China locks down Xinjiang a decade after deadly ethnic riots

July 06, 2019

ISTANBUL (AP) — A decade after deadly riots tore through his hometown, Kamilane Abudushalamu still vividly recalls the violence that left him an exile. On July 5, 2009, Abudushalamu was hiding with his father on the 10th floor of an office tower in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region that is home to the Turkic Uighur ethnic minority. By a park, he spotted a bus on fire. Then he heard a crack as a motorcycle nearby exploded.

Hours later, when he and his father stepped out to sprint home, he saw crowds of Uighurs stabbing Han Chinese in front of a middle school. The bodies of half a dozen people lay scattered on the streets — just a fraction of the estimated 200 killed that night.

Abudushalamu and tens of thousands of other Uighurs now live in Turkey, cut off from friends and family back home. Analysts say the Urumqi riots set in motion the harsh security measures now in place across Xinjiang, where about 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims are estimated to be held in heavily guarded internment camps. Former detainees have told The Associated Press that within, they are subject to indoctrination and psychological torture.

Abudushalamu was just 9 years old when the riots took place. At the time, he knew he was witnessing something terrible, but he never imagined where the following years would lead. "I thought Han and Uighur people could be at peace," he said. "The camps? I never thought that would happen."

DECADES OF RESENTMENT

The riots started as a peaceful protest.

Weeks before, Han workers killed at least two Uighur migrants in a brawl at a toy factory in Shaoguan, an industrial city in China's coastal Guangdong province. The Han workers were angry about the alleged rapes of Han women by Uighur men, though a government investigation later concluded there was no evidence such an assault had taken place.

Images and videos of the brawl quickly circulated among Uighurs back in Xinjiang, including gory scenes of what appeared to be a Han Chinese man dragging a dead Uighur by his hair.

The videos enraged many Uighurs long upset with the Han-dominated government that took control of their region following the Communist revolution in 1949.

The litany of complaints was long: heavy restrictions on religious education, discrimination against college-educated Uighurs looking for jobs, subsidies and benefits for Han migrants to settle on lands once owned by Uighurs.

Among the most odious were threats from state officials of fines or even jail time if parents didn't send their young, unmarried daughters to work in factories in inner China. "Hashar," a program that forced farmers to pave roads, dig ditches, and clear land for crops for the government for no pay fueled further resentment.

The killed Uighur workers had been on a state employment program, sent more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from home. For many, their deaths crystallized everything that was wrong about Beijing's heavy-handed interventionist policies — and the belittling racism they felt they were subjected to by the Han Chinese.

The images spurred Urumqi students to organize a protest on July 5 demanding a government investigation. Demonstrators were stopped by police in the late afternoon, and tensions mounted until officers opened fire, Uighur witnesses say.

Two students present at the protests told AP that they were shot at. One recalled that as he turned and ran, bullets whizzed by his head and others around him dropped to the ground.

Furious Uighurs attacked Han civilians on the streets. An estimated 200 people were killed — stabbed, beaten or burned alive in the melees that followed. Uighurs smashed storefronts, overturned cars and buses and set some ablaze.

THE CRACKDOWN DESCENDS

Abudushalamu hid with his family for days as mobs of Uighurs and Han killed each other in cycles of bloody revenge.

When they stepped outside a few days later, the streets were eerily empty, Abudushalamu said. Then the police arrived and started shooting.

"Two maybe SWAT team (members) came after me and shot at me," said Abudushalamu, now 19. "The bullet went through right behind my right ear. I'm lucky I'm still alive."

In the days after the violence on July 5, 2009, Beijing had sent in thousands of troops to restore order. For weeks, they fired tear gas, raided businesses and swept through Uighur neighborhoods to arrest hundreds, many of whom were punished with decades in prison. The entire region of 20 million people was cut off from the internet for months in an attempt to curtail use of social media.

Normality had returned, but Xinjiang was never quite the same. Ethnic divisions hardened. Han Chinese avoided Uighur neighborhoods, and vice versa. Many Han Chinese steered clear of the whole of the region's south, home to most of Xinjiang's Uighurs, because they believed it was too dangerous.

Experts say that July 5 and the subsequent crackdown was a "turning point."

"From that moment on, China took a very hard-line position toward the control of religion and the control of minority ethnic groups in the region," said Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International's regional director for East and Southeast Asia. "It increased dramatically its security operation. That really is what led to the situation today."

UNITED "LIKE POMEGRANATE SEEDS"

In the following years, a series of violent terror attacks rocked Xinjiang and elsewhere. Dozens of civilians were hacked to death at a busy train station in China's south. A Uighur drove a car into crowds at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Forty-three died when men threw bombs from two sports utility vehicles plowing through a busy market street in Urumqi.

When newly appointed Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang in 2014, bombs tore through an Urumqi train station, killing three and injuring 79. In a Xinjiang work conference shortly afterward, Xi called on the state to integrate different ethnicities and remold religion to ward off extremism.

"The more separatists attempt to sabotage our ethnic unity, the more we should try to reinforce it," state media quoted Xi as saying. China's ethnicities, Xi said, could and should be united like "the seeds of a pomegranate."

Already tight limits on religion, culture, education and dress tightened even further, with restrictions on long beards and headscarves and the detentions of prominent Uighur academics and literary figures who were widely considered moderate advocates of traditional Uighur culture.

After a new party secretary was appointed to take control of Xinjiang in 2016, thousands began to vanish into a vast network of prison-like camps. Beijing calls them "vocational training centers" designed to ward off terrorism and root out extremist thoughts, but former detainees describe them as indoctrination centers which arbitrarily confine their inmates and subject them to torture and food deprivation.

That same year, Abudushalamu's father had taken him to Turkey to study at a boarding school and then returned to China. The following June, he stopped responding to messages, and Abudushalamu never heard from his father again.

Abudushalamu finally discovered his father's fate last year when an acquaintance in Turkey told him he saw his father in an internment camp. He says he has now heard of more than 50 family members that have been detained in Xinjiang. Researchers estimate the camps now hold 1 million or more Uighurs and other members of Xinjiang's ethnic minorities.

Abudushalamu says there is no reason for authorities to "train" his father, a successful businessman who speaks nine languages.

"It's delusional," he said. "Why does he still need to be 'educated?'"

Associated Press journalists Kiko Rosario in Bangkok and Yanan Wang in Beijing contributed to this report.

UN rights chief renews call for access to China's Xinjiang

Geneva (AFP)
March 6, 2019

The UN rights chief on Wednesday renewed her request to access China's Xinjiang region, where large numbers of the Uighur ethnic minority are reportedly being held in re-education camps.

In her annual address to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Michelle Bachelet said her office was seeking to "engage" with China on conditions in Xinjiang.

She also re-issued her requests for "full access to carry out an independent assessment of the continuing reports pointing to wide patterns of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions, particularly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region".

A UN panel of independent experts has said there are credible reports that nearly one million Uighurs and other Turkic language-speaking minorities are being held in Xinjiang.

Beijing at first denied the allegation, but later admitted putting people into "vocational education centers".

Xinjiang has long suffered from violent unrest, which China claims is orchestrated by an organized "terrorist" movement seeking the region's independence. It has implemented a massive, high-tech security crackdown in recent years.

But many Uighurs and Xinjiang experts say the violent episodes stem largely from spontaneous outbursts of anger at Chinese cultural and religious repression, and that Beijing plays up terrorism to justify tight control of the resource-rich region.

Bachelet said she was confident that "stability and security in this region can be facilitated by policies which demonstrate the authorities' respect of all people's rights."

Source: Space War.
Link: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/UN_rights_chief_renews_call_for_access_to_Chinas_Xinjiang_999.html.

AP Exclusive: Anger with China drives Uighurs to Syria fight

December 22, 2017

ISTANBUL (AP) — It was mid-afternoon when the Chinese police officers barged into Ali's house set against cotton fields outside the ancient Silk Road trading post of Kashgar. The Uighur farmer and his cowering parents watched them rummage through the house until they found two books in his bedroom — a Quran and a handbook on dealing with interrogations.

Ali knew he was in trouble. By nightfall the next day, Ali had been tied against a tree and beaten by interrogators trying to force him to say he took part in an ethnic riot that killed dozens in western China. They held burning cigarette tips to Ali's face, deprived him of sleep and offered him only salt water. When he asked for fresh water, they gave it to him — in buckets poured over his head.

That winter night in 2009, Ali recalled years later, would set him on a path that ended on northern Syria's smoldering plains, where he picked up a Kalashnikov rifle under the black flag of jihad and dreamed of launching attacks against the Chinese rulers of his homeland.

Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad's troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters as the six-year conflict nears its endgame.

But the end of Syria's war may be the beginning of China's worst fears. "We didn't care how the fighting went or who Assad was," said Ali, who would only give his first name out of a fear of reprisals against his family back home. "We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China."

Uighur militants have killed hundreds, if not thousands, in attacks inside China in a decades-long insurgency that initially targeted police and other symbols of Chinese authority but in recent years also included civilians. Extremists with knives killed 33 people at a train station in 2014. Abroad, they bombed the Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan in September last year; in 2014, they killed 25 people in an attack on a Thai shrine popular with Chinese tourists.

China is just like the West, its officials say: the country is a victim of terror, and Uighur men are pulled by global jihadi ideology rather than driven by grievances at home. Muslims in the Uighur homeland of Xinjiang, as one Chinese official declared in August, "are the happiest in the world."

But rare and extensive Associated Press interviews with nine Uighurs who had left China to train and fight in Syria showed that Uighurs don't neatly fit the profile of foreign fighters answering the call of jihad.

There was a police trainer who journeyed thousands of miles with his wife and children to Syria, a war zone. A farmer who balked at fundamentalist Islam even though he charged into battle alongside al-Qaida. A shopkeeper who prayed five times a day and then at night huddled with others in a ruined Syrian neighborhood to study Zionist history.

And there was Ali, a short, soft-spoken 30-year-old with a primary school education who knew little of the world beyond his 35-acre farm when he left China, a home that had become unlivable. Sitting cross-legged one recent evening in an empty apartment overlooking a kickboxing gym in Istanbul, he recalled the vow he made the night Chinese police beat him for participating in a riot he never joined.

"I'll get revenge," he said.

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Ali's parents eventually got him out of detention — but it cost them 10,000 yuan ($1,500) in bribes to local officials, no small amount for the family of farmers.

Despite his release, Ali was not free.

It was late 2009, and Xinjiang was in lockdown. Four months earlier, hundreds of Uighurs had rioted in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and attacked the Han, China's dominant ethnic group. An estimated 200 people died in the unrest that night, the bloodiest ethnic violence the country had seen in decades and an event that would change Ali's life and that of 10 million Uighurs in Xinjiang.

The government, caught off-guard by the unrest, rolled out an expansive security crackdown and surveillance programs in the region that have accelerated in the last year . Thousands of Uighurs, including moderate Uighur intellectuals, are believed to have been arrested or detained, some of them without trial.

Ali was constantly stopped and questioned wherever he went. He couldn't check into a hotel, buy a train ticket or get a passport.

"I had nowhere to go," he said. "Except out."

As the repression mounted, what began as a trickle of Uighurs fleeing China grew into a mass exodus. In 2013, more than 10,000 left across southern China's porous borders, according to Uighur exiles. Nearly all the Uighurs who spoke to the AP after returning to Turkey from Syria recounted being persecuted by Chinese authorities as a motive for taking up arms.

"The Chinese government had been accusing Uighurs of militancy for a long time when there hasn't been much of a threat," said Sean R. Roberts, an expert on Uighur issues at George Washington University. "That changed after the 2009 crackdown. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

ESCAPE AND ROAD TO SYRIA

Desperate to leave China, Ali paid more than 100,000 yuan ($15,000) to human smugglers and made his way overland through Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, where he received a Turkish travel document.

In Turkey, Ali drifted in Istanbul, working construction and electrical jobs for $300 a month. Within two months, his brother said he had met people who could take them to Syria, where they could learn weapons training and return to China to "liberate" their friends and family.

"We'll avenge our relatives being tortured in Chinese jail," he said.

Ali agreed, thinking they would go for a few weeks. They ended up spending two-and-a-half years in Syria.

The story of how Ali ended up in a distant war zone echoed the experiences of other Uighurs the AP spoke to in Turkey, who said they joined religious militant groups at first because of grievances against Beijing or support for the idea of a Uighur nation. Most knew little about political Islam that fueled jihadis in other countries, and none said they met with recruiters inside China.

But that changed as soon as they left China's borders. As Uighur refugees traveled along an underground railroad in Southeast Asia, they said, they were greeted by a network of Uighur militants who offered food and shelter — and their extremist ideology. And when the refugees touched down in Turkey, they were again wooed by recruiters who openly roamed the streets of Istanbul in gritty immigrant neighborhoods like Zeytinburnu and Sefakoy, looking for fresh fighters to shuttle to Syria.

Uighur activists and Syrian and Chinese officials estimate that at least 5,000 Uighurs have gone to Syria to fight — though many have since left. Among those, several hundred have joined the Islamic State, according to former fighters and Syrian officials.

As Uighurs streamed out of China, militant leaders have seized upon China's treatment of Muslims as a recruiting tactic. The Islamic State, for instance, regularly publishes Uighur-language editions of its radio bulletins and magazines, while the Turkistan Islamic Party has been releasing videos on a near-weekly basis, said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence monitoring group.

"How can those who are imprisoned due to their faith be freed? How can they be saved from this humiliation?" a masked Uighur fighter says in a Turkestan Islamic Party video released last year. "Words from our mouths won't help, but jihad for Allah will."

A FARAWAY WAR

From Istanbul, several of the former fighters described taking buses or being driven to the border region of Hatay, where they would cross on foot at night through lightly guarded hills. After a three-hour hike into Syria, cars waited in a forest clearing to whisk them to separate camps dotting the country's north. One fighter said he simply drove in, unobstructed, on the highway from the Turkish city of Gaziantep.

When the Uighurs arrived in Jisr al-Shughour, a strategic town on the edge of Assad's stronghold of Latakia region, men with families, like Ali, moved into a ruined neighborhood of single-story brick homes where 150 families stayed. Single men lived together in larger apartment buildings.

The men undertook three-month training sessions in the use of Soviet AKM rifles, shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launchers, physical conditioning and mapping.

At the beginning of the course, the trainers showed off their prized cache of captured American M-16s and German G3 rifles, but each fighter received a battered AKM and cheap Chinese ammunition. Boys as young as 12 and 13 — mostly orphans — were taken to a separate camp for religious classes and physical training.

Two fighters said they received boxes of food from IHH, a Turkish Islamic charity group, that included rice, flour, meat and even fish imported from Thailand. One of the fighters said the food supplies were labeled with the foreign fighting group they were being shipped to — for example, "Turkistanis (Uighurs) or Uzbeks."

IHH spokesman Mustafa Ozbek said the group distributes aid in refugee camps near the Syrian border to civilians, but not armed groups.

"All of our aid is conducted officially, documented and reported," Ozbek said.

The Uighurs in Syria have a reputation for administering their territory with a light touch, said Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a British researcher at the Middle East Forum who has extensively interviewed jihadis in Syria, including Uighur fighters. They don't enforce an Islamic court system or replace local councils — unlike their close allies, the al-Qaida-linked Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, Arabic for Levant Liberation Committee.

Instead, an older Uighur would convene young fighters in the evenings to discuss history and politics. They looked to an improbable model for building an independent homeland: Israel and the Zionist movement.

"We studied how the Jews built their country," Ali said. "Some of them fought, some of them provided money. We don't have a strong background of that."

Few Uighurs spoke Arabic and most didn't mingle with locals, but at one point some residents joked that Uighurs should rename the city Shughuristan, a play on "East Turkistan," the Uighur exiles' preferred name for their homeland. The Uighurs were unconvinced.

"This is not our homeland," Ali and his comrades told the Arabs. "We want our homeland, we don't need yours."

FEARLESS 'PAWNS'

Like Ali, Rozi Mehmet wanted to do something to help his people fight Chinese oppression. His grandfather, a wealthy Uighur farmer, had been executed in the tumult of China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

Three years ago, Mehmet left the ancient oasis town of Hotan and hiked into Syria to join a class of 52 Turkistan Islamic Party trainees.

Within six months, he would be on the front lines with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher strapped to his skinny back, sprinting toward government positions near Jisr al-Shughour.

Jihadi clerics have exhorted Uighurs to take up holy war and reap the rewards of martyrdom. But if he would take a bullet, Mehmet thought as he rushed into battle, he wasn't dying for Islam — or the virgins that the preachers promised. His homeland was the only thing on his mind.

"I didn't feel fear," he told the AP. "If I felt fear, how could I be able to build my country?"

As fighting escalated in 2015 and 2016, hundreds of Uighurs died in its campaigns alongside al-Qaida's Nusra Front, according to two former fighters who fought in northern Syria.

Radical groups have aggressively recruited Uighurs. Al-Qaida's leader promised in a video that Islamic militants would repay the Uighurs by striking at "atheist Chinese occupiers" after the Syrian war. The Islamic State has echoed similar pledges and the group in March released a Uighur-language propaganda video vowing to one day shed Chinese blood if Uighurs would join the Syrian struggle.

As the chaotic opposition splintered and reorganized, groups vied for the Uighurs' support and lauded them for their suicide attacks that often kept the Syrian army off-balance, Mehmet boasted.

An older fighter, also from Hotan, chided the young man, saying he was more cynical about why the Arab jihadis lavished them with praise.

"They praise us, which means they want us to follow them and fight for them," said Rozi Tohti, 40, who fought near the city of Idlib. They "are trying to lure us to become their pawns."

DISSENT IN SYRIA

THREAT TO CHINA

But several Uighur fighters insisted that, in their minds, there was a distinct line between themselves and the Islamic militants they fought beside. Some Uighurs complained about being stuck in Syria instead of attacking China, as they had been promised.

"We fight for them and help them control the country, and then Uighurs are left with nothing," Mehmet said.

After joining the TIP in mid-2015, Uighur fighter Abdulrehim visited a graveyard for fallen militants and wondered why there were no Uighur national banners. At one point, he openly challenged a TIP senior leader, Ibrahim Mansour, about what they were doing in Syria, he recalled.

"We haven't fired a bullet against our enemy, China," he told a group of gathered Uighur fighters. "We always fight alongside international terrorists. What's going on here?"

Many Uighur militants have grown tired of the war and are looking to leave particularly as Assad's forces gain the upper hand, says Seyit Tumturk, a Uighur activist in Turkey who often speaks to fighters in Syria.

He said it was impossible for Uighurs militants to liberate Xinjiang, currently blanketed with paramilitary forces and riot police. But he said Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitious project to develop railway lines, ports, and other infrastructure linking various regions to China makes Beijing vulnerable to militant attacks abroad.

The Islamic State took credit in June for kidnapping and killing two Chinese teachers in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, which is a cornerstone of Beijing's so-called Belt and Road infrastructure project. In Kyrgyzstan, state security say a suicide bombing of the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was ordered by Uighur terrorist groups active in Syria and financed by al-Qaida's Nusra Front.

Chinese officials and Western analysts alike say that the Uighurs' experience in the Syrian jihadi melting pot will likely exacerbate violence against "soft" targets outside China. China's foreign ministry called the Turkistan Islamic Party a security threat for the Middle East.

"We hope our brothers, including Syria and Turkey, will work with us, strengthen cooperation and cut off the terrorists' cross-border movements and safeguard regional stability," the ministry said in a faxed statement in response to questions from the AP.

The ministry did not address questions about the causes of radicalization but said that China's government has invested heavily in Xinjiang's economic development, protected its minorities' rights and treated them just as every other ethnic group.

"Of course, when there are those who try to create tension in Xinjiang, the Chinese government's commitment to striking against violent terror and ethnic splittism is unquestioned," it said.

RETURN TO TURKEY AND AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

By June of this year, Ali had tired of Syria and wanted to get out. For him, the war consisted of spending months at a time manning checkpoints and patrolling borders.

But like many other Uighurs who sought to return to Turkey, he struggled to find a way back. Ali walked for a week to get around a wall built by the Turkish government on the border. He's now back in Istanbul and selling milk.

Although some of the Uighur returnees said they would attack China if the opportunity arose, others balked at the idea.

Uighur community workers are concerned that many of those cast back into Turkish society would struggle to integrate and be easily pulled back into radical groups. Many of the men make $200 to $300 a month, barely enough to cover rent in Istanbul, and spoke poor Turkish. Many faced daily discrimination.

Activists also worry about TIP recruitment continuing unchecked in Turkey, where it appears to have a degree of official support.

This year, Turkish authorities detained TIP members including a former top commander, ostensibly for his own safety, said a diplomat in Beijing and a Uighur activist who was allowed by Turkish officials to speak with him. But Turkey refused to allow Chinese intelligence to interrogate the former commander, deeply frustrating Beijing, the diplomat said.

Uighur leaders say Turkish police also have released several well-known Uighur jihadi recruiters even after the community offered tips that led to their arrest.

"There are suspicions that these recruiters have links with some individuals or agencies within the government," said Omer Kanat, director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington. "They're turning a blind eye."

Rozi Tohti, the middle-aged fighter from Hotan, sat in a meadow facing the ruined walls of old Constantinople and ruminated on the choices facing his compatriots in Turkey: give their lives to a radical Islamic movement that they did not believe in or struggle to settle into a Turkish society where they did not fit in.

One thing was clear. Returning to their homeland was out of the question.

"Who wants to live in a war zone?" Tohti said. "We once had paradise in our country. But it was being erased by the Chinese, so instead we looked for paradise in Syria."

Activists slam Thailand's repatriation of Uighurs to China

July 09, 2015

BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand sent back to China more than 100 ethnic Uighur refugees on Thursday, drawing harsh criticism from the U.N. refugee agency and human rights groups over concerns that they face persecution by the Chinese government.

Protesters in Turkey, which accepted an earlier batch of Uighur refugees from Thailand, ransacked the Thai Consulate in Istanbul overnight. Police in the capital, Ankara, used pepper spray to push back a group of Uighur protesters who tried to break through a barricade outside the Chinese Embassy.

Turkey's Foreign Ministry condemned Thailand, saying the deportation violated international humanitarian laws and came despite "numerous initiatives" by Turkey to prevent their repatriation. It said Turkey will continue to monitor their fate.

Thai deputy government spokesman Maj. Gen. Verachon Sukhonthapatipak said Thailand had assurances from Chinese authorities about the safety of 109 Uighurs. However, in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China would take action against those suspected of breaking the law.

Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said that as a third country, the matter was not Thailand's problem, and that the place they were sent to — he did not name China — would take care of it according to its justice system.

"I'm asking if we don't do it this way, then how would we do it?" he said. "Or do you want us to keep them for ages until they have children for three generations?" The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said it was "shocked" and considered Thailand's action "a flagrant violation of international law."

The Uighur group had been in Thailand for over a year, along with others who had fled China and claimed to be Turkish, Verachon said. Thai authorities sought to verify their nationalities before relocating them, he said.

"We found that about 170 of them were Turkish, so they were recently sent to Turkey," he said. "And about 100 were Chinese, so they were sent to China as of this morning, under the agreement that their safety is guaranteed according to humanitarian principles." He denied reports from Uighur activists that the refugees resisted deportation and some had been hurt.

Two witnesses who saw the Uighurs being led into trucks to be driven to Bangkok's military airport said the men were handcuffed and some of women were crying and shouted, "Help us! Don't allow them to send us back to China."

Bilal Degirmenci and a colleague from the Turkish humanitarian group Cansuyu said they were forced by police to delete photos and video they had taken of the Uighurs, and were threatened with punishment if any were published or posted on the Internet.

The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority in China's far western Xinjiang region. The group has complained of cultural and religious suppression as well as economic marginalization under Chinese rule.

The U.N. agency said it repeatedly brought up the matter of the Uighur refugees with the Thai government, and "in response, the agency was given assurances that the matter would be handled in accordance with international legal standards, and that the group would continue to receive protection."

Such deportations violate the right to protection against return to a country where a person has reason to fear persecution, said Volker Türk, UNHCR's assistant high commissioner for protection, said in a statement.

China's position is that the Uighurs left the country illegally. Beijing has accused Uighur separatists of terrorism in Xinjiang, where ethnic violence has left hundreds of people dead over the past two years.

"China's relevant departments will bring those who are suspected of committing serious crimes to justice according to law," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua told reporters. "As for those who are not suspected of committing crimes or who commit lesser offences, we will find proper ways to deal with them."

In Turkey, which has cultural ties to the Uighurs and agreed to take in the other 170 refugees despite China's objections, mostly Uighur protesters vandalized the Thai Consulate in Istanbul. The office was closed on Thursday.

Police allowed about 100 protesters to pray outside the consulate before taking nine of them away for questioning. The Thai Embassy issued a statement urging its nationals in Turkey to be on alert. The World Uyghur Congress, a German-based advocacy group, said those repatriated could face criminal charges and harsh punishment, possibly execution, under China's opaque legal system — the reasons they fled China in the first place.

"The extradition is a dirty political deal between the Thai and Chinese authorities," spokesman Dilxat Raxit said in a statement.

Associated Press writers Didi Tang in Beijing and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

Chinese police take away outspoken Uighur activist

January 17, 2014

BEIJING (AP) — Police have taken away an outspoken scholar of China's Turkic Uighur ethnic minority and raided his home, seizing computers, cellphones and even his students' thesis manuscripts, his wife said Thursday.

About 30 police officers raided economics professor Ilham Tohti's home in Beijing in a six-hour operation Wednesday afternoon after taking away the academic, his wife Guzaili Nu'er said in a phone interview.

It was the most serious of recent actions by Chinese authorities in apparent retaliation against the scholar, who is arguably the most famous mainland-based critic of the ruling Communist Party's restrictive policies in Xinjiang in western China.

China has tightened control over the restive region, which has been rocked by a series of riots and attacks on police and other symbols of Chinese power over the past year. State media reported earlier this month that President Xi Jinping has ordered authorities to refocus their efforts on "maintaining social stability" in Xinjiang.

Guzaili Nu'er said that Ilham Tohti and his two sons were at home while she was at work when police arrived. She rushed home but her husband had already been taken away. Beijing police did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular briefing that Ilham Tohti "is suspected of violating the law and committing a crime" and that police have placed him under criminal detention.

Calls to the scholar's mobile phone failed to connect. The overseas-based website he runs, Uighurbiz.net, was also down. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement that the United States was deeply concerned about the reports that Ilham Tohti had been taken away, and called on the Chinese authorities to account for his whereabouts.

The statement said the detention "appears to be part of a disturbing pattern of arrests and detentions of public interest lawyers, Internet activists, journalists, religious leaders and others who peacefully challenge official Chinese policies and actions."

Ilham Tohti has been barred from traveling and placed under house arrest numerous times in the wake of deadly ethnic rioting in the capital of the Uighur ethnic homeland of Xinjiang in 2009 that sparked a nationwide crackdown on Uighur activists.

He has not joined calls for Xinjiang's independence but his outspokenness on problems with China's ethnic policies has made him a target of security forces. He has criticized the authoritarian government's heavy-handed handling of recent unrest, saying China's stifling security presence, widespread discrimination and restrictions on religious and social practices have fanned ethnic discord in Xinjiang.

"The Uighur people have become outsiders in the development of their own homeland and survival," Ilham Tohti wrote in a post on his mobile social media account Wednesday morning. "It is here that the people's anger begins to grow. Uighur people need an avenue to express their aspirations and protect their rights."

The scholar's wife said she feared the authorities meant to take stronger measures against him this time. Although he has been taken away for questioning before, she said, he usually returns late at night.

"This time it's different. They sent so many security officers, including police from Xinjiang, Beijing and the nearby police station. This time it is more serious," she said. Guzaili Nu'er said police seized four computers, several mobile phones and Ilham Tohti's students' thesis papers, and refused to answer her questions about where he had been taken to, or why. On Thursday afternoon, two men in plainclothes were stationed in the hallway outside the apartment and they tried to block reporters from entering the apartment.

Atilamu, 22, who was one of two undergraduate students of Ilham Tohti's at the apartment Thursday, said that police took them away for several hours of questioning Wednesday before releasing them near midnight, and that their cellphones, computers and class notes also were seized. The students said they knew of at least about a half-dozen other Uighur students who were similarly questioned.

Associated Press reporter Isolda Morillo contributed to this report.

Up to 12 Uyghurs Shot Dead in Raid on Xinjiang 'Munitions Center'

2013-09-17

Authorities in China's restive northwestern region of Xinjiang have shot dead up to a dozen Uyghurs and wounded 20 others in a raid on what they said was a "terrorist" facility, according to local officials and residents.

Police confirmed the shooting in Poskam county (in Chinese, Zepu) near the Silk Road city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, home to some 9 million ethnic minority Muslim Uyghurs who say they have long suffered discrimination and religious controls under Beijing’s policies.

While police refused to give details of the incident, which had been kept under wraps for about three weeks, local officials and residents said it occurred in Jigdejay village around Kuybagh township on Aug. 23 during a raid on an alleged training camp and munitions center operated by a group of about 30 Uyghurs.

The raid came just three days after authorities in Kashgar's Kargilik (in Chinese, Yecheng) county gunned down 22 Uyghurs during another "anti-terrorism" operation on Aug. 20 while they were praying in a house at the edge of a desert area.

Nurmemet Tunyaz, the Jigdejay village head and local ruling Chinese Communist Party official in charge of "stability," said he was informed by local officials that six Uyghurs were killed and 20 others wounded in the Aug. 23 raid, but he and a senior local Islamic leader indicated that the death toll may be double the known figure.

A resident of Kuybagh township who witnessed the raid said that 12 people had died in the operation conducted by up to 80 security personnel.

"I do not know the details, but I have heard that they were making explosives and training in an excavated area," Nurmemet Tunyaz told RFA's Uyghur Service.

"We did not hear that any police were killed in this shooting. The injured suspects were transported to the county hospital but those killed were buried on the spot."

Security patrols

Some of the explosives in the camp were detonated during the raid, he said, which had sparked round-the-clock security patrols in the area.

Yasin Ahun-Karim, the leader of the Kuybagh central mosque, said he heard there were 30 Uyghurs in the group when the raid took place, 17 of them from Jigdejay village, suggesting that several others from neighboring villages may also have been gunned down.

"I heard that terrorists or separatists dug up a place near the edge of a desert in Jigdejay," Imam Yasin Ahun-Karim said. "They were hiding inside there and practicing how to make some sort of explosives. Their activities were discovered by a police helicopter, and police acted immediately to clean up the place," he told RFA.

He said he was given the information by Seypidin Ebey, the director of the village's United Front Work Department, an agency under the command of the Central Committee of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Officers in at least four village police stations in Kuybagh township, including one who was on duty on the day of the raid, confirmed the shooting with RFA but refused to provide details.  

Eyewitness

A Kuybagh resident who claimed he witnessed the raid but spoke on condition of anonymity said that 12 people had died in the incident.

"That's right, they killed 12 people," the Kuybagh resident said when asked about the police operation.

"[They were] training. The police discovered them. It was daytime. We were just in front, standing there. We saw them firing their weapons," he said.

He said the camp was run by local Uyghurs and raided by 70-80 armed police.

"They had made a huge weapon," he said. "The armed police went and raided them, and that was that.... There were more than 20 of them, and 12 of them were killed. Those who died were buried [right there]."

He said the camp had been discovered after the Uyghurs had made rocket launchers that exploded on testing, killing one of them.

"One of them blew their own head off, or they wouldn't have been discovered," he said.

"[We live] on the edge [of the county town]. The Gobi desert is right next door to us."

An official who answered the phone at the county government offices declined to comment on the incident.

Information blackouts

A Han Chinese resident of the regional capital Urumqi surnamed Zhang said local authorities frequently impose information blackouts on violent incidents in Xinjiang.

"They want to whitewash things so they can say Xinjiang is peaceful and harmonious," Zhang said.

"Also, if they reported all of these incidents of resistance, this could encourage other Uyghurs and maybe we would see even more of them."

Chinese authorities usually blame outbreaks of violence in Xinjiang on "terrorists" among the region's ethnic minority Muslim Uyghurs.

But rights groups and experts say Beijing exaggerates the terrorism threat to take the heat off domestic policies that cause unrest or to justify the authorities' use of force against Uyghurs.

Last week, the official Xinhua news agency reported that three ethnic Uyghurs had been sentenced to death for acts of "terrorism" in June in Xinjiang's Lukchun township of Pichan (in Chinese, Shanshan) county.

The punishments came about a month after Beijing sentenced two Uyghurs to death for their alleged links to another bloody incident in April in Kashgar prefecture's Siriqbuya township in Maralbeshi (Bachu) county.

Uyghur activists have blamed the Chinese government's "sustained repression and provocation" of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang for the two violent incidents.

Source: Radio Free Asia.
Link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/raid-09172013222650.html.

China sentences 3 to death for 'violent terrorism' in Xinjiang

BEIJING | Thu Sep 12, 2013

(Reuters) - A court in China's restive far western region of Xinjiang sentenced three ethnic Uighurs to death on Thursday for acts of "violent terrorism", including murder and being part of a terrorist organization, state media reported.

One other defendant was sentenced to 25 years in jail for his part in a June outbreak of violence, the official Xinhua news agency said.

All four were ethnic Uighurs, judging by their names.

China labeled the June incident, in which 35 people died, a "terrorist attack" by a gang engaged in "religious extremist activities".

It was the deadliest outbreak of violence in the troubled region since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots pitting Uighurs against ethnic Chinese in the region's capital Urumqi.

Violent discontent among the region's indigenous Muslim Uighurs had for some time been confined to southern districts.

But the June altercations in Shanshan county, in which state media reported gangs attacked a police station and a government building and set fire to police cars, marked a return of unrest to Xinjiang's north.

Xinhua said the accused had been involved in illegal religious activities and had been spreading religious extremism, which led to them decide to set up a terror cell and plan attacks.

"The methods used were merciless in the extreme and the incident had serious consequences so ought to be severely punished in accordance with the law, hence the sentences," the report cited the court judgment as saying.

Many of the Turkic-speaking Uighur people chafe at what they call Chinese government restrictions on their culture, language and religion. China says it grants Uighurs wide-ranging freedoms and accuses extremists of separatism.

Many rights groups say China has long overplayed the threat posed to justify its tough controls in energy-rich Xinjiang, which lies strategically on the borders of Central Asia, India and Pakistan.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten and Ben Blanchard; editing by Andrew Roche)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/09/12/uk-china-uighur-idUKBRE98B0RU20130912.

Eid Eve Clashes Stoked by Gunshots Fired at Uyghur Girl

2013-08-12

Clashes between Chinese security forces and Muslim Uyghurs on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival last week could have been contained if the armed troops did not open fire at random, killing three and wounding about a dozen other civilians, including an innocent four-year-old girl, according to officials and residents.

Ten policemen were also injured in the clashes Wednesday in the restive Xinjiang region's Aksu prefecture triggered by prayer restrictions imposed ahead of the Eid marking the end of Islam's holiest month of Ramadan.

The girl, identified as Subhinur Memet, who was injured in the leg, was among 13 people admitted to the Aksu No. 1 People's Hospital following the clashes in the No. 16 village of Aykol town, which occurred after the authorities prevented residents from one hamlet in the village from going to another to perform the Eid eve prayers.

"When the four year old girl was injured, people became very angry," Ablet Ghojamniyaz, secretary of the village's ruling Chinese Communist Party branch, told RFA's Uyghur Service. "It was difficult to disperse the crowd and they refused to back down."

As the crowd swelled to about 600 people and with some in the mob hurling stones and bricks at the security forces, the People's Armed Police arrived and "started to shoot haphazardly," he said. "But I do not know what happened after that, because I was also running away."

Ablet Ghojamniyaz, who witnessed the incident, said tensions first erupted when government officials prevented residents from hamlet No. 3 in the No. 16 village from praying at the mosque in hamlet No. 2.

The residents forced their way through to the mosque, prompting Party cadres to call in the police who detained and took away two Uyghurs and returned to take several more into custody, he said.

"When the police herded four Uyghurs into a police car, the people surrounded the vehicle and demanded the reasons for taking them away on the eve of the Eid festival, triggering the clashes."

"The clashes could have been avoided if the cadres allowed them to pray," he said.

Tensions inflamed

Ablet Ghojamniyaz said that Aykol police deputy chief Gheni Osman handled the situation deftly and almost persuaded the crowd to disperse after assuring them that he would release the two who were detained earlier.

But Aykol police station chief Wu Guiliang, a Han Chinese, intervened and used harsh words, inflaming tensions, he said.

"When the situation was getting under control, Wu Guiliang arrived, shouting and hitting the people with the rifle butt. Then people started throwing stones and he fired shots in the air and to the ground," Ablet Ghojamniyaz said. "The people did not back down and chased him [Wu] until he bolted from the scene."

Then, the situation spiraled out of control as four-year-old Subhinur was shot in the melee by the local police station personnel and as three other Uyghurs, including a woman, succumbed to bullet wounds on the spot after being hit by People's Armed Police and SWAT teams.

Subhinur's aunt, identified only as Ayimqiz, said her niece is recovering from her leg injuries.

"I went to see her at the hospital and she is bit better now," said Ayimqiz, the older sister of Subhinur's father, and chief of the No.16 village's women's union.

Subhinur's father has been detained, along with scores of others following the clashes.

In fact, No. 2 hamlet chief Ehet Mahmut said, "All the youths in my area have been detained" for questioning, without giving any specific number.

Only one of the three killed has been identified—Gopur Dawut, 27.

One of four injured woman, identified as Patem Turdi, 40, was shot while looking for her 15-year-old son, according to Ablet Ghojamniyaz.

Recent violence

Uyghurs in Xinjiang say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness, blaming their hardships partly on a massive influx of Han Chinese into the region.

Xinjiang has seen a string of violent incidents since June 26, leaving at least 64 dead in total, as the region marked the anniversary last month of July 5, 2009 clashes in the regional capital Urumqi between the minority Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese.

The rioting left some 200 people dead and 1,700 injured, according to official media reports.

Source: Radio Free Asia.
Link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/shooting-08122013193025.html.

Unrest leaves 27 dead in China's troubled Xinjiang: Xinhua

BEIJING | Wed Jun 26, 2013

(Reuters) - Gangs armed with knives attacked a police station and a local government building on Wednesday in China's restive far western Xinjiang region, leaving 27 dead in clashes with police, the government news agency Xinhua said.

The unrest in the region, home to a large Muslim Uighur minority, was the deadliest since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots pitting Uighurs against ethnic Chinese in the region's capital Urumqi.

Xinhua said Wednesday's unrest erupted at about 6 a.m. in the remote township of Lukqun, about 200 km (120 miles) southeast of Urumqi.

Gangs attacked Lukqun's police stations, the local government building and a construction site, stabbing people and setting fire to police vehicles, Xinhua quoted regional Communist Party officials as saying.

Nine policemen and security guards and eight civilians were killed before police shot dead 10 of the attackers, Xinhua quoted the officials as saying.

The reasons for the attacks were not immediately clear.

Many Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language, chafe at what they call Chinese government restrictions on their culture, language and religion.

China says it grants Uighurs wide-ranging freedoms and accuses extremists of separatism.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones; Editing by Ron Popeski)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/26/us-china-xinjiang-unrest-idUSBRE95P08C20130626.

China jails 19 Uighurs for religious extremism

BEIJING | Wed Jun 19, 2013

(Reuters) - Courts in China's far western region of Xinjiang have sentenced 19 ethnic Uighurs to up to six years in jail for promoting racial hatred and religious extremism online, in the latest crackdown on what China sees as violent separatists.

All but one of those jailed were from the heavily Uighur southern part of Xinjiang, including eight from the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, the official Legal Daily reported on its website.

Many Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who call energy-rich Xinjiang home, chafe at Chinese government restrictions on their culture, language and religion. China says it grants them wide-ranging freedoms.

In one of the cases, the suspect went on illegal websites to download material which "whipped up religious fervor and preached 'holy war'" and "whipped up ethnic enmity", the Legal Daily said in its report late on Wednesday.

"This created a despicable effect on society," the newspaper said, citing the court ruling.

Another suspect was jailed for spreading materials from overseas via the Internet which "advocate religious extremism and terrorism", the newspaper added.

While the report did not specify the ethnicity of those jailed, their names and the location of the courts where they were sentenced indicated they were all Uighurs.

China accuses armed Uighur groups of having links to Central Asian and Pakistani Islamist militants, and of carrying out attacks to establish an independent state called East Turkistan.

Many rights groups say China overplays the threat posed to justify its tough controls in Xinjiang.

The region, which lies strategically on the borders of Central Asia, India and Pakistan, sees frequent outbreaks of ethnic violence.

In April, 21 people were killed in clashes near Kashgar, the deadliest unrest since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/20/us-china-xinjiang-idUSBRE95J03K20130620.

Kazakhstan deports Uighur to China, rights groups cry foul

07 June 2011, Tuesday

Kazakhstan has extradited an ethnic Uighur schoolteacher who had been granted UN refugee status to face charges of terrorism in China, a diplomat said on Tuesday, and rights groups said he could face torture.

Ershidin Israil, who holds a Chinese passport, was arrested in Kazakhstan’s financial capital Almaty on June 24 last year on terrorism charges, following a request from Interpol, said Ilyas Omarov, press secretary for the Kazakh Foreign Ministry. The extradition comes as rights groups called on Kazakhstan to refrain from sending back 32 detainees who fled from Uzbekistan to seek asylum from religious persecution, saying they were at risk of torture.

“Israil has been extradited to the People’s Republic of China,” Omarov said, adding that the handover was made on May 30. “The Chinese side gave written guarantees that Israil would not be executed.”

The Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighur people are native to China’s far western region of Xinjiang, strategically located on the borders of Central Asia. Many of Xinjiang’s 8 million Uighurs resent the growing presence and economic grip of the majority Han Chinese.

Israil had officially applied for refugee status in Kazakhstan on June 8, 2010. At the time, he held a refugee mandate issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “Taking into account Israil’s confessions on his role in a terrorist act in China’s Xinjiang and ... his possible complicity in preparing a terrorist act in July 1997, the [migration] commission turned down [on Sept. 9, 2010] his request to obtain refugee status in Kazakhstan,” Omarov said.

Omarov said that, after studying Israil’s case, the UNHCR annulled on May 3 its refugee mandate issued to Israil.

The exiled World Uighur Congress said Israil had fled Xinjiang in 2009 after providing information to Radio Free Asia about the death of another Uighur man. That year, Uighurs rioted against Han Chinese residents in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi, killing at least 197 people, mostly Han.

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. “Israil’s deportation appears to be based on accusations by the Chinese authorities of his involvement in ‘terrorism,’” Human Rights in China said in a statement. “Such accusations, however, were levied against Israil after he allegedly released details of the Sept 18, 2009 ... death of ethnic Uighur Shohret Tursun, who had been detained by Chinese authorities following the Urumqi riots,” it added.

Source: Today's Zaman.
Link: http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&newsId=246570&link=246570.

Uyghur Repatriation Imminent

2011-05-27

A Uyghur is denied political asylum in Kazakhstan and faces extradition to China.

An ethnic Uyghur, once acknowledged by the U.N. as a refugee, is set to be deported to China after a Kazakh court refused to grant him political asylum, according to his brother.

Ershidin Israil, 38, fled to Kazakhstan in the aftermath of deadly riots in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and has been held by Kazakh authorities since June last year amid Chinese accusations he was involved in "terrorism."

Experts say the court ruling on Wednesday called into question Kazakhstan's adherence to international obligations in the face of increased pressure from neighboring China where Israil could be severely punished on his return.

Seeking political asylum in Kazakhstan may have been Israil’s last bid to stay out of China, whose anti-terrorism policy, according to rights groups, deliberately targets activists among ethnic minority communities such as Uyghurs and Tibetans.

If repatriated to his home country, he is likely to face harsh punishment in a specific case of informing RFA about the death in custody of a fellow Uyghur held by authorities for alleged involvement in July 2009 riots in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi.

His brother Enver Israil, who arrived in Kazakhstan three months ago, said he heard from his brother's lawyer that he was accused of being a terrorist by the Chinese police and that they had demanded his return.

"[The Chinese police] tortured a jailed protester to death and nobody is calling the Chinese terrorists, but my brother is accused of terrorism just because he told the media about the killing," he said in a phone interview Thursday from Almaty, the country’s largest city.

"Where is the justice?" he asked.

Seeking refuge

On Sept. 24, 2009, Israil fled on foot to Almaty from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), crossing the border without a passport after four nights of walking.

Chinese authorities in Ghulja, in Qorghas (in Chinese, Huocheng) county, Ili prefecture were searching for Israil for allegedly releasing details of the Sept. 18 beating death of Shohret Tursun, according to Israil’s sister-in-law.

Tursun was detained among a group of 40 Uyghurs in July 2009 around the time of ethnic riots in Urumqi that left some 200 dead.

His badly bruised and disfigured body was released to his relatives nearly two months later, prompting a standoff between authorities who wanted him buried immediately and family members who refused and demanded an inquiry into whether he had been beaten to death.

The family was forced to hold a burial for Tursun the following day.

In a previous RFA interview with Israil, he said he fled his hometown fearing harsh punishment from Chinese authorities as a two-time offender. Israil had previously served a six-year jail sentence in 1999 for "separatism."

After meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Almaty, Israil was granted refugee status in March 2010 and accepted for resettlement in Sweden that April.

But while making final preparations to leave Kazakhstan, a UNHCR official informed Israil that Kazakh authorities had refused to supply him with the necessary documents to leave the country.

On April 3, Israil was moved into an apartment guarded around the clock by Kazakh police officers while the UNHCR investigated the delay in his resettlement.

In June 2010, he was detained by local authorities and has since attended a total of five hearings on his application for refugee status, all of which rejected his bid and ruled that he must be returned to China.

‘A terrible track record’

Exiled Uyghur dissident Rebiya Kadeer, president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said the Kazakh government is disregarding international law by moving to repatriate Israil.

She called the Chinese charges against him “an obvious abuse of the Geneva Convention rules,” adding that he had committed no crime aside from revealing how Uyghurs have been treated in the aftermath of the 2009 riots.

“I urge the U.N. and EU to take
 action," she said. “I would ask the 
Kazakh government to not forget our blood relations and to take 
into consideration the one million Uyghurs who are living in Kazakhstan."

Memet Tohti, the WUC representative in Geneva, said China is desperate to take Israil back to prevent him from talking about the abuses he had witnessed and in order to show other Uyghurs that they cannot defy the government and escape punishment.

"Ershidin was in jail for six years and he is aware of a number of tragic stories that have taken place in China's black jails," he said, referring to the country's growing number of unofficial detention centers which serve as holding camps for petitioners seeking redress against official wrongdoing.

"Secondly, Chinese authorities want to discourage Uyghurs in East Turkestan from taking part in the Uyghur freedom movement by showing them that they can get to them no matter in what part of the world they seek refuge."

Uyghur groups use the term “East Turkestan” to refer to a short-lived Uyghur government that existed before the communist takeover of Xinjiang or to assert their cultural distinctiveness from China proper.

Nury Turkel, a Uyghur American attorney based in Washington, said Kazakhstan’s refusal to grant Israil political asylum is the latest example of the country bowing to Chinese pressure.

“Kazakhstan has a terrible track record of repatriating or forcibly removing Uyghurs to China who were suspected of being involved in any political activities, and history certainly will not be kind to Kazakhstan,” he said.

“Kazakhstan—being under the Soviet Union for several years and knowing how it feels to be oppressed—I think it’s time for Kazakhstan to enjoy their sovereignty and make a decision based on their international obligations, not on the pressure by neighboring countries.”

An uncertain future

Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, a New York- and Hong Kong-based group, said that as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional group for security and economic cooperation in Eurasia, Kazakhstan has a number of obligations to fellow SCO states, particularly China.

“These include forcible returns to China of any individual or group suspected of terrorism, separatism, or extremism, including individuals who may have been granted refugee status by UNHCR,” Hom said.

“China has designated Central Asia as a source of what it terms the 'East Turkestan' threat and has exerted intensified pressure on its neighbors, and most recently on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.”

Hom noted that Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—both SCO member states—obstructed travel of Uyghur activists to attend a recent conference in the U.S., apparently to preserve their relationship with China.

Hom said that Israil could “disappear” if he is deported to China, like many others forcibly returned to the country.

“If he is subjected to any Chinese legal process, it will be within a system that is politicized, corrupt, nonaccountable, and marked by the complete absence of due process. The international community needs to act immediately to protect him and demand respect for his refugee status.”

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China's ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Xinjiang is a vast, strategically important desert territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The region has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.

Source: Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/repatriation-05262011192244.html.

China confirms extradited Uighur facing terror charges

Tue Jun 14, 2011

(Reuters) - China on Tuesday confirmed that an ethnic Uighur schoolteacher faces terror charges after being extradited from Kazakhstan where he had won refugee status.

Human rights advocates criticized Kazakhstan's decision to deport Ershidin Israil, saying he could suffer harsh treatment and even torture in China, which says its far west Xinjiang region faces threats from militants seeking independence for the heavily Muslim Uighur minority.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei confirmed that Israil was now in Chinese custody.

"The person in question has been wanted by Chinese police as major terror suspect, and was also a target of a red-alert wanted notice from Interpol," Hong told a news conference.

"I understanding that this person has been extradited back to China, and now the case is being tried according to the law."

Hong did not say what specific accusations Israil faces.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has been visiting Kazakhstan and Beijing has sealed a currency swap deal worth $1 billion with its Central Asian neighbor and agreed to a $1.5 billion loan to a copper miner, highlighting China's growing economic pull in the region.

Israil, who holds a Chinese passport, was arrested in Kazakhstan's financial capital Almaty on June 24 last year on terrorism charges, following a request from Interpol, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said last week.

The exiled World Uighur Congress said Israil fled Xinjiang in 2009 after providing information to Radio Free Asia about the death of another Uighur man.

The Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighur people are native to Xinjiang, strategically located on the borders of Central Asia. Many of Xinjiang's 8 million Uighurs resent the growing presence and economic grip of the majority Han Chinese.

In 2009, Uighurs rioted against Han Chinese residents in Xinjiang's regional capital, Urumqi, killing at least 197 people, mostly Han.

Israil had applied for refugee status in Kazakhstan in June 2010. At the time, he held a refugee mandate issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But after studying Israil's case, the UNHCR annulled on May 3 its refugee mandate issued to Israil, a Kazakh official said.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/idINIndia-57688420110614.

Uyghur Leader Barred from Travel

2011-05-01

Airport officials in Kazakhstan block an exile Uyghur leader from attending a political conference in the United States.

Authorities in Kazakhstan have blocked Uyghur exile leader Kahriman Ghojamberdi from traveling to Washington D.C. for a meeting of the World Uyghur Congress, underscoring Chinese pressure on the central Asian state.

Ghojamberdi, 60, vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, was stopped by customs officials at the Almaty airport on Sunday and told that his passport was not valid for travel.

“I had gone through all the procedures at the airport, and just at the last step, when I handed my passport to the customs officer, he returned the passport to me after approximately five minutes and said ‘You cannot not travel with this passport, because two pages are ripped out,’” Ghojamberdi said in an interview.

But no pages had been missing from his passport earlier, he explained.

“I have traveled with this passport twice to Washington and twice to Europe with no problems,” he added.

He had previously traveled to the United States several times since the 1990s, including his most recent visit for a World Uyghur Congress meeting in 2009.

International conference

Ghojamberdi was scheduled to attend a week-long meeting of Uyghur groups from around the world beginning Monday in Washington, on the theme “The Future of Uyghur People in East Turkestan.”

Many Uyghur activists use the term “East Turkestan” to refer to an independent state they are struggling for in the present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China.

Several U.S. lawmakers are scheduled to address the Washington conference. There are also plans to hold protests in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington D.C.

Kyrgyzstan attendees blocked

In another development, four Uyghur activists from Kyrgyzstan planning to attend the conference were also prevented from boarding a plane to Washington.

“The four were taken off of the airplane by police on Sunday, and were not given any explanation for why they cannot travel,” said Omer Kanat, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress.

Chinese pressure?

“Obviously, it is a slander to block me from the conference by orders from China. The Central Asian countries are acting as one of the provinces of China since the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established,” Ghojamberdi said.

Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, along with Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and China, are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security grouping in which Beijing wields great influence.

Ghojamberdi explained that several other Uyghur activists had also been pressured not to attend the conference.

“In the past 30 days most of my friends who received invitations from Washington to attend the congress were ‘investigated’ by Kazakh police and ‘persuaded’ not to attend the conference."

“Three Uyghur artists whose visas were already approved gave up attending because of threats by police,” he said.

Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress, accused the two Central Asian states of bowing to Chinese demands.

“Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan not only abuse Uyghur activists’ rights, they also abuse the rights of their own citizens,” she said.

“I know that both countries need help from China, so to some extent, I can understand why they are not allowing Uyghur political activists against China in their country."

“But I am surprised at why they are involved in Uyghur activities in other countries and how they can follow China’s orders like they are a part of China.”

Uyghurs in Xinjiang say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China's ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Source: Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/worlduyghurcongress-05012011173228.html.

China to turn restive Xinjiang capital into global city

Wed Mar 30, 2011

(Reuters) - China will turn the restive capital of the far western region of Xinjiang into an "international trade center" for central Asia by 2020 as part of plans to win the hearts and minds of residents, state media said on Wednesday.

Regional capital Urumqi was rocked by ethnic violence in 2009 between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people. Many of the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs, who call Xinjiang home, chafe at Beijing's rule.

The government has subsequently turned its attention to boosting development there and providing greater job opportunities.

New plans for remote and dusty Urumqi call for it to be turned into a "core city", complete with improved transport links and two brand new districts built "with world-class standards", the Xinhua news agency said.

Urumqi will get a new rail link with central China, an expanded train station, a new airport terminal and possibly a new airport too, the report said, summarizing an urban development blueprint for the city up to 2020.

"Local authorities will build faster and more convenient transportation networks to strengthen links between Urumqi and inland Chinese regions as well as areas in central and west Asia," Xinhua added.

"Greater efforts have been made to boost the development of the far western ethnic region of Xinjiang after a deadly riot rocked Urumqi in 2009," it added.

The city's population is also expected to double to around 5 million by 2020, while its GDP will rise from a predicted 131.1 billion yuan ($19.9 billion) this year to 420 billion yuan by 2020, the report said.

Xinhua gave no investment figures for the ambitious scheme, nor said if any of the projects would be specifically aimed at the Uighur population.

Urumqi is a predominantly Han Chinese city. Many Uighurs complain of discrimination in the jobs market and say that government efforts to boost development in Xinjiang have mainly benefited the Han and attracted more of them to migrate there.

Xinjiang is strategically vital to China. A vast swathe of territory, it holds rich oil and gas deposits and borders Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Central Asia. ($1 = 6.561 Yuan) (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/china-xinjiang-idUKL3E7EU1H920110330.

Exiled Uighurs worried on death sentences

Feb 23, 2011

WASHINGTON — The leader of the exiled Uighur community on Wednesday voiced concern over China's plans to execute four people on charges of plotting unrest and accused Beijing of intimidation.

State media said China's highest court has given the green light for the four executions in the northwestern Xinjiang region, the scene of strife between the indigenous Uighur community and China's majority Han.

Uighur advocate Rebiya Kadeer, a former prisoner who lives in exile in the Washington region, voiced worries over the sentences and said she opposed any form of violence.

"By sentencing these four Uighurs to death, China is attempting to intimidate the Uighur people, fearing that they will take to the streets to demand human rights, democracy and freedoms from the authoritarian Chinese government," she said in a statement.

The state-run Xinjiang Daily said that two of those convicted were involved in an August 19 bombing in Aksu, near the border with Kyrgyzstan, that killed seven people and wounded 15 others.

China is highly critical of Kadeer and accuses her of stirring up unrest in Xinjiang, a charge that she and a number of US lawmakers dismiss as smears.

China says it has brought development to Xinjiang, but many Uighurs bristle at what they see as political and religious oppression and criticize the influx of Han Chinese to Xinjiang.

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

Uyghur Student Sentenced to Death

2010-12-30

A 19-year-old Uyghur becomes the second woman sentenced to die following ethnic violence last year.

A female Uyghur student in northwestern China was sentenced to death with a two-year suspension following a trial last April on charges of participating in ethnic riots that left hundreds dead, according to a classmate.

Pezilet Ekber became the second Uyghur woman to receive the death penalty in connection to the unrest. Another woman was executed by Chinese authorities earlier this year.

“Nobody knows what exactly led to Pezilet Ekber receiving such a heavy punishment, other than her ‘involvement in violence,’ because the trial was secret and her parents were only just informed of the decision,” her classmate, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote in a letter.

“After the trial, her parents were just given the judgment, and were warned to keep silent and to refrain from telling the content of judgment to anyone,” the letter said.

Pezilet Ekber, 19, had been enrolled in Russian language classes at Xinjiang University in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) capital of Urumqi just before the violence erupted, her classmate wrote.

But she had temporarily left the school because of her family’s financial difficulties and was working for a Han Chinese-owned business in the city’s Grand Bazaar as a translator and saleswoman at the time of the riots, the letter said.

Urumqi’s Grand Bazaar was one of the locations central to Uyghur demonstrations and violence during the July 5, 2009 riots, which left nearly 200 people dead, according to official Chinese estimates.

Pezilet Ekber was arrested two months after the unrest while visiting her parents in her hometown of Suydung, in the XUAR’s Qorghas [in Chinese, Huocheng] county, Ili prefecture.

In the letter, Pezilet Ekber’s classmate wrote that the two had met on July 4 last year, and that her friend had no plans to attend the demonstration the following day.

“Her workplace was at the center of the event so she was probably unable to keep herself away when she saw the demonstrators and witnessed the tragic event of the demonstrators being shot by police,” the letter said.

“She usually always took a careful approach to such subjects related to the ethnic problem, even if it was a class discussion, because of her family background—being the granddaughter of a former independence fighter.”

A concerned father

Pezilet Ekber’s father, Ekber, 45, was a former state security officer in Qorghas county, but was forced out of his job due to his family background when ethnic tension began to build in the XUAR in the late 1990s.

Her grandfather had served in Ili prefecture's Gulja city as a member of the East Turkestan Liberation Army shortly after its founding in 1944, seeking independence from China.

A friend of Mr. Ekber, reached by telephone, said he had traveled to Urumqi on April 16 to visit his daughter in detention, but police ordered him to leave the city within a day of his arrival.

“He left without seeing his daughter. It happened just a few days before Pezilet’s trial,” the friend said.

“After that, I never saw him again—I guess it was in order keep his daughter’s life safe. Now he has isolated himself from the public to avoid leaking ‘state secrets.’ I don’t know whether or not he was able to visit his daughter after the trial.”

Pezilet Ekber’s boss at the shop in the Grand Bazar, a man surnamed Zhang, briefly answered questions about her detention and subsequent trial.

When asked if Pezilet Ekber was available to speak, Zhang said she hadn’t worked at the store since September.

When asked when she would return to work, he answered, “My guess is that will never happen,” but hung up the phone before responding to questions about why she was unable to return.

Employees who answered the phone at the Urumqi Intermediate Court, which handed down the punishment to Pezilet Ekber, and the Ghalibiyet Police Station, which ordered her father to leave Urumqi in April, both refused to speak with reporters.

Family a factor?

Ilshat Hassan, U.S.-based spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, said Pezilet Ekber may have been singled out by the court due to her family history.

“Usually family background is the most considered factor at the time of a decision, especially in political and ethnic cases tried by Chinese courts,” Hassan said.

“A Communist-oriented family background might save your life, even if you are a murderer, while an anti-communist or pro-independence family background can lead to a death sentence, even if you are innocent,” he said.

“I think Pezilet Ekber’s family background was one of the factors which influenced the decision.”

Pezilet Ekber is the second woman known to receive the death penalty in the aftermath of the Urumqi unrest, according to information made public by Chinese authorities.

In January, Hayrinsa Sawut, 20, was executed for committing murder during the riots.

A third woman, Gulmire Imin, received life in prison for her role as an “illegal organizer” during the 2009 demonstrations.

Reported and translated by Shohret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Copyright © 1998-2010 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved.

Source: Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/death-12302010153000.html.

'Post riots, China's Xinjiang region still remains unstable'

2010-12-25

China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which was shaken by a deadly riot last year, still faces many factors that may affect stability, according to one of the top officials in the region.

"We should be aware that the stability of Xinjiang remains fragile. There are still many factors from home and abroad that may affect stability, and the task of maintaining stability remains tough," Xinhua quoted Zhang Chunxian, secretary of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Committee of the Communist Party of China, as saying in a key stability meeting.

Xinjiang, with 41.5 percent of its population from the Uygur ethnic group, is the Chinese front line in the battle against terrorism. The region borders eight central and west Asian countries, many of which have been troubled by terrorists and extremists, the report said.

The meeting, attended by Xinjiang's high-level officials and leaders of the regional army and police forces, concluded that authorities are determined to prevent major cases involving violence and terror, and large "mass incidents".

In July 2009, 197 people were killed and 1,700 injured in China's worst riot in Urumqi in decades. Authorities blamed separatists and extremists for inciting the violence.

In the wake of the riot, the central government initiated development drives in the remote, and one of the most underdeveloped regions with the aim of eliminating unscrupulous elements in the region.

Source: Sify.
Link: http://www.sify.com/news/post-riots-china-s-xinjiang-region-still-remains-unstable-news-international-kmzn4dajfhb.html.

Top Muslim leader dies in China's Xinjiang

Agence France-Presse
12/19/2010

BEIJING – Over 5,000 Muslims poured into the streets of the capital of western China's restive Xinjiang region to mourn the death of a key religious figure amid a massive police presence, a mosque official said.

Mahemuti, the mullah of the Hantenggeli Mosque – also known as the Great South Gate Mosque – died on Thursday leading to an outpouring of grief by Muslim followers in the regional capital Urumqi, a mosque official said.

"About 5,000 Muslim mourners came to the mosque on Thursday to mourn his passing," the official, who identified himself only as Gelimu, told AFP by phone on Sunday. Mahemuti died from heart disease, he said.

The mosque was at the center of ethnic rioting between Xinjiang's minority Uighurs and China's Han majority in Urumqi in July 2009 that left nearly 200 people dead and 1,700 injured, according to official tolls.

Chinese authorities blamed the unrest on "separatists" but provided no evidence of any organized campaign. More than 25 people have either been executed or received the death penalty for their involvement in the violence, state media has said.

Gelimu said that Thursday's mourning parade was peaceful and that the large police presence mainly aimed to regulate traffic as the body of the mullah was taken away for burial.

According to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, over 1,000 armed police implemented martial law in central Urumqi around the mosque following the mullah's death.

Mahemuti, 74, had been a prominent Muslim religious leader for over 30 years and was well-known throughout Xinjiang, the center said.

Police had stepped up surveillance on mourning activities throughout the region, the center added, fearful that simmering ethnic tensions could spark renewed rioting.

The far-western Xinjiang region, where Uighurs have long seethed under Chinese rule, has experienced several violent bouts of unrest in recent years.

In August, seven people were killed when a man drove a vehicle loaded with explosives into a crowd in the outskirts of Aksu, a city near China's border with Kyrgyzstan, officials said at the time.

Source: Inquirer.
Link: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20101219-309867/Top-Muslim-leader-dies-in-Chinas-Xinjiang.

China probes "slave boss" in Uighur region

The report did not say where the workers were originally from, though it said some were confused about their backgrounds.

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Chinese police are hunting a factory boss who enslaved mentally handicapped people, forcing them to work long hours without pay and beating them if they tried to escape, Chinese media reported on Tuesday.

The boss of a construction materials factory in Uighur region, hired about a dozen people, many of whom are mentally disabled, to grind rocks into powder, but did not provide clothing, pay or enough food for the workers, Chinese website tianshannet.com reported.

The report did not say where the workers were originally from, though it said some were confused about their backgrounds.

He disappeared before police raided the factory on Monday morning, and may have fled with the workers -- some of whom had been enslaved for up to four years -- to Chengdu city in Sichuan province, the report said. His wife was being held by police.

Incidents of forced labor have shocked China in the past, with slave bosses often preying on the mentally handicapped.

In 2007, more than 1,000 people were found working as slaves in brick kilns in Shanxi province, following a father's desperate search for his missing teenage son. The central government vowed to prevent similar offenses, but cases are occasionally reported by Chinese media.

Last December, Chinese human traffickers targeted mentally disabled people from the southwestern Sichuan province countryside, luring them into dangerous employment contracts and sometimes even killing them in mine accidents for compensation.

"I have not asked the boss for the money yet," one worker who had been laboring at the factory for four years was cited by tianshannet.com as saying.

Source: World Bulletin.
Link: http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=67388.