights groups on Tuesday pressed Harper to do just that.
Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa Citizen
ABOARD CANADIAN FORCES FLIGHT 01 — As Prime Minister Stephen Harper jets his way to his first official visit in China, many in Canada wonder if Harper will talk as tough on human rights once he's there as he did upon winning office three years ago.

For Harper and for many of the Conservatives he grew up with during the years of the Reform party and the Canadian Alliance, China once was to be given no quarter for jailing dissidents, persecuting Christians and dealing harshly with Tibet. For Conservatives, human rights trumped trade and Harper said so himself in 2007.

"There are those in the Opposition who will say, you know, China is an important country, so we shouldn't really protest these things . . . so maybe someday we'll be able to sell more goods there. I think that's irresponsible," Harper, then prime minister, said in 2007. "I think the government of Canada, when a Canadian citizen is ill-treated and when the rights of a Canadian citizen need to be defended, I think it's always the obligation of the government of Canada to vocally and publicly stand up for that Canadian citizen. That is what we will continue to do."

Well, here he is in China. He'll meet all the top Chinese leaders. Is he going to "vocally and publicly" stand up for human rights?

A coalition of Canadian human rights groups on Tuesday pressed Harper to do just that. The Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China, which includes Amnesty International, PEN Canada, the Canada Tibet Committee and others, sent a letter to Harper on the eve of his trip East, saying: "We urge you, as prime minister, to take the opportunity of your upcoming dialogue with Chinese leaders to show that Canada, along with the rest of the Western democracies, views human rights as a central plank of its relationship with China.

"We entreat you to speak out, confident that your personal intervention will give hope and strength not only to political and human rights activists in prison in China, but to all Canadians who share our belief that freedom of expression is both a sign of strength and a human right that cannot be compromised."

Dimitri Soudas, now Harper's chief spokesman but also one of Harper's longest-serving advisers, conceded to reporters Monday that while human rights may have once trumped other issues, it is now part of the broader mix of issues on this week's agenda.

"One issue doesn't trump the other while having frank, respectful and positive discussions on certain issues . . . that doesn't prevent one to express concern on others," Soudas said.

"So I would simply say that since taking office, the position of the prime minister and of this government has been consistent. It has sometimes been interpreted differently, but it has been very consistent since the beginning."

It doesn't seem that way to outside observers.

"More recently, that (early rhetoric) seems much more muted," said Alex Neve, Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada. "I think there's a perception that the criticism has faded and this concern about paying primary attention to the trading relationship once again seems to have become dominant."

The Canadian that Harper was referring to in that 2007 statement was Huseyincan Celil, a Uyghur imam of dual Chinese and Canadian citizenship. In 2006, while visiting Uzbekistan, he was arrested and subsequently deported to China, where he had been convicted in absentia of terrorism and sentenced to life in prison. Canadian officials believe that, at the very least, the Chinese have mistaken him for someone else and that he should be returned to Canada.

Celil, in fact, arrived in Canada first in 2001 as a refugee from China where he stood accused of murders and terrorist acts Chinese authorities alleged he committed beginning in 1994. But in 2006, Celil returned to China to try to get his three of his children out of the country. It was a terrible miscalculation and he now sits in jail.

No one thinks Harper is going to come home with Celil or effect the release of any other political prisoners during his three days here.

But many are hopeful that Harper's visit is the beginning of a rebalancing of the Canada-China relationship.

"The Chinese are very concerned about stability," said Liberal MP Bob Rae, who first visited China more than 25 years ago. "They're very concerned about order. They're very concerned about a billion people. They're fearful of the consequences of losing that kind of control. Seems to me we just have to keep on trying to persuade them that liberty is the better way. It's something we believe in and something we should share with them."

"What we need," says Amnesty's Neve, "is an approach to human rights that takes account of the entirety of that relationship and doesn't relegate it to a file that one or two mid-level diplomats at Foreign Affairs are supposed to think about from time to time but makes it a paramount consideration in all aspects of how we have dealing with China."

A good first step for Amnesty and others is an insistence that independent human rights workers be allowed into China to conduct their research and monitoring with no government interference. Neither Amnesty International nor any other human rights group has ever been allowed into the country do any monitoring or research.

"We've repeatedly said to the Canadian government, amongst others, that's one indicator amongst many others of the state of human rights in China, that they remain so defiant on that," Neve said. "They remain absolutely defiant about granting that kind of access for on-the-ground, independent, fact-finding."

Chinese leaders are not unprepared for these demands from Western politicians, says Rae, who dealt with them while he was Ontario's premier.

"They're not unused to this discussion," Rae said. "They're not afraid of it. There's no reason for us to be afraid of it. It's part of an ongoing engagement not only with the Chinese leadership but Chinese society generally about how a freer economy — in . . . our entire historical experience — generally leads to a freer society and that freer society generally leads to a freer politics."

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Harper urged to talk human rights with China

2009-12-01T14:52:00.000-08:00

Harper urged to talk human rights with China
PM set to discuss trade in 1st visit to economic superpower
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 1, 2009 | 12:21 PM ET

CBC News

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Summit in Singapore on Nov. 15. Harper will arrive in China for the first time on Wednesday in the hopes of improving trade. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Improving trade relations will be high on the agenda for Stephen Harper as he makes his first visit to China on Wednesday, but activists said Tuesday they want the Prime Minister to continue to address human rights issues.

Harper, who will arrive Wednesday and depart on Dec. 6, is hoping to use the trip to promote stronger economic ties with China.

Canada-China relations have been frosty since Harper formed his first government in 2006, particularly because of his past comments on China's human rights record.

But the Harper government has backed off in the last year from publicly chiding China, opting instead for more quiet diplomacy.

Harper said over the weekend that much of the visit to China will be spent discussing ways to improve investment between the two countries.

"Obviously we'll want to emphasize we're both advocates of opening up markets and that always has to be a two-way street," he said from a Commonwealth conference in Trinidad and Tobago.

Amnesty International spokeswoman Lindsay Mossman expressed concern, however, that the government is no longer making human rights a priority.

"We are concerned that the Canadian government has made fewer and weaker statements on human rights in China than they were perhaps making a few years ago," she said.

Coalition concerned over softened stance

The Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China issued a statement on Tuesday urging Harper to publicly push for improvement to China's human rights record.

"We need to see a mixture that includes closed-door diplomacy, but it is also vital to make public comments," Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, said at a press conference in Ottawa. Amnesty is one of the 10 organizations in the coalition.

Harper set the tone for a tough stance on China in 2006, first when Parliament unanimously adopted a motion giving honorary Canadian citizenship to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader that has been living in exile since China annexed the region in 1958.

P.O.V.

Harper in China: What issues should he raise?

Join the discussion.

Later in 2006 Harper also famously stated that he did not believe Canadians wanted him to sell out human rights beliefs "to the almighty dollar."

Chinese President Hu Jintao threatened to call off a meeting between the two leaders in Vietnam in 2006 after Harper criticized China over a case involving Huseyin Celil, a Canadian activist jailed in China for alleged terrorist links. Beijing continues to refuse to allow Canadian consular visits to Celil.

The coalition said Tuesday that thousands of Chinese, Uighur and Tibetan activists and human rights lawyers face arbitrary detention, harassment and imprisonment after unfair trials, and point out that China continues to carry out the death penalty, executing more people annually than the rest of the world's governments combined.

Cheuk Kwan of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China said Harper's comments in 2006 "echoed around the world" but that his comments of late have been less encouraging. While Harper was one of the few world leaders who did not attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kwan said it wasn't clear the decision was a public criticism of China's rights policies.

Trade relations have suffered

Other observers, however, say Harper's tough stance has done little to improve relations with China.

Jeremy Paltiel, a visiting political science professor from Carleton University in Ottawa, said the consensus is that Canada has ignored China and done little to foster better relations, even as China's economy was growing.

Victor Gao, a Beijing-based expert on international relations, said Canada stands to gain from engagement with China.

"If Prime Minister Harper applies appropriate importance to the relations of our two countries, then Canadian exports to China is positioned to double, triple, or even quadruple in the coming five to 10 years," he said.

In 2008, Canada exported $10.3 billion worth of goods to China. Canada, however, imported four times that amount from China.

The human rights coalition said Tuesday that speaking out does not necessarily hurt economic relations.

The group said that in 1997, the year Canada abandoned public criticism of human rights violations in China, Canada had a share of 1.41 per cent of total imports to China. That share dropped to .97 per cent in 2006 and only recently has bounced back, coincidentally around the time Canada began to more openly criticize China's human rights record.

Harper said in advance of his trip that he would bring up China's human rights record.

The timing to address those issues is awkward, however, after recent accusations that Canada turned over prisoners to Afghan authorities for what was almost certain torture.

The story of diplomat Richard Colvin's testimony was carried in some Chinese newspapers, and was further complicated by the allegation that David Mulroney tried to muzzle Colvin's reports. Mulroney is Canada's current ambassador to China.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/12/01/harper-china-visit.html

Edwards: PM's Beijing trip — more hype than hope

2009-12-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

Edwards: PM's Beijing trip — more hype than hope

Fred Edwards

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and China's President Hu Jintao chat at the APEC leaders summit in Singapore Nov. 15, 2009.
ADRIAN WYLD/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO
Now that Stephen Harper is China bound, it is tempting to believe that this country's recently troubled relationship with the Middle Kingdom will revert to the coziness of the past.

That prospect may well be mistaken, and perhaps even undesirable.

First of all, is Canada well equipped to take advantage of warmer relations with China? A report earlier this year by professor Charles Burton of Brock University, who has twice served as a councillor at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, suggests it is not.

Burton's report, A Reassessment of Canada's Interests in China and Options for Renewal of Canada's China Policy, was sharply critical of the competence of Canadian diplomatic personnel: "Our diplomats typically lack fluency in Chinese, and therefore lack the capacity to establish informal contacts with influential policy-makers in the Chinese system."

Instead, they engage China primarily through the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the "international offices" of other ministries. But these tend to be weak players in the Chinese power structure – senior Chinese Communists have been known to dismiss foreign affairs officials as mere "interpreters."

Burton's report called for wider engagement with influential Chinese decision-makers in the state council (cabinet), Communist party, and provincial and local governments. That's good advice, but following it will be difficult given Canada's relatively shallow talent pool of China experts.

Our government's failings have been mirrored in the business community. Canadian business leaders – Jim Balsillie of RIM is an example – have been critical of the Harper government's coolness toward China, but Canadian companies have not been particularly aggressive in the Chinese market. China accounts for only 6 per cent of Canada's merchandise trade and only 2 per cent of Canadian exports – almost 80 per cent of our exports go to the United States. The story is the same for investment: almost 44 per cent of Canada's international investments in 2007 were made in the United States and only 0.3 per cent in China.

Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the Canada China Business Council, put her finger on the problem: "It's so easy to come back and export to the U.S," she said last month at a Fraser Institute function. "We really need to convince more Canadian firms to include China in their strategies while welcoming more Chinese investment to Canada."

Yet is that a realistic prospect given the continental integration of the North American economy? Can the Canadian business class, so accustomed to operating in a familiar milieu as low-dollar exporters, display the creativity and flexibility required to break into the highly competitive Chinese market?

Canada's economic orientation toward the United States raises another question, and that is whether Harper's government has the skill or even the desire to find manoeuvring room between Washington and Beijing. Liberal leaders Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin all sought to expand the focus of Canadian foreign policy beyond its traditional North Atlantic orientation. Chrétien, in particular, aggressively promoted Sino-Canadian trade and was bold enough to criticize America's "cowboy-style attitude" during the 2001 Hainan Island incident, when a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter collided off the coast of China.

After coming to power in 2006, Harper pointedly rejected the Liberals' emphasis on multilateralism and reinforced the Washington link by following the U.S. lead across a wide policy front.

From economic stimulus and the bailout of the North American auto industry to a future continental cap-and-carbon trading system and perhaps a continental approach to border security, Canada has looked to Washington for leadership. At the same time, some prominent Canadians are promoting a new bilateral trade deal with the United States that would exclude Mexico and bind the American and Canadian economies even closer together. The subject of currency union has been raised, as well as a common Canada-U.S. policy on Arctic territorial waters. The end result could well be that future Canadian prime ministers will find it much more difficult to balance Washington and Beijing the way Chrétien did.

And how can China be expected to view the Canadian-U.S. relationship? Canada's resource-based economy would seem a natural fit for China's burgeoning manufacturing sector but will Beijing be comfortable relying on a strong U.S. ally for strategic minerals or energy? Better to deal with outcasts like Sudan or Venezuela, or non-aligned states in Africa.

Finally, there is the troublesome issue of human rights. The onset of the Sino-Canadian chill can be dated to Ottawa's criticism of China's jailing of Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen who belongs to China's Uighur Muslim minority, in the summer of 2006. Later that year, and referring explicitly to the Sino-Canadian relationship, Harper famously said: "I think Canadians want us to promote our trade relations worldwide, and we do that. But I don't think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values. They don't want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar."

This was a refreshing change from the days when Chrétien had clowned around with Li Peng, one of the architects of the Tiananmen massacre. Now, however, Harper appears to have come around to the view that the dollar is almighty after all. Is this progress?

Perhaps the Prime Minister will surprise us in Beijing and articulate a balanced, constructive policy that offers realistic economic goals without losing sight of democratic values. More likely, though, we will have a photo-op that allows Harper to close the politically troublesome China file while leaving Canada both uncompetitive in the Chinese market and ever more silent on human rights and democracy.

Fred Edwards is a member of the Star's editorial board and a former editor at Beijing Review, a news magazine published by the Chinese government.

Parliamentary Group Urges PM to Talk Human Rights on China trip

2009-12-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

Parliamentary Group Urges PM to Talk Human Rights on China trip
Parliamentarians’ letter to Harper seeks release of prisoners with Canadian ties
By Cindy Chan
Epoch Times Dec 1, 2009Last Updated: Dec 1, 2009

OTTAWA—As Prime Minister Stephen Harper heads to China on Tuesday, the recently formed Parliamentary Friends of Falun Gong (PFOFG) is asking him to raise the issue of human rights and specifically the Falun Gong persecution with Chinese authorities.

“We urge you on your upcoming China trip to ask your Chinese counterparts about their commitment to human rights and religious freedom. We also urge you to specifically raise the situation of Falun Gong practitioners in China and to call for the release of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience and an end to their persecution,” said the PFOFG letter.

“We think that the least the prime minister can do is raise that as one of the concerns that Canadians have in our relationship with China,” said MP Bill Siksay, chair of the PFOFG.

Mr. Siksay along with vice-chairs MPs Stephen Woodworth and Borys Wrzesnewskyj signed the letter to Mr. Harper on behalf of the 20-member group comprising senators and MPs from all parties represented in Parliament.

The letter noted United Nations reports’ findings that 66 percent of alleged torture victims in China were Falun Gong practitioners and that “reports of arrest, detention, ill-treatment, torture, sexual violence, deaths, and unfair trial of Falun Gong practitioners, are increasing.”

Mr. Siksay said the group hopes Mr. Harper will raise specific cases such as 14 Falun Gong prisoners of conscience who have close relatives in Canada. The letter attached a list of their names. Some have been sentenced to terms of 12 years.

The group’s concerns reflect the severity and extent of the persecution against Falun Gong as documented by the U.N., government bodies, human rights groups, and independent investigators worldwide.

Prominent among them is a Canadian report documenting evidence that the Chinese regime has killed tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners to extract organs for lucrative transplant surgeries.

“Bloody Harvest” was co-authored by Order of Canada international human rights lawyer David Matas, and former crown prosecutor and Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour.

Noting that “[China] persecutes the Falun Gong more than any other group,” Mr. Matas and Mr. Kilgour wrote: “Unravel the repression against the Falun Gong and all other victim groups will benefit.”

MP Keith Martin, a PFOFG member, also wrote to Mr. Harper asking him to request the release of the 14 imprisoned practitioners as well as an end to the persecution of Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and human rights activists.

On Tuesday morning the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China will hold a press conference on Parliament Hill to urge Mr. Harper to put human rights as a priority during his trip.

Speakers will include Alex Neve, Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada, English Branch; Cheuk Kwan, Chair, Toronto Association for Democracy in China; and Tenzin Wangkhang, National Director, Students for a Free Tibet (Canada).

They will share trade statistics that counter the argument that raising human rights impairs trade, according to a news release.

Other coalition groups include Uyghur Canadian Society, Canada Tibet Committee, Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, Canadian Labour Congress, Falun Dafa Association of Canada, PEN Canada, Rights & Democracy, ARC International, Federation for a Democratic China, and Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement in China.

The groups and supporters will also hold a rally on the hill.

The coalition has submitted to Mr. Harper’s office a list of names of 11 political prisoners.

At a Monday briefing by senior government officials on the prime minister’s China visit, journalists also raised the issue of Huseyin Celil, a Uyghur-Canadian serving life imprisonment in China.

Mr. Celil, an advocate of the rights of Uyghur Muslims in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, was arrested in Uzbekistan while visiting family in March 2006 and deported to China.

In 2006 and 2007 Mr. Harper had made Mr. Celil’s case a key issue in talks with the Chinese.

China's hidden night of state bloodshed

2009-11-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

China's hidden night of state bloodshed

(Diego Azubel)
Chinese soldiers patrol the streets of a Uighur neighborhood after an incident between ethnic Uighurs and Chinese security forces along the streets in Urumqi, Xinjiang province
Michael Sheridan

POSTERS went up on lampposts and walls all around drab neighbourhoods in the northwestern area of China last week, announcing a series of executions.

They proclaimed the deaths of nine men convicted of murdering people during the racial violence that convulsed the remote city of Urumqi in July. No details were released of the condemned men’s last moments and few dared to mourn them.

The executions marked the culmination of the Chinese authorities’ response to a revolt by native Uighur Muslims in the city on July 5.

The revolt triggered violent clashes with Han Chinese settlers before being put down by security forces that night. Chinese civilians later turned on the Uighurs.

Since the clashes ended on July 7, the Chinese and the Uighurs have traded acrimonious claims about what happened and how many died.

The government said that of the 197 people killed, only 46 were Uighurs. A local official put the number of rioters shot dead by the security forces at just 12.

Exiles, however, alleged that hundreds of Uighur men had died and thousands had disappeared after a police and army sweep through the rough district of Sai Ma Chang.

Last week The Sunday Times conducted dozens of interviews in an investigation to discover what had happened. We found a city with soldiers on every street, full of rumours and fear, cut off from communications with the outside world. But some facts became clear.

The trouble began thousands of miles away in June when workers at a factory in southern China ran amok on hearing dubious claims that a girl had been raped by migrant workers. Two Uighurs were beaten to death.

When news of this reached the Uighur region of Xinjiang by text message and mobile phone video, there was ferment. Students asked permission to hold a protest in People’s Square at the heart of Urumqi, the region’s capital.

They were turned down by Wang Lequan, the Communist party secretary, a hardliner who is the most powerful man in Xinjiang and also the architect of Chinese policy in neighbouring Tibet, but the authorities failed to defuse the tension.

In the late afternoon of Sunday, July 5, gangs of Uighur youths began attacking the police around People’s Square. They hurled rocks, smashed vehicles and set upon ordinary passers-by

Repulsed, they gathered near the great bazaar and by 6pm a crowd of more than 1,000 was turning on the Han Chinese merchants. Shops were ransacked and traders were killed where they worked. Their goods were looted.

By 8.30pm a reign of terror prevailed in the mixed ethnic districts that separate the poor Uighur districts in the south from the prosperous Chinese areas in the north. The mobs bludgeoned and butchered their victims, women and men alike. Cars were burnt. Corpses lay in the streets.

All this time — in a strange echo of the official paralysis when riots broke out in Tibet last year — there was no sign of forceful measures to end the riot, even though Wang had thousands of troops and police at his disposal.

“Everybody knows Wang was getting drunk at his villa,” spat a local businesswoman, repeating a rumour widespread among everyone from taxi drivers to policemen. The sophisticated version holds that the unrest suited the hardline agenda of repressive politics. “I believe they wanted it to happen,” claimed one well connected resident, “but it went out of control.”

After midnight, events took a decisive turn. First, a big force of army and special police units sealed off Sai Ma Chang. Then the power was cut off and a night of reciprocal terror began.

Numerous local witnesses, both Han and Uighur, confirmed hearing bursts of gunfire in Sai Ma Chang until dawn on Monday, July 6.

A man of 35, who gave his name as Shevket, said: “I know the difference between fireworks and machineguns. I heard shooting all night long. But we will never know how many of our brothers were taken and killed. Only God knows how many died.”

A Chinese woman who had stood and watched added: “They cut off the whole area and then they went in and got them. There was firing all night. But you couldn’t see much in the dark because the electricity was off.”

Around the bazaars there is talk that corpses were dragged away and buried in anonymous desert graves, but nobody has produced evidence.

A day later, Chinese mobs went on a reprisal rampage that was curbed quickly by the army but claimed an unknown number of casualties.

Raids and clashes persisted: in one, caught on video, three Uighurs with knives attacked eight armed police. They fought until all three had been shot, two fatally.

Every witness interviewed believed the number of Uighurs shot dead was many more than 12 but far fewer than the 400 to 800 claimed by the exiles. In China, all such information is a state secret.

The posters that went up last week showed the state making its case. The posters emphasised that the judges who had pronounced the death sentences were themselves Uighurs. So were the prosecutors and defence lawyers. The cases were conducted in the Uighur language. The trials were therefore “just and fair”.

Some detected in these pronouncements the strains of an empire that has subdued its minority peoples but is deeply troubled by its failure to integrate them into one nation.

As for the executed men, only one set of footprints led across the fresh snow that had fallen last Thursday on the newest graves in the Muslim cemetery in the foothills of the Tien Shan, the “heavenly mountains”. A lone mourner had crept past the army checkpoints and toiled up the slopes to place bunches of crimson flowers at the head of each unmarked heap of earth.

The fate of the condemned — all but one of them Uighurs — was stark, but Human Rights Watch has documented 43 missing Uighur men and boys aged from 14 to 35. It said hundreds had been detained and dozens remained unaccounted for.

RELATED LINKS
140 people die as China protest suppressed
Rioting Uighurs and a fading separatist dream
There is no doubt that harsh punishments were thought necessary to repress rebellion and placate the dominant Han Chinese, who enjoy a privileged status and whose fury at becoming victims has rebounded on the regime.

The Chinese government rushed to blame a “plot” led by the most famous Uighur exile, a businesswoman named Rebiya Kadeer who, in this script, plays the role of villain usually reserved for the Dalai Lama by the Chinese. Two local government officials, both Uighurs, laughed at the claim of a conspiracy, however. “I can’t believe this,” said one.

It is, of course, easier to blame a plot than to admit that the hardline policy towards China’s minorities is a failure.Yet that is the conclusion of an article published in September by the Xinjiang Social Research Review, a journal restricted to elite officials and academics.

It revealed that 97% of Chinese officials who come from minorities, such as Uighurs, Tibetans and Mongolians, feel “unease in their hearts” about the gap in wealth and power.

The direst finding of all was that 12% of these trusted officials believed the policy would, in the end, lead to the breakup of China. “We have to admit there have been mistakes,” wrote Professor Tian Zhongfu, of the Xinjiang Socialism University, in a commentary on the figures.

The silent and snow-shrouded graves on the slopes of the heavenly mountains testify to that.

Amnesty fears more Xinjiang executions

2009-11-10T11:49:00.000-08:00

Amnesty fears more Xinjiang executions

By Simon Lauder for PM

The recent execution of nine people over their role in violent ethnic clashes in north-west China in July has raised concerns for hundreds of others who were detained after the riots.

The executions were expected but Amnesty International says there was more secrecy surrounding them than usual.

Little detail was provided when the executions were announced yesterday by the state-owned China News Service.

It was reported that the men were convicted of violent crimes including arson and murder.

Violence in the provincial capital Urumqi erupted in July when protests by Uighurs and retaliatory attacks by Han Chinese led to about 200 deaths on the official count.

Dr Michael Clarke from Griffith University has studied separatist movements in China and says most of those executed were Uighurs while one was Han Chinese.

"Those charges of being convicted of arson and so forth, they're fairly ambiguous if you look at the Chinese criminal law," he said.

"It suggests a fairly political approach to dealing with what happened in July.

"It's interesting that some Chinese have been caught up in this, given that there was a wave of retaliatory violence by Han Chinese in the days that followed the unrest.

"That suggests the Chinese are at least attempting to appear to be even handed in their crackdown."

'Strike hard' campaign
The July clashes were sparked by the deaths of two Uighur factory workers but was underpinned by tensions over the distribution of wealth and labour in the resource-rich Xinjiang province.

The executions are just one element of a crackdown designed to prevent a repeat of the clashes.

University of Melbourne postgraduate student Tyler Harlan, who has travelled to Xinjiang a number of times, says the province is now the target of what's known as a "strike hard" campaign.

"I think that we will see perhaps not as much tension but a lot of Government involvement and perhaps raids in certain areas on certain groups," Mr Harlan said.

"[The campaign's] words mean a particular type of crackdown on religious extremism, on terrorism, on splitism, which are words that the provincial and central government have used to crack down on particular groups.

"For instance, they sometimes to go into mosques and close mosques at certain stages to limit groups that can organise."

The executions come just days ahead of the first trip to China by US President Barack Obama.

The White House has reacted to the news by urging China to ensure the legal rights of citizens are respected in accordance with international standards.

Closed process
Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific deputy director, Roseann Rife, says the executions and the trials that led to them have taken place in secrecy.

"We got a notice on October 30 that an appeal had been approved and the process then should have gone to the Supreme Court for a final review," she said.

"And it seems that in less than 10 days the review and the executions were both carried out. That is faster than usual."

Ms Rife says Amnesty is particularly concerned about reports that the trials were not open.

"Families were not notified. In fact we received reports that authorities told human rights lawyers in Beijing not to take up cases of anyone involved with the unrest in the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region in July," he said.

"So we have serious concerns that these trials were fair and that they were not transparent and didn't meet international standards."

The executions are the first to take place over July's ethnic violence but Ms Rife says they are unlikely to be the last.

"The official numbers have varied but it could be up to several hundred people who still could remain in detention for activities surrounding this unrest," she said.

"And we're concerned that this may only be the beginning of the executions."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/11/2739034.htm?section=world

Multi-faith Forum Focuses On Human Rights

2009-09-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

Multi-faith Forum Focuses On Human Rights
By Cindy Chan
Epoch Times StaffSep 20, 2009 Facebook Digg del.icio.us StumbleUpon | |
Related articles: Canada > National

ONE FREE WORLD: Rev. Majed El Shafie, founder and president of One Free World International, speaks at the multi-faith forum on human rights held at Congregation Machzikei Hadas in Ottawa on Sept. 10. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
OTTAWA—A multi-faith expert forum is traveling across the country to call attention to human rights concerns facing various faith-based communities in Canada and abroad.

Co-organized by One Free World International (OFWI) and B’nai Brith Canada, the forum was held in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto last week and will take place in Vancouver on Sept. 24.

The idea took shape when several leaders from different faiths sat down together a few months ago and decided to begin coalition building to help each other’s communities that are facing persecution.

Among them were Rev. Majed El Shafie, president of OFWI, a Toronto-based human rights group that works for the rights of religious minorities worldwide, and Dr. Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada, a national body that serves Jewish communities across the country.

Speaking at the Ottawa forum at Congregation Machzikei Hadas on Sept. 10, Rev. El Shafie told how OFWI came into being.

A Muslim from Egypt who converted to Christianity while in law school, Rev. El Shafie was persecuted and severely tortured after building an underground congregation and appealing for equal rights for Christians in the late 1990s.

He fled to Israel to escape execution and spent over a year in jail while Amnesty International and the United Nations investigated and intervened on his behalf. He eventually came to Canada, where he started OFWI.

UYGHURS FACING PERSECUTION: Mehmet Tohti, founder and past-president of the Uyghur Canadian Association, speaking on the Chinese communist regime's persecution against the Muslim Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China, formerly the Uyghurs' independent stat (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

“When I came to Canada, my perspective was, just defend my own community—the Christian Egyptians. Later, I grew up and I thought, ‘I need to defend every Christian around the world,’” Rev. El Shafie explained.
“But later on, one day at three o’clock in the morning, I woke up and asked myself, ‘If somebody was crossing the street in front of me, and a car came and hit him, would I ask him first about his religion, or would I call 911 anyway?’

“This was when I started to defend every community and everybody that I can help and support.”

Echoing this sentiment, Mr. Dimant told the audience that human rights is an issue “not only for the Jewish community, but we have others who are suffering. . . . We want to bring their plight to the attention of our community.”

Other forum speakers included Li Xun, president of Falun Dafa Association of Canada; MP Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Mehmet Tohti, founder of the Uyghur Canadian Association; and Iranian-Canadian human rights advocate Farnaz Farrokhi.
Slaves in Their Homeland
Mr. Tohti belongs to the Muslim Uyghur community in the Xinjiang region in northwest China, formerly the independent state of East Turkestan before the communist invasion in 1949.

He said the Uyghurs have become an ethnic minority who are “slaves” today in their homeland, a result of communist repression and large influxes of Han Chinese under the regime’s policy of assimilating his people.

All forms of telecommunication have been shut down since early July, when the human rights protests and violent suppression that occurred in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi captured the world’s attention, Mr. Tohti said.

But “the bad news is coming,” as he has just received news that one of his younger brothers was in prison.
Illicit Organ Trade
Since the communist party took control of China in 1949, it has waged brutal campaigns against one group after another, Mr. Li said.

Introduced to the public in 1992, Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, had 70 to 100 million followers by 1999 when the regime launched its persecution.

MULTI-FAITH FORUM SPEAKERS: Four of the six speakers at the multi-faith forum on human rights in Ottawa on Sept. 10. (L-R) Rev. Majed El Shafie of One Free World International, Dr. Frank Dimant of BÃ¢ï¿½ï¿½nai Brith Canada, Li Xun of Falun Dafa Association of (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
The regime orchestrates massive hate propaganda throughout China and abroad to vilify Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that teaches “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance,” Mr. Li said.

Following a 2005 China mission, U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak reported that two-thirds of the torture cases brought to his attention were Falun Gong.

Mr. Li noted that former cabinet minister David Kilgour and Winnipeg-based international human rights lawyer David Matas, legal counsel for B’nai Brith, conducted an investigation into the persecution in 2006-2007.

Their report, “Bloody Harvest,” detailed substantive evidence and concluded that the Chinese regime has been conducting large-scale organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners for an illicit organ trade.

“The Chinese government has yet to come clean and be transparent” after two U.N. requests for a satisfactory response, Mr. Nowak told The Epoch Times last month.

Chinese lawyers are another group suffering persecution. Gao Zhisheng, a Christian attorney and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, suffered extensive torture in 2007 after writing three open letters urging an end to the persecution of Falun Gong. Taken into custody again in February, his current whereabouts are unknown.
Connecting Aid to Human Rights
Rev. El Shafie said last year more than 165,000 Christians were killed because of their faith—about 80 percent in Muslim countries; 20 percent in communist countries like China, North Korea, and Cuba; and some in India.

He has travelled widely to conduct fact-finding missions and help those being persecuted, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.

Recently returned from Pakistan, he spoke about that country’s blasphemy law, which carries the death penalty for speaking against Islam, the Koran, or Muhammad. It is also a discriminatory law that has been used to intimidate and attack minorities including Hindus and Christians.

Noting other religious persecution in places like Egypt, Iraq, and China, Rev. El Shafie called on Canada to stop supporting countries that abuse people’s rights.

“Our aid to these countries needs to be connected to the improvement of their human rights,” he said.
Iran Nuclear Threat
Mr. Dimant said the Jewish people are facing a “very frightening” situation today.

“In 1932 and 1937, Hitler was not talking publicly about genocide and the Holocaust. Yet today, from reports in Iran, they are actually openly talking about a nuclear warhead being built to kill six million Jews. There is no attempt to disguise it.”

COMBATING ANTI-SEMITISM: M.P. Pierre Poilievre spoke at the multi-faith human rights forum in Ottawa about Canada's efforts to combat anti-Semitism. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
He also spoke of systemic discrimination against Israel and Jews in many parts of the world.

Mr. Poilievre highlighted Canada’s leadership in the fight against anti-Semitism.

Canada was the first country to withdraw from the Durban II conference in Geneva in April, a U.N. event intended to review progress toward the goals set in 2001 at Durban I to fight racism.

In 2008 Canada announced it would not participate because the “expression of intolerance and anti-Semitism” during Durban I was carrying over into preparations for Durban II.

The U.S., Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Israel, and other countries followed Canada’s lead.

Indeed, at Durban II, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “poured verbal acid all over Israel and the U.S. and Europe,” said Mr. Poilievre.

Ms. Farrokhi tcalked about the persecution of Christians, Bahai’s, Jews, and other religious minorities in Iran.

With Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, “no longer can the Iranian government hide from the international community,” she said, pointing to the role social networking tools played in communicating with the world about the mass protests and suppression following the disputed election results in June that returned Ahmadinejad to power.

Ms. Farrokhi urged the audience to sign the World Jewish Congress online petition to boycott Ahmadinejad’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this month.
China's Backing of Rogue States
When talking about rockets launched by Hamas into Israel, weapons proliferation in Iran, genocide in Sudan, and U.N. resolutions blocked by Muslim countries, Mr. Tohti emphasized that “it is the Chinese government mostly supplying financial and military aid” to those countries and groups.

“It’s important for all of us to stand up against the Chinese government’s ongoing persecutions, not only Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, and Uyghurs, [but] its support of terrorist groups in the Middle East,” he said.

The next multi-faith forum on human rights will take place in Vancouver on Thursday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m., at GT Church, 3456 Fraser St. The event is free.

Brutal crackdown in Xinjiang

2009-07-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

Brutal crackdown in Xinjiang
July 25, 2009
The Rafto Foundation strongly condemns the violent suppression of recent demonstrations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, and expresses its strong concern for the fate of those who have fallen victim to the ensuing mass arrests.

The Rafto Foundation strongly urges Norwegian authorities and the international society to put stronger pressure on Chinese authorities to ensure that those arrested will receive fair treatment. There is a strong reason to fear that the arrested face mass executions, and the international society must demand from Chinese authorities that they abide by international human rights.

Brutal crackdown
On 5 July 2009 in Urumqi a peaceful protest against the authorities’ handling of the recent killings of Uyghur workers in a factory in Shaoguan was met with brute force by Chinese police. While it is impossible to obtain accurate numbers of killed and arrested, the Rafto Foundation have a strong reason to believe that the number of detainees is far higher than the 1 434 people mentioned by Urumqi Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi, on 7 July. International media report of more than 4 000 Uyghurs detained in overfilled makeshift prisons.

Ethnic tension
The Rafto Foundation expresses its concern for the heightened level of ethnic tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, and deplores all injuries and deaths in this conflict, irrespective of ethnicity.

While the unrest has been portrayed by Chinese official media as consisting of Uyghur provocateurs and Han Chinese victims, there is a strong reason for believing that only a fraction of the number of Uyghur victims has been reported. Reports from Xinjiang tell of frightened Uyghurs fleeing their homes in fear of the general lynching sentiment spreading in the cities, fuelled by the nationalistically charged reporting of the unrest in Chinese official media. However, the most urgent issue at this point is the arrested citizens’ imminent risk of express trials with no respect for due process, and the strong likelihood of mass executions.

No fair trial
Urumqi’s Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi’s statement on 8 July that "brutal criminals will be sentenced to death" raises strong concerns for swift executions with no fair trial for the unknown numbers that were arrested in the aftermath of 5 July. In addition, reports of Chinese human rights lawyers receiving intimidations and strong warnings of taking on any cases related to the unrests in Xinjiang highlights the willingness of Chinese authorities to deprive the arrested of their right to free counsel and a due legal process.
The Rafto Foundation urges Norwegian authorities to issue stronger condemnations of the violent crackdowns, and to raise its strong concern by the apparent wish of the Chinese authorities to take swift action, regardless of their human rights commitments guaranteeing the right to fair trial.

Marginalised minorities
The Rafto Foundation has since awarding the 2004 Rafto Prize to the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, at the time still imprisoned in Xinjiang, voiced its strong concern for the increasing oppression and marginalisation of Uyghurs in China.

The recent events come as a grim déjà vu 12 years after similar peaceful Uyghur protests were brutally struck down in the Xinjiang city of Ghulja, a massacre which also was followed by mass arrests, and which still has seen no independent inquiry. Many of the arrested are still imprisoned. The violent 5 July crackdown adds to the list of brutal oppression of Uyghurs, and adds to the hopelessness felt by Uyghurs in Xinjiang as well as in exile.

Norwegian authorities must apply stronger pressure
The Rafto Foundation reiterates its urgent call for the Norwegian authorities to immediately raise their concerns for the rights of those arrested after the 5 July unrest.

The Rafto Foundation also urges the international community to apply more pressure on Chinese authorities with regards to the marginalisation and suppression of their minorities’ rights.

http://www.rafto.no/?page=20&news=131&PHPSESSID=9543901234dd824a81b2120c3a36be6b

China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race

2009-07-31T19:58:00.001-07:00

China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009

SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.

The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.

What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.

This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.

The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.

The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.

Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.

China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.

Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.

At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.

I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.

A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”

Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.

Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.

E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/world/asia/01iht-letter.html

Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side

2009-07-31T19:57:00.001-07:00

Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side

Peter Alford, Rowan Callick and Michael Sainsbury | August 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian

UIGHUR leader Rebiya Kadeer has replaced the Dalai Lama as China's enemy No 1.

THE new No1 hate figure targeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party arrives in Australia in a few days: Rebiya Kadeer.

Although the Dalai Lama is also due to come to Australia later in the year, Kadeer -- the charismatic 63-year-old president of the World Uighur Association -- has in the past month seized the Tibetan spiritual leader's place as China's Public Enemy No 1.

This has sent her global profile soaring, and attracted unprecedented interest in the Uighur cause.

Her hot-to-handle visit next week -- against which Beijing has protested in vain -- is further battering Australia's already rocky relationship with China.

And it points the way to future tensions between Beijing and democratic liberal countries more generally, as the Chinese government seeks to press its soft power globally, extending ever wider the circle of exiled leaders to whom it intends to provide no respite. Kadeer, who comes from Xinjiang, the Queensland-sized region of northwest China that is the home of the nine million Uighurs, lives in exile in Washington.

Last year it was the unrest and riots in Tibet, another huge region of western China, that saw the Dalai Lama blamed as a "splittist" manipulator of violent protests. This year the same mantle has been cast on Kadeer.

She has become a non-person in China, with articles that include her name being blocked by the "net police" even from the Google search engine.

What Kadeer describes as mere phone calls to her family in Xinjiang have been portrayed by Beijing as messages masterminding the inter-ethnic violence that caused about 200 deaths there a month ago.

Pan Zhiping, a researcher at Xinjiang Academy of Social Science, provides a sense of the outrage from Han Chinese, who suffered the initial casualties from the violence.

She told The Weekend Australian that Kadeer, who was one of China's wealthiest businesswomen before being jailed in 1999 for five years for political offences, "was not a good businesswoman, she just had a start-up and accumulated her money from tax evasion".

She says: "Ordinary Uighurs are not calling for independence, only so-called elite Uighur intellectuals. Rebiya was influenced by her husband, who was a third-class professor. These people agitated the street violence and manipulated extreme racism.

"She is rotten meat, the kind that only attracts flies. But she will have her verdict when the official investigation (on the riots) is finished -- lies can't be covered up. The human right she advocates are evil rights, murderers' rights." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that while being "deeply saddened by the loss of life and violence" in Xinjiang: "I will have to look at the case for exact information ... (which) I do not have."

The only inquiry so far announced is being conducted by the Chinese central government. On a visit to Japan this week, Kadeer urged the establishment of an international commission to examine what she claimed to be the disappearance of 10,000 Uighurs in Xinjiang last month.

China's ambassador to Japan said during Kadeer's stay in Tokyo: "She is a criminal," and compared her to Aum Shinrikyo, the cult leader who unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995.

Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Uighur Association of Australia, the main hosts for Kadeer's week-long visit, said: "China has blamed her for the troubles in Xinjiang in order to externalise what is an internal problem -- a classic Chinese tactic, as it also does with the Dalai Lama, to whip up nationalistic fervour, brainwashing its own citizens.

"This also transforms perceptions among ordinary Chinese of the Uighurs into an evil people, an enemy within. As a result, reconciliation now seems almost impossible," she says.

After Kadeer this week gave the foreign correspondents' club in Tokyo a lengthy, graphic and doubtless highly partisan account of the violent riots on July 5, a reporter from China's People's Daily posed what he perhaps thought was a "gotcha" question.

"It sounds like you were there," he noted. "How could you have such detailed knowledge when at the time you were tens of thousands of kilometres away in Washington?" Kadeer allowed herself a hard little smile before answering.

The element of the case against her most quoted by China's state media is a telephone tap allegedly of her saying: "Something will happen in Urumqi."

Kadeer says she learnt of the gathering Uighur unrest, provoked by a security crackdown in Xinjiang and local anger over the June mob killings of Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, and called to warn her family.

She has four sons -- two imprisoned since July 5 -- a daughter, numerous grandchildren and a brother still in Xinjiang, and says family members are the usual suspects to be rounded up when trouble flares.

She does not deny being closely plugged into contemporary affairs in Xinjiang, which, like other dissident Uighurs, she prefers to call East Turkestan, even after five years in Chinese prisons and four years in US exile.

It's one of the reasons, she says, the Chinese authorities hate her so.

That, and the fact she was once a poster-woman for ethnic integration in post-Maoist China, a self-made multi-millionaire and influential figure on policy towards the 55 minority nationalities -- who comprise 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population -- until radicalised by a violent suppression of Uighur unrest in 1997.

Beijing has sought to reposition her World Uighur Congress (WUC) rather than the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as the main driver of Uighur violence, linking both to al-Qa'ida and international Islamic terrorism.

There is no reason to doubt the genuine repugnance among Chinese officials and representatives abroad that so soon after the killings of at least 192 people, mostly Han Chinese according to the official account, countries such as Japan and Australia are hosting visits by the strongest voice in the world for Uighur separatism.

It was notable this week in Tokyo how carefully Japanese officials and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party handled her visit -- a likely indicator of the sort of damage they feared to China relations.

But Kadeer got her visa and she got her LDP meeting, which suggests the governments of Japan -- and Australia, the US and other countries -- do not believe the Beijing narrative about her associations with Islamic terrorism.

ETIM is a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- originally on China's post-9/11 advice to George W. Bush's White House. Yet Kadeer has been given refuge in Washington since 2005 and granted visas by countries, including Australia, that are members in good standing of the coalition against Islamic terror.

In the post-Guantanamo world, the cloak of international legitimacy cannot be earned by simply designating separatist movements as associates of international terrorists.

In fact, many Americans find it harder to tolerate evidence recently produced that the Bush defence department allowed Chinese interrogators inside Guantanamo to question 22 Uighur terror suspects in 2002 -- though the same department flatly refused American congressmen and women access to camp inmates.

The US has refused Chinese demands to return them, and the last of them are now being relocated to third countries -- five at first to Albania, and now four to Bermuda and 13 to Palau, which recognises Taiwan rather than China diplomatically.

Kadeer told The Weekend Australian in Tokyo: "While I was in China I followed the Communist Party (line) and was obedient to the government.

"I know well when the Chinese government says something which is lies and which is truth. It knows if it stops the voice of Rebiya, it stops the voice of the Uighurs in the world."

Small, intense and unusually charismatic, Kadeer talks as if she embodies the Uighur spirit of independence, and particularly since July 5 that seems close to the truth.

The WUC, a confederation of Uighur exile groups, is passionate but thinly spread and seems not very well organised. When Kadeer came to Tokyo two years ago, soon after taking over the leadership, she attracted only scant media attention, and certainly not three official protests from Beijing.

But in the past 25 days, she and her cause have attracted more headlines and sympathetic interest than in the four years since she arrived in the US, after Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's personal intervention with the Chinese led to her release.

Kadeer's name and cause are increasingly linked in international commentary with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet.

And she is exploiting that association for all it's worth.

"Of course, I have chosen the way of the Dalai Lama, so I will travel all over the world, I will give true information about East Turkestan -- I want to become (like) the Dalai Lama, to bring my homeland to freedom and liberation," she says.

While disavowing violence, Kadeer now refuses to rule out shifting from her established position of seeking proper political and religious autonomy for Xinjiang within the People's Republic, to a campaign for full independence.

That decision, she says, will be taken by the WUC once its campaign for an independent UN investigation of the July 5 uprising and the subsequent Chinese crackdown is settled.

Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, has put a large dent in what one pro-Beijing Uighur official recently called "the Great Wall of ethnic unity" allegedly bounding both the Han Chinese and the minority nations.

She is an opponent who came from inside the wall, who says policies she once supported and thrived under are now being turned to crushing the Uighurs.

She seems less inclined than the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet 50 years ago, to moderate her criticisms of Beijing in order to foster a dialogue on autonomy. "I cannot wait 50 years," she says.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25863570-2703,00.html

An old problem on China's new frontier

2009-07-31T19:55:00.001-07:00

An old problem on China's new frontier
By Konstanty Gebert

WARSAW - Had the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev not failed, the riots and death recently seen in Xinjiang could have been taking place in Russia.

Instead of hearing about a crackdown in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, we might be reading about hundreds killed on the streets of Almaty, and columnists would be making comparisons to the bloody crushing of Ukrainian independence demonstrations in Lvov the previous year.

As with China today, there would have been some feeble international condemnation, and some speculation about possible links between Kazakh militants and exile groups, or Islamic fundamentalists. Experts would remind us that Kazakhstan had never been a country, and that Ukrainian claims to independence are historically dubious. Substitute Xinjiang for Kazakhstan and Tibet for Ukraine and you get the picture.
Armed Chinese soldiers in riot gear walk past ethnic Uighur men and a Han Chinese woman along a main street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region . Pic courtesy Reuters.com

But that putsch, thankfully, ended as a farce. The decaying Soviet regime was unable to crush Russia's growing democratic movement - it would take Vladimir Putin to do that a decade later. By opting for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership set their country on a road starkly different from the one on which Russia subsequently embarked.

Though China's policies have brought about Pinochet-style economic growth, if on the scale of a country that is almost a continent unto itself, they have also ensured that there is in no freedom for anyone, including the Han majority. This, in turn, means that, while Kazakhstan and Ukraine are independent, Tibet and Xinjiang alternate between phases of violent agitation and bloody repression.

Though Russia today is autocratically governed, the introduction of a Chinese-style dictatorship seems hardly plausible, while GDP per capita was $15,800 last year, or almost three times that of China. Yet a majority of the Chinese population seems to support its' government's policies, including its brutal suppression of minorities and denial of democratic freedoms.

In fact, the latter seems to be the price paid for the success of the former. This is not a novel phenomenon. In 1863, the Russian democratic émigré thinker Alexander Herzen, commenting on the brutal crushing of the Polish uprising by the Tsarist army, wrote in his publication Kolokol that acceptance of violence on the streets of Warsaw meant the acceptance of violence on the streets of St. Petersburg. Oppression is a package deal. His comments cost him his Russian readership, and Kolokol had to close down.

When Herzen was writing his words, Moscow was not only busy successfully putting down the Poles, reasserting its rule there for another half-century, but also, together with China, carving up Central Asia, known then as Turkestan. The eastern part of the region fell under Chinese rule, and was renamed Xinjiang, or New Frontier.

Each time Chinese rule weakened, as in the 1930's and 1940's, short-lived East Turkestan Republics were established, with Russian support, only to flounder when Russia and China struck new deals. The leadership of the second East Turkestan Republic was presumably murdered on Stalin's orders, when the plane carrying it to Beijing for talks allegedly crashed in Soviet airspace.

Since then, East Turkestan has existed solely on paper, as a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a would-be competitor of the United Nations set up in 1991. In Xinjiang itself, the current agitation is more social than nationalist in character, and targets cultural oppression (Han Chinese by now make up half of the region's population) rather than expressing aspirations for independence. Yet the recent bloodbath there is almost sure to change that, as violence unavoidably breeds radicalization.

In the short and medium term, China's rule in Xinjiang and Tibet seems secure: the international community will not challenge a Security Council member state. Only its own citizens could do that, but Herzen's package deal seems to prevent that: just like the Tibetans, the Uighurs elicit not Han solidarity, but a braying for their blood - somewhat understandable, given that ordinary Han in Lhasa and Urumqi were made to pay with their own for China's misdeeds. In the longer term, however, the Chinese authorities have every reason to be worried: Xinjiang will grow to be a problem like Tibet.

Indeed, though the UNPO, to which both belong - alongside Assyria and the Buffalo River Dene Nation - has a vaguely Marx Brothers' air to it (one expects Freedonia, the mythical country of which Groucho Marx was prime minister, to be on the roster), six member states already have left it to join the UN, and Kosovo, now independent if lacking UN recognition, will eventually follow. Political maps are never carved in stone.
It is therefore safe to assume that not only obscure academics and correspondents, but officials in Beijing as well, are now busy studying the history of the Ghulja uprising and of Osman Batur's guerillas. Come to think of it: whatever happened to the Poles, whom Russia so successfully put down in 1863?

Konstanty Gebert is an essayist and author of ten books on Polish and European history. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009. Exclusive to the Sunday Times

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/090726/International/sundaytimesinternational-08.html

Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China’s ethnic relations

2009-07-23T16:12:00.001-07:00

Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China’s ethnic relations
Temtsel Hao, 23 - 07 - 2009
The interplay between local identity, state policy, and economic change is at the core of the violent events in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009. The Chinese government’s predicament in finding a workable policy in response is severe, says Temtsel Hao.
23 - 07 - 2009

The ethnic protests and clashes in China's westernmost region of Xinjiang on 5-6 July 2009 and the following days have caused around 200 deaths. The deadly violence, mainly between the Uyghur (and Muslim) population and the Han Chinese - but also involving the security forces killing some protesting Uyghurs, in circumstances that are not yet clear - has shocked and polarised public opinion across China. They have also focused renewed attention on the sensitive and complex theme of the relationship between different ethnic groups in the People's Republic of China.

Temtsel Hao is a journalist based in London, working for the BBC World Service

Also by Temtsel Hao in openDemocracy:

"Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009The argument can be heard on either side of the divide in Xinjiang that the political arrangements in the region don't match its socio-economic circumstances. Uyghurs are unhappy with the tokenism of "nationality policies", and demand more participation and more of a share in the Xinjiang economy and its social proceeds; Han Chinese are unhappy with what they see as official favouritism towards the Uyghurs, and seek to remove the guarantees of autonomy and special treatment that Uyghurs (and other ethnic minorities) are supposed to benefit from.

A balance of favour

The events of early July 2009 - which mainly, not not exclusively, occurred in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi - reflect the deeper processes of rapid economic growth and social transformation during in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, the national policies of China's leadership in opening the economy, creating new labour-market mechanisms, and encouraging internal-migration flows have had profound effects in this region (as elsewhere).

These processes have accompanied China's historic shift from a centrally planned to a market economy, which has made it the manufacturing centre of the world. Many have benefited, but there have also been great problems, including new development gaps - between urban and rural areas, coastal regions and inland/frontier areas, and prosperous and poor in the same places. In addition, there are huge insecurities: many people in China have lost the assurance of a lifetime job and the social safety-nets that they enjoyed a generation ago.

Also on Xinjiang in openDemocracy:

James Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)

Henryk Szadziewski, "Kashgar"s old city: the politics of demolition" (3 April 2009)

Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation" (6 July 2009)

Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs" (9 July 2009)

Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert" (14 July 2009)

Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink" (15 July 2009)In Xinjiang, this "uneven development" has in the eyes of many Uyghurs become institutionalised along ethnic lines to their disadvantage; the result has been that they have been increasingly marginalised in the region's economic life (see Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert", 14 July 2009).

The Uyghur intellectual and scholar Ilham Tohti - who was detained in the wake of the Urumqi events - has offered two examples. First, the Xinjiang production and construction corps is an all-embracing institution that brings together the communist party, government, army, farms, and factories; it has taken the best farmland in Xinjiang and diverted rivers from the upper streams to its further advantage. Second, Xinjiang has been supplying oil, coal, gas and cotton to more developed Chinese regions, yet locals have to pay higher prices for some of those products than are charged in inland Chinese areas.

Ilham Tohti argues that China's Xinjiang policy is worse even than "colonialism". When foreign capital comes to china or other less-developed countries, local people at least have the chance to be "exploited" in "sweatshop factories". But when China establishes state farms, businesses, and oil companies on its own territory, it imports large numbers of Chinese workers to the area concerned. Uyghur workers have in the main not been absorbed by state factories in Xinjiang; some though have been sent 4,000 kilometres away to work in factories in Guangdong province, where the deaths of two of them in a conflict with Han Chinese workers on 25-26 June 2009 played a role in the outbreak of the violence in Urumqi (see Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs", 9 July 2009).

An ideological disguise

Chinese communist forces entered Xinjiang in 1949 and disbanded the republic of East Turkestan. Since then, under successive systems of effective local independence and regional autonomy, China has created a facade of equality between the "nationalities". In practice, however, the new China continues to implement some elements of an older "frontier strategy": that is, using large-scale Chinese emigration to consolidate the strategically important regions across its western frontier (see "China and its Continental Borders", China Perspectives [2008/3]).

Human Rights Watch estimates that Han Chinese in Xinjiang composed 6% of the entire regional population in 1949, but had become 40% by 2007. The current figure does not include either members of the Chinese military and their families, or unregistered migrant workers. In addition, the aforementioned Xinjiang production and construction corps is the largest ever of its kind; its control of farms, mines, factories, towns, schools, hospitals, police and courts makes it in effect an independent kingdom transplanted into Xinjiang (and, significantly, it is praised by Chinese media as a "deterrence to guarantee the state's unity").

The establishment of Chinese immigration and dominance in Xinjiang, however, took place under the disguise of an ideology that was at once "supranational" and "socialist". In the communist doctrine of "proletarian internationalism", nations and national sentiments - whether of the Chinese or non-Chinese peoples - are regarded as temporary, destined to disappear into a nation-less communist commonwealth at a higher level of development.

Also in openDemocracy on Tibet:

Tenzin Tzundue, "Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown" (15 August 2006)

Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories" (18 March 2009)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq" (27 March 2008)

Donald S Lopez, "How to think about Tibet" (28 March 2008)

George Fitzherbert, "Tibet's history, China's power" (28 March 2008)

Dibyesh Anand, "Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind" (1 April 2008)

Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt" (4 April 2008)

Wenran Jiang, "Tibetan unrest, Chinese lens" (7 April 2008)

Ivy Wang, "China's netizens and Tibet: a Guangzhou report" (8 April 2008)

Wang Lixiong, "China and Tibet: the true path" (15 April 2008)

openDemocracy, "Chinese intellectuals and Tibet: a letter" (15 April 2008)

openDemocracy, "Tibet scholars and China: a letter" (22 April 2008)

Chang Ping, "Tibet: looking for the truth" (8 May 2008)

Fred Halliday, "Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure" (9 May 2008)

Woeser, "The Fear in Lhasa" (10 March 2009)

Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present" (18 March 2009)

Temtsel Hao, "Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009) The supranational policy and this associated ideology were equally against local ethnic nationalisms and manifestations of Chinese chauvinism, the latter including the oppressive policies toward non-Chinese peoples pursued by (for example) the pre-1949 Chinese warlords, the Manchu dynasty, and the Kuomintang. The legitimacy of Xinjiang's integration into China is based on the claim that the common interests of the toiling masses of Chinese and non-Chinese alike made unnecessary any demands for national self-determination by local non-Chinese peoples.

An ethnic revival

Since the late 1980s the supranational emphasis of Chinese nationality policy and theory has increasingly collided with the effects of China's market-reform policies. The older official ideology has little purchase on the emergent social realities, and the state's response has been to swerve to the right by emphasising statist cohesion and the idea of an all-inclusive Chinese nation. These notions need legitimacy, which is met in part by theories that have emerged to compete for prominence - among them the "Zhong Hua nation", the "descendants of Yan and Huang", the "people of the dragon", and other quintessences of "Chinese culture" and "Chineseness".

The period when China's official ideology has swung rightwards has coincided with the country's acquisition of tremendous economic strength and political influence in the international arena. The perception of a rising China is acutely felt at home. In particular, it acts to reinforce Han Chinese ethnic identity and nationalist sentiment; this in turn influences the internal ethnic relationship, by heightening the sense of insecurity felt by non-Chinese minorities facing economic marginalisation and cultural assimilation (see Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt", 4 April 2008).

Two more positive factors intensify the process of a sharpening of ethnic identity in regions such as Xinjiang. First, many people in Xinjiang share close ethnic affinities with those in the five central Asian and majority-Muslim states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These states, which emerged out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, represent a powerful reminder to the Uyghur in Xinjiang of their distinct identity and potentially different political loyalty in relation to their Han Chinese neighbours.

Second, the past two decades have witnessed the spread of new communication technologies such as the internet and the mobile phone. These have facilitated new forms of discourse, organisation and information flows on the part of the Uyghurs and comparable peoples. The connections between people in Xinjiang and those across the border or in the wider diaspora are an important part of this (see Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation", 6 July 2009).

At the same time, the creation of online networks also creates the possibility that false or malicious rumours can have nefarious effects in the real world; the Guangdong violence and that in Urumqi were characterised by the online fanning of hatred between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.

Much of this online orchestration of prejudice exploits pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. It is important to recognise here that these can work both ways. For example, at the national people's congress in Beijing in 2004, I witnessed the then Xinjiang governor Ismail Tiliwaldi react with visible irritation to a formulaic question from a Hong Kong journalist that invited his comment on the large number of common crimes allegedly committed by Uyghurs in Chinese cities. Tiliwaldi reminded the questioner of the need for balanced reporting, and added that ethnic population-exchange went in both directions.

The huge number of Chinese people who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades include many who have been through China's own prison system; some too are survivors of the many large state prisons scattered across Xinjiang's Gobi desert). Indeed, from the Manchu dynasty to 1949, Xinjiang played a role not unlike colonial-era Australia to Britain, as the enforced destination of many of its convicts. Members of local non-Chinese minorities complain about the high proportion of convicts among the Chinese immigrant population.

The emergence of deep divisions along ethnic lines - even when they fall, as they usually do, very far short of violence - suggests that much more than cosmetic repairs and propaganda spins will be needed if the fundamental problems in areas such as Xinjiang are to be addressed.

A quiet end

Today, many Chinese regard the old system of nationality-based regional autonomy as a proven failure. They criticise what they perceive as the central state's excessively benign policy towards ethnic minorities, claiming that this extends even to treating people as above the law. They blame especially the so-called "two restraints and one leniency" policy announced by the CCP in 1984, which enjoins leniency in restraining and prosecuting crimes committed by members of minorities.

These attitudes fuel nostalgia for the "good old days" of the 1950s, when Xinjiang was under the iron reign of General Wang Zhen - notorious for his merciless handling of ethnic and religious affairs, including the massacre of large numbers of minority people. Even Mao Zedong criticised Wang Zhen for his "ultra-left" zealotry and later removed from his Xinjiang post.

Wang Lixiong recounted his personal experience in Xinjiang in his book Our West Region is Your East Turkistan. He encountered the sharp contrast of views expressed by the different nationalities about General Wang Zhen and to the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai,who had ruled Xinjiang in the 1930-40s. The ethnic minorities in Xinjiang regarded Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as ruthless mass-killers; some even called Wang Lequan, the current Xinjiang party boss, "Wang Shicai". But most Chinese in Xinjiang see Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as national heroes who expanded and consolidated Chinese territory.

These attitudes influence political beliefs. Many influential Chinese figures - including Qian Xuesen, and other leading intellectuals and dissidents - have asked the Chinese authorities to re-examine the "favouritist" nationality policy. Some even have called for the cancellation of the existing nationality-based autonomous regions, and returned Xinjiang to its status as a Chinese province. The American model of "melting-pot" assimilation is widely regarded as the solution to China's ethnic problems.

Wang Lixiong too has more recently argued that China can do without the system of nationality-based regional autonomy, as long as individual rights are guaranteed under a democratic system. He says: "If individual rights are guaranteed, naturally the rights of ethnic groups consisting of individuals can be guaranteed; hence the nationality-based regional autonomy is no longer needed" (see Asia Week interview with Wang Lixiong, in Woeser's blog).

An impossible problem

A wider view, however, suggests that there is little empirical evidence in international history for the view of Chinese dissidents that democracy is something of a miracle solution to ethnic conflicts. Dibyesh Anand wisely comments that a "non-communist democratic China may not necessarily be more accommodative of minority interests" (see Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink", 15 July 2009).

In theory, China historically incorporated non-Chinese regions not via the will of leaders or by naked conquest, but by forging agreements with local ethnic elites - either radical (in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia) or conservative (Tibet). The basis of these agreements is a compromise between Chinese communist goals and non-Chinese nationalist demands for national autonomy or liberation. The pacts include the "seventeen-point agreement" and many other directives promulgated by Chinese communists and local non-Chinese communist and nationalist collaborators around 1949. The legitimacy of the nationality-based regional-autonomy system derives from these agreements (see James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [C Hurst, 2007]).

In another words, the major ethnic minorities of the autonomous regions consider that they joined the People's Republic of China in 1949 as groups - with their elites (revolutionary or conservative as the case may be) as their political representatives in the new system.

But after 1949, the ethnic elites within the system were gradually purged and replaced by more obedient ethnic cadres, who became the only legitimate representatives of their groups left within the system. China's lordly policy toward non-Chinese nationalism means that non-Chinese minority cadres have more worries than their Chinese counterparts about defending local interests (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009).

Now, sixty years on from 1949, the nationality system may serve a legitimation purpose for China as a multi-ethnic state - but in practice it has lost its original meaning. China is at a crossroads: after decades of capitalist reform, state control - including the nationality system - is in deep tension with forces of unrestrained economic change.

In this respect, the call for American-style assimilationism to deal with non-Chinese minorities represents support for a market-forces solution: one that (it is argued) tends to break down regional and ethnic barriers, and replace ethnic relations with individually-based economic relations. The logic is that as a result the state's core character would change from a multi-ethnic one into a homogenous nation-state.

A tough choice

The way Chinese authorities have responded to the Xinjiang riots has been criticised by both the Chinese public and Uighur exile groups. It is Chinese authority's supranational (even ostensibly "neutral") stance - seeing the riots not as an ethnic incident but as a political one - that is scorned come by Chinese (for the "official" position, see Fu Ying, "Unity is Deep in China's Blood", Guardian, 13 July 2009).

For the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other non-Chinese minorities, the great concern is how far Chinese authority can resist increasingly populist opinion and retain this limited neutrality. The answer to this question will affect how far and how much non-Chinese minorities can identify with the state. As China's society becomes more loose and state power recedes, government policy is more and more subject to social influences.

The Chinese authorities face a tough choice over how they maintain the state's legitimacy and deal with ethnic relations (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009). If they seek to respond to growing Han Chinese ethnic nationalism by accelerating assimilation of non-Chinese groups, this would provoke the minority-nationalist causes with which the Chinese state found some accommodation in 1949: national self-determination and national liberation. But if they seek to amend and improve existing multi-ethnic arrangements to improve inter-ethnic relations in autonomous regions, they risk severe problems with Chinese business interests and popular opinions.

China has no easy way out. The fires of Lhasa, and now Urumqi, cannot be extinguished without the most intelligent and sophisticated policy mix. But even that might not be enough. Several genies are out of the bottle, and flying free. Welcome to the 21st century, China.

B’nai Brith Canada draws attention to Uyghur Muslim plea for help

2009-07-23T09:54:00.001-07:00

B’nai Brith Canada draws attention to Uyghur Muslim plea for help

Written by the Jewish Tribune staff
Wednesday, 22 July 2009

TORONTO – B’nai Brith Canada has issued a call to all nations and peoples of goodwill not to let the plight of ethnic minorities in China go unchallenged at a time when authorities seem intent on fanning the flames of inter-ethnic conflict.
The Jewish human rights group issued this call in the wake of the unfolding turmoil in the capital of China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the Uyghur people have long been subject to discrimination and oppression.

“The violence and bloodshed on the streets of China’s Urumqi city is yet another example of the brutality of the Chinese regime that has a long and well-known history of human rights abuses,” said Frank Dimant, executive vice-president, B’nai Brith Canada.

“We once again call on Canada to use its good influence on the world stage to draw attention to the plight of Uyghur Muslims in China. We further urge the community of nations to raise their collective voices to ensure that no more blood is spilled as ethnic strife intensifies in the region.”
Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 July 2009 )

http://www.jewishtribune.ca/TribuneV2/index.php/200907221857/B-nai-Brith-Canada-draws-attention-to-Uyghur-Muslim-plea-for-help.html

State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009 - China

2009-07-23T08:08:00.001-07:00

State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009 - China

Contributed by Marusca Perazzi

The year 2008 was marked by a spectacular Olympic Games, intended to promote China's prestige and influence, a devastating earthquake in western Sichuan province, and a string of social instability issues, infringements of rights and denial of fundamental freedoms, highlighting the challenges the Chinese authorities face in governing a Han-dominant multi-ethnic China.

Governance and 'Regional National Autonomy'

In 2008, the government announced its ambitious goal of attaining democratic social progress by 2020, through its official articulation of the Chinese 'nation'. China has never recognized any minority as 'indigenous' or as having special rights. The 'autonomous' regions, districts, and counties where most minorities live, and that today cover 64 per cent of China's territory, offer mostly symbolic recognition of 'minority autonomy', as the Han Chinese increasingly dominate even in those areas.

During 2008 mounting turmoil in minority-populated areas revealed the contradicitons of living under national policies that force minorities to forge a closer identification with the 92 per cent Han majority. While the government promoted more non-Han regional governors to work on the implementation of minority policies, it ensured that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) remained firmly in control. It also continued to grant some minorities, including the Dai and Yao, more freedom to promote their cultural heritage. Through permitting expressions of ethnic identity, such as ethnic folklore and music, that do not challenge the state's control over minority affairs, the authorities bolstered the country's self-image as a tolerant and united multicultural society.

Minority rights and fundamental freedoms

Deep-seated issues for both the Han majority and minorities in governance and the rule of law, employment and social welfare, land seizure and expropriation came to a head in 2008. Central and local authorities heavily monitored and circumscribed minorities' activities, disregarding genuine discontent caused by discriminatory national policies that prevent them from fully enjoying their rights. The March 2008 Tibetan protests and riots in Lhasa, fuelled by deep resentment towards Han dominance, spilled over into Tibetan-inhabited areas in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu, leading to increased tensions, including between Tibetan Buddhists and Hui Muslims.

The authorities relied on emergency measures to ensure stability, to quell rising dissent and to keep dormant frustration from escalating in minority-inhabited areas in Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Hubei, Guangxi, Heilongjiang and Yunnan. Instead of addressing the underlying institutional factors, the state stepped up security in the Tibet Autonomous Republic (TAR) and the strategic Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Republic (XUAR), home to Muslim Turkic-speaking Uyghur and Hui Sunni, and cracked down on protests in Hotan and Kashgar. Some religious minorities were concerned about measures that support atheism in schools; deny the full exercise of rights of belief, freedoms of expression and movement; and fail to tackle discriminatory practices in education and employment. The government continued to subject minority Buddhists, Muslims and Christians to a strict regulatory framework. It also silenced Tibetan and Uyghur voices, by imposing curfews, preventing mass prayers and impeding international pilgrimages. The public security bureau closely monitored minority rights activists and often equated their peaceful activism with social unrest to be repressed. In the TAR, the authorities renewed the 'patriotic education' campaign to convince the masses to 'fight splittism and protect stability'. Across the country, religious leaders were targeted for ongoing state indoctrination and the circulation of religious publications and texts was curtailed.

Harassment of minority communities along the North Korean border intensified, with local authorities preventing unregistered children of mixed ethnic origin from accessing schooling. The administration in XUAR barred minority children from participating in religious activities, and prohibited teachers from publicly expressing their faith, and students from attending services and receiving private religious teaching. Following the September 2008 local ban on headscarves in Hotan, Muslim women were forced to unveil their faces in public, and others were discouraged from fasting during Ramadan. In Sichuan's Tibetan areas, monks were reportedly removed from monasteries, and hundreds of children shifted from the attached schools to public schools to receive compulsory education.

The authorities used 'anti-terrorism' as a justification to crack down on all forms of perceived dissent on the part of minorities in the TAR and the XUAR. This included prohibitions on language use, harassment of defence lawyers, forced disappearances, widespread arrests and sentencing of an unknown number of Tibetans and the indictment of 1,154 Uyghurs charged with 'endangering state security'. Unaffiliated and unregistered religious groups, including Christians in the eastern regions, continued to be subject to government interference and increased police surveillance, arrests, detention and torture. In November 2008, the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) criticized the discriminatory treatment of minority groups in China and the 'alleged reluctance of police forces and the authorities to conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into discriminatory or violent practices'.

Language policies, identity challenges, and resistance in minority education

The state's achievements in its endeavour to provide 'free' basic education for all are creditable. However, China's minorities have been mainly treated as a single entity in education reforms, and the cultural, regional and developmental differences that distinguish them have been largely ignored. The implementation of national education policies has produced mixed results and additional challenges for minority groups during 2008. The National Commonly Used Language Law (2000) guarantees standard Chinese (Putonghua) as the national common language in the political, economic, social and education spheres. There are no formal restrictions in using Putonghua and minority languages simultaneously, but there have been increased limitations on the official use of minority languages and access to education and employment have consequently been affected.

The government reiterated its emphasis on the application of minorities' language policies (of over 120 spoken languages, both with and without a written script), while incorporating the mastering of Putonghua, the official form of spoken Chinese. Such policies have worked best to reduce illiteracy in communities without a formal writing system (Dongxiang), or where language use is limited to some social domains (Zhuang). For others with well-established written scripts (Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Yi), where minority groups strongly identify with their native language, policies that limit their use in school have been met with increasing resistance. Minority learners and parents increasingly perceive formal schooling to be more about repressing minorities' culture than promoting their education and cultural integration. The 2008 UNESCO Education for All global monitoring report sees this trend as of particular relevance to predominantly pastoralist minority communities. For the Daurs, Ewenkis, Hezhen and Tibetans, in fact, formal education poses further problems, ranging from accessibility of schools to the availability of bilingual teachers qualified to work with pastoralist children. Nomadic Mongolian communities also continued to sacrifice their linguistic and cultural heritage in education. The government has yet to balance policy to support linguistic diversity and also take into account minorities' education needs.

The amended China Compulsory Education Law (2006), adopted to ensure attainment of compulsory education in rural areas, increases central government control over teaching materials in minority classes and advanced further the use of Putonghua. Mongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs in 2008 continued to suffer disproportionately from unequal or restricted access to quality education or the implementation of inappropriate education strategies. In the Tibetans' case, unwanted assimilation imposed through exclusionary education policies and practices, including bilingual teaching, neither serves the aim of communities' self-development, nor does it open the way to better prospects for employment, housing and adequate standard of living.

The government's commitment to invest more financial and human resources to redress discriminatory practices in language use and development of disadvantaged minorities, have yet to impact on the structural and institutional limitations. The 2007-8 increased level of governmental funding has not led to the educational development of minority communities. Additional investment is required to help remove gender-based discrimination towards minority girls affected by power relations in the community and family commitments, including early marriage, and changes in institutional education policies that do not respect their traditional roles. Gender awareness advocacy pilots in Guangxi and education initiatives in the Gansu significantly increased the enrolment of minority girls in schools by providing financial support, teacher training to minority women and community participation in school planning. But commitments such as training of minority teachers and improved school management in minority areas still have some way to go.

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4a66d9bbc.html

China Fears Ethnic Strife Could Agitate Uighur Oasis

2009-07-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

China Fears Ethnic Strife Could Agitate Uighur Oasis
Alan Chin for The New York Times

The oldest section of Kashgar, in the Xinjiang region of western China, is the heart of Uighur culture, but it is being razed for modernization projects.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: July 22, 2009

KASHGAR, China — Ali the tour guide seemed nice enough and his English flowed with grammatical perfection — a useful attribute in a city where most people speak a Turkic language that sounds nothing like Chinese.

Alan Chin for The New York Times

Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, above, was closed during the recent turmoil in Urumqi. A protest outside the mosque was quickly dispersed.

“Sure, I will take you wherever you want to go, but first I have to call my friend and see if he will drive us,” Ali said, turning away. After a quick exchange, he hung up the phone and politely announced that his friend was actually a government minder who would soon be arriving to guide the would-be clients away from any potential trouble.

The destination his “friend” had in mind? The airport, where the reporters, subject to a ban on foreign journalists, would be escorted onto the next flight out of town.

“Sorry,” Ali said as the journalists prepared to flee in a taxi. “But if I didn’t make that call, I would get in big trouble.”

Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis and backpacker lure, has been besieged by fear since ethnic rioting about two weeks ago claimed at least 197 lives in Urumqi, the capital of this northwestern expanse known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Although the two cities are separated by about 700 miles of punishing desert and snow-draped mountains, the authorities are especially anxious about potential unrest in Kashgar, a city of 3.4 million that is 90 percent Uighur, a Muslim minority that has long had a mercurial relationship with the Han Chinese who govern Xinjiang.

The authorities have good reason to be skittish. Last August, at least 16 military police officers were killed in an attack here, unnerving the government just as dignitaries and athletes were arriving in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. The police called it a terrorist strike by two Uighur men armed with explosives and machetes, though some witnesses later challenged that version of events.

In the early 1990s, Kashgar was also the scene of bombings and demonstrations; at least 21 people were killed and thousands were arrested during one particular army crackdown. The city has long been a crucible for Uighur self-determination, even if nationalist aspirations were never the same after a Chinese warlord vanquished the newborn East Turkestan Republic, a short-lived nation that called Kashgar its capital for a few months in 1933.

Although it is rapidly being bulldozed in the name of modernization, Old Kashgar and its ancient dusty warrens remain the heart of Uighur culture and a beguiling draw for tourists. To China’s leadership, however, the city is also an incubator for those seeking to create a Uighur homeland by the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and a handful of other predominantly Muslim countries whose names end with “stan.”

This time around, Kashgar has been relatively quiet. During the turmoil in Urumqi, a crowd of 200 people tried to protest outside the city’s Id Kah Mosque, the largest in China, and were quickly dispersed by the police.

But while journalists in Urumqi can roam with relative freedom, the few foreign reporters who made it to Kashgar were promptly hustled out of town.

“The situation may look calm now, but it could change at any second,” a local government official told Mark MacKinnon, a writer for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, as he and his colleagues were sent to the airport.

The uncertainty and sense of isolation have been only magnified by the blocking of access to the Internet and shutdown of text messaging and international phone service that has severed communications in Kashgar and the entire region. The blackout has been especially challenging for export companies, banks, factory owners and academics, and some of them say they have been told that Internet and phone service will be curtailed until at least October, when China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution.

“I’m expecting a group of Swiss tourists next week, but I have no way of knowing whether they’re still coming,” said one beleaguered tour operator.

Like Urumqi, which has been flooded with soldiers since July 5, Kashgar is patrolled by young men in military camouflage, many of whom ride through the city day and night, their green army trucks draped with ostensibly calming slogans like “National Separatists Are Our Enemy.”

But the government’s most effective weapon against potential trouble is largely unseen: the neighborhood committees made up of appointed Uighur cadres and citizens who, driven by fear or ambition, are ready to do the government’s bidding.

“You have to be careful because informers are everywhere,” said Ismail, a secondary school teacher who used only one name for his own safety. He said his brother had been detained after publicly criticizing plans to tear down the old mud-and-straw homes that, until recently, flanked Kashgar’s historic mosque. “I would not trust anyone if I were you,” he said.

To China’s nervous leadership, Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis filled with dusty warrens, could be an incubator for those seeking to create a Uighur homeland in the Xinjiang region.

His words were not hyperbole. By late last week, hotel clerks, tour guides and taxi drivers had been instructed to be on the lookout for pesky foreign journalists. A woman employed by a state-owned tourism company told of a meeting during which her boss warned that people caught assisting reporters would lose their jobs — as would members of their immediate families.

The campaign appeared to be extremely effective. When his passengers asked to be taken to a rural county known for its unemployed and disaffected residents, one Uighur driver called the police and then warned other drivers against helping the passengers escape.

After several close encounters with the authorities, the foreigners made it to the well-irrigated countryside that forms a lush buffer between Kashgar and the vast Taklimakan Desert stretching 590 miles to the east. In one town, a group of old men hacking at the soil spoke rapturously about the pace of modernization that had made farming, and their lives, much easier.

“We have electricity, fertilizer and motorbikes now,” one of the men said.

Later, after some gentle prodding, the farmers allowed that life was not without difficulties. One man, pointing to a row of unfinished brick houses, said local officials had demolished the villagers’ old homes and promised that the government would pay for the construction of new ones.

“The homes they’re building are half as large, and now we have to pay half their cost,” he said as his neighbors nodded with disgust. “We don’t have that kind of money.”

The men continued on for a while, speaking animatedly as the tour guide’s face registered a kaleidoscope of troubled expressions. Their ranting done, the guide, a graduate student best left unidentified, paused before declining to render their words into English.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s better for everyone if I just pretend I didn’t hear that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/asia/23kashgar.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em

Xinjiang widens crackdown on Uighurs

2009-07-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

Xinjiang widens crackdown on Uighurs

By Kathrin Hille in Kashgar

Published: July 19 2009 17:13 | Last updated: July 19 2009 17:13

The government of the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang is stepping up security amid a widening crackdown on Uighurs after ethnic unrest earlier this month that left more than 190 dead and many more wounded.

The move came as Nuer Baikeli, Xinjiang’s regional governor, admitted in a public statement on Sunday that Chinese police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in the region, in a rare government admission of the deaths inflicted by security forces. He claimed that the rioting was an attempt by exiled separatists to split Xinjiang from China.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
China adds special riot squad to arsenal - Jul-19
In depth: China’s Uighurs - Jul-10
Xinjiang riots damage Sino-Turkish ties - Jul-14
Analysis: Trouble at the margin - Jul-10
Police kill two Uighurs in Urumqi - Jul-13

Sources informed of security planning in the wake of the unrest said the government was flying more armed police into Xinjiang as the need for continued heavy presence in and around Urumqi, the regional capital, was stretching troops thin in other parts of the region.

Armed police levels are to be raised to 130,000 before October 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

In the worst ethnic unrest in China since the Cultural Revolution, Uighurs attacked majority Han Chinese in Urumqi on July 5 after taking to the streets to protest against an ethnic clash at a factory in south China in June which left two Uighurs dead.

More than 4,000 Uighurs had been arrested since July 5, said a source briefed on security matters.

According to a person present at a Communist party meeting discussing the crackdown, Urumqi’s prisons are full and newly arrested people are being held in a People’s Liberation Army warehouse.

Armed police have established checkpoints on all roads leading in and out of Urumqi. This week all vehicles were being stopped and all passengers on long-distance buses leaving Urumqi had to disembark for identity checks.

Private cars without Uighur passengers were waved through after a quick document check for the drivers.

Vehicles with Uighur drivers or with Uighur passengers were being searched at gunpoint.

A source who receives regular briefings on the security procedures said: “It may have been possible for Uighurs to get out of Urumqi on the same day but now no one is going to slip through the net.”

The regional government warned at the weekend that Uighurs could try to take hostages and then demand that they be exchanged for members of their ethnic group.

Security is also tight beyond the regional capital. Armed police were stopping vehicles at motorway entrances and exits, toll stations and entrances and exits of towns and cities between Urumqi and Kashgar, which is south-west of the capital.

Several rural counties in Xinjiang, which the government suspects to be the home of most Uighurs involved in the riot, have been closed off entirely.

On Sunday thousands of ethnic Uighurs rallied in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to protest against the crackdown on Uighurs in China.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5aa932ee-747c-11de-8ad5-00144feabdc0.html

China says police shot dead 12 Uighurs this month

2009-07-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

China says police shot dead 12 Uighurs this month
Sat Jul 18, 2009 10:13am EDT

By Max Duncan

URUMQI, China, July 18 (Reuters) - Chinese police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in Xinjiang this month, regional governor Nuer Baikeli said on Saturday, in a rare government admission of deaths inflicted by security forces.

In Xinjiang's worst ethnic unrest in decades, Uighurs attacked majority Han Chinese in regional capital Urumqi on July 5 after taking to the streets to protest against an ethnic clash at a factory in south China in June which left two Uighurs dead.

The violence left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 wounded, mostly Han Chinese who launched revenge attacks in Urumqi days later. About 1,000 people, mostly Uighurs, have been detained in an ensuing government crackdown.

Asked to elaborate on the casualties, the governor said most of the victims sustained head wounds after they were bludgeoned with bricks and iron rods.

Police shot dead 12 armed Uighurs attacking civilians and ransacking shops after they ignored warning shots fired into the air, said Nuer Baikeli, a Uighur, a Turkic people who are largely Muslim and share linguistic and cultural bonds with Central Asia.

Of the 12, three were killed on the spot, while nine died either on their way to or after arriving at hospital.

"In any country ruled by law, the use of force is necessary to protect the interest of the people and stop violent crime. This is the duty of policemen. This is bestowed on policemen by the law," the governor said.

Beijing cannot afford to lose its grip on a vast territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.

DVD FOOTAGE

Police exercised the "greatest restraint", the governor said in a 100-minute interview with a small group of reporters, including from Reuters.

"Most of the victims were innocent civilians," Nuer Baikeli said. "The violent elements were most inhuman, barbaric ... extremely vicious, unscrupulous and brutal."

The unrest was Xinjiang's "most abominable, had the most serious consequence and the worst impact" since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, he said.

The government handed out copies of a four-odd-minute DVD with footage from police and surveillance cameras inside and outside a mosque purportedly showing three Uighurs trying to force Muslim worshippers to take to the streets.

The knife-wielding trio chased some of the worshippers when they refused, according to the footage. Two of the three were shot dead when they tried to attack patrolling police.

Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tension, fostered by an economic gap between many Uighurs and Hans, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants who now are the majority in most key cities.

Nuer Baikeli insisted the rioting was an attempt by exiled separatists to split Xinjiang from China.

He denied the government had a policy of migrating Hans to Xinjiang or forcing Uighurs to work in Chinese cities.

Nuer Baikeli said stability has been restored, and he defended the government shutting down the Internet and blocking cell phones from receiving or sending text messages, saying the moves were aimed at preventing unrest from spreading.

"Internet control was necessary ... It became a tool to spread false information," the governor said.

Xinjiang needs stability, ethnic unity and harmony to develop its economy, he said, adding that the government would invest 3 billion yuan ($441.2 million) over the next five years to give a facelift to the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar. (Additional reporting and writing by Liu Zhen and Benjamin Kang Lim)

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLI462648

Challenges go beyond Uighurs

2009-07-18T05:16:00.000-07:00

Challenges go beyond Uighurs
Domination by Beijing, migration of ethnic Han are key issues

By Austin Bay | Saturday, July 18, 2009

Rioting last week between ethnic Han Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Province left 180 people dead and 1,000 injured. Chinese police and paramilitary forces arrested 1,500.

The Beijing government insistently weighs media coverage of China. The ethnic clashes so troubled Chinese President Hu Jintao that he left the economic summit of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations. Mr. Hu's hasty departure, in front of the cameras of every global news organization, indicates how serious the Chinese government views the violence in its far northwestern province.

Although officially designated the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the region is not autonomous and, as time passes, less Uighur. Beijing dominates provincial politics, which is one reason the region's 9 million Uighurs chafe. For the Turkic and predominantly Sunni Muslim Uighurs, Beijing's policy of "Sinicization" is a key source of friction. The policy promotes the centralization of Chinese state authority on China's periphery, in the "delicate" border areas that make Beijing very nervous.

The migration of ethnic Han Chinese is another facet. The Han and Han subgroups are the dominant ethnic group in China, and to ethnic Uighur activists, the slow but massive Han migration into Xinjiang amounts to cultural and ethnic drowning and eventual Uighur assimilation as the Han population swells.

The Tibetans make the same accusation for the same reasons. Tibetans have rioted -- last year, 200 Tibetans died in a Beijing-ordered crackdown.

Uighurs, like Tibetans, have had their own state. An East Turkestan Republic briefly existed in the 1940s as distracted Chinese nationalists and communists fought the Japanese and their own civil war. The victorious communist army returned in 1949, and East Turkestan disappeared from the map. It has not disappeared from Uighur memory, however, as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) indicates.

ETIM is a testament to Uighur desperation. It is an al Qaeda affiliate. Radical Islamists offer money, weapons training and promises. One promise is: Follow Osama bin Laden, and when he establishes the global caliphate, Islamist Uighurs will rule a revived East Turkestan, just like Spanish Muslims will reconquer Spain. The four recently released Guantanamo Bay Uighurs (arrested in Afghanistan, now starting a restaurant in Bermuda) likely fell for such propaganda.

In the wake of the riots, al Qaeda's North African affiliate, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), threatens to attack Chinese workers in Africa. The Uighurs have received some ethnic support from very distant but concerned cousins. A senior Turkish government official has demanded that Turks boycott Chinese-made goods because of the Chinese crackdown. Turkey has a record for supporting the rights of ethnic Turkic peoples throughout Asia.

Turkey is also a member of NATO -- an American audience may not immediately note that fact, but Beijing's foreign ministry does.

That leads to the strategic issues that pulled Mr. Hu from the G-8 summit.

As the minorities on the periphery see it, China's "Han core" is fighting a slow war of expansion. Beijing, however, scans its borders and sees challenges and threats. Vietnam remains a latent enemy. In 1979, China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody border war. The South China Sea is a potential war zone, as Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, China and, yes, Taiwan, have conflicting claims. Taiwan is an armed thorn. Beijing's generals have been telling the world the mainland will acquire Taiwan -- preferably by diplomacy, but by force if required.

The Koreas pose problems. North Korean nukes rattle East Asia. China fears a collapse in Pyongyang would have dire economic consequences but -- worse, from Beijing's perspective -- could produce a United Korea. Imagine a super-South Korea -- modern, wealthy, militarily capable and biting into China like a bulldog.

Japan, Russia, Mongolia: The Japanese are ancient antagonists, Russia occupies Siberia (which China claims the czars stole), and the Mongolians want to be U.S. allies.

As for Central Asian Turkic peoples, Beijing fears the collapse of the Soviet Union is not complete, at least in terms of ethnic political aspirations. The Uighurs are symptomatic.

China's absorption of Tibet remains incomplete, and south of Tibet lies India. India and China fought a war in 1962.

China's Han? Perhaps the core is not so solid. Chinese Han regions (e.g., Guangdong in the south) see differences in language, culture, history and economic development.

President Hu, call your office.

Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/18/challenges-go-beyond-uighurs/

Witnesses Describe Two-Way Violence

2009-07-17T12:15:00.001-07:00

Witnesses Describe Two-Way Violence
2009-07-17

Vivid new accounts describe violence on both sides in a deadly ethnic clash in northwestern China.

AFP

A Uyghur man walks past armed Chinese security forces in Urumqi, July 17, 2009.

HONG KONG—Witnesses to deadly ethnic violence between minority Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of northwest China have described brutality on both sides of the conflict.

A Uyghur shop owner said that on July 5 he saw thousands of young Uyghurs in the streets around People's Square at the heart of the regional capital, Urumqi, who had come out to demand an inquiry into the deaths of Uyghur migrant workers at the hands of a Han Chinese mob at a factory in southern China.

"The first time I saw them was on People's Square. I heard they had gone there to request a meeting with officials and a reply on the [Shaoguan] toy factory incident, and that the officials didn't come out," he said.

"The police starting detaining people, and after that happened the Uyghurs went to Nanmen district."

"At the beginning there wasn't any fighting. More than 1,000 people went to Shanxi Alley to protest," he said, referring to an area of downtown Urumqi.

Gunshots reported

Another Uyghur, who was in the vicinity of Urumqi's Grand Bazaar, said that just past 8 p.m. he saw clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs near the Baojian Hospital. After that, he saw a mob of more than 20 Uyghurs attack any Han Chinese they saw.

"I went over to the Rebiya Trade Building. The Uyghurs were fighting the paramilitary police. I came back to Eryuan [the No.2 Hospital], and I saw more than 20 young Uyghur men. They attacked any Han Chinese they saw and injured them," he said.

He said that after 9 p.m. he began to hear gunshots near the Grand Bazaar.

He added that he saw a Uyghur mob beat a Han woman and he tried to stop them, saying they shouldn't attack women. He later saved a Han man and his mother and took them to hospital.

"I think more than 500 people died, Han and Uyghur together."

"There were more deaths of Han Chinese on the evening of July 5. There were more Uyghur deaths on July 6 and 7," he said.

Trapped in hotel

Uyghurs visiting Urumqi on business from neighboring Kazakhstan said they were trapped in their hotel, also near the Rebiya Trade Building.

"There [were] about 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese people moving around as a mob, breaking in around the Hualin district and saying that they would kill all the Uyghurs in Urumqi," he said.

"They were moving around with sticks and knives, but the police did not stop them."

The three businesspeople, two men and one woman who had stayed in the same hotel together, said they saw heavy violence against Uyghurs in their part of town.

"The number of dead Uyghurs right in front of my hotel building was around 150 to 200," the first Uyghur businessman said.

A businesswoman traveling with him said that none of the violence against Uyghurs was described by official media.

‘It was chaotic’

"I heard men and women shouting and crying. I looked outside and saw that the Chinese police were chasing people. They were running, and girls were screaming," she said.

"It was so chaotic, and I got scared ... They were beating and kicking the young men and detaining them ... Girls were running away, crying and screaming. I did not know what to do. I just watched. So much blood was shed."

"Towards the evening, there was a blackout, and then the shooting started," she said.

A second businessman in the group added: "We saw Han Chinese citizens carrying metal bars and axes, chasing, beating, and killing Uyghurs wherever they saw them."

Beijing has blamed the ethnic strife in the region on Washington-based Uyghur dissident Rebiya Kadeer, who said the rioting in Urumqi was sparked after a peaceful protest demanding an investigation into the deaths of Uyghur migrant workers at a toy factory in southern China was suppressed violently by police.

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, religious controls, and continued poverty despite China's ambitious plans to develop the vast hinterland to the northwest.

China accuses some Uyghur separatist groups of links to international terrorism.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Hailan, and by RFA's Uyghur service. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

Copyright © 1998-2009 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/witnesses-07172009121028.html

If China had drawn some stupid cartoons instead…

2009-07-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

July 16, 2009
If China had drawn some stupid cartoons instead…
Posted: 06:02 PM ET

Police brutality in China killed two ethnic Uighurs earlier this week.

Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

The recent violence in China’s western Xinjiang province has been called the ““worst civil turmoil since 1989.” This human rights catastrophe has led to the deaths of nearly 200 Uighur ethnic Muslims in the region.

But what if rather than cracking down on the Uighurs, China had drawn sophomorically offensive cartoons (a la Danish newspapers circa December 2005) instead? This different approach probably (and sadly) may have inspired a more global outcry from the greater Muslim world.

Not since the now infamous Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989 has the world seen such civil turmoil inside China. The tension revolves around the fulcrum of ethnic identity, societal discrimination and flat-out racism between the predominant ethnic majority Han Chinese (from the eastern parts of China) and minority ethnic Uighur Muslim populations indigenous to Xinjiang province along China’s western frontier.

Xinjiang is a massive western region that accounts for nearly one-sixth of China’s total land area. And it is home to the majority of the Uighurs in China. At its height in the 9th century, the Uighur empire stretched from the Caspian Sea into eastern China. The Uighurs also managed to establish independent republics twice during the 20th century before being annexed by the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Since then, the Chinese government has actively promoted the migration of the dominant Han Chinese to Xinjiang, and since the 1950’s the region’s ethnic Han community has grown from 5 to 40 percent of the region’s total population.

Although the region has seen enormous economic growth in recent years, local Uighurs have become increasingly resentful of Beijing’s political and economic control. After an Uighur uprising in 1990, for example, the Communist Party took steps to accelerate the integration of Xinjiang into China by stepping up migration into the area and increasing the security presence of baton-wielding police forces. It took control over freedom of religion in the region as well.

According to BBC World News,, Chinese authorities say more than 140 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded in riots in the mainly Muslim region since protests erupted last month. According to a recent article in Newsweek magazine in June, a resentful laborer spread rumors that Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women, leading a vengeful Han mob to attack Uighur workers. When authorities were slow to the arrest the attackers, Uighurs in Xinjiang took to the streets in protest.

Moises Naim recently noted in Foreign Policy, that “…In different countries, mullahs, imams, and assorted [Muslim] clerics have found the time to issue fatwas [religious decrees] condemning among other practices, Pokémon cartoons, total nudity during sex for married couples, and the use of vaccines against polio, not to mention Salman Rushdie. They have yet to find the time to say anything about China’s practices toward Uighurs…”

Prominent Uighur Muslims like Rebiya Kadeer (who was once celebrated by the Chinese government as the richest woman in China) have been vocal against the Chinese government’s policies of what they consider to be discrimination for years, saying that its policies “keep many Uighurs poor and badly educated.”

Outside of China’s borders, however, there has been scant coverage of the violence. And the greater Muslim world has been largely silent on the human-rights abuses taking place in the region.

One reason for this large silence may be that most people have never heard of Uighurs before. Since they are not Arab, it is not surprising that their plight is not within the current zeitgeist radar of the greater Muslim and Arab world.

Furthermore, an even more sobering thought occurs when one thinks that perhaps if the Uighurs were not Muslim we may have seen more media coverage of their situation. What would the American evangelical Republican apparatchik do if the Uighurs were Christians? We can assume that they might be indignant towards China and their continued human-rights abuses against the Uighurs.

Either way, sadly, if the Chinese government had drawn some moronic newspaper cartoons instead, we might have heard some more global condemnations (from all sides of the global political velvet rope) on these blatant human-rights violations occurring on our global watch today in China.

Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, contributor for True/Slant, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/16/if-china-had-drawn-some-stupid-cartoons-instead%E2%80%A6/

The New Great Game

2009-07-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

The New Great Game
Charles Hill, 07.16.09, 12:01 AM EDT
China's best-kept secret is out.

For years it's been a closely held secret: The People's Republic of China is an empire desperately trying to make the world think it's a state.

The riots by Uighurs in China's far northwest are not something new; the place really erupted back about the time of the American Civil War. Clashes between Han Chinese moving into the basin, range and uplands inhabited by the much different ethnic people of the Central Asian heartland began at least 2,000 years ago in the Han Dynasty. Some of the most powerful pieces in Chinese literature, like the Tang Dynasty Ballad of the Army Carts by the eighth-century poet Du Fu, tell of the bitter hardships of lonely soldiers sent to garrison military settlements far to the west of China proper.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) conquered East Turkestan in the 18th century and began to consolidate control there in the late 1800s. But the Qing court, terminally beleaguered by Western encroachments along the China coast, was too feeble to impose central control on its far-flung takings.

The collapse of the Qing in 1912 intensified China's Search for a Political Form, as historian Jack Gray titled it. Mao Zedong's successful guerrilla wars and 1949 takeover imposed the form: a Communist internationalism under which the acquisitions of dynastic empires past, as well as ethnic and nationalistic movements, were swiftly and powerfully subsumed by a Marxist-Maoist ideology aimed at bringing world revolution. The new People's Republic of China declared the far northwest to be its "Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region."

Ever since the rise and conquests of the Arabs in the seventh century, waves of Muslim influence began to reach Chinese Central Asia. Arab traders, indigenous converts, mystical Sufi enthusiasts and, eventually, the radical Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood arrived and even played a role in bringing about an end to the Qing Dynasty. Across the years, one constant theme was periodic rebellion by Muslim Uighurs and a growing sense in Beijing that the locals were intractable, treacherous and violent.

With China's rise to wealth and power in the post-Mao era, the PRC, now lacking the cover of world revolution, was forced to find some way to legitimate its possession of Xinjiang. World history's age of empire had ended by the mid-20th century. Communist China's evil twin, the USSR, had been the territorial successor to the Tsarist empire as Mao's PRC had been to the Qing.
Related Stories

You state: "a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chin....

At the Cold War's end, the Soviet Union came apart; its counterparts to China's Xinjiang became independent sovereign states and UN members. The PRC, determined to avoid a like fate, began a fervent campaign to convince the international community that all lands behind its borders, acquired in the imperial past, are inviolable internal possessions of its sovereign statehood.

Whatever the forum, notably in the United Nations and its associated international agencies, and whenever an issue touches on sovereign statehood, as when Kosovo was detached from Serbia in 2008, the PRC can be counted on as the most determined defender of the proposition that nonintervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state within the Westphalian international system is the most sacrosanct principle of world affairs. China takes every care to present itself as the perfect, and most particular, international citizen.

It's no wonder why. China's vast borderlands today encompass a dizzying variety of languages, ethnicities, religions and nationalities: Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs are the most prominent; a lengthy list of other distinctive minority peoples are spread all along China's southern and southeastern marches.

And yet China's apparent ambitions beyond its borders seem to belie its insistence on tightly wound statehood. Some of the Qing possessions not still under PRC control are in its sights--Taiwan and the entirety of the South China Sea down to Brunei are included. As the U.S. Navy is starting to realize, a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chinese "lake." If nominally still in the category of international straits or high seas, these waters would become de facto a "no go" zone for the world's shipping. Chinese authorities would have to be prenotified and approve passage there--imperial-era influence regained.

The 1989 Tiananmen killings occurred when students confronted soldiers. The uprising was crushed but left a feeling that the Chinese Revolution, which might be dated back to 1911 or even 1839, was not over. Predictions were that when the next round came, it would not be students but urban workers who would have to be put down. The Uighur riots of July 2009 look something like that but with the added volatility of ethnicity and religion at work as well.

The epicenter of the Islamist war on world order (a more accurate term than the "war on terror") is now on the Afghan-Pakistan border, a fact that should be keeping China's leaders sleepless in Beijing as a restive Uighur population in "East Turkestan," as the locals call it, offers a new front for radical Islamist warfare. Perhaps this possibility was in President Hu Jintao's thoughts as he broke off from the G-8 summit in Italy to return to oversee the Xinjiang crisis.

The July riots in Urumqi are not just one more case of "every 30 years a small rebellion," as the Uighur-Han confrontation has been described. A new concatenation of claims is taking shape.

The Chinese will have to accelerate their program to overwhelm Xinjiang with Han-dominated population, culture, and economy--to complete their centuries-long imperial plan even as they insist on their privileges as a sovereign state.

The Uighurs and their external supporters in the World Uighur Congress will seek a solution in the autonomy promised by the original creation of the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region, but they won't get it any more than Tibetans will be allowed true autonomy in their autonomous region, where another process of Chinese-ization has been long under way.

By frustrating legitimate Uighur aspirations, Beijing will provide al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants with the means to radicalize the Muslim population of China's northwest in a jihad. China's minorities policy recognizes the existence of ethnic nationalities like Uighurs and Tibetans but refuses to recognize religion. This plays into the hands of Muslim extremists. Beijing has already branded the Uighur uprising as "Islamic terrorism."

The idea of a ''clash of civilizations'' may be superseded by a clash of ''spheres of influence,'' an old concept in world affairs that has raised its head again. China is extending its de facto power westward to fit its de jure state boundaries. Russia is seeking a sphere of influence over its lost territories in Central Asia; Russia approves what the PRC is doing with the Uighurs because it wants approval for its own ambitions in the area. The U.S. has important interests there as a staging area for its ''Af-Pak'' counter-insurgency efforts.

And the rising power Turkey has come on the scene to claim a sphere of influence across all the Turkic ethnic-linguistic Central Asian lands that range well inside China's borders. The Turkish prime minister has called the situation in Xinjiang a "genocide." There are layers of complex factors in play here involving power politics, economic exploitation, ethnic rivalries and religion. A new "Great Game" is under way, and the Chinese Revolution is still not over.

Charles Hill, a former U.S. diplomat, is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he is co-director of the Hoover working group on Islamism and International Order.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/15/uighurs-china-great-game-russia-al-qaeda-opinions-contributors-charles-hill.html

In the Middle East, Little Outcry Over China's Oppressed Uighurs

2009-07-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

In the Middle East, Little Outcry Over China's Oppressed Uighurs
By Abigail Hauslohner / Cairo Thursday, Jul. 16, 2009

Armed Chinese paramilitary police in riot gear disembark a truck outside a mosque in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 13, 2009.
Armed Chinese paramilitary police in riot gear disembark a truck outside a mosque in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 13, 2009.
David Gray / REUTERS

The fatal stabbing of an Egyptian Muslim woman in a German courtroom two weeks ago sparked anger across the Muslim world and fueled demands for a formal apology from Germany. But while the region rages about the story of the "headscarf martyr," holding her up as a symbol of persecution, the plight of China's Muslim population has provoked a more muted response.

On July 5, riots broke out between China's minority Muslim Uighur population and the majority Han Chinese in the far western Xinjiang province. The government responded with a violent police crackdown and, in the end, at least 192 people were left dead. But, says Diaa Rashwan, a political analyst at the government-backed Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo: "There is not a lot of interest or attention paid to these events in the Arab and Muslim world." (See pictures of the unrest in Urumqi.)

Many Arabic news media covered the story only sporadically or failed to pick up on it until days after the riots began, and opinion writers — who were especially prolific in defense of the headscarf martyr — had very little to say about the Muslims in China. An article over the weekend in Saudi Arabia's Arab Times likened the struggle of their Uighur "co-religionists" to that of the Palestinians, and compared the Han Chinese to the Jews; and an editorial in Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper last week urged the international community to pay more attention to the crackdown. But calls for Muslim and Arab leaders to condemn the violence in China remains conspicuously absent from the regional press. (See pictures of the unrest in Urumqi.)

Which isn't necessarily surprising. Most of the region's governments — and what is largely a state-sponsored press — have several reasons to ignore China's ethnically and religiously charged clashes. To some Arab regimes, the bloody images of riot police clashing with Uighur protesters in Xinjiang's capital last week were strikingly familiar, because the same thing happens at home. "They make the same systematic separation of opponents, of Islamic groups, of opposition groups, and they arrest many and they kill many," says Essam el-Erian, a leader of Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood, comparing Arab regimes to the Chinese government. "How could they criticize the Chinese? They are in the same boat." (Read "A Brief History of the Uighurs.")

Indeed, the Uighurs and the popular Islamist Muslim Brotherhood have much to commiserate over. The Uighurs complain of religious and cultural persecution and economic marginalization by China's Han-dominated government. Not unlike Egypt's heavy-handed treatment of the Brotherhood — which is banned from participating in politics, and whose members are frequently subject to arrests and interrogations — China also limits the Uighurs' international travel, and maintains a degree of control over the sermons they provide at local mosques.

So far, Turkey has been the only government in the region to offer strong condemnation of China's actions, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan likening the crackdown to "genocide." Turkey shares linguistic and cultural ties with China's Uighurs, and its leaders' criticism of the Chinese government is made easier, says Erian, because "they have a democratic system." (Read "China's War in the West.")

This week, some signs of protest were also evident in Jordan, where, according to U.S.-funded Arabic satellite network Al-Hura, 40 Jordanian lawmakers submitted a letter to the head of parliament calling on the government to formally condemn the events in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the Jordanian Moderate Islamic Party encouraged Arab and Islamic governments to take a stance on the "practices against Muslims in Germany and China." But no formal government statements have followed.

A large factor in the regional silence, according to local analysts, is trade. "There are other political and economic interests and challenges," says Hala Mustafa, editor-in-chief of Egypt's government-affiliated Al-Ahram Quarterly Democracy Review. China has a significant economic presence in the Middle East, particularly where it fills the gaps left by U.S. sanctions. According to U.S. government statistics, China is both Iran and Sudan's biggest trade partner, and either the main or secondary source of imports for most of the other countries in the region. (Read: "How Iran Might Beat Future Sanctions: The China Card.")

There is also a potential double standard to consider. In the case of Egypt, "China is not involved in or critical about any of the political challenges in Egypt and it doesn't interfere on this level," says Mustafa. "That makes Egypt more reserved towards any clashes that Muslims are involved [with] in China."

Even so, some predict the official reaction will come — in time. "I think in the next days and weeks there will be more attention, because it just started in the Arab media," says political analyst Rashwan, adding that Muslim organizations in the Middle East will also start to publicly voice support for the Uighurs. In the most extreme case yet, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb this week called for attacks on Han Chinese in North Africa in retaliation for Muslim deaths. (See pictures of China after the riot deaths on LIFE.com.)

And while the Iranian government, which waged its own violent crackdown on opposition protesters last month, has remained relatively mute on the issue, several of the country's high-ranking Shi'ite clerics have also spoken out against China's actions. "Defending the oppressed is an Islamic and humanitarian duty," Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani said on Wednesday, according to the Tehran Times.

Still, the chances that the region's heads of states will follow suit seem unlikely.

POWERED BY digg

Toy Factory Melee Set Off Western China Violence

2009-07-15T15:46:00.000-07:00

Toy Factory Melee Set Off Western China Violence
Alan Chin for The New York Times

A shift change at the Early Light Toy Factory in Shaoguan, in the Guangdong province of southeastern China, where an ethnic riot between Chinese and Uighur workers in June killed two and wounded 120, sparking a much deadlier riot in Urumqi, in Xinjiang Province.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: July 15, 2009

SHAOGUAN, China — The first batch of Uighurs, 40 young men and women from the far western region of Xinjiang, arrived at the Early Light Toy Factory here in May, bringing their buoyant music and speaking a language that was incomprehensible to their fellow Han Chinese workers.

“We exchanged cigarettes and smiled at one another, but we couldn’t really communicate,” said Gu Yunku, a 29-year-old Han assembly line worker who had come to this southeastern city from northern China. “Still, they seemed shy and kind. There was something romantic about them.”

The mutual good will was fleeting.

By June, as the Uighur contingent rose to 800, all recruited from an impoverished rural county not far from China’s border with Tajikistan, disparaging chatter began to circulate. Taxi drivers traded stories about the wild gazes and gruff manners of the Uighurs. Store owners claimed that Uighur women were prone to shoplifting. More ominously, tales of sexually aggressive Uighur men began to spread among the factory’s 16,000 Han workers.

Shortly before midnight on June 25, a few days after an anonymous Internet posting claimed that a group of six Uighur men had raped two Han women, the suspicions boiled over into bloodshed.

During a four-hour melee in a walkway between factory dormitories, Han and Uighur workers bludgeoned one another with fire extinguishers, paving stones and lengths of steel shorn from bed frames. By dawn, when the police finally intervened, two Uighur men had been fatally wounded and 120 other people were injured, most of them Uighurs, according to the authorities.

“People were so vicious, they just kept beating the dead bodies,” said one man who witnessed the fighting, which he said involved more than a thousand workers.

Ten days later and 1,800 miles away, the clash in Shaoguan provoked a far greater spasm of violence in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region. On July 5, a demonstration by Uighur students protesting what they said was a lackluster investigation of the factory brawl gave way to a murderous rampage against the city’s Han residents, followed by killings carried out by the Han.

In the end, 192 people died and more than 1,000 were injured, according to the government. Of the dead, two-thirds were Han, the authorities said. Uighurs insist that the toll among their own was far higher.

Shaoguan officials, who said that the rape allegations were untrue, contended that the violence at the toy factory was used by “outsiders” to fan ethnic hatred and promote Xinjiang separatism. “The issue between Han and Uighur people is like an issue between husband and wife,” Chen Qihua, vice director of the Shaoguan Foreign Affairs Office, said in an interview. “We have our quarrels, but in the end, we are like one family.”

Li Qiang, the executive director of China Labor Watch, an advocacy group based in New York that has studied the Shaoguan toy factory, has a different view. He said the stress of low pay, long hours and numbingly repetitive work exacerbated deeply held mistrust between the Han and the Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority that has long resented Chinese rule. “The government doesn’t really understand these ethnic problems, and they certainly don’t know how to resolve them,” Mr. Li said.

In the government’s version of events, the factory clash was the simple product of false rumors, posted on the Internet by a disgruntled former worker who has since been arrested. A few days later, the authorities added another wrinkle to the story, saying that the fight was prompted by a “misunderstanding” after a 19-year-old female worker accidentally stumbled into a dormitory room of Uighur men.

The woman, Huang Cuilian, told the state news media that she screamed and ran off when the men stamped their feet in a threatening manner. When Ms. Huang, accompanied by factory guards, returned to confront the men, the standoff quickly escalated.

The Uighur workers have since been sequestered at an industrial park not far from the toy factory. Officials refused to allow a reporter access to the workers, and a large contingent of police officers blocked the hospital rooms where two dozen others were recovering from their wounds.

“They want to lead a peaceful life and not be bothered by the media,” Mr. Li, the Shaoguan official, said. He said the government of Guangdong Province, where Shaoguan is located, and the factory would provide them employment at a separate plant.

Officials at Early Light, a Hong Kong company that is the largest toy maker in the world, did not return calls seeking comment.

In the city of Kashgar, the ancient heart of Uighur civilization, the Shaoguan killings have inflamed longstanding anger over the way China manages daily life in Xinjiang. Many Uighurs complain about policies that encourage Han migration to the region and say the government suppresses Uighurs’ language and religion. When it comes to employment, they say coveted state jobs go to the Han; a 2008 report by a United States Congressional commission noted that government job Web sites in Xinjiang set aside most teaching and civil service positions for non-Uighurs.

“If we weren’t so poor, our children wouldn’t have to take work so far from home,” said Akhdar, a 67-year-old man who, like many others interviewed, refused to give his full name for fear of reprisals from the authorities.

According to government figures, more than 6,700 people left Shufu County, the suburb where many of the Shaoguan workers were recruited, for factory jobs this year in the more prosperous cities of coastal China, as part of a jobs export program intended to relieve high youth unemployment and provide low-cost workers to factories. Nearly 1.5 million Xinjiang residents are already employed outside the region. According to an article in the state-run Xinjiang Daily, “70 percent of the laborers had signed up for employment voluntarily.” The article, published in May, did not explain what measures were used to win over the remaining 30 percent.

But residents in and around Kashgar say the families of those who refuse to go are threatened with fines that can equal up to six months of a villager’s income. “If asked, most people will go, because no one can afford the penalty,” said a man who gave his name only as Abdul, whose 18-year-old sister is being recruited for work at a factory in Guangzhou but has so far resisted.

Some families are particularly upset that recruitment drives are directed at young unmarried women, saying that the time spent living in a Han city far away from home taints their marriage prospects. Taheer, a 25-year-old bachelor who is seeking a wife, put it bluntly. “I would not marry such a girl because there’s a chance she would not come back with her virginity,” he said.

Still, a few Uighurs said they were thankful for factory jobs where wages as high as $191 a month are double the average income in Xinjiang. One man, a 54-year-old cotton farmer with two young daughters, said he was ready to send them away if that was what the Communist Party wanted. “We would be happy to oblige,” he said with a smile as his wife looked away.

Once they arrive in one of China’s bustling manufacturing hubs, the Uighurs often find life alienating. Mr. Li of China Labor Watch said many workers were unprepared for the grueling work, the cramped living conditions and what he described as verbal abuse from factory managers.

But the biggest challenge may be open hostility from Han co-workers, who like many Chinese hold unapologetically negative views of Uighurs. Many Han say they believe that Uighurs are given unfair advantages by the central government, including a point system that gives Uighur students and other minorities a leg up on college entrance exams.

Zhang Qiang, a 20-year-old Shaoguan resident, described Uighurs as “barbarians” and said they were easily provoked to violence. “All the men carry knives,” he said after dropping off a job application at the toy factory, which is eager to hire replacements for the hundreds of workers who quit in recent weeks.

Still, Mr. Zhang acknowledged that his contact with Uighurs was superficial. When he was a student, his vocational high school had a program for 100 Xinjiang students, although they were relegated to separate classrooms and dorms.

If he had any curiosity about his Uighur classmates, it was quashed by a teacher who warned the Han students to keep their distance. “This is not prejudice,” he said. “It is just the nature of their kind.”

Zhang Jing contributed research

China Unrest Tied To Labor Program

2009-07-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

China Unrest Tied To Labor Program
Uighurs Sent to Work in Other Regions

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

URUMQI, China -- When the local government began recruiting young Muslim Uighurs in this far western region for jobs at the Xuri Toy Factory in the country's booming coastal region, the response was mixed.

Some, lured by the eye-popping salaries and benefits, eagerly signed up.

But others, like Safyden's 21-year-old sister, were wary. She was uneasy, relatives said, about being so far from her family and living in a Han Chinese-dominated environment so culturally, religiously and physically different from what she was accustomed to. It wasn't until a local official threatened to fine her family 2,000 yuan, or about $300, if she didn't go that she reluctantly packed her bags this spring for a job at the factory in Shaoguan, 2,000 miles away in the heart of China's southern manufacturing belt.

The origins of last week's ethnically charged riots in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region, can be traced to a labor export program that led to the sudden integration of the Xuri Toy Factory and other companies in cities throughout China.

Uighur protesters who marched into Urumqi's main bazaar on July 5 were demanding a full investigation into a brawl at the toy factory between Han and Uighur workers that left two Uighurs dead. The protest, for reasons that still aren't clear, spun out of control. Through the night, Uighur demonstrators clashed with police and Han Chinese bystanders, leaving 184 people dead and more than 1,680 injured in one of the bloodiest clashes in the country's modern history. Two Uighurs were shot dead by police Monday, and tensions remain palpable.

"I really worry about her very much," Safyden, 29, said of his sister, whom he did not want named because he fears for her safety. "The government should send them back. What if new conflicts happen between Uighurs and Han? The Uighurs will be beaten to death."
ad_icon

Both Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 percent of the country's population and dominate China's politics and economy, and Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority living primarily in China's far west, say anger has been simmering for decades.

By moving Uighur workers to factories outside Xinjiang and placing Han-run factories in Xinjiang, Chinese officials say, authorities are trying to elevate the economic status of Uighurs whose wages have lagged behind the nationwide average. But some Han Chinese have come to resent these policies, which they call favoritism, and some Uighurs complain that the assimilation efforts go too far. Uighurs say that their language is being phased out of schools, that in some circumstances they cannot sport beards, wear head scarves or fast as dictated by Islamic tradition, and that they are discriminated against for private and government jobs.

Xinjiang's labor export program, which began in 2002 and has since sent tens of thousands of Uighurs from poor villages to wealthier cities, was supposed to bring the two groups together so they could better interact with and understand each other. The Uighur workers are lured with salaries two or three times what they could earn in their home towns picking cotton, as well as benefits such as training on manufacturing equipment, Mandarin language classes and free medical checkups.

Several Uighur workers said that they have prospered under the program and that they were treated well by their Han bosses and co-workers. Others, however, alleged that the program had become coercive.

In the villages around the city of Kashgar, where many of the workers from the Xuri factory originated, residents said each family was forced to send at least one child to the program -- or pay a hefty fine.

"Since people are poor in my home town, they cannot afford such big money. So they have to send their children out," said Merzada, a 20-year-old who just graduated from high school, and who, like all the Uighurs interviewed, spoke on the condition that a surname not be used.

A Uighur man named Yasn said his family had no choice but to send his sister, who had just graduated from middle school, to the eastern city of Qingdao to work in a sock factory last year because they could not afford the fine: "She cried at home every day until she left. She is a girl -- according to our religion and culture, girls don't go to such distant places. If we had it our way, we would like to marry her to someone or let her go to school somewhere to escape it," he said.

The Han Chinese owner of a textile factory in Hebei province that has been hiring Uighur workers from the program since 2007 said that in the first year the company participated, 143 female workers came to the company. Liu Guolin said he was surprised to see that they were accompanied by a bilingual police official from their home town who oversaw the details of their daily life.

"Without the policeman, I assume they would have run away from the very beginning. I did not realize that until the local officials revealed to me later. Only by then did I learn most of those girls did not come voluntarily," Liu said.

He said the security officer did not allow them to pray or wear head scarves in the factory workshops. He later learned that some of the girls were as young as 14 and that their ID cards had been forged by the local government.

Bi Wenqing, deputy head of the Shufu county office that oversees the Xinjiang labor export program, denied that any participants had been coerced or threatened with fines. However, he said that although the Uighur workers at the factories have the freedom to worship, the practice is not encouraged.

"We have been trying hard to educate them into disbelieving religion. The more they are addicted to religion, the more backwards they will be. And those separatists try to leverage religion to guide these innocent young Uighurs into evil ways," Bi said.
ad_icon

The Xuri Toy Factory -- which makes electronic toys and travel bags -- once seemed a model for the export program.

In May, 818 Uighurs from Xinjiang joined the 18,000-person workforce. While the newcomers had limited Mandarin skills, the Uighurs and Han Chinese workers bonded over nightly dances that seemed to transcend lingual, cultural and religious barriers.

But the atmosphere started to become tense last month when a rumor spread about a rape at a toy factory. An anonymous message, posted on the Internet in June, stated that six Uighurs assaulted two Han female co-workers. No one seemed to know exactly who the alleged victims were, employees said, and police later said the story was made up by a disgruntled former worker. But suspicions festered.

When Huang Cuilian, a 19-year-old trainee who is Han, walked into the wrong dormitory and ran into two Uighur men on the night of June 25, she screamed, and a melee ensued. When other workers heard the commotion, a brawl broke out between the Han and Uighur workers. In the end, 120 were injured, and two Uighurs later died.

Information about the fight spread via the Internet and cellphones to the Uighurs' home towns in Xinjiang, and there were calls for other Uighurs to take action.

In the aftermath of the fighting, both Han Chinese and Uighur workers at the factory say they are afraid of each other.

Tursun, a 20-year-old Uighur man from Kashgar, said he had been lying in bed in the dormitory when "suddenly a bunch of Han Chinese broke into my dorm and beat me."

Liu Yanhong, a 23-year-old Han Chinese who works in the assembly department, said: "I still don't know if I can work together with them, after that thing happened. If they really come back, I will quit my job and go home."

Two days after the deadly riots in Urumqi, officials at the Xuri Toy Factory announced that they had come up with a solution to the ethnic tensions: segregation.

The company opened a new factory exclusively for Uighur workers in an industrial park miles from its main campus. They have separate workshops, cafeterias and dorms.

A Uighur employee named Amyna, 24, said the working conditions at the new factory are "not very good" and the living conditions also are "not very good." But at least, she said, "the Uighurs are living together and don't mingle with Han Chinese."

Researchers Zhang Jie, Wang Juan and Liu Liu contributed to this report.

The Echoes of Xinjiang

2009-07-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Contributor
The Echoes of Xinjiang

Article Tools Sponsored By
By PHILIP BOWRING
Published: July 14, 2009

HONG KONG — The problems in Xinjiang could prove a bigger international headache for China than Tibet was. The latter attracted much Western attention, thanks in part to the appeal of the exiled Dalai Lama. But Tibet does not have the foreign linkages that Xinjiang’s Turkic and Islamic identity do.

Many Asian countries may find it difficult to ignore popular sentiment in favor of Uighur aspirations.

The comment by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that Chinese policy in Xinjiang was “like a genocide” and that China should “abandon its policy of assimilation,” will ring in Beijing ears for a long time. However excessive his choice of words, Mr. Erdogan was in effect speaking for all Turkic people from the Mediterranean to central China.

China’s immediate Turkic neighbor, Kazakhstan, may be more discreet as it seeks to balance its relations with Russia and China.

But China’s President Hu Jintao should need no reminding of where the sentiments of Kazakhs likely lie, given two centuries of Russian attempts to integrate them into the Russian empire through Russian settlement.

The expansion of Han Chinese rule over that same period — to Manchuria, Mongolia and Taiwan — was largely achieved through migration. So it was only natural for Beijing to assume that the same could be achieved in Xinjiang, despite the late, postwar start.

But the process had already stalled before these riots as many Hans saw better opportunities elsewhere in China. China’s demographics no longer support Han expansion through migration.

It may not be too late for China to address Uighur grievances, but the Chinese Communist Party’s centralist tendencies and cultural chauvinism make it unlikely. The Chinese media’s presentation of the disturbances suggests that few lessons are being learned. Underlying issues go unaddressed, the Hans are presented as the main victims and Uighurs as ungrateful for the material progress that China has bestowed on what was once known as East Turkestan.

Then there is the Islamic issue. Central Asian Islam is mostly of a relaxed and unfanatical sort, but Muslim identity in Xinjiang has been strengthened both by restrictions on religious activities and by the rise in Muslim consciousness globally.

China has tried to pin the Al Qaeda label on Xinjiang separatists and will doubtless do so again — helped by Al Qaeda proclaiming that it will retaliate for the Urumqi killings.

But mainstream Muslims are also sounding aggrieved. In Indonesia, there have been demonstrations in support of the Uighurs.

Indonesia of course has its own ethnic separatist problem in Papua and lingering issues over the position of ethnic Chinese, so no Erdogan-style statements are likely from Jakarta. The same applies in Malaysia, where formal discrimination against non-Malays would make any protests seem hypocritical, and would spur Beijing into overt support for the Malaysian Chinese.

Yet in much of Southeast Asia, the Xinjiang issue is seen not so much as a religious matter as an ethnic one, and thus an issue that touches fears of China’s claims to the South China Sea and its island groups, and occasional Chinese media references to past “tributary” relationships with most of its neighbors.

None of this suggests that policies toward China will change because of the Uighurs, who remain a minor issue in the wider scheme of international affairs. But they are and will likely remain what East Timor once was to Indonesia — a “pebble in the shoe” for China’s diplomacy.

Parliament asks China to send delegation to Xinjiang

2009-07-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

Parliament asks China to send delegation to Xinjiang
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
ANKARA – Daily News Parliament Bureau

Turkish Parliament Speaker Köksal Toptan has asked China to allow a parliamentary delegation to visit the Xinjiang autonomous region, where two weeks of unrest between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese have claimed the lives of at least 184 people.

Toptan made the request during a meeting with current and former Chinese ambassadors to Turkey, namely Gong Xiaosheng and Aiguo Song, late Monday, the Daily News has learned from reliable sources.

“We are concerned about the incidents. We want to visit the area and see what happened with our own eyes,” Toptan told ambassadors. According to sources, the Chinese envoys positively responded to the request but said they first had to ask Beijing for approval. If the Chinese government allows Parliament to send a delegation, a small mission would be established.

Toptan also asked the ambassadors for an open and comprehensive investigation and punishment for those responsible. “Some Chinese officials’ statements that said capital punishment would be given to those who took part in such riots did escalate our concerns. Security forces should not use disproportionate force against the demonstrators. The violations of fundamental human rights make us more nervous,” Toptan stated, according to sources who were familiar with the talks.

The parliament speaker repeated Turkey’s official position on the territorial integrity and political unity of China. “Such problems should be resolved within the territorial integrity of China,” he noted.

China was also planning to allow a group of journalists to visit the area and conduct interviews with local people in order to compile stories

Exiled Uighur leader says 'no thanks' to Al Qaeda

2009-07-14T17:30:00.001-07:00

Exiled Uighur leader says 'no thanks' to Al Qaeda

Posted 3 hours 42 minutes ago

The exiled leader of China's Uighur minority has firmly distanced herself from Al Qaeda, condemning the group's threats to attack Chinese interests in retaliation for the Muslims' deaths.

Rebiya Kadeer, the Washington-based head of the World Uighur Congress, said she opposed the use of violence in her campaign to bring greater rights for the ethnic group in China's north-western Xinjiang province.

"I do not believe violence is a solution to any problem," Ms Kadeer said in a statement.

"Global terrorists should not take advantage of the Uighur people's legitimate aspirations and the current tragedy in East Turkestan to commit acts of terrorism targeting Chinese diplomatic missions or civilians."

Algerian-based offshoot Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has threatened to target Chinese interests, according to international consultancy Stirling Assynt.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese work in the Middle East and North Africa, including 50,000 in Algeria, estimated the group, which has offices in London and Hong Kong providing risk advice to corporate and official clients.

It marks the first time Osama bin Laden's network has set its sights on the Asian power, which has sought warm relations with the Islamic world.

China has accused Ms Kadeer of masterminding recent violence in Xinjiang and said she is backed by "terrorists."

Ms Kadeer denies the charges and US legislators have introduced a resolution demanding that China stop its "slander" of the 62-year-old former businesswoman and mother of 11, who spent six years in a Chinese prison.

Chinese authorities have said that riots in the Xinjiang city of Urumqi by Uighurs on July 5 left 184 people dead, most of whom were China's dominant ethnic group Han and more than 1,600 injured.

Uighur leaders accuse Chinese forces of opening fire on peaceful protests and say that Uighurs have been killed in subsequent mob attacks.

Uighurs generally practice a moderate brand of Islam influenced by Sufi mysticism and earlier shamanistic traditions.

- AFP

Why the West is silent on rioting in Xinjiang

2009-07-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

Frank Ching
Why the West is silent on rioting in Xinjiang

When China slapped Tibet, the world shouted. But things change

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Tuesday, Jul. 14, 2009 03:01AM EDT

The rioting in Xinjiang last week echoed violence in Tibet last year but, interestingly, the international reaction has been very different.

Last year, Western countries put pressure on Beijing to hold a dialogue with representatives of the Dalai Lama, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy even threatening to boycott the Beijing Olympics if China refused. Beijing's protestations that Tibet was an internal Chinese affair were disregarded.

This time, however, the Western response is muted. The United States has adopted a mild tone, with President Barack Obama merely calling on all parties in Xinjiang “to exercise restraint.” The European Union has gone even further, taking the position that violence in Xinjiang “is a Chinese issue, not a European issue.” Serge Abou, the EU's ambassador to China, said Europe also had its problems with minorities and “we would not like other governments to tell us what is to be done.”

While there are similarities between events last year in Tibet and those in Xinjiang this month, the world has changed: China is now seen as an indispensable partner of the United States and Europe, both of which are facing a financial crisis. Beijing's diplomatic assistance in resolving the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues is also seen as too important to put in jeopardy.

What reaction there has been came mainly from Muslim countries. The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments, condemned what it called the excessive use of force against Uyghur civilians. At least 184 people, both Uyghurs and Han Chinese, have been killed.

The OIC statement declared: “The Islamic world is expecting from China, a major and responsible power in the world arena with historical friendly relations with the Muslim world, to deal with the problem of Muslim minority in China in broader perspective that tackles the root causes of the problem.”

The country that has taken the strongest position is Turkey, whose people share linguistic, religious and cultural links with the Uyghurs. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan actually went so far as to characterize what has happened as “a kind of genocide” and said his country would bring the matter up in the United Nations Security Council.

Since then, China's Foreign Minister has spoken on the telephone with his Turkish counterpart and apparently invited Turkey to send journalists to Xinjiang. This would be good if the journalists would be allowed not only into Urumqi but to other areas as well, such as Kashgar, where foreign journalists are currently barred.

While Indonesian Muslims have voiced support for the Uyghurs, with about 100 attending a mass prayer session in Jakarta on Sunday, the government itself has not taken a position, even though Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country.

One problem for the Uyghurs is that the world at large knows little about them. Events of the past week have served to publicize their cause. Hitherto, publicity on Uyghurs has focused on the 22 who were held by the United States in Guantanamo, but a link to terrorist suspects is not likely to gain them public support.

Rebiya Kadeer, the U.S.-based Uyghur activist accused by Chinese officials of instigating the violence, is seeking American support for her cause and has urged the United States to open a consulate in Urumqi. This, she said, “would be a clear signal that the United States is not indifferent to the oppression of my people.” China has denied a request for an American consulate in Tibet and is unlikely to allow one in Xinjiang.

The Urumqi events were followed by demonstrations, mostly by ethnic Uyghurs around the world. Eggs were hurled at the Chinese consulate-general in Los Angeles, while the one in Munich was attacked by home-made gasoline bombs. (Munich is also home to the headquarters of the World Uyghur Congress, of which Ms. Kadeer is president.)

Demonstrations were also held in Turkey, the Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Japan and Sweden. Ms. Kadeer herself led a protest march in Washington to the Chinese embassy.

The Uyghurs lack a charismatic figure such as the Dalai Lama to lead them. But China, perhaps unwittingly, may provide the solution. It is likening Ms. Kadeer to the Dalai Lama, saying they are both “separatists.” The People's Daily has actually called her the “Uyghur Dalai Lama” and warned the Nobel committee not to award her the Peace Prize. Beijing may not realize it, but likening Rebiya Kadeer to the Dalai Lama may actually win her supporters in the West.
Frank Ching is author of China: The Truth About Its Human Rights Record.

China's Urumqi tense after police shooting

2009-07-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

China's Urumqi tense after police shooting

By Dan Martin – 12 hours ago

URUMQI, China (AFP) — Heavily armed security forces were out in force in China's volatile Urumqi on Tuesday close to where police shot dead two Muslim Uighurs who state media said were calling for jihad.

Large groups of police armed with semi-automatic weapons and batons were deployed close to the scene of Monday's violence, where Chinese authorities said police shot and killed two Uighur "lawbreakers" and wounded another.

The shootings showed the capital of the northwest Xinjiang region remained a powder keg more than a week after ethnic unrest on July 5 left at least 184 people dead, despite an ongoing security clampdown.

An Algerian-based Al-Qaeda affiliate meanwhile called for reprisals against Chinese workers in north Africa, according to an intelligence report by London-based risk analysis firm Stirling Assynt.

The call came from Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Stirling report said. It is the first time Osama bin Laden's network has directly threatened China or its interests, it noted.

Xinjiang is a huge mountainous region bordering eight countries, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its Muslim Uighur community has long chafed at Chinese rule.

Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China would take all precautions to protect its overseas interests, while not commenting directly on the alleged Al-Qaeda threat.

"We will keep a close eye on developments and make joint efforts with relevant countries to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of overseas Chinese institutions and people," he said.

The spokesman also appealed for understanding from the Muslim world over China's handling of the unrest, while denying accusations from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Beijing was guilty of "a kind of genocide."

"We hope that the relevant Muslim countries and Muslims can recognise the nature of the July 5 incident in Urumqi," Qin told reporters.

"The incident ... was aimed at sabotaging China and sabotaging ethnic unity. It was orchestrated by the three forces (of terrorism, religious extremism and separatism) in and outside of China."

On Tuesday, shops in the Uighur district close to the site of Monday's police shootings were slow to open and a major mosque near where the attack happened was shut early Tuesday with security guards outside.

One businessman said he was not opening his clothing stall.

"It is too tense right here. How can I make money with no customers around?" the man from the ethnic Hui minority told AFP.

By the afternoon, Uighur merchants selling goods ranging from carpets to shoes lined the roads close to the scene of the violence, although the city's grand bazaar remained closed.

Police checked the bags of some pedestrians in the area, according to an AFP reporter at the scene.

The latest shooting was the first time the government said security forces had killed anyone since the unrest broke out, despite claims by exiled Uighurs that many people had died in the clampdown.

State news agency Xinhua Tuesday released its first detailed report of the event, saying the three Uighur men had tried to incite other Muslims to launch a "jihad", or holy war, and attacked a mosque guard before police shot them.

A government statement released in Urumqi Monday said the police intervened when the three men attacked a fellow Uighur.

But two Uighurs who said they witnessed the incident from 50 metres (yards) away told AFP that the trio had been trying to attack security forces.

"They hacked at the soldiers with big knives and then they were shot," one of the witnesses told AFP.

Before Monday's shootings, security forces had worked hard to regain control of the city, and many shops outside the Uighur district had reopened and traffic had returned to the streets.

The initial unrest of July 5 saw Uighurs attack Han Chinese, according to the government and witnesses interviewed by AFP, in the worst ethnic violence to hit the country in decades.

Thousands of Han Chinese retaliated in the following days, arming themselves with makeshift weapons and marching through parts of Urumqi vowing vengeance against the Uighurs.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

Central Asian Uighurs fear crackdown could spread

2009-07-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

Central Asian Uighurs fear crackdown could spread

By PETER LEONARD – 52 minutes ago

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan (AP) — Anguished by ethnic violence in China but fearful that crackdowns on their minority group could spread, Uighur activists across Central Asia said Tuesday they have urged local communities to avoid large public protests.

Up to half a million Uighurs live in the former Soviet states west of China, prompting concerns that ethnic clashes in China's western Xinjiang region could trigger a wave of violence across the region.

Tensions still run high in Xinjiang amid tight security, more than a week after the regional capital, Urumqi, erupted in riots that the government says claimed 184 lives. Chinese authorities say most of those killed were Han Chinese — an assertion denied by international Uighur rights groups.

Public reactions among Uighur minorities in Central Asia have been muted, however, amid fears that governments might crack down on protesters to appease China, the regional giant.

"This has been a strong psychological blow for Uighurs in Kazakhstan," said Khakhriman Khozhamberdi, who leads an Uighur political movement in that country. About 300,000 ethnic Uighurs live in Kazakhstan, the largest population outside China.

"But no protests are taking place here," Khozhamberdi said. "Instead we are holding traditional religious ceremonies as a mark of respect for the dead. We are calling on everybody to remain peaceful."

The far-flung Uighur diaspora in Central Asia are descendants of refugees that escaped Xinjiang during the Chinese conquest of that region in 1870s. Like many other Central Asian peoples, they speak a Turkic language and most are Muslims.

During the Soviet era, China had little influence in this energy-rich land of sand and steppe. Today, Beijing's political and economic influence is rapidly expanding.

In April, Beijing agreed to lend Kazakhstan about $5 billion in exchange for an increased stake in the country's energy sector.

In Kyrgyzstan, home to around 60,000 ethnic Uighurs, activists hoped that 2,000 would come to a protest outside the Chinese embassy after news of the violence in Xinjiang. But those plans were shelved due to concerns that authorities would use force to disrupt any large-scale demonstrations ahead of presidential elections later this month.

"We decided not to pursue this path of action at this time, since there is an election campaign going on and we feared some act of provocation," said Askhat Namanov, a leader of Ittipak, a Uighur rights group.

Instead, Namanov said the Uighur community has begun a letter-writing campaign to China, the United Nations, the United States, Russia and several other countries to rally support for their cause.

In a letter to the United Nations, Kyrgyz Uighurs called for the public condemnation of Chinese policies allegedly aimed at driving Uighur minorities from Xinjiang so they can be used as cheap labor.

Governments in the region have remained largely silent about the events in Xinjiang but all have denounced separatist movements. In recent days, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have evacuated more than 1,000 of their nationals from the violence-affected Chinese region.

Government officials in impoverished Tajikistan, which shares a mountainous 250-mile (400-kilometer) border with China and has around 6,000 ethnic Uighurs, say they do not expect any local repercussions.

"Interethnic relations in Tajikistan are stable," said Zukhra Madamedzhanova, head of govenment-run ethnic relations department.

Tajik Uighur leaders have also reacted cautiously to the riots in China and expressed fears about worsening economic ties with their neighbor to the east.

"Now, hardly any businessmen are traveling to Urumqi, but previously our traders would go there everyday for goods," said Olim Khasanov, chairman of the Uighur Association in Tajikistan. "We sympathize with both the Chinese government and our compatriots in Urumqi."

In the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, about 15 activists held an unauthorized picket outside the Chinese embassy, holding up signs reading: "No to racism in China!"

Some Azeri protesters tried to approach the embassy to submit a resolution, but four of them were detained by police.

Turkey has ethnic and linguistic ties to China's Uighur minority, and thousands of Turks on Sunday protested in an Istanbul square to denounce the ethnic violence in Xinjiang. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan even compared the ethnic violence to genocide.

About 5,000 people gathered in Istanbul's Caglayan square, on the European side of the city, holding up Turkish flags and the blue-and-white flags of a short-lived Uighur breakaway republic in the 1930s.

There have been no street protests since the weekend, but a Turkish foreign ministry official said China on Monday sent a former ambassador for talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to calm tensions.

While most Uighurs are Muslim, the clashes in China have generated little reaction in the broader Middle East and Arab world.

Kuwaiti political analyst Ayed al-Mannah said the Uighurs don't have much "political weight" in the broader Muslim society. "They are not mujahedeen and they are not Palestinians," he said.

Of the 184 reported killed in Urumqi on July 5, the Chinese government has said 137 were Han Chinese and 46 were Uighurs, along with one minority Hui Muslim. Uighurs say they believe many more of members of their ethnic group died in the government crackdown.

The Uighurs, who number 9 million in Xinjiang, have complained about an influx of Han Chinese and government restrictions on Islam. They accuse the Han of discrimination and the Communist Party of trying to erase their language and culture.

Uighurs communities in former Soviet Central Asia have long alleged that regional governments violate their political and linguistic rights. They blame Beijing, saying the Chinese encourage the local crackdowns.

Associated Press writers Leila Saralayeva in Bishkek, Olga Tutubalina in Dushanbe, Tajikstan, and Aida Sultanova in Baku, Azerbaijan, also contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Echoes of Xinjiang (NYT)

2009-07-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Contributor
The Echoes of Xinjiang

By PHILIP BOWRING
Published: July 14, 2009

HONG KONG — The problems in Xinjiang could prove a bigger international headache for China than Tibet was. The latter attracted much Western attention, thanks in part to the appeal of the exiled Dalai Lama. But Tibet does not have the foreign linkages that Xinjiang’s Turkic and Islamic identity do.

Many Asian countries may find it difficult to ignore popular sentiment in favor of Uighur aspirations.

The comment by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that Chinese policy in Xinjiang was “like a genocide” and that China should “abandon its policy of assimilation,” will ring in Beijing ears for a long time. However excessive his choice of words, Mr. Erdogan was in effect speaking for all Turkic people from the Mediterranean to central China.

China’s immediate Turkic neighbor, Kazakhstan, may be more discreet as it seeks to balance its relations with Russia and China.

But China’s President Hu Jintao should need no reminding of where the sentiments of Kazakhs likely lie, given two centuries of Russian attempts to integrate them into the Russian empire through Russian settlement.

The expansion of Han Chinese rule over that same period — to Manchuria, Mongolia and Taiwan — was largely achieved through migration. So it was only natural for Beijing to assume that the same could be achieved in Xinjiang, despite the late, postwar start.

But the process had already stalled before these riots as many Hans saw better opportunities elsewhere in China. China’s demographics no longer support Han expansion through migration.

It may not be too late for China to address Uighur grievances, but the Chinese Communist Party’s centralist tendencies and cultural chauvinism make it unlikely. The Chinese media’s presentation of the disturbances suggests that few lessons are being learned. Underlying issues go unaddressed, the Hans are presented as the main victims and Uighurs as ungrateful for the material progress that China has bestowed on what was once known as East Turkestan.

Then there is the Islamic issue. Central Asian Islam is mostly of a relaxed and unfanatical sort, but Muslim identity in Xinjiang has been strengthened both by restrictions on religious activities and by the rise in Muslim consciousness globally.

China has tried to pin the Al Qaeda label on Xinjiang separatists and will doubtless do so again — helped by Al Qaeda proclaiming that it will retaliate for the Urumqi killings.

But mainstream Muslims are also sounding aggrieved. In Indonesia, there have been demonstrations in support of the Uighurs.

Indonesia of course has its own ethnic separatist problem in Papua and lingering issues over the position of ethnic Chinese, so no Erdogan-style statements are likely from Jakarta. The same applies in Malaysia, where formal discrimination against non-Malays would make any protests seem hypocritical, and would spur Beijing into overt support for the Malaysian Chinese.

Yet in much of Southeast Asia, the Xinjiang issue is seen not so much as a religious matter as an ethnic one, and thus an issue that touches fears of China’s claims to the South China Sea and its island groups, and occasional Chinese media references to past “tributary” relationships with most of its neighbors.

None of this suggests that policies toward China will change because of the Uighurs, who remain a minor issue in the wider scheme of international affairs. But they are and will likely remain what East Timor once was to Indonesia — a “pebble in the shoe” for China’s diplomacy.

What ignited China's ethnic powder keg?

2009-07-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

What ignited China's ethnic powder keg?

What ignited China's ethnic powder keg?
Police in China admit killing Uighurs
Picking up the pieces
Survivor baffled by sudden violence
Prominent Uighur economist missing
Stories of brutality from protests
Fresh ethnic unrest rocks China
Protest photos
Police in China admit killing Uighurs
Police fatally shot two Uighur men and wounded a third yesterday in western China, where violence continues to flare despite massive numbers of troops sent to restore calm more than a week after deadly ethnic rioting.
Xinjiang region rife with political strife
Jul 14, 2009 04:30 AM

THE ECONOMIST

It began as a protest about a brawl at the other end of the country; it became China's bloodiest incident of civil unrest since the massacre that ended the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago.

The ethnic Uighurs in the far western city of Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province, accused Han Chinese factory workers in the southern province of Guangdong of racial violence against Uighur co-workers. By the time Urumqi's Uighurs had finished venting their anger, at least 184 people were dead and hundreds injured.

Much is still unknown about what happened on the afternoon of July 5. A protest by several hundred people in the city's central plaza, People's Square, moved southward into Uighur areas, including the Grand Bazaar, a large shopping centre. Somehow – perhaps, overseas Uighur activists say, because the police opened fire – it became an explosion of anger, in which random Chinese were clubbed and stoned to death.

Xinjiang is no stranger to unrest among its more than 8 million Uighurs. Many resent rule by China, which they accuse of trampling on their Muslim Central Asian culture. Chinese officials were quick to accuse an overseas group, the World Uyghur Congress, of having "masterminded" the unrest in Urumqi, but have yet to offer proof. They have particularly attacked the WUC's leader, Rebiya Kadeer, a former member of Xinjiang's political elite. Kadeer was one of the region's wealthiest entrepreneurs until she fell afoul of the authorities because of her sympathies with Uighur nationalism and spent six years in prison on state security charges. She now lives near Washington, D.C.

Many Uighurs dismissed the government's account that the July 5 riot was part of a separatist plot. But few – such was the terror of police or Han recrimination – were willing to say much.

One Uighur owner of a clothes shop, who claimed to have witnessed the riot from the beginning, said it started as a demonstration calling on Xinjiang's governor to talk about what had happened in Guangdong. In the fracas there on June 25, Han Chinese workers accused Uighurs of rape. At least two Uighurs were killed in the fight.

After about 90 minutes, the police told Urumqi's protesters to leave, said the man from the clothes shop. The police then began shoving and pulling demonstrators who refused to go. When some Uighurs responded by smashing windows, the police used greater force, beating people and firing their weapons. Violence by Uighurs then began to flare across the city.

Repression had been stepped up in Xinjiang long before the rioting. The escalation dates back to the launch of America's anti-terror campaign in 2001.

China then began linking long-simmering separatist tensions in Xinjiang with the same forces of extremism the United States faced. It said one Uighur group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, was part of Al Qaeda.

The U.S. backed this assertion, but rights groups said there was little evidence of Al Qaeda's involvement in Xinjiang. China played up the link, they said, to justify harsher measures against Uighur nationalists.

Twenty-two Uighurs were indeed caught by the Americans in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Four were freed in June and resettled in Bermuda. The Uighurs insist they were not involved in any anti-American operations in Afghanistan.

But their capture helped to bolster China's argument it too faced an organized terror threat.

The authorities have tightened controls on mosques in Xinjiang and rules that ban children from receiving religious education. Students and civil servants were warned not to observe Ramadan.

In the rioting in Urumqi, racial discrimination is likely to have been a bigger source of grievance than religious repression. Uighurs have faced more such discrimination in the past year as a result of security measures in the buildup to the Olympic Games in Beijing in August. Police harassed Uighurs then because of their perceived potential links with terrorism.

Security is again being tightened across China as the authorities prepare to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the country's founding on Oct. 1. This will involve a huge military parade through Beijing, which the authorities fear could become a target for discontented minorities.

Economic factors come into play, too. Many Uighurs resent what they see as the business advantages enjoyed by Han Chinese immigrants, whose clan, commercial and political networks extend across China.

The recent economic crisis may have exacerbated problems faced by Uighur migrant workers in other parts of China. Millions of people have lost jobs as a result of China's recent export slump.

Many Uighurs feel that their culture is being threatened by a massive influx of Han migrants in recent years. China has stepped up investment in the western region to give the area a greater share of the prosperity that the east has enjoyed.

The government denies it is trying to change the ethnic mix of Xinjiang, but Uighurs complain that Hans have enjoyed the lion's share of dividends from the investment drive.

China can count on strong moral support from its Central Asian neighbours, with which it is co-operating closely to try to combat cross-border militancy. In the old alleyways of Kashgar, now being rapidly torn down as part of an urban-renewal program that is fuelling yet more resentment among local Uighurs, official painted slogans condemn Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group calling for a universal caliphate. The group has started to gain recruits in Xinjiang.

The U.S. feels these closer ties with Central Asian countries are being forged at its expense. But it appreciates China's quiet support for the anti-terror campaign, including intelligence-sharing. The U.S. has no interest in supporting Uighur nationalism and exacerbating instability in an already volatile region.

The article failed to mention that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) openly waged terrorist attacks in China long before 9/11. The Uighur terrorists caught in AL Quaeda training camp in Afghanistan was part of Al Quaeda organization, except that maybe their terrorist targets are not Americans, but Chinese. How ironic the Americans found 4 of them are not American's enemies, but Chinese's, and set them free? Terrorism is everyone's enemy. Indeed Chinese policies toward minorities need to improve, say, not just pouring money in the area, but doing more work in racial equality and co-existence. Here Canada has a lot of experiences to offer.

Two Uyghurs shot dead by Chinese police

2009-07-13T10:12:00.001-07:00

Two Uyghurs shot dead by Chinese police

* Story Highlights
* Chinese police shoot dead two Uyghurs, wound another in city of Urumqi
* Urumqi was scene of violent clashes between Uyghurs, Han Chinese last week
* Heavily armed troops remained on streets over weekend, curfews still in effect
* Hundreds of Han Chinese take to streets calling for punishment for Uyghurs

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Police shot and killed two ethnic Uyghurs and wounded another in a Chinese region that has seen violent ethnic strife in recent weeks, state media reported Monday.
Police patrol Urumqi, China, on Saturday, July 11.

Police patrol Urumqi, China, on Saturday, July 11.

The police were trying to stop the three people from attacking a fourth person with clubs and knives in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China Radio International reported, citing the local government.

All four people involved in the incident were ethnic Uyghurs, a minority Muslim group distinct from China's majority Han population, CRI said.

At least 184 people were killed in demonstrations in the region eight days ago, and more than 1,600 injured, according to government figures.

Chinese President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to the Group of Eight summit in Italy last week in the face of the violence in his country.

Heavily armed troops remained on the streets of Urumqi over the weekend, and curfews were in effect.

On Saturday, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported that Urumqi has banned public assembly without police approval.
Don't Miss

"Assemblies, marches and demonstrations on public roads and at public places in the open air are not allowed without the permission by police," read a notice by the Public Security Bureau of Urumqi, Xinhua said.

The Urumqi security measures on public assembly came on the eve of a sensitive day of mourning, media reported. It is traditional for ethnic Han to mourn their loss on the seventh day after a death, the South China Morning Post reported.

The violence is a result of ethnic tensions between the Uyghurs, who are predominantly Muslim, and members of China's Han majority.
advertisement

Hundreds of Han Chinese were on Urumqi streets on Monday, holding sticks and pipes, and calling for punishment of the Uyghurs, who they say committed serious crimes.

The Uyghurs say they have been victimized and many of those killed in the violence were Uyghurs. Uyghur religious leaders have condemned the violence, saying it is against the spirit of the Muslim faith and Uyghur tradition.

Uyghur-Canadians trapped in Xinjiang

2009-07-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

Uyghur-Canadians trapped in Xinjiang

Mershat Dilmurat, 23, and Naziyre Dilmurat, 19, who are missing in Urumchi, China.

Nazatet Mahmutuowa and her husband Dilmurat Barat hold up a photo of their children

Nothing has been heard from at least 28 Canadian citizens since rioting broke out a week ago

Jennifer MacMillan

From Monday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Jul. 13, 2009 08:11AM EDT

Dilmurat Barat and his wife, Nazatet, keep their children's bedrooms in their tidy home in north Toronto just as they left them. Their daughter Naziyre's bed is neatly made, with a worn stuffed horse placed just so on the pillow and bottles of nail polish carefully lined up on a dresser.

The 20-year-old university student and her 23-year-old brother, Mershat, left home on July 2 to spend the summer reconnecting with their grandparents in their mother's native city, Urumqi. But deadly riots broke out just days after their arrival, and their parents haven't heard a word from their children since.

Their father says he has made dozens of calls to relatives and friends in the region, but hasn't been able to get through to anyone. Shortly after the riots began on July 5, international calls to the region were blocked and Internet service cut off.

"I want them to come home soon," said Mr. Barat, an engineer. "I just want them to come home."

Mehmet Tohti of the Uyghur-Canadian Association says his group believes there are at least 28 Canadian citizens of Uyghur origin who are currently in Xinjiang province, including the Barats' children. Mr. Tohti says because the communication lines are down, their families don't know if they're in danger or not.

"It's impossible for those Uyghurs to contact the outside world," Mr. Tohti said.

Mr. Tohti said he has asked the Department of Foreign Affairs for help to make sure the Uyghur-Canadians in the region are all right. He is calling on the Canadian embassy in Beijing to dispatch a team to Xinjiang to help evacuate Uyghur-Canadians.

Foreign Affairs spokesman Rodney Moore says there are no Canadian embassy staff in Xinjiang, but staff in Beijing will respond to requests from Canadians in the country for assistance. He said those in Canada worried about family members in Xinjiang can also contact the department's emergency operations centre in Ottawa.

Mr. Barat says he called Foreign Affairs last Tuesday to ask for help contacting his children and gave them his children's names, passport numbers and the phone number of the home where they were staying in Urumqi. He said he was told Foreign Affairs would contact him once they had been able to reach his son and daughter, but he has not heard back.

Mr. Moore said Chinese authorities have been asked to inform the Canadian embassy if any Canadian citizens have been affected by the unrest in Urumqi, but Mr. Tohti, a long-time human rights activist, says he is skeptical about China's co-operation.

Ottawa has lobbied the Chinese government for years over the imprisonment in Urumqi of Huseyin Celil, an Uyghur-Canadian whose wife and children live in Burlington, Ont.

China has accused Mr. Celil of terrorism, but senior Canadian government officials say they've never seen evidence of his guilt. China does not recognize Mr. Celil's Canadian citizenship.

Mr. Celil is one of many Uyghurs - a Turkic Muslim ethnic group based in northwest China - that Beijing has convicted of terrorism offences.

Fuse of Fear, Lit in China, Has Victims on 2 Sides

2009-07-12T20:05:00.000-07:00

Fuse of Fear, Lit in China, Has Victims on 2 Sides
Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Abulimit Asim, right, a Uighur, left a police station where he was turned away while trying to report an assault by men who are Han, China’s main ethnic group.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By EDWARD WONG
Published: July 12, 2009

URUMQI, China — The lynch mob first set upon the lame Uighur shoeshine boy in the narrow alley, sticks and knives in hand. Then it turned to the two men working at the reception desk in the Light of Dawn hotel.

Dozens of ethnic Han men broke down the door to the room where Mr. Abulimit locked himself for protection in Urumqi.

The men dashed into the rear bedroom and locked the wooden door. It quickly gave way to the dozens of ethnic Han men hacking and kicking and punching at it. One knife blow fell on Abulimit Asim’s head, then another.

“They wanted to kill us, but there was nowhere for us to go,” Abulimit, who goes by his given name, said Wednesday, a day after the attack, his head bandaged and dried blood still splattered across his white shirt. “We were helpless.”

Abulimit survived the deadliest outbreak of ethnic violence in China in decades, when Uighurs and Han slaughtered each other for days across this regional capital of 2.3 million. But the assault on him is also the latest chapter in what the Uighurs say is a long history of victimization by the Han, the dominant race in China but relative newcomers to the western region of Xinjiang.

Like many Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking race of Sunni Muslims, his tale begins in the string of oasis towns in southern Xinjiang, settled by Uighurs in the 10th century after their migration from the Mongolian steppe. Five years ago, Abulimit and his family abandoned their poor farmland to seek their fortunes among the gleaming towers of Urumqi.

He found himself among people whose language he does not speak, but who hold all the power across Xinjiang — political, economic and cultural. Although Uighurs are still the largest ethnic group among the 20 million people of Xinjiang, Han settlers, many just poor farmers, have been flocking to the region for decades, in part because of government encouragement. Urumqi is now more than 70 percent Han.

“They don’t listen to us,” he said as he walked Wednesday from a police station where he had been turned away while trying to report the assault.

The bottled frustration of the Uighurs exploded on July 5, when a clash between at least 1,000 Uighur protesters and riot police officers turned into a night of bloodletting in which young Uighur men rampaged through the streets killing Han civilians. For at least three days after, Han mobs armed with sticks and knives roamed the city exacting vengeance.

The Chinese government says that at least 184 people were killed in all, three-quarters of them Han, and that those responsible are “terrorists.” But many Uighurs assert that hundreds of Uighurs were shot dead by Chinese security forces and massacred by Han mobs.

What has emerged is two distinct versions of the violence, two narratives of victimhood.

For the Uighurs, the role of victim is all too familiar, they say.

“Our traditions, our clothing, our language, they want us to get rid of it all,” said a Uighur merchant in the same alleyway where Abulimit lives and works. “They want us to become Han.”

Chinese officials say the Uighurs are treated with respect and are even given advantages over the Han when it comes to family planning policy and university admissions, among other things.

But many Uighurs, especially those like Abulimit from the south, say they feel alienated in a quickly changing Xinjiang. Raised in remote oasis towns like Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan, they are less educated and rarely speak Mandarin. They are also more devout.

“We’re just farmers from Khotan,” said Abulimit’s wife, a woman in black robes and a white floral head scarf.

Once the seat of a Buddhist kingdom on the Silk Road, Khotan sits on the southern edge of the scorching Tarim Basin. It is known for its nephrite jade and silk carpets, but there is, too, an air of desperation. Every day, residents scour a dry riverbed for tiny pieces of jade, hoping to find the one stone that will transform their lives.

Abulimit, his wife and two children left five years ago, following relatives to Urumqi. They made the 24-hour bus trip north across the Taklamakan Desert.

The old Uighur quarter is redolent of Islamic bazaars across Asia. Open-air food markets thick with the smell of grilling kebabs spill across sidewalks. Narrow passageways wind behind mosques.

Here and in nearby suburbs, the streets are crowded with migrants from southern Xinjiang selling fruit from wooden carts or cheap household goods from blankets. It is usually the only job they can get. With little knowledge of Mandarin, they cannot compete with Han migrants, even for something as menial as construction work.
“The Han discriminate against us,” said the merchant who works in the same alleyway as Abulimit. “Some companies want only Han workers. Even a lot of Uighur college graduates cannot get jobs.”
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Locals stared at a stall wrecked during the riots of July 5.
Multimedia
Minorities in ChinaInteractive Map
Minorities in China
Related
Rumbles on the Rim of China’s Empire (July 12, 2009)
Times Topics: China | Uighurs

Several middle-class Uighurs said in interviews that poorer migrants from the south were to blame for the killings of Han civilians on July 5, frustrated as they were by their downtrodden state.

Abulimit was luckier than most. An older brother owned flophouses along a dead-end alley that ran south off Tianchi Road, west of the heart of the Uighur quarter. Abulimit got a desk job at the Tang Nuri hotel, or Light of Dawn, and he and his family moved into a cramped room on the fifth floor of another hotel around the corner.

The alley, in part a ghetto for jade sellers from Khotan, was a natural target for the reprisal attacks by Han vigilantes that mostly took place across Urumqi on July 7. That day, at about 2 p.m., dozens of men armed with sticks and knives turned from a wide avenue to the mouth of the alley. They beat a convenience store owner, Abulajang, 32, who walks with a limp now and can barely turn his head.

“Now, I don’t have a good impression of the Han,” he said. “When I go out, those Han Chinese who see me, I believe they hate me.”

Abulajang and many others in the area said there were about 30 armed paramilitary soldiers standing near the mouth of the alley that day, presumably to stop any violence. “But the soldiers did nothing,” Abulajang said.

Next, the mob descended on the lame shoeshine boy outside the Light of Dawn hotel. He was hit in the head and stabbed in the back, said a grand-uncle, Muhammad Jang.

Inside the hotel, Abulimit and a security guard, Abdul Rahman, barricaded themselves in a bedroom next to the reception desk. The vigilantes knocked a wide hole in the door.

“We couldn’t stop them,” Abulimit said. “I fainted when they started beating and cutting me.”

The mob moved on, perhaps thinking they had killed the men.

This past weekend, their dried blood was still splattered across the blue-and-white floor tiles and a vinyl sofa.

Abulimit sat in a clinic next door while a doctor changed the dressing on his head. How quickly the wounds would heal, no one knew.

Turkey says China "invited" Turkish journalists to Uighur region

2009-07-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Turkey says China "invited" Turkish journalists to Uighur region

Turkish FM Davutoglu talked to Chinese Foreign Minister Yang on the phone regarding the recent violence in East Turkistan.
Sunday, 12 July 2009 16:27
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu talked to Chinese Foreign Minister Jiechi Yang on the phone regarding the recent violence in East Turkistan.

Han Chinese attack on Uighur workers in a factory, that cost lives of two people and injured 118, sparked massive protests in East Turkistan that China changed its name to "Xinjiang" in 1955, calling it "Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region."

Anadolu news agency quoted Foreign ministry as saying "the telephone conversation lasted for one hour and 15 minutes."

Davutoglu "clearly conveyed Turkey's sensitivities and expectations on the matter and expressed the reaction to the incidents in the public."

Davutoglu said Uighur people was "a bridge of friendship" in Chinese-Turkish relations, and underlined that Turkey considered this matter from human rights point of view.

Davutoglu said Turkey was "not intended to interfere with the domestic affairs of China" and "respected territorial integrity of this country", stressing that China would be strengthened in case the investigation into the incidents is concluded urgently and transparently.

China officially raised the death toll to 184 in police crackdown, but Uighur World Congress put the death toll from the unrest at between 600 and 800, saying the estimate was based on eyewitness accounts of the violence.

"Invitation by China for Turkish journalists"

Turkish foreign minister also welcomed an invitation by China for the Turkish journalists to visit the places where the incidents occurred.

Chinese foreign minister Yang said Turkish-Chinese relations were "strategic", and noted China "attached a high importance" to relations with Turkey.

Chinese minister defended the process of masive arrests as saying that the perpetrators would be brought into court "without any ethnical discrimination".

Chinese oppression of minorities

2009-07-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Chinese oppression of minorities
By Paul Lin 林保華

Sunday, Jul 12, 2009, Page 8

‘If the CCP really views Uighurs as Chinese, blood should prove to be thicker than water and the CCP should stop the killings.’

The unrest in Urumqi and the massacre of Muslim Uighurs once again highlighted the instability of Chinese society and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cruel, merciless nature.

At 11pm on June 25 in Shaoguan City in Guangdong Province, a fight broke out between Han Chinese workers and Uighur workers over rumors that a Uighur had raped a Han Chinese girl at a factory. The result was that two Uighur workers were killed and 118 people injured, 79 of them Uighurs. Armed police did not intervene until after 4am. With the CCP’s ability to stop protests even before they get started, this was a very slow response, which in effect meant the party approved the beating of Uighurs. The Chinese government’s long-term nationalistic propaganda aimed at giving the Uighurs a bad name has resulted in most Han Chinese viewing Uighurs as suicide bombers, splittists and terrorists.

After the incident, Chinese authorities did not release any news on how they intended to stop the ethnic conflict. When a group of Uighurs protested in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi last Sunday, it turned into a bloodbath. How this peaceful protest turned into conflict remains a mystery because the CCP had blocked all information in and out of the area, including telephones and the Internet. News reports at around midnight on July 5 said only two people died, but the morning after, officials announced that the death toll had jumped to 140 with 828 injured. Not long after the second set of figures were released, Beijing announced that the death toll had increased to 156 and yesterday raised it to 186 — with many believing that the real figure is much higher.

Thanks to the authorities rapidly “calming the unrest,” many people were killed that night and their corpses quickly disposed of, with thousands more arrested. Reporters from outside of Xinjiang were then allowed into designated areas for interviews, while the government laid all the blame on the president of the World Uighur Congress Rebiya Kadeer, a 62-year-old Uighur businesswoman who lives in exile in the US. The surprising effectiveness of the Chinese government’s actions imply that the incident was carefully planned in advance to draw the Uighurs out and give them a beating without leaving any traces behind.

The Uighurs have been wrongly accused and even with reporters from other areas and abroad arriving on pre-arranged tours, there were brave people who — like the monks last year in Tibet — directly exposed the CCP’s tricks and violent acts, saying troops drove directly at protesters in armored cars and raided the houses of innocent Uighur civilians taking away all able-bodied men.

This is the second mass slaughter conducted by the CCP after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Is this how Beijing has “improved its human rights” record as President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has claimed? Because China is a powerful country, the international community has been relatively silent in its response. The UN should step forward and investigate these racially motivated killings. While an investigation team may be deceived by the CCP, at least it would force the CCP to restrain itself somewhat.

If the CCP really views Uighurs as Chinese, blood should prove to be thicker than water and the CCP should stop the killings. If however, the CCP views the Uighurs as some foreign tribe, they should be given the right to self-determination.

The reaction of the Taiwanese media was slow and television talk shows did not even touch on the issue on Monday evening. Have they forgotten all about the 228 incident? Last year and this year, the 228 Memorial Foundation held international symposiums on Xinjiang and invited Kadeer to provide a written statement. This year, I submitted a report on the latest state of human rights in Xinjiang and said Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) concept of hexie (和諧), or harmony, is not applicable to the Uighurs and that the current secretary of the CCP in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan (王樂泉) and his empire have deliberately stirred up tensions to increase conflict. Judging by the recent developments, I was right.

Taiwanese should open their eyes and see what is happening. If Taiwan is swallowed up by China because of Ma’s surrender to the CCP, the Han Chinese — who long have been brainwashed into viewing Taiwan with hostility — will sooner or later be manipulated to kill Taiwanese and another 228 incident will become a reality.

Paul Lin is a political commentator.

Now the Uighurs (Washington Post Editorial)

2009-07-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

Now the Uighurs
There's a reason news of unrest in China's Xinjiang province reads a lot like last year's trouble in Tibet.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

IF THE reports of deadly riots and repression in a far-off region of China sounded familiar last week, it's because you have heard them -- or something much like them -- before. The uprising by ethnic Uighurs in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang province was the third such popular protest by Uighurs in the past 20 years, and it looked a lot like the trouble that broke out last year in Tibet. What began as a peaceful protest by an aggrieved minority turned to rioting after police responded harshly. Then followed a brutal crackdown by security forces, accompanied by revenge attacks by members of China's Han majority.

As always, Chinese authorities have been unsparing in the force used to silence the protests. As always, they are blocking communications from the region (though some Western journalists were allowed to travel to Urumqi) and fomenting Han nationalism with xenophobic diatribes in the state-controlled media. Once again an exiled leader is blamed, without evidence, for fomenting "terrorism" -- in this case Rebiya Kadeer, the World Uighur Congress leader, who lives in Fairfax County. And -- as always -- China is doing and promising nothing to remedy the underlying cause of the unrest, which is its treatment of both Tibet and Xinjiang as if they were colonies, populated by captive nations.

One reason China's Communist leadership rejected the political reforms undertaken by the Soviet Union in the 1980s is a fear that Xinjiang would follow the path of neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics -- some of them also populated by Turkic ethnic groups -- that became independent nations. But Beijing is simply repeating all of the mistakes of the Soviet Union and other colonialist powers. It has systematically suppressed Uighur culture and language; practice of the Muslim religion is also tightly controlled. Millions of Han Chinese have moved to the province over the last half century, turning the 8 million Uighurs into a minority in their own land. As in Tibet, Han Chinese hold a privileged economic position in the cities, while Uighurs are regarded and often treated as an inferior race.
ad_icon

The United States and other Western countries have tried for years, in vain, to persuade Chinese leaders to change policy in Tibet. Unlike the Dalai Lama, Uighurs get little love in Paris or Hollywood; mostly they are known for the alleged militants held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, who have been found to pose no threat but who (with four recent exceptions) have not been released, for lack of a place to send them. But this minority, too, deserves support. The brutal suppression of the Uighurs' legitimate demands for justice will not make them go away; it will only weaken China's ability to hold on to the territory in the long term.

Rumbles on the Rim of China’s Empire(NYT)

2009-07-11T14:13:00.000-07:00

Rumbles on the Rim of China’s Empire
Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

TENSION Official pronouncements hung torn on a shuttered store in Urumqi.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By EDWARD WONG
Published: July 11, 2009

URUMQI, China — Its name alone indicates what the western region of Xinjiang means to the Chinese state: it translates as New Frontier or New Dominion, a place at the margins of empire. For centuries, the rulers of China have sought to control and shape Xinjiang, much as the dry winds of the vast deserts here sculpt the rocks.

A history exhibition in the main museum in this regional capital goes one step further. “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” it asserts, implying that Beijing or Xian or some other imperial capital has for time immemorial held sway over this land at the crossroads of Asian civilizations.

But many Uighurs, a Turkic race of Muslims that is the largest ethnic group among the 20 million people of Xinjiang, have their own competing historical narrative. In it, the region is cast as the Uighurs’ homeland, and the ethnic Han, who only began arriving in large numbers after the Communist takeover in 1949, are portrayed as colonizers.

Mechanisms typical of colonial control — the migration of Han, who are China’s dominant race, and government policies that support the spread of Han language, culture and economic power — provided tinder, some scholars say, for the conflagration of the past week in Xinjiang.

The fighting quickly turned into the deadliest outbreak of ethnic violence in China in decades, and has forced Uighurs and Han across the region to question not only their relations with each other, but also the relationship of the Chinese state to the frontier, or, as some would put it, the imperial power to the colony.

The upheaval began with young Uighurs marching last Sunday in this regional capital to protest a case of judicial discrimination. That exploded into clashes with riot police and Uighurs rampaging through the city and killing Han civilians. Then, for at least three days, bands of Han vigilantes roamed Urumqi, attacking and killing Uighurs. The government said at least 184 people were killed and 1,100 injured in the violence, with most of the dead being Han, a statement that Uighurs dispute.

One Uighur university graduate told of hiding in her apartment for most of the last week. “This is Xinjiang,” she said. “This is our homeland. Where are we going to live if we leave this city? Where are we going to go?”

Xinjiang has always been a great melting pot, a former hub on the Silk Road that today has 13 sizeable ethnic minority groups and borders eight countries. The concept of homeland is at the heart of the conflict. Uighurs shy away from openly framing the issue as one of independence and national sovereignty, but they ask: Who is the guest here? And whose culture and way of life should take precedence?

Though many Uighurs claim to be the indigenous people of the region, foreign historians say the Uighurs did not migrate from the Mongolian steppes to what is now Xinjiang until the 10th century. They eventually built tribal societies here, mostly around oasis towns along the southern edge of the large desert depression called the Tarim Basin.

Archaeological finds, especially recent excavations of amazingly well-preserved mummies, show that the first people to live in the region were likely West Eurasians, some of whom seem to have worshipped cows. The oldest of those mummies date back 3,800 years.

“I say the Tarim Basin was one of the last parts of the earth to be occupied,” said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been a leading scholar on the mummies. “It was bound by mountains. They couldn’t live there until they had certain irrigation technologies.”

The race of first settlers, the Tocharians, herders who spoke an Indo-European language, died out long ago, Mr. Mair said, and there are no descendants to make historical claims on the land.

As for signs of the Chinese empire, the most prominent Chinese gravesites were discovered at a place called Astana, believed to be a former military garrison. The findings there date from the 3rd to the 10th centuries, ending with the Tang Dynasty, when trade along the Silk Road was at its height. But for that period and for centuries afterward, ethnicities, tribes and power centers in the region remained in flux, with no one culture exerting long-term rule.

The Chinese empire did not exercise full political control over the territory in its current shape until the Qing Dynasty, ruled by ethnic Manchus, annexed the region in 1760 and later gave it the name Xinjiang, according to the scholars James A. Millward and Peter C. Perdue.

“By first establishing military and civil administrations and then promoting immigration and agricultural settlements, it went far toward ensuring the continued presence of China-based power in the region,” the two professors wrote in a 2004 volume of essays by 16 scholars, “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland.”

Mr. Millward wrote in an e-mail message that the emperor Qianlong had conquered Xinjiang because efforts to rule it through Mongolian and Uighur proxies had failed.

Xinjiang’s location, bordering the nomadic areas of Central Asia, had already made it a strategic place for military garrisons during earlier periods when the Chinese empire had tentative control. Each time, the military would reclaim land for farming and build irrigation works, according to Calla Wiemer, another of the 16 essayists.

But the Qing dynasty brought the practice to a new level, greatly expanding the region’s economy. More than 50,000 demobilized troops were offered benefits if they stayed and farmed, and free land and seeds were given to Chinese willing to move here from the interior, Ms. Wiemer wrote.

It was a precursor to the policies of the Communist Party, the ones that have modernized Xinjiang but also contributed to its fractious ethnic landscape. In the early 1950s, the central government established the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, an enterprise to manage large farms and construction projects called bingtuan and provide jobs for demobilized soldiers.

The bingtuan are hugely profitable, and an estimated one out of every six Han in Xinjiang — about 1.3 million people — belongs to one. But Uighurs rarely get work there.

Government incentives as well as market forces have spurred a flood of Han migration, and the Han now make up at least 40 percent of the population, compared with 6 percent in 1949. Most of the settlers are from poor rural areas.

“We were farmers in Henan, and we wanted to make a better living,” said Lu Sifeng, 47, a street fruit vendor whose son was killed by a Uighur mob on July 5.

Uighurs resent not only the increased competition for jobs, but also the tightening of cultural policies since the 1990s, implemented partly because the Chinese government feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead Uighurs to identify with Turkic nationalist causes or Islamic fundamentalism. The result, many Uighurs say, is a set of problems that shred their dignity: a lack of jobs for non-Han; strict limits on the practice of Islam; a need to subsume their own language to Mandarin in order to get ahead economically.

“Real colonization only started with Mao after the liberation,” said Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The Chinese government points to the fact that the gross domestic product of Xinjiang doubled from $28 billion in 2004 to $60 billion in 2008. With that has come a rise in living standards and more jobs overall, and better education for every ethnic group, including the Uighurs. Officials say there is no need to change policies, no need for true autonomy, and that Xinjiang is an example of the future in borderlands of China, with ethnic minorities and the Han prospering side by side.

It is, they say, the best that one can hope for from a new frontier.

How China Wins and Loses Xinjiang

2009-07-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

How China Wins and Loses Xinjiang

The Chinese government can put down a riot -- but its heavy-handed tactics ensure that ethnic tensions will keep simmering.
BY CHRISTINA LARSON | JULY 9, 2009

Photo Essay: Who Are the Uighurs?

On Sunday, more than 1,000 Uighurs clashed with police in the western Chinese city of Urumqi -- marking one of the country's bloodiest ethnic conflicts in recent years.

The government's crackdown on the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority group that has long chafed under Beijing's rule, was nasty, brutish, and short. Overnight curfews were imposed. Thousands of police officers dispersed. President Hu Jintao left the G-8 summit in Europe to focus on putting out fires at home. But not all aspects of China's policies toward Uighurs and other minorities are characterized by such precision.

If you visit Xinjiang, the restive province that's home to China's roughly 8 million Uighurs, you'll realize there's a gap -- often a chasm -- between official intention on minority issues and what happens in practice. Sometimes the government's missteps appear to be the product of malevolence, sometimes of ignorance. The results are both tragic and absurd.

On bad days, the tragedy is obvious: More than 150 people, Uighur and Han Chinese, have died in recent riots. But there is also a thread of dark comedy, a continual drama of miscommunication and miscalculation, as Han authorities try to hamstring the practice of Islam and local politicians try to at once appease and suppress the Uighurs.

On paper, Islam is one of China's five officially recognized and legal religions. And the central government, in order to foster a "harmonious society," aims to help all minority peoples prosper alongside their Han neighbors. But in practice, ethnic policies as implemented alienate and inflame the largely Muslim population of Xinjiang. Tensions run high, liable to erupt at even distant provocations. (The spark that lit last Sunday's riots was the mistreatment and murder of Uighur factory workers in faraway Guangdong province.)

Recently, Robert D. Kaplan argued in The Atlantic that, on purely pragmatic grounds, in the case of Sri Lanka, repression worked. Other writers have recently made similar assertions in the case of Xinjiang. One line of argumentation indeed holds that China's uncompromising stance toward its ethnic populations may be unsavory to Westerners, but is in fact the surest way to keep the peace.

If only Beijing's iron fist were so dexterous. China's government is indeed effective at disbanding protests, building skyscrapers, and staging high-profile spectacles like the Olympics. It's also proved relatively adept, to its credit, at managing the financial crisis and keeping factories churning.

But you don't have to look far for signs of breakdown or miscoordination. Take the embarrassing wavering over Green Dam, the much-maligned Internet nanny program; or last year's scandals over tainted milk, an economic and international public relations disaster for Beijing. China routinely looks more vulnerable from the inside than the outside, and its volatile minority affairs are just another example.

Ultimately, China is more adept at creating fearsome impressions in the moment -- grand like the Olympic Opening Ceremony, or cruel like the crackdown on protestors -- than at maintenance. When you look close, it's apparent how much muddle there is beneath the surface, especially when authorities attempt to formulate policy around something they don't truly understand.

The Uighurs, as well as Islam itself, mystify China's secular leadership. In Xinjiang, a vast western province -- three times the size of France and bordering eight countries -- China's long-term policy toward minorities is puzzled in principle, capricious in execution, and the result is much suffering on the part of both Uighur and Han. Far from containing tension, the heavy-handed approach fans the flames. It is a brutal kind of confusion.

Miscalculations about Uighurs and their religion have graver implications, too.

Beijing claims that new industry and oil exploration in Xinjiang is bringing wealth into the region, benefiting both Han and Uighurs. Yet according to the Asian Development Bank, income inequality in Xinjiang remains the highest in all of China. Hiring discrimination is a substantial barrier, often fueled by the Chinese Communist Party's perplexed attitude toward religion. "You have a party that is primarily Han and officially atheist," explains Gardner Bovingdon, professor of East Asian and Eurasian studies at Indiana University. "The party doctrine is founded on notion that religion is a mystification. It requires its members to be atheist; any party member or teacher in Xinjiang must renounce Islam."

The vast majority of the new jobs in Xinjiang are state-affiliated: Construction crews, bank clerks, police officers, nurses and school-teachers all work for the government (there isn't much private business on the frontier). Many of those positions are off-limits to publicly observant Muslims. The state-run Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the largest development company in the province, for instance, not long ago filled, by mandate, 800 of 840 new job openings with Han Chinese.

Such policies exacerbate inequality and rile ethnic tensions. But do they also help the government squash would-be separatist movements?

Most analysts do not believe that religion itself, or radical Islam, animates pro-independence factions in Xinjiang. To target actual separatists, more precise strategies could be envisioned. "The way to respond to a small minority in a society is not to prevent the religiosity of an entire population," Bovingdon explains. "That's counterproductive, and makes plenty of people resentful."

And yet, that appears to be precisely the strategy the local government has adopted. Since 2002, when the U.S.-led "war on terror" gave China cover for greater surveillance of its own Muslim populations, the Xinjiang public security bureau has increased crackdowns on what it deems, with alarmingly broad brushstrokes, the "three evils" of "separatism, religious extremism and terrorism."

In practice, this means that loudspeakers in mosques are banned in Urumqi; families hosting dinner parties during religious festivals must register with the government; the interiors of even small rural mosques are plastered with tawdry government propaganda, and routinely visited by Han inspectors (who don't bother to doff their shoes when they enter and check log books). Although Islam is not officially outlawed, Uighurs are subject to a litany of intrusions on daily religious life, which leads them to see the government as an antagonistic force. As one man in Kashgar told me, "Because I am born a Uighur, I am a terrorist -- that is what the government thinks?"

The authorities' overreach is also clear in the way security policies target children. During certain religious holidays, anyone under 18 is barred from entering a mosque. In Kashgar, communal meals are imposed at school during the fast period of Ramadan, and attendance is required at special assemblies timed to coincide with Friday prayers. There's no reason to treat every Uighur child like an aspiring terrorist or separatist, unless the aim is truly to stamp out religion from next generation. But this tactic would seem a high-stakes gamble for the CCP.

Andrew Nathan, chair of the political science department at Columbia University, explains, "This is the Chinese style toward religion -- the government is very suspicious of religion. In Xinjiang, separatism is the thing they want to avoid. They conceive of the separatists as people who are religious fundamentalists. They're making a logical leap of faith. It produces resistance. It produces deep resentment."

And there are some indicators that China's attempts to curb Islam in the name of assimilating the Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang are woefully backfiring. Even as the local government has tightened its "counterterrorism" policies in recent years, the U.S. Congressional Commission on China has determined, the level of unrest in the province has actually increased. Last year saw a string of bus bombings and attacks on police in southwest Xinjiang; Sunday's bloody riots in Urumqi were the worst in many years.
Xinjiang has been called the "Texas of China," and it certainly exhibits a rough-and-tumble frontier feel. Oil and mineral wealth have in recent years attracted Beijing's attention, and an influx of Han businessmen, swashbucklers, and entrepreneurs migrating from east China. When the western desert territory was incorporated into the People's Republic, the Chinese leaders selected as their provincial capital Urumqi, a city undistinguished by landmarks or history. In a region with a long and storied past, and a landscape dotted by historic mosques and the sites of famous battles and tombs of Uighur kings, the new capital was a relative blank slate. It seemed a place that new settlers could, in effect, start over.

But, on the face of it, official policy in Xinjiang is not to erase Uighur history or identity. Indeed, special efforts are made to highlight certain aspects of the past. Airport gift shops sell books printed by Han publishing houses about the charming customs of Xinjiang's minority groups. A stream of tourists, international and Han Chinese, comes to visit the historic old towns in cities like Kashgar, located in southwest Xinjiang. The local government is flirting with, or at least trying to make a few yuan off of, what the spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in London described to the BBC's Radio 4 as the region's "multiculturalism."

Outside Urumqi, the troubled provincial capital where Sunday's riots took place, new highway signs are posted in both Mandarin characters and the Uighur language, written in an Arabic script. But there's a danger of getting lost if one tries to follow those signs. If you ask the local Uighurs, they say that what passes for signage in their language is often nonsensical transliterations, a version of "Chinglish" in Uighur. There's ornamental appeal, sans utility -- evidently Uighurs weren't consulted in planning or proof-reading.

Special funds are allocated by the central government for religious affairs and poverty reduction bursaries in Xinjiang, as in other western provinces. But how are they spent? Take the "Xinjiang Minority Street" project in downtown Urumqi. It's a five-story market complex with an exotic-looking exterior, dominated by pale yellow turrets and fanciful archways, with numerous stalls and winding staircases inside. A placard by the entrance proudly announces that it was built in 2002 for the benefit of Xinjiang's minority people, as a place to sell their ethnic handicrafts, for the hefty sum of 160 million yuan (around $23.4 million).

But inside, most of the stalls, if they were ever occupied, are now empty. A few are home to Han jewelers selling jade trinkets. The paint is beginning to peel. A Chinese hostess stands outside a deserted restaurant with décor resembling how Walt Disney might imagine Arabia. In short, this is what a boondoggle looks like. Or rather, it's how local officials and contractors conceive of what Uighurs want (or at least how they can capture funds Beijing sets aside for minority affairs), without much consultation with Uighurs themselves. Sadly, the building sits adjacent to what is in fact the heart of the city's Uighur district, where families live in one-story shanties of brick and mud that could badly use money for repairs.

The building, a work of pure architectural and promotional fantasy, epitomizes the vast disconnect between how Han officialdom envisions China's minorities and how Uighurs see themselves, and Islam.

Last year I was in Kashgar during October's Golden Week -- an extended national holiday commemorating the founding of the People's Republic of China. My hotel sat on the grounds of the former Russian consulate -- a reminder of when Western powers fought over influence in Central Asia. That afternoon Chinese state television was showing continuous coverage of the Golden Week celebrations, including parades of China's officially-recognized minority peoples in bright costumes, singing and dancing, and saluting the legacy of New China.

But outside, residents of Kashgar were gathering to mark a rather different festival: the end of Ramadan, the month-long fasting period for Muslims. The final day of Ramadan, when the fast is broken and people celebrate, is called Rozi Festival. Annually, 10,000 men and their families from across southwestern Xinjiang travel to Kashgar to commemorate the holiday outside the ancient Id Kah mosque.

The sight of thousands of devout Muslims kneeling on unfurled prayer mats in a ceremony unsupervised by the state of course makes local authorities deeply nervous. The government hasn't razed the mosque or explicitly prohibited worship, but it has recently erected a giant TV screen in the public square facing the mosque. Kazakh soap operas are now screened at regular intervals throughout the day, timed to coincide with daily services. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't had much impact on mosque attendance.

One night I asked a Uighur man headed into Id Kah mosque about the TV. "If they put it somewhere else, people would be happy," he said. "But not here -- here it makes us angry."

"China's attempts to suppress Islam," a recent Human Rights Watch report concludes, "is a policy that is likely to alienate Uighurs, drive religious expression further underground, and encourage the development of more radicalized and oppositional forms of religious identity."

Commenting from a different angle, Richard Weitz, director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute, finds broader regional security implications. "A lot of Chinese problems do appear to be a bit of their own making," he said. "They justify a lot of what they're doing in the name of counterterrorism, but we fear it might also exacerbate a terrorist threat. Of course, the same could be said for some U.S. policies -- look at Iraq and Afghanistan."

Misunderstanding the Uighur culture and religion, the Chinese authorities fear the worst. And their current policies seem more likely to foster resistance and resentment than peace and passivity. Perhaps the backlash is already beginning.

China's flood of fortune seekers unsettles Xinjiang

2009-07-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

e
From the Los Angeles Times
China's flood of fortune seekers unsettles Xinjiang
Opportunities found by one group -- the Han -- and lost by another -- the Uighurs -- are behind the violence in China's far west.

By Barbara Demick and David Pierson
July 11, 2009

Reporting from Urumqi, China, and Beijing - Wearing a dirty striped T-shirt, scuffed loafers and dusty cargo pants, Liu Xiuyi arrived in Urumqi last week after a 56-hour train ride that took him from the east coast to the farthest reaches of China's northwest.

Like the young Americans who in the 19th century followed Horace Greeley's imperative to "Go west, young man," the 26-year-old Liu left home in search of a job, space and opportunity. He knew nothing about the Xinjiang region except rumors that you could make more than $400 a month here, almost twice as much as back home in Jiangsu province.

"I heard everything was great here, but when I got in, everything was scary," Liu said in a thick country accent.

What Liu didn't realize when he boarded the train was that ethnic tensions in Xinjiang were exploding, fueled in part by the westward migration of people like himself.

The Uighurs in Xinjiang The Uighurs in Xinjiang Graphic

At least 180 people have been confirmed dead in street fighting between the Han, China's dominant ethnic group, and the native Uighurs of Xinjiang.

Record numbers of migrants have been pouring into Xinjiang, spurred by the global financial crisis that is closing down export-driven factories in the east and curtailing new construction in Beijing and Shanghai. The Chinese government says 1.2 million people migrated here last year.

And that's not counting the hundreds of thousands who come to pick cotton and potatoes, recruited by the quasi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which has extensive farmland.

This year especially, local governments fearing social unrest caused by unemployment have played a role in organizing trips. The city of Chongqing in central China announced that it was sending 100,000 people to Xinjiang this year. In March, one county in Ningxia, in northern China, held a large ceremony for 3,200 peasants who were being sent out.

In effect, they chose to export instability to western China.

The Uighurs, a Turkic people whose majority here has been slipping away, complain that the outsiders are gobbling up the best jobs. Many employers here refuse to hire Uighurs for even the most menial positions, whether picking cotton or working in mines.

"Room service staff needed, 18-40 years old. Junior high school degree required. Han only," read an advertisement last week on a bulletin board at a government-run labor agency in Urumqi.

Han migrants often get free transportation, insurance, housing and help in finding jobs or starting businesses.

The ruling Communist Party's restrictions on government employees practicing religion keeps many Uighurs, who are Muslim, out of jobs as bureaucrats, police officers or teachers; if they are caught attending mosque or fasting during Ramadan, they can be dismissed or demoted.

Uneducated Uighurs are handicapped by their language, which is closer to Turkish than Chinese.

"It's hard for Uighurs to find jobs. No Han is going to hire me if I go into their shop," said a 36-year-old tailor who gave his name as Mijiti and barely spoke Chinese. He wore tattered dress slacks and a dirty white shirt, squatting in a familiar pose of resignation.

He had used almost all his money to buy fabric, but now the shop was closed. He was trying to figure out how to support his wife and 8-month-old son with the equivalent of $4 in his pocket.

Nearby was a strip of Han-owned auto dealerships that had been vandalized in the riots. Windows were smashed, brand-new sedans overturned.

Bilingual university graduates also find it difficult to compete with native speakers of Mandarin on tests that require knowledge of thousands of Chinese characters. Although Uighur students applying to Chinese universities are admitted with lower test scores, job applicants don't have such an advantage. And since 2000, most public schools have shifted the primary language of instruction to Chinese, which has thrown tens of thousands of Uighur teachers out of work.

A college graduate in his 20s living in Kashgar said he was unable to get a job teaching English at home even though he speaks almost native Chinese and flawless English.

"Of course Uighurs should learn Chinese. We are in favor of bilingual education, but not if it means we are shut out of the job market," said the man, who asked not to be named.

He said Uighurs are resentful when they see the opportunities available to newly arrived Han.

"All we want is the same opportunity," he said.

Liu, the fresh-off-the train migrant, is a case in point. Although the job he'd planned on fell through, the day after he arrived he lined up another -- collecting flowers for a manufacturer of herbal medicines.

"It's possible they hate us because we're taking their jobs," said Liu, pointing nervously down an alley near the railroad station where he'd heard that bodies had been discovered. "I'm really scared of the Uighurs now. When I look into their eyes, I see wolves."

Related links

*
The Uighurs in Xinjiang The Uighurs in Xinjiang Graphic

The Chinese government doesn't release figures on unemployment among ethnic groups. But a leading Uighur intellectual, Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing, has estimated that 1.5 million Uighur workers -- the equivalent of half the adult males -- are unemployed.

In an interview aired by Radio Free Asia in March, he warned that there could be "no peace without equal development between Han immigrants and native Uighurs." Tohti has since disappeared from public view and is believed to be under house arrest.

Xinjiang (the name means "new territory" in Chinese) is the equivalent in modern Chinese mythology of the American Wild West -- a vast, desert-like terrain with oil and mineral deposits that have inspired a gold-rush mentality. After the Communists came to power in 1949, the military sent demobilized soldiers here.

For centuries the Uighurs were renowned as traders and money-changers. With their cities built on oases of the old Silk Road, they had access to the lucrative trade between Asia and Europe. Trade soared in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's manufacturing prowess.

But after 2001, China tightened borders, fearing that separatists were receiving arms and training from Islamic militants.

Massive urban-renewal projects resulted in the demolition of the mud-brick labyrinthine alleys where Uighurs ran shops out of storefronts attached to their homes. Relocated to Chinese-style apartment complexes in the suburbs, they are unable to raise money to open new businesses.

Chinese migrants today come willingly to Xinjiang, drawn by annual growth rates of more than 10%. Over the last decade, the central government has invested more than $100 billion to make Xinjiang more appealing.

"There's a special army going to the west," the railroad ministry boasted on its website in March. It said 109 trains had carried 210,000 people from three cities in central China to Urumqi to work in construction, energy and agriculture.

It is likely that the passion for heading west has cooled in the last week.

Perhaps the only consolation for unemployed Uighurs is that thousands of the newcomers are trying to flee -- if they can get tickets from scalpers who are charging five times the normal prices for bus and train tickets out of town.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

david.pierson@latimes.com

Protest at Chinese embassy against crackdown on Uyghur protesters

2009-07-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

Canada Urged to Investigate Uyghur Crisis in China
By Cindy Chan
Epoch Times Staff Jul 10, 2009

Protest at Chinese embassy against crackdown on Uyghur protesters
Uyghurs and supporters protest outside the Chinese embassy in Ottawa on July 10, 2009. (Gerry Smith/The Epoch Times)

OTTAWA—Concerned Canadian groups are urging the government to launch an immediate investigation into the crisis in northwest China where human rights protests by the Uyghur minority have escalated into large-scale rioting and violent suppression with growing casualties.

Demonstrations first began July 5 in Urumqi, capital of China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and have since spread to other parts of the region.

The protests were prompted by grievances over the Chinese regime’s handling of an incident at a factory in Guangdong province in June in which two Uyghurs were killed.

As Chinese authorities dispatched security forces to quell the protestors, the incident turned into violence with the Muslim Uyghurs, who have traditionally lived in Xinjiang, facing Han Chinese, who migrated there in recent years at the regime’s encouragement, and the mainly Han Chinese security forces.
Related Articles

* Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Calls for Right to Peaceful Protest In China
* World Media Follow Beijing's Lead in Xinjiang Reporting
* Conflict Continues in Xinjiang, Martial Law Declared
* Uyghur Protesters Cite Litany of Abuses by Chinese Regime
* End Violence in Xinjiang

Human rights observers say the protests and the regime’s crackdown and information blockade reflect communist China’s longstanding repression and rights abuses against the Uyghurs.

“The violence and human rights violations that have been so widespread in the Xinjiang region for many years have obviously spilled over into the terrible violations and suffering this week,” said Alex Neve, Secretary-General of Amnesty International Canada’s English Branch, at a demonstration in front of the Chinese embassy Friday afternoon.

“The Chinese government must be pressed by Canada and all other governments to immediately agree to launch an independent and credible investigation into what’s happened,” he said.
Protest at Chinese embassy against crackdown on Uyghur protesters
Uyghurs and supporters protest across the street from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa calling on the Chinese regime to stop its violence and rights abuses against the Uyghur people in northwest China. (Gerry Smith/The Epoch Times)

The U.S. embassy in Beijing has sent representatives to Xinjiang. Mr. Neve urged Canada to do the same and to also send a parliamentary delegation to investigate the situation first hand.

Chinese authorities say that 156 people have been killed, over 1,000 injured, and 1,434 detained.

But Mr. Neve said it is very difficult to get an accurate and clear understanding of the situation.

“The Chinese government has been restricting access to information, barring journalists from many parts of Xinjiang, imposing restrictions, as they often do, on Internet use. So it’s been very difficult to get the kind of information that is so crucial right now.”

Along with supporters from Toronto, London, Montreal, Ottawa, and elsewhere, Mehmet Tohti of the Uyghur Canadian Association was at the demonstration following a press conference and gathering on Parliament Hill earlier in the day.

He said the Chinese regime has imposed martial law and deployed more than 70,000 troops to Kashgar and 30,000 troops to Urumqi.

Protest at Chinese embassy against crackdown on Uyghur protesters
David Kilgour (R) in support of the protest outside the Chinese embassy in Ottawa calling for an end to the violence in Xinjiang (Gerry Smith/The Epoch Times)
Today, Friday, is a day for Muslims to gather in prayer. But Mr. Tohti said only two mosques are open in Urumqi and “the government did not allow people to come to pray. Police search, house by house, is continuing. Lots of arrests and lots of people are still dying in hospitals.”

Uyghur sources in Xinjaing report that more than 1,000 Uyghurs have been killed, he said.

David Kilgour, former Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, also at the embassy, noted a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights in China that extensively documented “egregious restrictions” on people’s rights in Xinjiang.

He said a BBC report this morning showed Uyghurs being surrounded by police and beaten by batons while coming out of the mosques.

Yasin Altug of the Turkish Canadian Cultural Association of Ottawa was also at the demonstration.

He called for help from the world community. “There is a genocide happening [in Xinjiang]. They have to stop,” he said.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group and many Uyghurs exiled from Xinjiang live in Turkey. Turkey’s Prime Minister has said his country will ask the United Nations Security Council to address the crisis.

Canada’s Transport and Infrastructure Minister John Baird left yesterday for a ten-day trip to China to promote trade relations.

Mr. Kilgour urged Mr. Baird to speak up against the persecution of the Uyghurs and other groups in China.

Uyghur protest at Chinese embassy in Ottawa
Protesters hold signs and flags outside the Chinese embassy to call for respect for human rights in Xinjiang. (Gerry Smith/The Epoch Times)
“He has a real opportunity to raise these issues at high levels with the government. We would say to him that he has a responsibility to do so,” Mr. Neve agreed.

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon issued a statement July 6 urging “restraint on all sides” and calling on Chinese authorities “to respect freedom of speech and information and the right to peaceful protest.”

Mr. Neve said what is needed “is a strong statement that recognizes that the Uyghur people are experiencing grave human rights violations and that Canada is determined and committed to bringing that to an end.”

Urging Canada to join the U.S. and other countries to investigate the crisis, Mr. Tohti also called on foreign investigators to talk directly with local Uyghurs who are the “victims of this atrocity

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/19415/

A Strongman Is China’s Rock in Ethnic Strife

2009-07-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

A Strongman Is China’s Rock in Ethnic Strife
Claro Cortes IV/Reuters

Wang Lequan, left, Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, and Nuer Baikeli, Xinjiang's governor.

o

Article Tools Sponsored By
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: July 10, 2009

BEIJING — As ethnic Han gangs roamed the streets of Urumqi on Tuesday at dusk, seeking revenge against Muslim Uighur rioters who killed scores of Han two nights earlier, a balding Communist Party bureaucrat abruptly appeared on the city’s television screens to call for calm.

The nine-minute speech by the bureaucrat, Wang Lequan, was mostly government boilerplate: the riots were no homegrown problem, but “a massive conspiracy” to sabotage ethnic unity; Urumqi citizens should “point the spear toward hostile forces at home and abroad,” not at their neighbors; attacks on Han or Uighurs alike were heartbreaking.

Then he turned to the Han who were on the streets, repaying the riots’ blood debt. “Comrades, to start with, such action is fundamentally not necessary,” he told them briskly. “Our dictatorial force is fully able to knock out the evildoers, so there is no need to take such action.”

Mr. Wang, 64, the Communist Party secretary and absolute power in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, is largely unknown outside China, and until lately stayed in the shadows even at home. But China’s leadership elite, and perhaps especially his patron, President Hu Jintao, have put their faith in him: they have let him run Xinjiang for 15 years, well beyond the usually strict limit of a decade in one powerful post. They have elevated him to the Politburo, the ruling party’s inner sanctum.

They have made him their go-to expert on policies toward minorities, which account for the more than 100 million of China’s 1.3 billion citizens who are not ethnically classified as Han. Those in power are reputed to have given him leading roles on senior advisory groups that coordinate and oversee ethnic policies. They have placed his protégé, Xinjiang’s former deputy party boss, in charge of restive Tibet.

They have done all this, those who watch Mr. Wang say, because of performances like the one on Urumqi television.

The government media may call this week’s rioting the worst outbreak of ethnic violence in recent Chinese history, killing at least 184 and injuring more than 1,000. But Mr. Wang is fully able to knock out the evildoers. He did so in 1997, quelling riots in Yining, near the Kazakhstan border, at a cost in lives that remains unknown.

Iron fist and velvet glove, he has suppressed Islam, welcomed industry, marginalized the Uighur language, built roads and rail links to the outside world, and spied on, arrested and jailed countless minority citizens in the name of stopping terrorism and subsuming Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) into a greater China.

Even his detractors allow that he has done a masterful job. His nickname is “the stability secretary” — a tribute to his ability to step into chaos and haul it to order.

“He consolidated a piece of territory that is one-sixth of China, and for centuries has been a headache for Beijing in terms of ethnic trouble and stability,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher based in Hong Kong for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch and a sharp critic of Mr. Wang’s ethnic policies. “He firmly rammed into the ground the state’s control there. This is something that has weight in the political system in China.”

A signal question now is whether it will continue to have weight. For China is entering a period of backroom political jockeying, as Communist leaders prepare to name successors in 2012 to President Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Some China analysts suspect that the violence in Xinjiang, and in Tibet last year, may become weapons in the struggle over China’s future.

At a simple level, the question is whether Beijing’s leadership will judge the quashing of riots in China’s two least-tamed regions as military successes or policy failures. But Chinese politics are rarely simple; they are a tangle of alliances based on loyalty, self-interest and ideology. Mr. Wang’s success or failure will be shared by his friends and mentors, and at the top of that list is Mr. Hu.

As leader of the influential Communist Youth League in the mid-1980s, Mr. Hu recruited talented league members as allies, including Mr. Wang, who at the time ran the group’s operations in Shandong Province, in eastern China. As president, Mr. Hu has moved dozens of league officials into the Politburo and other top government posts.

Mr. Wang and Mr. Hu share a second tie: Mr. Hu was the party boss in Tibet when Mr. Wang was moved from Shandong to Xinjiang in 1991. They embrace a hard line on minority issues. Mr. Hu’s sudden elevation to the top echelons of power in 1992 was sped by his swift action in crushing an uprising in Tibet in 1989.

Some China scholars say they suspect that Mr. Hu’s abrupt return to Beijing this week from an economic summit meeting in Italy was a mission to shore up support among Politburo members and to ensure that the riots out west did not lead to political conflict within the leadership.

Yet it is not at all clear that the Xinjiang riots will be viewed as a black mark. China’s leaders see success and failure very differently from, say, American leaders.

“No one is going to engage in any fundamental rethink of policies toward ethnic minorities unless those policies fail to produce stability,” said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing analyst who closely follows issues in China’s leadership elite. But in Politburo terms, stability has a special meaning.

“It’s not about stability in the streets,” he added. “It’s about legitimacy.”

Mr. Wang has also amassed his own political capital, much of it based on his reputation as an efficient, if pitiless, troubleshooter of Beijing’s most daunting problems.

Mr. Wang “is one of the major figures in the hard-line faction who thinks that more than an economic downturn, ethnic issues are the potential Achilles’ heel of this regime,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Wang was born in Shandong, China’s industrial and petroleum capital. At 21, he was sent into the countryside as a laborer during the Cultural Revolution. When he returned in 1966, he joined the Communist Party and began a 25-year rise to vice governor.

His familiarity with the oil industry may have played a role in his transfer to Xinjiang, an oil-rich region. But he made his mark there by combining relentless economic development with punishing social policies to remake Turkic Xinjiang in Han China’s image.

Mr. Wang arrived in Xinjiang as the Soviet Union was dissolving, its central Asian pieces shedding their colonial chains. Millions of Han citizens transplanted by Mao after China’s army occupied the region in 1949 were leaving. Beijing feared that Xinjiang’s growing Muslim Uighur population would try to follow its Soviet neighbors into independence.

Mr. Wang’s antidote was a heavy dose of modernization for the ancient Uighur culture. He opened the region’s oil and gas fields to drilling, laid pipelines east to the Chinese heartland and west to Kazakhstan, and turned the Production and Construction Corps, a creaky make-work project for mustered-out Han soldiers, into a moneymaker listed on the Shanghai stock exchange.

Han workers began flowing back, lured by industry and government jobs that Uighurs say were disproportionately parceled out to Han migrants. During the 1990s, Mr. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said, about two million Han relocated to Xinjiang.

At the same time, Mr. Wang tightly constrained Uighur culture and religion. He substituted Mandarin for Uighur in primary schools, saying minority languages were “out of step with the 21st century,” and banned or restricted Islamic practices among government workers, including the wearing of beards and head scarves and rituals like fasting and praying while on the job.

Yet Mr. Wang’s efforts intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Within months, he began a campaign against terrorism and separatism that he linked to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a little-known Uighur group. The Bush administration agreed, adding the group to its list of allies of Al Qaeda in 2002.

In later years, Xinjiang waged a series of “strike hard” campaigns, dragnets that swept up thousands of Uighurs accused of terrorism or religious extremism.

The same year that the campaign began, Mr. Hu rewarded Mr. Wang with a Politburo seat.

“Wang Lequan came in and cracked heads, launched a ‘strike hard’ campaign, and lo and behold, he gets elevated to the Politburo,” said Dru C. Gladney, a China expert and president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College.

Now that Xinjiang has exploded in violence, Western critics may contend that Mr. Wang’s hard-nosed rule has failed, much as urban race riots in 1960s America were seen as a failure of social and legal policies then.

As yet, there is no sign such arguments will move Beijing’s leaders.

Mr. Wang’s deputy in Xinjiang, Zhang Qingli, became party secretary in Tibet in 2005 and quickly became known for the same unbending policies that are Mr. Wang’s hallmark. In 2008, Tibet suffered its worst unrest in decades. Today, Mr. Zhang sits on the party’s central committee.
« Previous Page

Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting from Beijing, and Edward Wong from Urumqi.

Death toll from China's ethnic riots hits 184

2009-07-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

Death toll from China's ethnic riots hits 184

By WILLIAM FOREMAN and GILLIAN WONG – 18 minutes ago

URUMQI, China (AP) — China raised the death toll from riots in its Xinjiang region to 184, state media said Saturday, giving an ethnic breakdown of the dead for the first time after communal violence broke out in this far western city.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 137 of the victims belonged to the dominant Han ethnic group. The rest included 45 men and one woman who were Muslim Uighurs, and one man of the Hui Muslim ethnic group, the report said, citing the information office of the regional government.

The previous death toll was 156.

Protests continued Friday after a petite Muslim woman began complaining that the public washrooms were closed at a crowded mosque — the most important day of the week for Islamic worship. Muslims perform required ablutions, or washing, before prayer.

When a group gathered around her on the sidewalk, Madina Ahtam then railed against communist rule in Xinjiang.

The 26-year-old businesswoman eventually led the crowd of mostly men in a fist-pumping street march that was quickly blocked by riot police, some with automatic rifles pointed at the protesters.

Women have been on the front line in Urumqi partly because more than 1,400 men in the Muslim Uighur minority have been rounded up by police since ethnic rioting broke out July 5. As the communist government launches a sweeping security crackdown, the women have faced down troops, led protests and risked arrest by speaking out against police tactics they believe are excessive.

The violence came as the Uighurs were protesting the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers in a brawl in southern China. The crowd then scattered throughout Urumqi, attacking Han Chinese, burning cars and smashing windows.

Many Uighurs who are still free live in fear of being arrested for any act of dissent.

Chinese leaders have alleged that a woman masterminded the rioting in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi. They blame activist Rebiya Kadeer, a 62-year-old businesswoman who was once the government's favorite Uighur success story. But she began criticizing communist rule, served time in prison and eventually went into exile in the U.S. She has repeatedly denied instigating the violence.

Thousands of Chinese troops have flooded into Urumqi to separate the feuding ethnic groups, and a senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting.

At the Group of Eight summit in Italy, Gen. James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, urged two Chinese diplomats "to ensure that government forces act with appropriate restraint," according to a senior Obama administration official, who described the meeting to reporters on condition of anonymity because of White House ground rules.

In many Uighur neighborhoods during the crisis in Urumqi, the women did much of the talking with reporters as the men gathered in small groups on street corners and in back alleys, speaking quietly among themselves.

"I can't speak freely. The police could come any minute and haul me away," said a Uighur man who would only identify himself as Alim.

But on Friday, some men challenged officials when they showed up for prayers at Urumqi's popular White Mosque and found the gate closed. Officials had earlier said the mosque would be closed for public safety reasons as security forces tried to pacify the capital.

The mosque was eventually opened when the crowd swelled and there was a threat of unrest, police said.

Most Muslim Uighurs practice a moderate form of Sunni Islam or follow the mystical Sufism tradition. The women often work and lead an active social life outside the home. Many wear brightly colored head scarves but the custom is not strongly enforced. Young Uighur women often wear jeans, formfitting tops and dresses.

As the faithful streamed into the White Mosque, Ahtam arrived holding a lilac umbrella and told foreign reporters in broken English, "Toilet no open. No water."

She led reporters to an area where the faithful are supposed to cleanse themselves before prayers and said with tears running down her cheeks, "Washing room not open. Everybody no wash."

After the prayers, she continued speaking on the sidewalk and attracted about 40 people who applauded when she criticized the government.

"Every Uighur people are afraid. Do you understand? We are afraid. Chinese people are very happy. Why?" said Ahtam.

The government believes the Uighurs should be grateful for Xinjiang's rapid economic development, which has brought new schools, highways, airports, railways, natural gas fields and oil wells in the sprawling, rugged Central Asian region, three times the size of Texas.

But many of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, with a population of 9 million in Xinjiang, accuse the dominant Han ethnic group of discriminating against them and saving all the best jobs for themselves. Many also say the Communist Party is repressive and tries to snuff out their Islamic faith, language and culture.

As Ahtam's crowd became more agitated, about 20 riot police with clubs marched toward the group. The Uighurs pumped their fists in the air and walked down the street with Ahtam leading the pack.

About 200 more riot police arrived and cut off the group, with some of the security forces kneeling down and pointing their automatic rifles at the marchers. Foreign reporters were led to a side alley, out of view of the protesters, who were forced to squat on the sidewalk along a row of shuttered shops.

Hours later, calls to Ahtam's cell phone went unanswered and it was unknown what happened to her.

Associated Press writer Charles Babington contributed to this report from L'Aquila, Italy.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

China plans massive change in Uyghur cultural capital

2009-07-10T19:51:00.000-07:00

China plans massive change in Uyghur cultural capital
Muslim worshipers pray outsise a mosque in noon prayers in Kashgar, China, Friday, July 10, 2009.

Muslim worshipers pray outsise a mosque in noon prayers in Kashgar, China, Friday, July 10, 2009.

More than 10,000 families will be moved out of historic old city to make room for low-rise apartment blocks

Mark MacKinnon

Kashgar, China — From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Friday, Jul. 10, 2009 08:09PM EDT

Walking through the labyrinthine alleys that snake between the mud-and-straw homes and handicraft shops at the heart of this ancient city, it's easy to see that life here has hardly changed for centuries.

Five times a day, holy men climb to the top of their mosques and sing out the Muslim call to prayer the same way they did in the time of Mohammed. The homes in Kashgar's Old City are so close together that there's no need for such newfangled inventions as the loudspeaker.

For more than 1,000 years, this place has resisted the march of modernity, as have the 220,000 ethnic Uyghurs who call the Old City home. But under a Chinese government plan to redevelop the city, massive and irrevocable change is slated to come swiftly to Kashgar, China's westernmost city and the cultural capital of Xinjiang province.

Over the next few years, more than 10,000 families will be moved out of the Old City. There homes will be demolished to make room for a new development of low-rise apartment blocks and streets wide enough to accommodate cars.

In the wake of this week's deadly riots that left 184 people dead in the provincial capital of Urumqi, the future of Kashgar's Old City looms as the next potential flashpoint between the Uyghurs of Xinjiang and their Han Chinese rulers.

The government says the Old City is no longer safe to live in, citing a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Xinjiang six years ago that killed 266 people was felt in Kashgar, even though its epicentre was 200 kilometres away. In 1902, a massive quake did hit the city, killing 667 residents.

The government says families that are moved out of the Old City will be given money to build new homes and promises the new $440-million (U.S.) development will maintain an Islamic style of architecture that hints at the history here.

But that's little consolation to those who will soon be evicted from homes that their families have lived in for generations.

Opposition to the plan among residents of Kashgar's Old City is quiet but widespread.

“Kashgar has 2,000 years of history. If these homes are removed, we lose this,” said Omar Ali, a 36-year-old pottery maker who sells his wares to the foreign and Chinese tourists who still flock to the famous Silk Road oasis. Other residents sell handmade scarves, prayer hats and copper pots, plying the same trades in the same buildings that their ancestors did.

Some locals see the government's plan as an attack on Uyghur identity. “Beijing has the Great Wall, Kashgar has the Old City. If we don't preserve the architecture, how can we understand the history of the nation?” said a young Uyghur man who works in the Old City as a tour guide. Fearing repercussions, he asked that his name not be printed.

Even without the plan to demolish the Old City, the situation is tense here following the riots in Urumqi. Thousands of soldiers have poured into the city in recent days, patrolling the streets in long convoys of green trucks draped with red banners proclaiming their mission “to maintain the stability of society and the border region.” Military helicopters kept watch from the sky.

The city's main Id Kah mosque has been closed since Sunday, when some 200 Uyghurs gathered for a brief protest that ended when police moved in and began arresting participants.

The few foreign journalists in Kashgar yesterday were taken from their hotel rooms and escorted to the airport just before noon prayers. “You must leave the city, for your own safety, for your own good,” said a man who identified himself as a local government official told The Globe and Mail, before arranging a police escort to the airport. “The situation may look calm now, but it could change at any second.”

Flights out were delayed, however, by a steady stream of incoming military aircraft unloading more soldiers who boarded buses heading into the city. Some of the troop-carrying planes came from as far away as the Pacific Ocean port of Shenzhen.

Even without the recent unrest, the government knows it has a tough sales job on its hands with the Old City redevelopment plan, especially in the charged environment following the Urumqi riots.

“Because many houses were built privately without any approval, the life of residents is not convenient and the capability against earthquakes and fire is weak,” a report in the state-run local media said recently. “Our target is every family has a house, every family has employed members and the economy will be developed.”

Today's Kashgar no longer has the Silk Road traffic of previous eras, but it very much remains a crossroads of cultures with traders and travellers arriving from nearby Pakistan and Central Asia. The city was linked by rail to the rest of China in 1999, preceding an influx of Han Chinese that has escalated tensions with the local Uyghurs.

The Han Chinese community lives outside of the Old City, in apartment blocks that stretch south of the city's main square, which is dominated by a large statue of Mao Zedong.

Local Uyghurs challenge the government's assertion that people must be moved out of the Old City because of the danger of an earthquake, arguing that because the homes there are made of mud and straw, they would be less likely than modern concrete buildings to kill inhabitants in the event of a collapse.

While simple in appearance on the outside, homes in the Old City are often quite elegant on the inside, with rooms grouped around a central courtyard. Some are quite spacious, housing three or more generations of the same family. Astonishingly, the centuries-year old site has never been added to the UNESCO world heritage list because China has never applied to have it certified.

In a 2008 book called Kashgar: Oasis City on China's Old Silk Road , architect and historian George Michell called the Old City “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in Central Asia.” Nevertheless, that example has been under attack for decades.

Mr. Michell made his assessment long after Chinese authorities had torn down much of the ancient city wall, a 10-metre-high earth berm, and paved over its moat in the 1980s to create a ring highway. It later tore down homes to build Liberation Street, a wide boulevard that bisects the Old City in two.

“I can't understand why no international organization like UNESCO is doing anything to save this,” said Marica de Goti, a 23-year-old Italian tourist who visited the Old City this week with two friends.

Most residents expected they would have little choice but to leave when the government eventually came knocking.

“We are just ordinary people, and the government is the government,” said an old woman with gold teeth, knitting a traditional Uyghur cap in her living room while at the same time keeping an eye on her rambunctious infant grandson. “If they say move, we will have to move.

Turkish leader calls Xinjiang killings "genocide"

2009-07-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Turkish leader calls Xinjiang killings "genocide"
Fri Jul 10, 2009 1:25pm EDT

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Friday genocide was being committed in China's northwest province of Xinjiang and called on Chinese authorities to intervene to prevent more deaths.

"The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There's no point in interpreting this otherwise," Erdogan said.

Rioting between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang has killed 156 people and wounded more than 1,000 in the worst ethnic violence in China in decades. Both Uighurs and the Han have claimed a higher death toll from the strife.

"We're having trouble understanding how the Chinese government would remain a bystander to this," Erdogan told reporters in comments broadcast live on NTV television. "We want the Chinese administration, with which our bilateral ties are continuously improving, to show sensitivity."

Muslim Turkey shares linguistic and religious links with Uighurs, and Turkish nationalists see Xinjiang as the easternmost frontier of Turkic ethnicity. Thousands of Uighur immigrants live in Turkey.

Turkey has sought to boost ties with China, the world's third-biggest economy. President Abdullah Gul last month became the first Turkish president to visit China in 15 years, signing $1.5 billion worth of trade deals, according to Turkish media.

Turkey's Industry Minister Thursday called on Turks to boycott Chinese goods to protest the violence in Xinjiang, but a spokesman said this was the minister's personal view and not government policy.

Thursday, Erdogan said Turkey would grant a visa to exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, who is based in the United States. Kadeer told Turkish television that Turkish authorities had twice denied her visa application to visit the country.

(Writing by Ayla Jean Yackley)

US issues statement on China killings of Uighurs "after five days"

2009-07-10T19:44:00.001-07:00

US issues statement on China killings of Uighurs "after five days"
US president's national security adviser urged Chinese leaders to act with "appropriate restraint" in dealing with unrest in East Turkistan, an official said.
Friday, 10 July 2009 14:23

U.S. President Barack Obama's national security adviser urged Chinese leaders on Friday to act with "appropriate restraint" in dealing with unrest in East Turkistan, a senior U.S. official said.

East Turkistan was occupied by the communist China in 1949 and its name was changed in 1955.

World Uighur Congress said that near 800 Uigurs were killed during a week-violence after Han Chineses attacks and following intervention of China forces. The China governmnet put the death toll 156.

Gen. James Jones also told Chinese leaders that Obama wanted to continue cooperation with Beijing on the North Korean nuclear issue, the official said.

After the attack, Chinese police arrested 1,434 Uighurs two days after killings thousands and wounding more than 1,000 since Uighurs started the protests.

Han Chineses attacked on Uighur workers in a dormitory of a toy factory in China's southern Guangdong province, killing two people and injuring 118.

Video appeared showing Chinese lynch that sparked Uighur protests in East Turkistan.

Toptan says killings of Uighurs raises Turkey's concerns

2009-07-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

Toptan says killings of Uighurs raises Turkey's concerns

The Turkish parliament speaker said that being strong did not give any one the right to behave unjustly.
Friday, 10 July 2009 13:26
The Turkish parliament speaker said on Friday that being strong did not give any one the right to behave unjustly.

Turkey's Parliament Speaker Koksal Toptan referred to developments in the East Turkish during his meeting in Ankara with Dimeji Bankole, the speaker of Nigerian House of Representatives, and said being strong did not give any one the right to behave unjustly.

Toptan expressed Turkey's concern over the incidents, and said Turkey favored solution of problems of the Uighur.

Toptan said however, recent incidents raised Turkey's concerns.

World Uighur Congress said that near 800 Uigurs were killed during a week-violence after Han Chineses attacks and following intervention of China forces. The China governmnet put the death toll 156.

After the attack, Chinese police arrested 1,434 Uighurs two days after killings thousands and wounding more than 1,000 since Uighurs started the protests.

Urumchi is in the Uighur Autonomous Region that has a population of over 21 million. Nearly 11 million Uighurs, Mongols and Huis live in the region.

However, Uighur Turks living outside China often say Chinese government pursued an assimilation policy against Uighurs.

Uighur Turks living in Turkey staged protests in Istanbul and called on the international community to take action to stop Chinese government.

Protestors also said death toll was more than announced by Chinese officials.

http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=44645

Delahunt Urges Administration To Condemn China's Uighur Crackdown

2009-07-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

Delahunt Urges Administration To Condemn China's Uighur Crackdown

First Posted: 07-10-09 07:34 AM | Updated: 07-10-09 09:48 AM

The Chinese government's crackdown against Uighurs living in Xinjiang province now has the full attention of the House Human Rights Subcommittee Chair Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) said Thursday night.

"At this point in time what we want is for the People's Republic of China to stop abusing and repressing the Uighur people," Delahunt said. "We're going to be introducing a resolution, which we hope receives broad bipartisan support."

This past weekend, Uighur protests in the provincial capital Urumqi turned violent when Chinese authorities fired on the crowds, leaving at least 156 dead and more than 1,000 wounded. Massive protests were incited by a Han Chinese attack on Uighur workers at a toy factory dormitory in Guangdong province, which resulted in two deaths and 118 injuries. Police arrested 1,434 Uighurs early this week and shut down Uighur mosques Thursday, leading to more arrests of protesters.

Delahunt said he and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight Subcommittee, began focusing on the plight of the ethnic Muslim community in China during the investigation they began last year into abuse of Uighur detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison. A delegation from the People's Republic of China brutally interrogated and threatened those men for more than a week back in 2002, Delahunt said, and he and Rohrabacher have sought answers from the Department of Defense since the Bush administration denied their request to meet with the Uighur detainees in July 2008.

"I find it outrageous," Delahunt said. "Since when do we allow Communist agents to interview detainees and particularly when they were members of a minority that historically has been persecuted, tortured, threatened, intimidated and in some cases executed by the Chinese? And yet two duly elected members of Congress were denied (access) despite the full consent of their lawyers and the willingness of the detainees to meet with us."

Since then, Delahunt's subcommittee has held hearings on the plight of the Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay -- four of whom were released to Bermuda last month, with 13 still in custody -- but broadened its focus in June to the Uighur people generally. The House subcommittee has not communicated with the Obama White House regarding the Uighurs, Delahunt said, but he and Rohrabacher sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a letter Monday urging her to condemn the Chinese government's actions.

They have not received a direct response, but Clinton has publicly expressed caution. "[W]e are deeply concerned over the reports of deaths and injuries from violence in Western China," she said Tuesday. "We are trying to sort out, as best we can, the facts and circumstances from the region, and we're calling on all sides to exercise restraint. We know there's a long history of tension and discontent, but the most immediate matter is to bring the violence to a conclusion."

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu asked Clinton Thursday to take a more active stand, while Japanese diplomats urged their Chinese counterparts at a bilateral human rights meeting in Tokyo to guarantee the Uighurs their human rights.

Though the current violence has taken center stage, Delahunt said he and Rohrabacher remain interested in hearing from the Department of Defense why they were barred from Guantanamo Bay. "It's not the Pentagon that defines what our oversight responsibilities are," he said.

DOD claimed Chinese intelligence treated the detainees humanely and helped them authenticate individual identities, Delahunt said. "That's just beyond absurd," he said. "Is this the message of tolerance that we want to send to the Muslim world?"

US-INTERNATIONAL Summary

2009-07-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

US-INTERNATIONAL Summary

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging
» Links to this article
Reuters
Friday, July 10, 2009; 9:32 PM

China raises Xinjiang death toll to 184

URUMQI, China (Reuters) - China has raised the death toll from ethnic rioting in the far western region of Xinjiang to 184, and for the first time gave a breakdown by ethnicity and sex of those who died, state media reported on Saturday. The official Xinhua news agency said that 137 of those killed were Han Chinese, who form the majority of China's population, including 111 men and 26 women.

Honduras rivals agree more talks to pursue solution

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - The rivals for power in Honduras agreed on Friday to hold more talks to seek a solution to the crisis created by last month's coup, keeping alive hopes that dialogue would prevail over confrontation. The talks' mediator, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, made the announcement after chairing a first round of discussions between teams representing ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the man put in his place by the June 28 coup, Roberto Micheletti.
ad_icon

Eight British troops killed in Afghanistan

L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - Britain said on Friday it had lost eight soldiers in Afghanistan in the space of 24 hours, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown said troops faced a "very hard summer," suggesting it should brace itself for more losses. The deaths, announced by the Ministry of Defense, included five who were killed in two blasts while on foot patrol, the highest death toll in a single attack.

Obama uses G8 debut to issue warning to Iran

L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama warned Iran on Friday the world will not wait indefinitely for it to end its nuclear defiance, saying Tehran had until September to comply or else face consequences. Obama, speaking at the end of a G8 summit in Italy, said leaders had sent a message condemning the "appalling" events surrounding Iran's disputed presidential election and expressing solidarity against Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Medvedev threatens U.S. over missile shield

L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned the United States Friday that if it did not reach agreement with Russia on plans for missile defense systems, Moscow would deploy rockets in an enclave near Poland. In sharp contrast to his positive words during President Barack Obama's visit to Moscow earlier this week when the two reached broad agreement on nuclear arms cuts, Medvedev used a news conference at the G8 summit to return to Russia's earlier tough rhetoric on arms control.

Eight British troops die in Afghan war in 24 hours

LONDON/L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - Britain said on Friday eight soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan, its worst death toll in a 24-hour period, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown said troops faced a "very hard summer" battling insurgents. Five troops on foot patrol were killed by two blasts, the highest death toll in a single attack.

Hundreds injured in south China quake

BEIJING (Reuters) - A 6.0 magnitude earthquake that shook southwest China's Yunnan province on Thursday has killed one person and injured 325 people, Xinhua news agency said. More than 400,000 people had to be relocated or evacuated as thousands of homes were damaged by the quake and a series of aftershocks, the agency said.

Iraq denies U.S. policy shift brought Iranians' release

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Five Iranians jailed by the U.S. military in Iraq were freed this week not as the result of a U.S. policy shift on Iran but because their turn came up in a queue of prisoners awaiting release, an official said on Friday. Deputy Interior Minister Major-General Hussein Kamal said U.S. officials transferred the men, accused by U.S. forces of arming Shi'ite Muslim militias at the height of Iraq's sectarian war, to the Iraqi government, which then turned them over to Iranian officials in Baghdad.

U.N. rights boss sees possible war crimes in Somalia
ad_icon

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations human rights chief said Friday both sides in Somalia's conflict are committing attacks and using torture against civilians, which may amount to war crimes. Islamist insurgents are executing civilians, planting mines and bombs in residential areas and using torture while their tribunals hand down death sentences by stoning and decapitation, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said.

Australian shot dead near Freeport Papua mine

JAKARTA (Reuters) - An Australian worker has been shot dead near the massive Grasberg mine in Indonesia's Papua province, which is run by a unit of Freeport McMoran Copper & Gold Inc, Papua's police chief said Saturday. "An Australian working for Freeport got shot at 5.30 this morning," police chief Bagus Ekodanto said by telephone, adding the shooting happened between Tembagapura and Timika.

Report: Major mosques close in Urumqi, China

2009-07-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

Report: Major mosques close in Urumqi, China

* Story Highlights
* Report: Five major mosques close in Urumqi, in China's Xinjiang region
* Friday is the main day of worship for Muslims
* More than 1,400 detained following weekend protests in Xinjiang region
* 156 people killed and more than 800 others injured in violence

July 10, 2009 -- Updated 0707 GMT (1507 HKT)

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Five major mosques near the center of violence last weekend in Urumqi, the capital of China's far-west Xinjiang region, were closed Friday morning, state-run media reported.
A Chinese Uyghur man opens the gate to a mosque in Urumqi on Thursday during a media tour.

A Chinese Uyghur man opens the gate to a mosque in Urumqi on Thursday during a media tour.

Same smaller mosques in the city remained open, according to the Xinhua news agency.

"Mosques in some sensitive areas were closed at their imams' suggestion," an official in charge of religious affairs with the Xinjiang regional government said Friday. "Muslims normally perform rituals at home in time of plague or social unrest."

Friday is the main day of worship for Muslims.

Violent demonstrations on Sunday left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured in the capital, according to government figures. Heavily armed troops remain on the streets of Urumqi and curfews are in effect. See a map of China's Xinjiang region »

More than 1,400 suspects have been detained, according to Chinese officials, who have vowed to deal harshly with those involved in Sunday's riot.

"For those who brutally killed the other people in the riot, the government will execute them," Urumqi's Communist Party leader, Li Zhi, said Wednesday.
Don't Miss

China's chief police officer, Meng Jianzhu, said the main instigators "should be punished with the utmost severity," while others who were "provoked" to take part in the riots "should be given persuasion and education," according to Xinhua.

Police have detained 15 suspects in connection with that incident, Xinhua reported.

As a result of the violence, Chinese President Hu Jintao cut short his trip to Italy for the Group of Eight economic summit. China was invited to attend as one of the world's emerging economic powerhouses.

The violence is a result of ethnic tensions between the Uyghurs, who are predominantly Muslim, and members of China's Han majority. Hundreds of Han Chinese were on the streets of Urumqi on Tuesday, holding sticks and pipes and calling for severe punishment of the Uyghurs, who they say committed serious crimes.

The Uyghurs say they have been victimized and many of those killed in the violence Sunday were Uyghurs. Uyghur religious leaders have condemned the violence, saying it is against the spirit of the Muslim faith and Uyghur tradition.
advertisement

There is speculation that Sunday's protest, which took place in the predominantly Uyghur-populated Bazaar district, may have been a reaction to ethnic violence in southern China.

That violence took place late last month at a toy factory in Guangdong province, where many migrants, including Uyghurs, have moved in search of work. A massive brawl reportedly broke out between workers of Uyghur and Han nationalities. Two Uyghurs reportedly died.

Statement from the Office of Senator Ted Kaufman

2009-07-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

Statement from the Office of Senator Ted Kaufman

FOR RELEASE: July 9, 2009

CONTACT: Alex Snyder-Mackler (202) 224-5042

Kaufman Condemns Repression of Uighurs and Clashes in Western China

Senator speaks out against press restrictions and human rights violations in China

July 9, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - Last night, Sen. Ted Kaufman, (D-DE) spoke out on the Chinese government's heavy-handed response to the bloody clashes between the minority Uighur community and the majority Han ethnic group in the Xinjiang Region of Western China.

"I am deeply concerned about ongoing tension in Xinjiang, and believe the senseless loss of life, suppression of press freedom, and violations of basic human rights is unconscionable in China, and anywhere in the world," said Sen. Kaufman on the Senate floor. "I call on all parties to demonstrate restraint, end the violence, cease persecution of minorities, and protect fundamental human rights."   

As a former four-term member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), Sen. Kaufman has a deep commitment to freedom of the press and preserving the free flow of information. In this capacity, and more recently as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has closely followed China's censorship of independent journalism and use of advanced technology to jam international satellite and radio broadcasting including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia - two broadcasting entities overseen by the BBG.    

"I also call on the Chinese government to open internet and mobile phone access, end jamming of international broadcasting, and lift the grave and growing restrictions on the press," Sen. Kaufman continued. "Independent journalists have been censored for decades in China - a fact that is painfully evident as we try to understand how recent demonstrations metastasized into violence in Western China."   

Full remarks, as prepared for delivery:   

Mr. President, this week, bloody clashes have erupted between the minority Uighur community and the majority Han ethnic group in the Xinjiang Region of Western China. Reports indicate that the Chinese government has responded with a heavy hand - deploying police and paramilitary troops, establishing a curfew, closing mosques, cutting-off internet and mobile phone access, and rounding-up and arresting innocent civilians. The state-controlled media reported that at least 156 Chinese citizens have been killed, more than 1,000 have been injured, and approximately 1,400 have been arrested since the clashes began earlier this week.   

I am deeply concerned about ongoing tension in Xinjiang, and believe the senseless loss of life, suppression of press freedom, and violations of basic human rights is unconscionable in China, and anywhere in the world. Today, I call on all parties to demonstrate restraint, end the violence, cease persecution of minorities, and protect fundamental human rights. I also call on the Chinese government to open internet and mobile phone access, end jamming of international broadcasting, and lift the grave and growing restrictions on the press.    

Independent journalists have been censored for decades in China - a fact that is painfully evident as we try to understand how recent demonstrations metastasized into violence in Western China. According to the State Department Report on Human Rights for 2009, the Chinese government has increased cultural and religious repression of ethnic minorities, including the Muslim Uighurs. It appears that as ethnic tensions rose, members of the Uighur community took to the streets, resulting in an aggressive crack-down by the Chinese security forces on Sunday.  

The exact circumstances by which violence transpired remains unclear, largely because the government censors such information, including the official number of casualties. In what can only be described as "questionable," these numbers have remained stagnant in the past two days despite ongoing violence and civil unrest.   

In recent years, the Chinese government has demonstrated great efficiency in monitoring the internet and restricting websites such as Facebook, My Space, Twitter, You Tube, blogs, and other outlets of information to monitor the free exchange of ideas among its people and the press.    

It has also used advanced technology to jam international satellite and radio broadcasting - including the U.S.-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. In Xinjiang specifically, it has shut down more than 50 Uighur language internet forums, jammed Radio Free Asia's Uighur-language service, and cut-off internet and mobile phone access in the past week.    

In fact, Li Zhi, a top Communist Party official in Urumqi - the capital of Xinjiang Province - confirmed yesterday that the government cut-off internet access to the region. Because of such limitations, the Han population now believes that the Uighurs are solely responsible for ongoing unrest, and such misperceptions have elevated the level of ethnic tension. By creating a vacuum of information in and out of Xinjiang, the Chinese government has exacerbated the crisis.   

While the casualty numbers remain uncertain, it is clear that recent developments have incurred an immeasurable human toll, including - but not limited to - the loss of innocent lives.  

There have been pictures of children in hospitals, who have been forced to witness violence perpetrated against their parents. The Washington Post today reported emotional stories of women demanding the return of their missing husbands. And the UK's Guardian reveals an image of an elderly woman on crutches standing defiantly in front of a police riot bus - an image which is eerily reminiscent of the bravery and defiance demonstrated twenty years ago in Tiananmen Square.    

These glimpses of ongoing developments stir great empathy and anger, and it is essential that the whole story be told, among the international community and also within China. This is why I call on the Chinese government to provide unimpeded press coverage and internet access, allow journalists to report without restrictions. I condemn the continued repression of Uighurs and violence perpetrated against all innocent civilians in China, and hope the ongoing unrest will soon be brought to an end.

* * * * *

If you wish to stop receiving e-mails from the Uyghur Human Rights Project, please send an e-mail to pressrelease-unsubscribe@uyghuramerican.org.

The Uyghur American Association (UAA) works to promote the preservation and flourishing of a rich, humanistic and diverse Uyghur culture, and to support the right of the Uyghur people to use peaceful, democratic means to determine their own political future.

The UAA has undertaken the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) for the purpose of promoting improved human rights conditions for Uyghurs and other indigenous groups in East Turkistan, on the premise that the assurance of basic human rights will facilitate the realization of the community’s democratic aspirations.

Uyghur Human Rights Project
Uyghur American Association
1700 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. Suite 400
Washington, D.C. 20006
Tel: +1 (202) 349 1496
Fax: +1 (202) 349 1491
admin[at]uyghuramerican.org
www.uhrp.org
www.uyghuramerican.org

World won't rally to help lost cause of Uyghurs

2009-07-10T19:29:00.001-07:00

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.

Continued After Advertisement Below

Advertisement

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.

The Uighur Woman Who Stood up to a Line of Soldiers

2009-07-09T08:15:00.001-07:00

The Uighur Woman Who Stood up to a Line of Soldiers

July 09, 2009 10:30 AM

ABC's Clarissa Ward reports from Urumqi, the capital of China's north-western Xianjiang province:

We went on a mission today to find the Uighur woman who stood up to Chinese security forces on Tuesday, as she and other women protested the mass arrests of Uighur men. The images of her boldly walking up to the wall of soldiers are undoubtedly some of the most striking of this conflict. Some have compared her to the lone student protestor who stood in front of the tank on Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Nm_china_protest_090707_main

We started our search in a bustling, impoverished Uighur neighbourhood where the lanes are thick with people selling watermelon and kebabs and butchers slaughtering sheep. It did not take long to find her. We asked a group of locals if they knew about this brave woman and they immediately took us over to her house.

Her name is Tursun Gul. She is a migrant worker and she is not from Urumqi. In person, she looks younger than she does in the pictures but her eyes are tired. She was injured in a car accident and now uses a crutch to help her walk.

She told us why she took to the streets in protest on Tuesday.

“My husband, younger brother and older brothers, 5 in all, were arrested,” she said, “We were eating when it happened. The police came and took them away and they never returned. I don’t know why they took them.”

When we asked if she was not frightened walking up to a line of heavily armed soldiers she retorted, “How could I be afraid when I did not commit any crime? We’re just migrant workers from another part of Xinjiang. We’re not guilty of anything.”

Tursun, a mother of two young children, said she does not know where her brothers and her husband are being held and she does not know when, or if, they will be released. And she does not know how she will support her family now.

“There is no one to take care of us,” she lamented.

Other local residents we spoke to told us that more than 20 men were taken from the area. None of them have been seen since. According to official figures, more than 1400 people have been arrested in connection with this week’s violence.