Rebiya Kadeer, the 62-year-old leader-in-exile of China's Uyghur muslim minority, faced a few supporters and friendly journalists on the stairs of a federal courthouse in Washington DC last November. The Circuit Court had just ruled that 17 Uyghur muslims would remain in American military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, despite a district court ruling six weeks earlier that had found they were not terrorists.
"They are innocent men," she said. "When you compare them with terrorists, it's very unfair. That's why I think America will let them stay [in the country]."
Kadeer, who is about five feet tall and favours girlish salt and pepper pigtails crowned with a traditional kufi-like hat, had good reason to have faith in her adopted homeland. In 2005, after she had spent six years in a Chinese prison, the US State Department and John Kamm, a former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, negotiated her release. The US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy provides a US$249,000 annual grant to her Uyghur American Association (UAA).
From a cramped, bland office space a couple of blocks from the White House - the firm next door speculates on multifamily real estate - she struggles to uphold the rights of more than 10 million Uyghurs, who inhabit China's far western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area they prefer to call East Turkistan.
The US State Department has recently decried Beijing's policy towards the Uyghurs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated that judgment during her first visit to China, in February. Nonetheless, the US has not pressed the issue, preferring not to antagonise Beijing.
When Kadeer talks about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, her voice rises.
"I was treated as an enemy of the state because I asked the Chinese government, `Why won't you allow the Uyghur people and the Chinese people to live in peace and harmony? And why don't you respect the Uyghur people's rights to their education and culture.' But the government doesn't want to hear that."
Kadeer's struggle has been at times lonely and difficult. There are about 1,000 Uyghurs in America but the post September 11 phobia about Muslims has not helped their cause.
"Tibetans are treated well in the west because they are Buddhist and considered peaceful," says Alim Seytoff, who runs UAA sister organisation Uyghur Human Rights Project. "The Tibetans are victims and we are victims, too."
In a year of milestones in the mainland - the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, 10 years since repression of the Falun Gong began and the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's exile - few people are aware that it is 60 years since the Communist Party annexed Xinjiang.
Like that of many of the peoples of Central Asia, the Uyghur experience has been shaped by war and conquest. The two brief periods in the 20th century when they weren't under the thumb of the Russians or the Han Chinese - the first East Turkistan Republic lasted nine months in 1933 and the second lasted for five years, between 1944 and 1949 - loom large in the Uyghur consciousness.
In August 1949, after the Communists had all but defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, Mao Zedong planned to meet with seven leaders of the Second East Turkistan Republic and negotiate their role within the country. The plane carrying the seven Uyghurs crashed, an event that wasn't reported until four months later.
"There were rumours about a plot from Beijing; a plot from Moscow," says Gardner Bovingdon, an Indiana University professor and Xinjiang expert. "There is a popular Uyghur notion that the Uyghur were going to negotiate [a self-determining role in China]," Bovingdon continues. "The bodies were never found, the plane itself was never found and there remains a controversy."
"The Soviets and the Chinese [used the plane crash] basically to deceive the Uyghur people," claims Kadeer. "And then they selected a puppet to represent us - that's how we became part of China. They had the Bingtuan, [also known as] the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, strategically located near Uyghur communities to monitor them and suppress them if necessary. We're not able to get out and get our message out."
According to the Han narrative, Xinjiang is traditionally part of China and the meeting was just a formality. The Bingtuan, an economic, semi-military organisation that has built roads and infrastructure, has brought opportunity and desperately needed development to an area that in 1955, like its neighbour Tibet, became an autonomous region.
Common to people who consider themselves stateless, the struggle for self-determination is all-consuming. "We have so many heroes who rose up against Chinese rule," says Kadeer, who was two years old when the plane crashed. "All of them were imprisoned or executed."
Kadeer's father, a respected community leader, battled the Nationalists and her grandfather helped burn down a Manchu dynasty palace.
In her 2007 German-language autobiography, Dragon Fighter, which has recently been translated into English, Kadeer describes a childhood marked by profound fear and dislocation. She was born in Altai prefecture, in the far north of Xinjiang; the borders of Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia form an X across the Altai mountain range. In the village where she was raised, Uyghurs lived in the centre and ethnic Kazakhs in the surrounding mountains.
Han Chinese were an abstraction until she was 13, when the Bingtuan entered her village. They ordered her family to leave, destroyed their house and confiscated her dogs. Her father remained in Altai. Her mother, Kadeer and four siblings drove for weeks to Aksu, near the Kyrgyzstan border.
Two years later, she married Abdirim, a Uyghur 13 years her senior. He was an abusive husband and theirs was a loveless marriage. At 15, she became a mother and she went on to have five more with Abdirim, who was a manager in a state bank.
The hardship of her early years contrasts with Kadeer's later success. As the Asian Wall Street Journal noted in a 1994 profile, it was literally "a rags to riches story". After leaving Abdirim, she used the money she made as a washerwoman to trade in commodities. She eventually made enough to open a shopping mall in downtown Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. By the early 1990s, Kadeer ran an import-export empire that bridged China and Central Asia.
She had remarried, her second husband being a Uyghur professor and government critic named Sidik Rouzi. During the Cultural Revolution, Rouzi served a decade in prison for counter-revolutionary activities. The marriage set up a complicated balancing act for Kadeer; her business success was held up as an example of Uyghur progress in Chinese society but it also afforded her a platform for advocacy.
As a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultive Conference (CPPCC), she travelled to Beijing, where she protested against the mass migration into Xinjiang of Han, sent to fill energy and agriculture jobs. In 1996, the still-outspoken Rouzi fled to Washington. And on February 5, 1997, demonstrations in the city of Gulja (also known as Yining) turned brutal. An Amnesty International report on the incident concluded that "hundreds, possibly thousands, lost their lives or were seriously injured". An estimated 50 Uyghurs, detained in bitterly cold cells, suffered frostbite.
After the Gulja incident, Kadeer publicised the testimony of witnesses of the repression.
"My situation became extremely bad," Kadeer recalls. "Basically, the Chinese authorities severely disrupted my import-export business. My passport and my colleagues' passports were confiscated." She'd also angered the most powerful man in the region, Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan.
By 1998, the government had stripped her of her position in the CPPCC and Wang had began publicly denigrating her.
"Her commercial activities have been very poor over the last few years," Wang told reporters at a Beijing press conference that year. "Her reputation in business circles isn't very good either ... Moreover, her husband, Sidik, has engaged in activities to split the state from outside our borders."
Things soon grew worse. On August 11, 1999, en route to meet a US congressional delegation investigating human rights abuses, Kadeer was arrested. She was convicted of revealing state secrets: mailing widely-available newspaper clippings to Rouzi.
During her six years in prison, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the US State Department made pleas for her release. She was treated better than the other prisoners, she says.
"When I describe the treatment of the Uyghur prisoners, it sounds like an outrageous claim," she says. "I have witnessed the kind of torture you would see during the second world war."
In prison, she writes in Dragon Fighter, her jailers encouraged her Han cellmate, a convicted killer, to drive her crazy.
Kadeer's situation improved when Kamm intervened. The American stepped down as president of AmCham in 1990 and now runs San Francisco-based NGO Dui Hua, which has been instrumental in winning the release or improving the treatment of more than 250 political prisoners in the mainland. Kamm negotiated a sentence reduction for Kadeer. He then secured an early release by convincing the US to drop a United Nations resolution critical of mainland human rights abuses.
"It was more difficult than most transactions I've been involved with," Kamm recalls. "There were several high-ranking Chinese officials who opposed releasing Rebiya Kadeer, including the party secretary in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan."
Kadeer landed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on March 17, 2005. She was greeted by five of her children and Rouzi, who was waving both the US and the East Turkistan flags. Her children had grown up and Rouzi's thick black hair and eyebrows had turned white. For her part, she'd gained international renown - garnering the attention of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and earning Norway's Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize for Human Rights.
The political landscape had changed, too. In the uncertainty following September 11, Beijing conflated all Uyghur independence groups with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which has been inconclusively linked to terrorist group al-Qaeda. Chinese agents were even allowed into Guantanamo to interrogate the Uyghur detainees, who had been captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas.
What is not often mentioned in the media is that for Uyghurs fleeing Xinjiang, the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders are the safest places to exit because their ethnic cousins in the other border states - Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - are dependent on China's voracious energy consumption and have signed up to Beijing's "war on Uyghur terror" through the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.
China's soft power extends even further into the region. Beijing is building a pipeline through Xinjiang to the oil and gas fields of Central Asia and connecting it to the mainland-funded Arabian Sea port in Gwadar, Pakistan.
Observers such as pro-democracy NGO Freedom House believe that nine Uyghur "terrorists" recently captured in Pakistan's tribal areas were extradited to the mainland on April 27 to appease Beijing.
Few countries want to risk arousing the wrath of China. Since the 2006 release of six Uyghur prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Albania, the US has reportedly approached many countries to find sanctuary for the remaining 17. None has dared take them in - not even Albania - although Australia is now considering a request to accept 10, having denied two previous requests.
"My hope is that these Uyghurs - if not all of them, some of them - can be released into the US and the others can be released into European democracies," says Kadeer. "Of course, the ideal situation is for all the Uyghurs to come [to the US]. It would be good for us to assist them." And there is a secondary reason.
"[It] would make illegitimate the Chinese government's use of the terrorist label," she says.
But the mere suggestion of Islamic terror is enough to make even the most sympathetic politician think twice. When reports surfaced early last month that six of the Guantanamo Uyghurs might be released in the US, Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman representing Virginia who Kadeer had counted as an ally a few months earlier and who has supported pro-Uyghur resolutions, grew nervous. Wolf sent Attorney-General Eric Holder a letter protesting any plan to release them in the US. Since most of the Uyghurs in the greater Washington area live in his district, the detainees would probably have ended up on Wolf's doorstep.
"We're feeling betrayed by Congressman Frank Wolf," says Nury Turkel, the Washington-based aviation lawyer who founded UAA. "It's unclear why he is turning his back on us now. Congressman Wolf should know that these men are victims of communism and prisoners of politics. They harbour no ill-intent or hostility towards America."
In large Xinjiang cities, such as Kashgar and Urumqi, people have learned to be cautious.
"If you are a Uyghur there are rules about congregating," says Nick Zaller, an American epidemiologist who worked on Xinjiang's HIV problem in an Urumqi clinic between 2002 and 2004. "No more than three people can congregate.
"I never directly had any conversations about [Kadeer]," he says. "People are careful about what they say. A lot of times they will [only] talk in general. In my experience, a lot of people are not talking overtly about this."
Seytoff - a former divorce lawyer who came to America as a student in 1996, became politically active in Uyghur causes and can't return to his homeland - is less delicate when describing the situation in Xinjiang. "You can imagine the Jews in Germany before the second world war, how terrified they were," he says. "The only difference is the Chinese government has not required Uyghurs to wear a Star of David because Uyghurs don't look like Han Chinese."
In the run up to the Beijing Olympics, tensions in Xinjiang again boiled over. As many as 33 people are believed to have been killed in uprisings and attacks, which Beijing blamed on the ETIM. (With the mainland's media restrictions, accurate numbers and reports are hard to obtain.) Once the attention died down, Beijing launched a vicious crackdown during the religious month of Ramadan that banned fasting, beards and veils, according to the US State Department.
She may have escaped to America but the long arm of the Chinese state still reaches Kadeer. Despite a US House of Representatives non-binding resolution passed last September urging their release, two of her sons are in mainland prisons: Ablikim Abdiriyim is serving a nine-year sentence for secessionism; Alim Abdiriyim a seven-year sentence for tax evasion. Two daughters are trapped under virtual house arrest in Xinjiang.
Amnesty International believes the mainland government is harassing and jailing her family to silence her. Kadeer says even her grandchildren have been targeted and forced out of school. She says a working group has been created to dismantle the business empire she built and allegations of tax evasion and financial irregularities have been made. Little is left. But Kadeer has no plans to hold her tongue.
"I believe I should continue what I'm doing because the world should know our situation," she says.
"Somebody has to speak up on behalf of the Uyghur people.
"[The Han Chinese in Xinjiang] enjoy a great life; we enjoy hell," she says, showing a rare flash of anger.
Down the hall from the conference room where she receives guests, inside her small office, there is a decade-old picture of Kadeer. She wears a flowing, lacy white dress. A white headscarf covers half her head. She is perfectly made up, has smooth skin and immaculate jet-black hair that is swept up into a peak. Her dark eyes burn with intensity.
Rebiya Kadeer looks very different today. Her hair is flecked with strands of grey; her face seems permanently creased with worry. When asked whether she regrets trading luxury for struggle, she doesn't hesitate.
"Not very much. I am doing what I want to do so I consider that big wealth. For me, freedom is a very important thing. I don't want to compare my life then with my life now."
On the wall beside her, the goal and the cost are on view. There is a bright blue East Turkistan flag on one side of the room while the other side features pictures of two handsome Uyghur men: her imprisoned sons.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It
To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Preservationists say the demolition of the Old City section of Kashgar, top, is a blow to China’s Islamic and Uighur culture. But work has already begun, center, to raze about 85 percent of the area.
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By MICHAEL WINES
Published: May 27, 2009
KASHGAR, China — A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets. Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.
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Preservationists say the demolition of the Old City section of Kashgar is a blow to China’s Islamic and Uighur culture.
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The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.
Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.
Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”
Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.
In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.
Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands. “The entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,” Mr. Xu said. “I ask you: What country’s government would not protect its citizens from the dangers of natural disaster?”
Critics fret about a different disaster.
“From a cultural and historical perspective, this plan of theirs is stupid,” said Wu Lili, the managing director of the Beijing Cultural Protection Center, a nongovernmental group devoted to historic preservation. “From the perspective of the locals, it’s cruel.”
Urban reconstruction during China’s long boom has razed many old city centers, including most of the ancient alleyways and courtyard homes of the capital, Beijing.
Kashgar, though, is not a typical Chinese city. Chinese security officials consider it a breeding ground for a small but resilient movement of Uighur separatists who Beijing claims have ties to international jihadis. So redevelopment of this ancient center of Islamic culture comes with a tinge of forced conformity.
Chinese officials have offered somewhat befuddling explanations for their plans. Mr. Xu calls Kashgar “a prime example of rich cultural history and at the same time a major tourism city in China.” Yet the demolition plan would reduce to rubble Kashgar’s principal tourist attraction, a magnet for many of the million-plus people who visit each year.
China supports an international plan to designate major Silk Road landmarks as United Nations World Heritage sites — a powerful draw for tourists, and a powerful incentive for governments to preserve historical areas.
But Kashgar is missing from China’s list of proposed sites. One foreign official who refused to be identified for fear of damaging relations with Beijing said the Old City project had unusually strong backing high in the government.
The project, said to cost $440 million, began abruptly this year, soon after China’s central government said it would spend $584 billion on public works to combat the global financial crisis.
It would complete a piecemeal dismantling of old Kashgar that began decades ago. The city wall, a 25-foot-thick earthen berm nearly 35 feet high, has largely been torn down. In the 1980s, the city paved the surrounding moat to create a ring highway. Then it opened a main street through the old town center.
Still, much of the Old City remains as it was and has always been. From atop 40 vest-pocket mosques, muezzins still cast calls to prayer down the narrow lanes: no loudspeakers here. Hundreds of artisans still hammer copper pots, carve wood, hone scimitars and hawk everything from fresh-baked flatbread to dried toads to Islamic prayer hats.
And tens of thousands of Uighurs still live here behind hand-carved poplar doors, many in tumbledown rentals, others in two-story homes that vault over the alleys and open on courtyards filled with roses and cloth banners.
The city says the Uighur residents have been consulted at every step of planning. Residents mostly say they are summoned to meetings at which eviction timetables and compensation sums are announced.
Although the city offers the displaced residents the opportunity to build new homes on the sites of their old ones, some also complain that the proposed compensation does not pay for the cost of rebuilding.
“My family built this house 500 years ago,” said a beefy 56-year-old man with a white crew cut, who called himself Hajji, as his wife served tea inside their two-story Old City house. “It was made of mud. It’s been improved over the years, but there has been no change to the rooms.”
In Uighur style, the home has few furnishings. Tapestries hang from the walls, and carpets cover the floors and raised areas used for sleeping and entertaining. The winter room has a pot-bellied coal stove; the garage has been converted into a shop from which the family sells sweets and trinkets. Nine rooms downstairs, and seven up, the home has sprawled over the centuries into a mansion by Kashgar standards.
But Hajji and his wife lost their life’s savings caring for a sick child, and the city’s payment to demolish their home will not cover rebuilding it. Their option is to move to a distant apartment, which will force them to close their shop, their only source of income.
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Mahire, 19, left, eating lunch at the 500-year-old home of her in-laws in Kashgar, China. The building is scheduled to be demolished as part of a government plan to guard against earthquake damage.
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Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
As part of the reconstruction of Kashgar, China will move many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs.
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“The house belongs to us,” said Hajji’s wife, who refused to give her name. “In this kind of house, many, many generations can live, one by one. But if we move to an apartment, every 50 or 70 years, that apartment is torn down again.
“This is the biggest problem in our lives. How can our children inherit an apartment?”
Building inspectors have deemed most of the oldest homes unsafe, including all mud-and-straw structures, the earliest form of construction. They will be leveled and, in many cases, rebuilt in an earthquake-resistant Uighur style, the city promises.
But three of the Old City’s seven sectors are judged unfit for Uighur architecture and will be rebuilt with decidedly generic apartment buildings. Two thousand other homes will be razed to build public plazas and schools. Poor residents, who live in the smallest homes, already are being permanently moved to boxy, concrete public housing on Kashgar’s outskirts.
What will remain of old Kashgar is unclear. Mr. Xu said that “important buildings and areas of the Old City have already been included in the country’s special preservation list” and would not be disturbed.
No archaeologists monitor the razings, he said, because the government already knows everything about old Kashgar.
Kashgar officials do have good reason to worry about earthquakes. Last October, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck barely 100 miles away. In 1902, an 8.0-magnitude quake, one of the 20th century’s biggest, killed 667 residents.
Some residents say they also prefer a more modern environment. The thousand-year-old design that gives the Old City its charm often precludes basics like garbage pickup, sewers and fire hydrants.
In Mr. Xu’s view, demolition will give the Uighurs a better life and spare them from disaster in one fell swoop.
All that said, there is a certain aura of forcible eviction about the demolition, an urgency that fear of earthquakes does not completely explain. The city is offering cash bonuses to residents who move out early — about $30 for those who vacate within 20 days; $15 if they move in a month. Homes are razed as soon as they become empty, giving some alleys a gap-tooth look.
On Kashgar television, a nightly 15-minute infomercial hawks the project like ginsu knives, mixing dire statistics on seismic activity with scenes of happy Uighurs dancing in front of their new concrete apartments.
“Never has such a great event, such a major event happened to Kashgar,” the announcer intones. He boasts that the new buildings “will be difficult to match in the world” and that citizens will “completely experience the care and warmth of the party” toward the Uighur ethnic minority.
The infomercial also notes that Communist Party officials from Kashgar to Beijing are so edgy over the prospect of an earthquake “that it is disturbing their rest.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/asia/28kashgar.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own
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China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 22, 2009
It is the awkward fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.
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China is also just beginning to grapple with the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the welfare state.
Most anachronistic of all, though, is the country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.
In this memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent dissident.
Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders; gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and harsh repression.
Even Westerners who pay relatively little attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by the Nobel committee and received at the White House.
Such is not the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.
One thing the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”
Nor, she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.
In the end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs, including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors. Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a powerful China.
On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically prominent member of the National People’s Congress.
Here, though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong, indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.
By the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that “after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”
Years, several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under such horrible conditions?”
If not the first time she had spoken truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six years and exiled to the United States.
This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.
Source
China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 22, 2009
It is the awkward fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.
Skip to next paragraph
China is also just beginning to grapple with the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the welfare state.
Most anachronistic of all, though, is the country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.
In this memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent dissident.
Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders; gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and harsh repression.
Even Westerners who pay relatively little attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by the Nobel committee and received at the White House.
Such is not the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.
One thing the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”
Nor, she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.
In the end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs, including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors. Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a powerful China.
On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically prominent member of the National People’s Congress.
Here, though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong, indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.
By the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that “after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”
Years, several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under such horrible conditions?”
If not the first time she had spoken truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six years and exiled to the United States.
This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.
Source
Friday, April 3, 2009
Uyghurs Targeted Over Prayers
Uyghurs Targeted Over Prayers
2009-04-02
Members of a mostly Muslim ethnic group in China are detained and fined for worshiping outside their own villages.
AFP Photo
A Chinese policeman (R) watches as ethnic Uyghurs line the street for an official ceremony in Kashgar, in China's northwestern Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Aug. 7, 2008.
HONG KONG—Local authorities in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region are detaining and fining members of the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority for conducting prayers outside their home villages, residents and officials say.
Several hundred Uyghurs who gathered to pray at a Qariqash county shrine in Khotan prefecture, south of Kashgar, were surrounded by local police and detained for hours on March 26, one of the detained villagers said.
Village authorities, contacted by telephone, confirmed that “cross-village worship” was considered a "social crime."
It is a social crime."
Hebibullah, Ilchi village chief
Emin Niyaz, 65, who is retired and lives in Ilchi village, said that because he no longer works he had decided to travel to the Qariqash county shrine.
“Since my childhood, we have had a custom of worshiping at that shrine, so I thought there was nothing wrong with worshiping there,” Niyaz said.
“While we were worshiping, suddenly the police surrounded us. They gathered us in the shrine and then they brought us to Zawa village police station,” he said, adding that the worshipers were questioned and photographed individually.
Fined for worship
“After that they called our village chiefs and sent us back into their custody. The village chiefs brought us to the government buildings in each of our villages and detained us there,” Niyaz said.
His village chief, Niyaz said, accused the group of planning an “illegal gathering.”
“If you worship in your own village it might be all right, but if you engage in cross-village worship they say it is illegal. The village chief said that if so many people are gathering in the desert, they must have some secret motive,” Niyaz said.
They were also required to pay a fine or face being returned to the village police station for detention, he said.
“They told each of us to pay a 500 yuan (U.S. $70) fine … In the beginning, we begged not to pay the fine because we couldn’t afford it. But in the end, each of us had to pay to be released,” he said.
The average yearly income for an Ilchi village resident is 3,000 yuan (U.S. $440).
Niyaz said that the group was held for a total of 12 hours until all fines had been collected.
“We had no choice. Our village chiefs went to our families and relatives during the middle of the night and collected the money from them,” Niyaz said. “They detained us at 2 p.m. and we didn’t get home until 2 a.m.”
Official response
The Ilchi village chief, Hebibullah, who gave only his first name, confirmed that he had fined the group for worshiping at the shrine.
“It is a social crime. Last year 10 people died on their way to worship at a shrine. Since then, the Prefectural Party Committee has forbidden cross-village worshiping,” Hebibullah said, adding that an agreement between villagers and the government required him to impose the fine.
“The agreement includes laws about birth control, work production, social stability, and other items. Based on this agreement, I fined them 500 yuan each,” Hebibullah said.
Party Secretary Jur’et, in charge of politics and law in Ilchi village, called the incident a “sensitive political event.”
“The shrine is located 5 kms (3.1 miles) from the nearest village in the desert. Nobody used to go there to worship, but in the last two years more and more people have been going there,” Jur’et said.
Asked about a man who took villagers to the shrine in his vehicle and said he was fined 5,000 yuan (U.S. $730), Jur’et said: “His name is Metrozi. We fined him for providing transportation for an illegal gathering.”
Self-criticism
Two days after being released, the 13 members of the Ilchi group were called in front of the rest of their village and criticized, Niyaz said.
“One of us gave a speech on behalf of the rest of us and acknowledged our crime, expressing that other people should learn their lesson from us,” he said.
But when asked if he felt guilty for committing a crime, Niyaz said he didn’t know.
“There is a stone in front of the shrine that says you can worship there. It says you cannot gamble there,” he said.
“They accused us of an illegal gathering, but how was I supposed to know that there were already so many people there?”
Uyghurs targeted
Social stability campaigns are frequently launched in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in a bid to stop petitioners from going public with their complaints and quash potential unrest, experts say.
In July last year, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, police launched a house-to-house search campaign in Gulja [in Chinese, Yining], a Uyghur city in Ili prefecture known as a traditional center of opposition to Beijing’s rule.
Uyghurs whose homes had been raided reported that their copies of the Quran had been confiscated by police.
Many Uyghurs, who twice enjoyed short-lived independence as the state of East Turkestan during the 1930s and 40s, oppose Beijing’s rule in Xinjiang.
Beijing blames Uyghur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence in the Xinjiang region. But diplomats and foreign experts are skeptical.
International rights groups have accused Beijing of using the U.S. “war on terror” to crack down on nonviolent supporters of Uyghur independence.
In an April 2005 report, Human Rights Watch accused authorities of maintaining a "multi-tiered system of surveillance, control, and suppression of religious activity aimed at Xinjiang’s Uyghurs."
At its most extreme, peaceful activists who practice their religion in a manner deemed unacceptable by state or party authorities are arrested, tortured, and at times executed, the report said, while more routinely many Uyghurs experience harassment in their daily lives.
Original reporting in Uyghur by Shohret Hoshur. Translated by Dolkun Kamberi. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Source
Monday, March 30, 2009
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - China : Uyghurs
Title World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - China : Uyghurs
Publication Date July 2008
Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - China : Uyghurs, July 2008. Online.
UNHCR Refworld, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49749d3c4b.html [accessed 31 March 2009]
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - China : Uyghurs
Updated July 2008
Profile
Uyghurs speak a south-eastern Turkic language and are thought to currently number around 8.6 million, though some groups assert that their numbers are much higher. They tend to be mainly concentrated in the north-western corner of China and, until recently, a substantial majority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Most are Sunni Muslims. The Uyghurs are a majority in western XUAR and in the Turpan prefecture, while Han Chinese are the majority in most major cities and in the east and north. There are also Uyghurs found in Hunan province in south-central China.
Historical context
China's Uyghur minority are a remnant of the vast Uyghur Empire which stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria in the eighth century, eventually to be overrun by other tribes in much of Central Asia.
During many centuries, various Uyghur, Mongol and Chinese regimes ruled the region. Much of what is today Xinjiang ('new frontier') was ruled by or owed allegiance to the Mongols from the thirteenth century. Various Uyghur and Mongol khanates exerted authority over different parts of the region, with the Manchu Qing Empire entering the area and controlling all of it by about the mid-eighteenth century. For a brief period after 1864, Xinjiang was to break away from the Qing Empire while China was weakened by other conflicts and unable to maintain its garrisons in the distant province. Chinese control was reasserted in 1877.
The end of the Qing Dynasty and the creation of the Republic of China in 1912 were followed by a period of weak central government control over Xinjiang. A rebellion in the 1930s (in reaction to a large degree to heavy taxes on Uyghurs to finance Han migration and settlement on some of the province's best agricultural land) resulted in the establishment of the first modern Uyghur state in 1933. The East Turkistan Republic was centred mainly in the southern region of Kashgar and Khotan. It survived only one year and returned to the control of the Han Chinese under warlord Sheng Shicai. Parts of northern Xinjiang were to form the second East Turkistan Republic between 1944 and 1949. The Uyghurs' taste of independence was brought to an end with the arrival of the People's Liberation Army in Xinjiang in 1949.
The region took its current shape as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on 1 October 1955. Tensions and resentment, despite some early idealistic moves that were receptive to the rights of nationalities, quickly increased when Chinese Communist authorities began to clearly favour Han Chinese. There were initial statements by the Communists criticizing past Han nationalism and promising that Xinjiang would remain in control of its nationalities, since they had a right of self-determination, but real power in the post-1955 XUAR appeared to be held in practice by the Han Chinese cadres.
While no segment of Chinese society escaped the effects of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, most accounts agree that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang appeared to be particularly targeted, with between 60,000 and 100,000 Uyghurs and Kazakhs fleeing the country after 1962 to avoid repression and famine.
Resentment of and resistance to government-supported migration or support of Han Chinese to the detriment of Uyghurs, restrictions on their religious and cultural practices, and loss of land have periodically caused eruptions of violence in the region. There were student demonstrations and riots in the 1980s linked to opposition to an announced expansion of Han migration and the Baren Township riot in 1990, where at least 50 people were killed (some reports claim there were hundreds) following a government decision to close down a local mosque. This subsequently led to a series of riots in other parts of Xinjiang.
Numerous bombing incidents in Xinjiang and Beijing itself – blamed on Uyghur extremists – occurred in 1997, as well as attacks against Chinese soldiers and officials. Widespread demonstrations and street fighting followed the arrest of suspected separatists during Ramadan.
The overall effect of the Communist Party of China's policies in the last six decades, one of the main sources of the tensions and resentment in the region, is unmistakable and stunning: the proportion of the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang has jumped from about 6 per cent in 1949 to much more than 40 per cent in 2004, with a massive influx of about 8 million Han Chinese – not counting soldiers and others on 'temporary contracts'. The capital of the province itself went from being a city where the Uyghurs were the clear majority (their proportion being about 80 per cent) to one where the Uyghurs have been almost completely displaced, and where it is now the Han Chinese who constitute about 80 per cent of the total population.
As the demographic weight of the Uyghurs is thus reduced, use of their language and the practice of other cultural and religious activities closely linked to Uyghur identity are being increasingly restricted by Chinese authorities who more and more openly espouse a pro-Han chauvinism. Schools and universities are increasingly being required to teach in Mandarin rather than Uyghur.
Current issues
The strategic position of Xinjiang and the potential for ethnic unrest translates into a high degree of control of the region and of the affairs of the Uyghur minority by central authorities. Decision-making is concentrated in the centrally appointed Party structure and in Beijing, thereby excluding ethnic Uyghurs. Two additional factors contribute to this configuration: the role of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, directly under the State Council and virtually independent of the government; and the extremely limited power granted to national minorities, in particular Uyghurs, in the government and the Party – even compared to other national minority areas of China.
Until recently, the large number of Uyghurs (perhaps 8 million or so) constituted a substantial majority in Xinjiang, and legislation and regulations are supposed to guarantee them minority and language rights as well as prohibit discrimination. However, the control and role which one would expect the Uyghurs to be able to exercise over the operations of administrative units has been eroded or even eliminated in recent years, along with the language requirements for job opportunities within government offices and the language of education in schools.
Since the mid-1990s the gradual exclusion of Uyghurs from state-based employment – and the rising number of private jobs is stunning and statistically verifiable from a variety of sources. Reports in 2005 point out how Han Chinese are employed and ethnic Uyghurs kept out of new construction jobs, on road-building projects and oil and gas pipelines. While the Han Chinese have an unemployment rate of only about 1 per cent in Xinjiang, the rate among the Uyghurs is a staggering 70 per cent.
As with the Mongolian and Tibetan minorities, access to employment is increasingly a contentious issue for the Uyghur minority, and is seen as dependent on fluency in Mandarin, since state authorities in the region refuse to recognize any concrete entitlement to use of Uyghur beyond its use as a medium of education. The reduction of bilingual services provided by state authorities has resulted in the removing of bilingual employment opportunities, which would have meant the employment of more Uyghurs, whereas increased monolingual state operations have led to a much higher proportion of Han Chinese being preferred in almost all fields of employment. For example, in April 2005 the government announced that in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs constitute over 95 per cent of the population, 500 out of 700 new civil service positions would be given to Han Chinese. At the same time, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps hired 9,000 Han Chinese from Gansu to work on its farms, rather than employ Uyghurs living nearby.
Even the few areas where use of Uyghur was associated with job opportunities – such as in education – have seen a rapid reduction since 2000. From the late 1980s, Chinese-language instruction became more prominent, whereas instruction in Uyghur began to be curtailed, sometimes through the process of merging Chinese and Uyghur schools with the unavoidable result that these schools would teach almost exclusively in Mandarin. Xinjiang University, initially established in 1949 as a bilingual (Uyghur/Mandarin) university has all but cast away instruction in Uyghur since 2002. Authorities have moved towards replacing Uyghur with Mandarin in almost all schools: schools in Artush, for example, began teaching all first grade elementary school classes exclusively in Mandarin Chinese in September 2006. The policy will apparently require that all primary and secondary schools teach exclusively in Mandarin by 2012. About 80 per cent of the population of Artush is Uyghur.
A continuing issue for the Uyghur minority is the role and dominating impact of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps – a body which is probably best described as an economic and semi-military quasi-state organization. Operating almost completely outside the control of the XUAR authorities since 1981, it has de facto administrative authority over a number of cities, settlements and farms all across Xinjiang. It has coordinated the settlement and employment of millions of Han Chinese in the area and continues to fulfil administrative functions such as health care, printed and electronic media and education for areas under its jurisdiction. This includes primary, secondary and tertiary education (with two universities, Shihezi University and Tarim University). It has control over 16 million mu (over 2.5 million acres) of farmland, representing about a third of the Xinjiang's arable land. Its operations are essentially exclusively in Mandarin, thus acting as an important agent in the sinicization of the XUAR, and of the growing exclusion and disempowerment of the Uyghur minority. This is part of an overt government policy of supporting massive Han migration into the region in order to weaken the demographic and political weight of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – which is a dangerous source of frustration and resentment. Another issue that has emerged is the right of members of a minority to their name in their own language, which is protected under international law under the right to private and family life. A policy adopted in 2002 seems to require that Uyghur names be changed into Chinese pinyin.
A perhaps even more contentious issue involves the freedom of religion of Uyghurs and the crackdown by authorities in the name of security and the fight against terrorism and separatism. The religious activities of Muslims in Xinjiang are subjected to extensive controls and restrictions which are not applied to any other part of China: a special regulation of the XUAR effectively bans minors from participating in religious activities, resulting in authorities prohibiting teaching of Islam to school-age children. Though in theory applying to all religions in Xinjiang, reports in 2005 and 2006 seem to confirm that this regulation is applied more harshly to Uyghur Muslims. The ban has also been interpreted in some areas as prohibiting children from entering mosques, and has led to the confiscation and destruction of unapproved religious texts, and the censoring of imams' sermons. Any type of unsanctioned religious activity in Xinjiang risks much more serious consequences than in other parts of China, with the result that Uyghurs are likely to be arrested and detained for extremely long periods in the name of fighting extremism, even for innocuous activities. In 2001 a Uyghur, Abduhelil Zunun, was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into Uyghur.
In May 2008, one Uyghur leader in exile claimed that more than 10,000 Uyghurs had been rounded up in the previous four to five months. Another exiled Uyghur claimed that the Olympic torch relay through Xinjiang province ahead of the August 2008 Beijing Olympic Games had prompted a heavier crackdown against Uyghurs in the area.
Source
Publication Date July 2008
Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - China : Uyghurs, July 2008. Online.
UNHCR Refworld, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49749d3c4b.html [accessed 31 March 2009]
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - China : Uyghurs
Updated July 2008
Profile
Uyghurs speak a south-eastern Turkic language and are thought to currently number around 8.6 million, though some groups assert that their numbers are much higher. They tend to be mainly concentrated in the north-western corner of China and, until recently, a substantial majority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Most are Sunni Muslims. The Uyghurs are a majority in western XUAR and in the Turpan prefecture, while Han Chinese are the majority in most major cities and in the east and north. There are also Uyghurs found in Hunan province in south-central China.
Historical context
China's Uyghur minority are a remnant of the vast Uyghur Empire which stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria in the eighth century, eventually to be overrun by other tribes in much of Central Asia.
During many centuries, various Uyghur, Mongol and Chinese regimes ruled the region. Much of what is today Xinjiang ('new frontier') was ruled by or owed allegiance to the Mongols from the thirteenth century. Various Uyghur and Mongol khanates exerted authority over different parts of the region, with the Manchu Qing Empire entering the area and controlling all of it by about the mid-eighteenth century. For a brief period after 1864, Xinjiang was to break away from the Qing Empire while China was weakened by other conflicts and unable to maintain its garrisons in the distant province. Chinese control was reasserted in 1877.
The end of the Qing Dynasty and the creation of the Republic of China in 1912 were followed by a period of weak central government control over Xinjiang. A rebellion in the 1930s (in reaction to a large degree to heavy taxes on Uyghurs to finance Han migration and settlement on some of the province's best agricultural land) resulted in the establishment of the first modern Uyghur state in 1933. The East Turkistan Republic was centred mainly in the southern region of Kashgar and Khotan. It survived only one year and returned to the control of the Han Chinese under warlord Sheng Shicai. Parts of northern Xinjiang were to form the second East Turkistan Republic between 1944 and 1949. The Uyghurs' taste of independence was brought to an end with the arrival of the People's Liberation Army in Xinjiang in 1949.
The region took its current shape as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on 1 October 1955. Tensions and resentment, despite some early idealistic moves that were receptive to the rights of nationalities, quickly increased when Chinese Communist authorities began to clearly favour Han Chinese. There were initial statements by the Communists criticizing past Han nationalism and promising that Xinjiang would remain in control of its nationalities, since they had a right of self-determination, but real power in the post-1955 XUAR appeared to be held in practice by the Han Chinese cadres.
While no segment of Chinese society escaped the effects of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, most accounts agree that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang appeared to be particularly targeted, with between 60,000 and 100,000 Uyghurs and Kazakhs fleeing the country after 1962 to avoid repression and famine.
Resentment of and resistance to government-supported migration or support of Han Chinese to the detriment of Uyghurs, restrictions on their religious and cultural practices, and loss of land have periodically caused eruptions of violence in the region. There were student demonstrations and riots in the 1980s linked to opposition to an announced expansion of Han migration and the Baren Township riot in 1990, where at least 50 people were killed (some reports claim there were hundreds) following a government decision to close down a local mosque. This subsequently led to a series of riots in other parts of Xinjiang.
Numerous bombing incidents in Xinjiang and Beijing itself – blamed on Uyghur extremists – occurred in 1997, as well as attacks against Chinese soldiers and officials. Widespread demonstrations and street fighting followed the arrest of suspected separatists during Ramadan.
The overall effect of the Communist Party of China's policies in the last six decades, one of the main sources of the tensions and resentment in the region, is unmistakable and stunning: the proportion of the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang has jumped from about 6 per cent in 1949 to much more than 40 per cent in 2004, with a massive influx of about 8 million Han Chinese – not counting soldiers and others on 'temporary contracts'. The capital of the province itself went from being a city where the Uyghurs were the clear majority (their proportion being about 80 per cent) to one where the Uyghurs have been almost completely displaced, and where it is now the Han Chinese who constitute about 80 per cent of the total population.
As the demographic weight of the Uyghurs is thus reduced, use of their language and the practice of other cultural and religious activities closely linked to Uyghur identity are being increasingly restricted by Chinese authorities who more and more openly espouse a pro-Han chauvinism. Schools and universities are increasingly being required to teach in Mandarin rather than Uyghur.
Current issues
The strategic position of Xinjiang and the potential for ethnic unrest translates into a high degree of control of the region and of the affairs of the Uyghur minority by central authorities. Decision-making is concentrated in the centrally appointed Party structure and in Beijing, thereby excluding ethnic Uyghurs. Two additional factors contribute to this configuration: the role of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, directly under the State Council and virtually independent of the government; and the extremely limited power granted to national minorities, in particular Uyghurs, in the government and the Party – even compared to other national minority areas of China.
Until recently, the large number of Uyghurs (perhaps 8 million or so) constituted a substantial majority in Xinjiang, and legislation and regulations are supposed to guarantee them minority and language rights as well as prohibit discrimination. However, the control and role which one would expect the Uyghurs to be able to exercise over the operations of administrative units has been eroded or even eliminated in recent years, along with the language requirements for job opportunities within government offices and the language of education in schools.
Since the mid-1990s the gradual exclusion of Uyghurs from state-based employment – and the rising number of private jobs is stunning and statistically verifiable from a variety of sources. Reports in 2005 point out how Han Chinese are employed and ethnic Uyghurs kept out of new construction jobs, on road-building projects and oil and gas pipelines. While the Han Chinese have an unemployment rate of only about 1 per cent in Xinjiang, the rate among the Uyghurs is a staggering 70 per cent.
As with the Mongolian and Tibetan minorities, access to employment is increasingly a contentious issue for the Uyghur minority, and is seen as dependent on fluency in Mandarin, since state authorities in the region refuse to recognize any concrete entitlement to use of Uyghur beyond its use as a medium of education. The reduction of bilingual services provided by state authorities has resulted in the removing of bilingual employment opportunities, which would have meant the employment of more Uyghurs, whereas increased monolingual state operations have led to a much higher proportion of Han Chinese being preferred in almost all fields of employment. For example, in April 2005 the government announced that in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs constitute over 95 per cent of the population, 500 out of 700 new civil service positions would be given to Han Chinese. At the same time, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps hired 9,000 Han Chinese from Gansu to work on its farms, rather than employ Uyghurs living nearby.
Even the few areas where use of Uyghur was associated with job opportunities – such as in education – have seen a rapid reduction since 2000. From the late 1980s, Chinese-language instruction became more prominent, whereas instruction in Uyghur began to be curtailed, sometimes through the process of merging Chinese and Uyghur schools with the unavoidable result that these schools would teach almost exclusively in Mandarin. Xinjiang University, initially established in 1949 as a bilingual (Uyghur/Mandarin) university has all but cast away instruction in Uyghur since 2002. Authorities have moved towards replacing Uyghur with Mandarin in almost all schools: schools in Artush, for example, began teaching all first grade elementary school classes exclusively in Mandarin Chinese in September 2006. The policy will apparently require that all primary and secondary schools teach exclusively in Mandarin by 2012. About 80 per cent of the population of Artush is Uyghur.
A continuing issue for the Uyghur minority is the role and dominating impact of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps – a body which is probably best described as an economic and semi-military quasi-state organization. Operating almost completely outside the control of the XUAR authorities since 1981, it has de facto administrative authority over a number of cities, settlements and farms all across Xinjiang. It has coordinated the settlement and employment of millions of Han Chinese in the area and continues to fulfil administrative functions such as health care, printed and electronic media and education for areas under its jurisdiction. This includes primary, secondary and tertiary education (with two universities, Shihezi University and Tarim University). It has control over 16 million mu (over 2.5 million acres) of farmland, representing about a third of the Xinjiang's arable land. Its operations are essentially exclusively in Mandarin, thus acting as an important agent in the sinicization of the XUAR, and of the growing exclusion and disempowerment of the Uyghur minority. This is part of an overt government policy of supporting massive Han migration into the region in order to weaken the demographic and political weight of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – which is a dangerous source of frustration and resentment. Another issue that has emerged is the right of members of a minority to their name in their own language, which is protected under international law under the right to private and family life. A policy adopted in 2002 seems to require that Uyghur names be changed into Chinese pinyin.
A perhaps even more contentious issue involves the freedom of religion of Uyghurs and the crackdown by authorities in the name of security and the fight against terrorism and separatism. The religious activities of Muslims in Xinjiang are subjected to extensive controls and restrictions which are not applied to any other part of China: a special regulation of the XUAR effectively bans minors from participating in religious activities, resulting in authorities prohibiting teaching of Islam to school-age children. Though in theory applying to all religions in Xinjiang, reports in 2005 and 2006 seem to confirm that this regulation is applied more harshly to Uyghur Muslims. The ban has also been interpreted in some areas as prohibiting children from entering mosques, and has led to the confiscation and destruction of unapproved religious texts, and the censoring of imams' sermons. Any type of unsanctioned religious activity in Xinjiang risks much more serious consequences than in other parts of China, with the result that Uyghurs are likely to be arrested and detained for extremely long periods in the name of fighting extremism, even for innocuous activities. In 2001 a Uyghur, Abduhelil Zunun, was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into Uyghur.
In May 2008, one Uyghur leader in exile claimed that more than 10,000 Uyghurs had been rounded up in the previous four to five months. Another exiled Uyghur claimed that the Olympic torch relay through Xinjiang province ahead of the August 2008 Beijing Olympic Games had prompted a heavier crackdown against Uyghurs in the area.
Source
China cracks down in Muslim west
China cracks down in Muslim west
By ALEXA OLESEN, The Associated Press
5:26 a.m. March 30, 2009
BEIJING — An overseas rights activist said Monday that authorities in China's predominantly Muslim far west are closing unregistered Islamic schools and conducting house-to-house searches in a new security crackdown in the restive region.
The campaign under way for five weeks in the city of Hotan underscores Beijing's persisting concerns about separatist movements in its Central Asian border province of Xinjiang.
While anti-government protests and a security clampdown in Tibetan areas have grabbed attention over the past year, China has also been battling unrest in Xinjiang, with a flare-up in violence last year that killed 33 people. Like the Tibetans, many of Xinjiang's ethnic minority Uighurs have chafed under Beijing's rule and restrictions on the practice of religion.
The clampdown in Hotan – once a jade-trading center on the Silk Road and still a bastion of Uighur culture – was meant to quash dissent before August's anniversary marking communist troops' entry to Xinjiang 60 years ago, the Germany-based World Uighur Congress said Monday.
A congress spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, said in an e-mail that armed police were making nighttime raids from house to house. At least seven religious schools have been shut and 39 people arrested so far, Raxit said.
The official Xinhua News Agency earlier this month reported that Hotan authorities had launched a campaign against "illegal religious activity" at the end of February and "had already achieved some initial success."
"Officials uncovered some illegal religious activities, seized a large number of illegal books, handwritten materials, computer discs, audio tapes and other propaganda materials as well as bullets, fuses, explosive and flammable materials, and other weaponry," it said.
A secretary with Hotan's Communist Party Propaganda Department on Monday denied that any religious schools were closed, people arrested or bullets, explosives and other materials seized. But he confirmed that some illegal religious activity has been halted and illegal books, writings, computer discs and audio tapes had been confiscated.
He refused to give his name or any more information and referred calls to other departments where the phone rang unanswered or officials said they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The clampdown is consistent with previous efforts to target a resurgent Islam that the government says is fanning radical, violent separatism in Xinjiang. A year ago, several hundred Muslims staged a protest in Hotan that rights groups said was against a ban on women wearing headscarves but that the government said was incited by an overseas Islamic group.
Uighur separatists have waged a low-intensity campaign of sporadic bombings and assassinations for the past 20 years as social controls loosened along with free-market reforms and as more ethnic Chinese came to Xinjiang in search of work.
Last August, violence in Xinjiang killed 33 people, including 16 border guards slain when two attackers rammed a stolen truck into the group before tossing bombs and stabbing them.
Source
By ALEXA OLESEN, The Associated Press
5:26 a.m. March 30, 2009
BEIJING — An overseas rights activist said Monday that authorities in China's predominantly Muslim far west are closing unregistered Islamic schools and conducting house-to-house searches in a new security crackdown in the restive region.
The campaign under way for five weeks in the city of Hotan underscores Beijing's persisting concerns about separatist movements in its Central Asian border province of Xinjiang.
While anti-government protests and a security clampdown in Tibetan areas have grabbed attention over the past year, China has also been battling unrest in Xinjiang, with a flare-up in violence last year that killed 33 people. Like the Tibetans, many of Xinjiang's ethnic minority Uighurs have chafed under Beijing's rule and restrictions on the practice of religion.
The clampdown in Hotan – once a jade-trading center on the Silk Road and still a bastion of Uighur culture – was meant to quash dissent before August's anniversary marking communist troops' entry to Xinjiang 60 years ago, the Germany-based World Uighur Congress said Monday.
A congress spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, said in an e-mail that armed police were making nighttime raids from house to house. At least seven religious schools have been shut and 39 people arrested so far, Raxit said.
The official Xinhua News Agency earlier this month reported that Hotan authorities had launched a campaign against "illegal religious activity" at the end of February and "had already achieved some initial success."
"Officials uncovered some illegal religious activities, seized a large number of illegal books, handwritten materials, computer discs, audio tapes and other propaganda materials as well as bullets, fuses, explosive and flammable materials, and other weaponry," it said.
A secretary with Hotan's Communist Party Propaganda Department on Monday denied that any religious schools were closed, people arrested or bullets, explosives and other materials seized. But he confirmed that some illegal religious activity has been halted and illegal books, writings, computer discs and audio tapes had been confiscated.
He refused to give his name or any more information and referred calls to other departments where the phone rang unanswered or officials said they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The clampdown is consistent with previous efforts to target a resurgent Islam that the government says is fanning radical, violent separatism in Xinjiang. A year ago, several hundred Muslims staged a protest in Hotan that rights groups said was against a ban on women wearing headscarves but that the government said was incited by an overseas Islamic group.
Uighur separatists have waged a low-intensity campaign of sporadic bombings and assassinations for the past 20 years as social controls loosened along with free-market reforms and as more ethnic Chinese came to Xinjiang in search of work.
Last August, violence in Xinjiang killed 33 people, including 16 border guards slain when two attackers rammed a stolen truck into the group before tossing bombs and stabbing them.
Source
Friday, March 6, 2009
Uyghur Moderate Speaks Out
Uyghur Moderate Speaks Out
2009-03-06
A Uyghur moderate speaks out against Chinese policies in Xinjiang as China's legislative body meets.
HONG KONG—A leading moderate in China’s mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority has sharply criticized Chinese policies in the northwestern Xinjiang region, saying that joblessness remains the single biggest problem and residents have suffered under the current governor.
“Unemployment has existed in Xinjiang since the 1950s,” Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing, said in an interview with RFA’s Uyghur service. “No matter what … I will still talk about the issue of unemployment.”
“Unemployment among Uyghurs is among the highest in the world,” he said after returning home to Beijing from a weeklong academic exchange in France.
(Xinjiang has developed, but the people are living in poverty, especially Uyghurs." Ilham Tohti)
Tohti spoke as the National People’s Congress, China’s annual session of parliament, met in Beijing—where the governor of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), Nur Bekri, warned Friday of a “more fierce struggle” against separatist unrest in the region.
China has accused Uyghur separatists of fomenting unrest in the region, particularly in the run-up to and during the Olympics in August last year when a wave of violence hit the vast desert region. The violence prompted a crackdown in which the government says 1,295 people were detained for state security crimes.
“The [security] situation will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce in the region this year,” Nur Bekri said Friday, according to the official Xinhua news agency. “It’s a time of celebration for Xinjiang people, but hostile forces will not give up such an opportunity to destroy it."
This year marks 60 years since China’s People’s Liberation Army entered Xinjiang and implemented what it calls a “peaceful liberation” of the region. Many Uyghurs regard the move as an invasion.
Tohti also called for the inclusion of Uyghur intellectuals in regional government.
“In the 1990s, I participated in the central government’s 9th five-year research plan, and I was responsible for research on Xinjiang. At that time I wrote that there were 1.5 million unemployed workers in Xinjiang, but the Xinjiang government rejected this,” he said.
“Two years ago they finally acknowledged that there is surplus labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” he said.
“Other provinces in China have had some improvements with regard to democracy. But in Xinjiang, the situation has worsened,” he said.
The [security] situation will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce in the region this year."
Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri
Citing official media, Tohti noted that 1.2 million workers migrated to Xinjiang from elsewhere in China in 2008. “This indicates that there are abundant employment opportunities in Xinjiang, but why are these opportunities not for Uyghurs?” he asked.
“I don’t oppose migration [to Xinjiang], but we need to re-evaluate it. Xinjiang doesn’t need migrants the way it needed them in the 1950s and 60s —so why bring in migrant workers? If there’s really no unemployment in Xinjiang, why transfer young Uyghur women to inland China as cheap labor?”
Asked about Bekri, the regional governor, Tohti said, “I think he’s unqualified … I don’t know how he became governor of Xinjiang, and I don’t recognize him as a qualified governor.
“He doesn’t care about Uyghurs. He’s always stressed the stability and security of Xinjiang and threatened Uyghurs. Xinjiang has developed, but the people are living in poverty, especially Uyghurs. Laws that should have been applied in the Uyghur Autonomous Region haven’t been implemented.”
Safety fears
Tohti said he hasn’t visited Xinjiang for two years because of tensions there, adding that he fears for his own safety because he has been outspoken in criticizing the government.
“Of course I worry, but what I have said doesn’t conflict with Chinese law. If they put me in jail, I am ready. I’ve sat in front of a computer for so many years—jail would give me a chance to exercise and lose weight …Then I will sue them, and I believe I will win.”
Web site
In mid-2008, Chinese authorities closed a Web site launched by Tohti in 2006 and aimed at promoting understanding between Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs.
Tohti said it was fellow Uyghurs who told authorities his Chinese-language Web site, Uyghur Online, had links to Uyghur “extremists” abroad.
At the time, Tohti said his site—which employed 67 people of 12 nationalities, all unpaid—sometimes scored 1 million page views daily, with content published in Chinese and written by Uyghur, Han, Korean, Tibetan, and other contributors.
The site was later reopened but went offline again this week.
“My Web site has been shut down again because of an unlawful decision. I am not accountable to anyone but to the Constitution—and I believe my Web site will be reopened soon. I don’t oppose the Constitution, but I object to its wrongful implementation.”
According to his official biography, Tohti was born in Atush, Xinjiang, on Oct. 25, 1969. He graduated from the Northeast Normal University and the Economics School at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing.
Original reporting by Shohret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur service. Translated by Rukiye Turtush. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written and produced in English by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Source
2009-03-06
A Uyghur moderate speaks out against Chinese policies in Xinjiang as China's legislative body meets.
HONG KONG—A leading moderate in China’s mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority has sharply criticized Chinese policies in the northwestern Xinjiang region, saying that joblessness remains the single biggest problem and residents have suffered under the current governor.
“Unemployment has existed in Xinjiang since the 1950s,” Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing, said in an interview with RFA’s Uyghur service. “No matter what … I will still talk about the issue of unemployment.”
“Unemployment among Uyghurs is among the highest in the world,” he said after returning home to Beijing from a weeklong academic exchange in France.
(Xinjiang has developed, but the people are living in poverty, especially Uyghurs." Ilham Tohti)
Tohti spoke as the National People’s Congress, China’s annual session of parliament, met in Beijing—where the governor of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), Nur Bekri, warned Friday of a “more fierce struggle” against separatist unrest in the region.
China has accused Uyghur separatists of fomenting unrest in the region, particularly in the run-up to and during the Olympics in August last year when a wave of violence hit the vast desert region. The violence prompted a crackdown in which the government says 1,295 people were detained for state security crimes.
“The [security] situation will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce in the region this year,” Nur Bekri said Friday, according to the official Xinhua news agency. “It’s a time of celebration for Xinjiang people, but hostile forces will not give up such an opportunity to destroy it."
This year marks 60 years since China’s People’s Liberation Army entered Xinjiang and implemented what it calls a “peaceful liberation” of the region. Many Uyghurs regard the move as an invasion.
Tohti also called for the inclusion of Uyghur intellectuals in regional government.
“In the 1990s, I participated in the central government’s 9th five-year research plan, and I was responsible for research on Xinjiang. At that time I wrote that there were 1.5 million unemployed workers in Xinjiang, but the Xinjiang government rejected this,” he said.
“Two years ago they finally acknowledged that there is surplus labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” he said.
“Other provinces in China have had some improvements with regard to democracy. But in Xinjiang, the situation has worsened,” he said.
The [security] situation will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce in the region this year."
Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri
Citing official media, Tohti noted that 1.2 million workers migrated to Xinjiang from elsewhere in China in 2008. “This indicates that there are abundant employment opportunities in Xinjiang, but why are these opportunities not for Uyghurs?” he asked.
“I don’t oppose migration [to Xinjiang], but we need to re-evaluate it. Xinjiang doesn’t need migrants the way it needed them in the 1950s and 60s —so why bring in migrant workers? If there’s really no unemployment in Xinjiang, why transfer young Uyghur women to inland China as cheap labor?”
Asked about Bekri, the regional governor, Tohti said, “I think he’s unqualified … I don’t know how he became governor of Xinjiang, and I don’t recognize him as a qualified governor.
“He doesn’t care about Uyghurs. He’s always stressed the stability and security of Xinjiang and threatened Uyghurs. Xinjiang has developed, but the people are living in poverty, especially Uyghurs. Laws that should have been applied in the Uyghur Autonomous Region haven’t been implemented.”
Safety fears
Tohti said he hasn’t visited Xinjiang for two years because of tensions there, adding that he fears for his own safety because he has been outspoken in criticizing the government.
“Of course I worry, but what I have said doesn’t conflict with Chinese law. If they put me in jail, I am ready. I’ve sat in front of a computer for so many years—jail would give me a chance to exercise and lose weight …Then I will sue them, and I believe I will win.”
Web site
In mid-2008, Chinese authorities closed a Web site launched by Tohti in 2006 and aimed at promoting understanding between Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs.
Tohti said it was fellow Uyghurs who told authorities his Chinese-language Web site, Uyghur Online, had links to Uyghur “extremists” abroad.
At the time, Tohti said his site—which employed 67 people of 12 nationalities, all unpaid—sometimes scored 1 million page views daily, with content published in Chinese and written by Uyghur, Han, Korean, Tibetan, and other contributors.
The site was later reopened but went offline again this week.
“My Web site has been shut down again because of an unlawful decision. I am not accountable to anyone but to the Constitution—and I believe my Web site will be reopened soon. I don’t oppose the Constitution, but I object to its wrongful implementation.”
According to his official biography, Tohti was born in Atush, Xinjiang, on Oct. 25, 1969. He graduated from the Northeast Normal University and the Economics School at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing.
Original reporting by Shohret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur service. Translated by Rukiye Turtush. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written and produced in English by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Source
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