China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Uighers (6)

• More Uighurs Sentenced To Death In China

  

  From The Australian:

  CHINA has begun sentencing 20 more ethnic Uighurs – some to death – for their part in riots which left 197 people dead in the remote western city of Urumqi on July 5, as the second batch of trials of more than 1200 people arrested as a result of the carnage began today, with at least one man sent for execution.

  In early December five people were sentenced to death and a further eight given prison terms, bringing to 17 sent to be executed in trials of the first two groups of people from the bloody unrest. Nine have been executed so far.

  The province of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital, remains locked down with internet, text messaging and international phone access cut off.

  The Australian has learned that three new trials were held today with other accused expected to be given their final sentences in coming days.

  » Read more
  • December 23, 2009 4:15 PM

• Fear Grips Shaoguan’s Uighurs

  

  Back to Shaoguan:

  When the local government in Xinjiang province dispatched more than 800 Uighur workers to a toy factory here in May, they couldn’t have predicted their fate would blow up into a national crisis. Today, police say two of the Uighur workers were killed and scores more injured in the June 26 events that ignited a firestorm of protest in restive Xinjiang. More mysteriously, some 700 of the original Uighur workers of Shaoguan’s massive electronic toy factory are being held out of sight behind locked gates roughly 10 miles away in an abandoned factory. Their plight, and the lack of quick police action on the initial murders, sparked mass protests and killings on July 5 in the Urumqi, adding the latest cracks in China’s façade of ethnic harmony.

  

  “The Uighurs are like wild men,” said Li Xiaoming, a factory worker from Sichuan province. “They carry knives and steal things, they never do what the bosses tell them.” His comment is par for the course among Han Chinese factory workers and locals across the manufacturing region. Most Han migrant workers in these parts, with little exposure to the outside world themselves, appear to have deep-rooted bias about Uighurs and what they might do. They appreciate the Uighurs’ dancing and food, but don’t trust them. “I think it’s possible they raped a girl,” said one factory worker outside an Internet café. “They made people nervous. They didn’t speak Chinese.”

  Read the full article on the Far Eastern Economics Review. 

  » Read more
  • July 16, 2009 2:27 PM

• Mary Hennock: Bad Press

  

  From Newsweek:

  Another tried-and-true technique follows the script used in Tibet: Beijing has blamed exiled businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer for the violence. Kadeer, who heads a Washington-based confederation of exile organizations scattered through the U.S., Germany, Britain, and Australia, denies involvement. The provincial government has said “violence … was instigated and directed from abroad, and carried out by outlaws in the country.” Similar florid language was applied to the Dalai Lama after the Lhasa riots; he was described as a “jackal in monk’s robes.” The official media “is very unified,” says Xiao. “They all point to Rebiya Kadeer, they all have the same narrative, there’s no independent reporting—it’s a very highly controlled version of the story.”

  A final piece of spin targets the Uighur population directly and hints that the CCP feels it needs to address Uighur grievances. The Urumqi riot began when Uighur factory workers thousands of miles away in Guangdong province were falsely accused of raping Han women by a disgruntled former workmate. A fight broke out, killing two Uighurs and injuring more than 100. Since Urumqi’s protest erupted, the government’s Uighur-language TV channel has carried a statement from Xinjiang provincial government chairman Nur Bekri promising “strenuous efforts” to investigate the killings in Guangdong. On Tuesday, Xinhua also reported 13 arrests over the false allegations. This attempt at redress segments the message. Awareness of local grievances is aired on regional TV in the Uighur language, while the wider message of Uighur thuggery plays to a receptive national audience. Prejudice against Uighurs often portrays them as violent criminals. “There’s this stereotype of Uighurs, that they’re thieves or … involved in the drug trade,” says Prof. Barry Sautman, a specialist on China’s ethnic policies at Hong Kong’s Science and Technology University.

  » Read more
  • July 8, 2009 10:22 PM

• Poor Migrants Describe Grief From China’s Ethnic Strife

  

  From the New York Times:

  As Muslim Uighurs rampaged through the streets of this western provincial capital on Sunday, Zhang Aiying rushed home and stashed her fruit cart away, safe from the mob. But there was no sign of her son, who ventured out amid the ruckus to retrieve another of the family’s carts.

  “Call him on his cellphone,” Ms. Zhang, 46, recalled shouting to another relative. “Tell him we want him home. We don’t need him to go back.”

  Her son, Lu Huakun, did not answer the call. Three hours later, after the screaming and pleading had died down, Ms. Zhang went in search of him. A dozen bodies were strewn about. She found her son, his head covered with blood, his left arm nearly severed into three pieces.

  The killing of Mr. Lu, 25, was a ruinous end to the journey of a family that had fled their poor farming village in central China more than a decade ago to forge a new life here in China’s remote desert region.

  Mr. Lu and his parents are typical of the many Han migrants who, at the encouragement of the Chinese government, have settled among the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking race that is the largest ethnic group in oil-rich Xinjiang Province. The influx of Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, has transformed Xinjiang: the percentage of Han in the population was 40 percent in 2000, up from 6 percent in 1949.

  “We wanted to do business,” Lu Sifeng, 47, the father, said Tuesday, his eyes glistening with tears as he sat smoking on his bed. “There was a calling by the government to develop the west. This place would be nothing without the Han.”

  » Read more
  • July 8, 2009 8:03 PM

• Uyghur Charged With Spying

  

  The Swedish government has charged Babur Mehsut, an ethnic Uigher born in China who was naturalized as a Swedish citizen, with spying for the Chinese government:

  Born in the northwestern Chinese city of Lanzhou to a Uyghur father and an ethnic minority Hui Muslim mother, Babur later moved to Hotan in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), now China’s northwesternmost province.

  He entered Sweden as a political refugee in the late 1990s and became a Swedish citizen in 2002.

  The chief prosecutor in the case, Tomas Lindstrand, told local media Babur was suspected on reasonable grounds of unlawful espionage from January 2008-June 2009, with activities both in Sweden and overseas.

  Swedish authorities allege that Mehsut was spying on the Uigher community in Sweden, and the Swedish government has expelled a Chinese diplomat in Sweden.  China has responded by expelling a Swedish diplomat from China.

  See also past CDT posts on the Uighers.

  » Read more
  • June 26, 2009 12:09 PM

• Supreme Court is Urged to Order Uighurs’ Release into U.S.

  

  Human rights lawyers have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to release 17 Chinese muslims being held at Guantanamo Bay. From The Los Angeles Times:

  The Muslims, members of the Uighur minority from China’s Xinjiang region, have been held without charge at Guantanamo Bay for more than seven years despite their military jailers’ concession years ago that they posed no threat to the United States.

  [...]

  “This is now President Obama’s Guantanamo. If he is truly committed to closing the detention center, these men should be on a plane to restart their lives in the United States,” said Emi MacLean, a staff attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

  Obama in January ordered the review of all 240 prisoners still at Guantanamo, where nearly 800 have been brought since the Bush administration began detaining terrorist suspects abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks.

  » Read more
  • April 6, 2009 6:04 PM

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