Uighur Post

Curious case of Canuck abroad Uighur activist's allegiance appears to be elsewhere

2006-08-31T21:02:00.000-07:00

By PETER WORTHINGTON

In a front page story this week, the Globe and Mail recounted how a Canadian citizen, Hussein Celil, had been arrested in Uzbekistan and deported to China.

On the surface, it seems yet another case of a Canadian in trouble overseas being abandoned by his government.

Yet there are wrinkles that make this story different from the outrage that happened to Bill Sampson -- framed in 2001 for murder in Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death, with the Canadian government preferring to believe Saudi protestations of their decency rather than the visual evidence of Sampson's torture.

Nor is Celil's case similar to that of Montreal photographer Zahra Kazemi, who in 2003 was raped and murdered by Iranian police who didn't realize she had a Canadian as well as an Iranian passport.

Celil's case is more curious. In 1994 he was arrested in China for activities on behalf of the Uighur people (one of China's 56 nationalities) and was sentenced to death in absentia after he escaped to Turkey .

In Turkey he applied for (and got) admission to Canada in 2001 as a refugee. He settled in Burlington with his wife and began siring children -- four, at this count.

Celil is Muslim and was an imam at the Burlington mosque. In fact, his ardent religious activism is what got him into trouble in China.

What are the Uighurs, you might ask? There are up to 10 million of them world-wide, most of them converts to Islam, and most of them living in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia. About a million live in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang.

China views the Uighur independence movement as terrorism. Thus their antipathy to Celil.

The question begs: Wotinell was Celil doing in Uzbekistan, apart from visiting his wife's relatives?

Is the guy nuts -- a refugee, given sanctuary by a generous Canadian government going back into where trouble awaits while his family exists on welfare?

Four sons since 2001 are evidence that he's spent some time in Burlington, but clearly he was up to something questionable in Uzbekistan (hardly a Jeffersonian democracy).

Since he has dual Chinese and Canadian citizenship, he surely should have known the chance he was taking.

The Uighurs have a tortured history. Their region was known as Eastern Turkestan before being conquered by China's Manchu armies in 1921.

The Soviet Union pushed communism on the Uighurs, who also subscribed to Islam. The men take multiple wives (contrary to Chinese law) and males are considered adults at 12, girls at 9.

Although Uighurs are not "terrorists" by our definition, they are a nuisance to the Chinese, and Hussein Celil seems more than an Islamic pacifist doing his bit in Central Asia to promote world peace.

At Guantanamo Bay, some 22 of the original 700 al-Qaida suspects were Uighurs -- most of whom have since been released as they have no apparent argument with America.

The question raised by the Celil and other cases, is why should Canada give refuge to those with no allegiance to Canada who are bent on clandestine activities in other countries?

Celil's wife survives on welfare and gripes Canada is lax in helping her man, who has landed in the chow mein when he should have known better.

Technically he's a Canadian citizen -- but also a Chinese citizen. Whatever he was doing in China (and in Uzbekistan) might have been legal in Canada but was not in those countries, which have a lousy record for human rights.

Celil may not be a terrorist, as the Chinese claim, but it's hard to see why Canada should feel responsible for this guy whose allegiance is elsewhere.

Source

A family's fate hinges on Chinese justice

2006-08-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

A mother wonders whether her newborn son will ever see his father

A day after giving birth, Kamila Telendibaeva sat alone in the corner of a cold hospital room gazing at her newborn son.

Bound tightly in a white blanket, the infant slept soundly as his mother chewed on the nail of her index finger.

"He's got his daddy's eyes," Ms. Telendibaeva said, clad in a blue housecoat and a leopard-print veil. "It makes me think of him, and it's hard."

This was the fourth time the 29-year-old had given birth, but the first time she did it alone, without her husband by her side.

For more than two months, Huseyin Celil (pronounced je-lil) has sat in a Chinese jail cell facing charges for alleged involvement in separatist activities supposedly dating back to the early 1990s, when he lived in the country's far-western Xinjiang region.

In March, the Canadian citizen was arrested in Uzbekistan while visiting his wife's family. Three months later, he was extradited to China, accused of terrorist activities and killing a Chinese government official in Kyrgyzstan in March of 2000.

His family and his lawyer vehemently deny the allegations, saying Mr. Celil was in Turkey waiting for refugee status in 2000. His wife admits he was politically active in his homeland and had spoken out against China, but says he had never been violent and is certainly not a terrorist.

But they likely won't get a chance to defend him. Chinese officials are keeping Mr. Celil's whereabouts secret, saying only that his trial is not yet complete. China has denied the Canadian government consular access to him, which contradicts the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

The ordeal has taken its toll on the Burlington, Ont., family.

With the birth of the baby, who will be one week old tomorrow, Ms. Telendibaeva now has four sons and raising them is a full-time job. Her eldest, seven-year-old Mohammad, is developmentally disabled and uses a wheelchair. He cannot bathe himself or eat without assistance. Ms. Telendibaeva's mother has flown to Canada on a six-month visa to help.

With no breadwinner, finances are quickly drying up. The family survives on $600 a month in welfare payments. Amid the chaos of single parenthood, Ms. Telendibaeva says she is always thinking about her husband, constantly wondering where he is, how he is and if he's ever coming home.

The Department of Foreign Affairs maintains it is actively working to find out where Mr. Celil is being held and precisely what charges he's facing, and to ensure he has adequate representation.

So far, diplomatic efforts have gotten nowhere. Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay raised Mr. Celil's case during a meeting last month with his Chinese counterpart. But the minister was brushed off, receiving no information about the Canadian in custody.

Wayne Marston, NDP critic for international affairs, is slamming the government for not doing enough. He's calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to personally get involved in the case and send a special envoy to China in search of answers.

"I can't fathom why Mr. Harper wouldn't come to the aid of a Canadian citizen," said Mr. Marston, MP for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek. "It's baffling to me. We have a Canadian citizen here who is under the threat of death. What further extreme do you need to pull out all the stops to try to help?"

Before his detainment, Mr. Celil was an imam at a Hamilton mosque. He was a popular mentor to young pupils and was studying accounting at Mohawk College, his wife said.

Three weeks ago, the family thought they had struck a lead in the case when Mr. Celil's sister in China was told by a local police officer that her brother was being held in either Kashgar or Urumqi, cities in Xinjiang region. But Canadian officials have been unable to confirm the rumour.

Chinese officials told Ottawa this month they are not seeking the death penalty, although the country has sentenced Mr. Celil to death once before. In 1994, he was arrested in China on charges of forming a political party to work on behalf of the Uyghur people, a Muslim, Turkic-language minority group long at odds with China over the right to greater freedom.

After serving a month in prison, Mr. Celil escaped, eventually buying false documents to enter Uzbekistan, his wife said. He made his way to Turkey before being granted refugee status in Canada in 2001. Meanwhile, in China, a court sentenced Mr. Celil to death in absentia for his alleged role in the anti-government political movement.

The family's lawyer said he worries more about Mr. Celil's condition with each passing day.

"My private fear is that he's not in the shape to be seen and that's why they're denying access to him," said Chris MacLeod, alluding to the possibility of torture.

More than a month ago, Mr. MacLeod wrote a letter to the Chinese ambassador to Canada, requesting a visa so he could visit his client in jail. There has been no response.

Government officials in Canada have also been tight-lipped on the case, rarely commenting publicly and often having little to say.

"The minister is following this case very closely," said Foreign Affairs spokesperson Ambra Dickie. "We continue to maintain regular contact with Mr. Celil's family in Canada. The minister, Mr. MacKay, has personally met with his wife."

But that was more than four months ago, when Mr. Celil was being held in Uzbekistan. "I met with [Mr. MacKay] for 15 minutes and he said he would do everything he could to get him out," Ms. Telendibaeva said.

"He told me they would try to get Russia to put pressure on China. But he did not do enough."

Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat based in China, believes Canada is steadily losing negotiating power as time drags on.

"The whole case hasn't been handled very well and I'm very concerned about Mr. Celil," said Mr. Burton, a professor of political science at Ontario's Brock University. "In the Chinese system, once someone comes up for trial it's very unusual for them to be declared not guilty. If he is found guilty, the question is what the nature of the punishment will be."

Mr. Burton said China has used the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to crack down on the Uyghur minority, aiming to convince the international community that the group promotes terrorism.

"Since 9/11 there are blurred lines between what's considered political activity, what's separatism and the Chinese government calls terrorism," he said. "The Chinese government wants the West to believe Uyghurs are terrorists. But there is no empirical evidence of this."

If Ms. Telendibaeva could get one message to her husband it would be that he has another son, and that the baby is named Zubeyir, the name he liked. Family friends suggested she name the child after his father, but Ms. Telendibaeva refused.

"I won't do that. I don't want to replace him because I still have hope that he's coming home," she said defiantly.

But as weeks turn into months without word on his condition, she cannot help but lose some of that hope as the reality of the situation sets in. She may never see her husband again. He may never see his child. And she knows that.

Source

China foils oilfield, power plant bombings - HK paper

2006-08-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have seized explosives and foiled attempts by separatists to blow up oilfields, power plants and highways in the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang, a Beijing-funded Hong Kong newspaper said on Wednesday.
Uighur militants, whom Beijing calls terrorists, have been struggling for decades to make the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang an independent state called East Turkestan.

More than 41 tonnes of explosives had been seized since 1990 in the fight against the "three forces" of religious "extremism, separatism and terrorism", the Ta Kung Pao daily quoted Xinjiang's public security deputy chief Wang Lexiang as saying.

"We've forcefully dealt a blow to the 'three forces' and maintained stability in Xinjiang," Wang was quoted as saying. He did not give a figure for the number of arrests.

Police had also confiscated 6,540 grenades and 4.15 metric tons of raw materials to make explosives during the period, Wang said, adding that plans by separatists to bomb power plants, highways and railways had been thwarted.

Police had intensified a crackdown on illegal possession of explosives since July, Wang said without elaborating.

"The social situation is still grave," he said, adding that the number of violations of rules governing explosives increased by 195 percent last year.

Separatists successfully bombed barracks of the paramilitary People's Armed Police and a rail line in 2004, Wang said without saying how many were killed or wounded.

Turkic-speaking Uighurs account for about 8 million of the 19 million people in Xinjiang, which borders the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Beijing has waged a long campaign against Uighur separatists, whom it accuses of staging a series of bombings, riots and assassinations since the 1980s and training and fighting alongside the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.

But human rights groups accuse Beijing of using its support of the U.S.-led war on terror to legitimise a crackdown on Uighur activists and of systematically violating Uighurs' rights, including arbitrary arrests, unfair trials, torture and religious discrimination.

Judges from Shanghai Cooperation Organisation members -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- will meet in Shanghai next month to discuss extradition procedures and cross-border work to fight the "three forces".

Copyright © 2005 Reuters

Detainee in China isn't aware of his new son

2006-08-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

By Christine Cox
The Hamilton Spectator
BURLINGTON (Aug 25, 2006)
Kamila Telendibaeva is thrilled with her newborn son, but wishes desperately that her husband, Huseyin Celil, could be there to share her joy.

Telendibaeva gave birth to the couple's fourth child Wednesday at McMaster University Medical Centre. Her husband is languishing in a jail in China, where authorities say he's on trial for terrorist activities. Celil is a political dissident who had championed the cause of the Muslim Uyghur people.

Canadian officials have not had access to him in China and Celil, 37, doesn't even know he's a father again. Telendibaeva said her son weighed 3.5 kilos and will be named Zubayir.

"I am very happy that he's healthy, he's normal, but I feel very sad that my husband wasn't there with me at the hospital," she said yesterday. "I was missing my husband."

She said her other three children are pleased their little brother is home "and are playing around the baby."

Telendibaeva hasn't seen her husband since last spring. He was arrested in Uzbekistan in March and subsequently extradited to China, although he was travelling on a Canadian passport.

Celil's lawyer, Chris MacLeod, is not sure if a trial has actually begun or not. He wonders if there was a translation error in a statement that suggested it was under way.

MacLeod said the Chinese would be breaching international obligations if they didn't tell Canadian officials what the charges were and that the trial had started. He continues to press for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to send a special envoy to Beijing to look into the Celil case.

"I think it's important," MacLeod said yesterday.

Ottawa says it has had an assurance that China will not seek the death penalty for Celil. His wife does not think he will be killed, but fears he may be tortured.

ccox@thespec.com

Source

Quick change in China

2006-08-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

Rick Gunn
For the Appeal
August 27, 2006

I'd never plan to fly in China.

Flying here was for the seasoned masochist, or those with a goal of a nervous breakdown.

But there I was, stuffed knees to chest, within the ridiculously scant space of a Chinese airliner. Reeling at the depth of my most recent misfortune, my flight began when a passenger approached and clocked me in the head with his briefcase.

Just after he stepped on my foot, he took the seat next to mine. Almost immediately - without so much as a word exchanged between us - I was certain of three things about the man: He loved garlic, didn't use deodorant, and possessed the almost inexhaustible ability to produce gas.

After liftoff, I was engulfed by the feature film, (a Chinese documentary about the mating habits of grouper fish), before I caught my new friend as he began to drift. He'd fallen asleep as if by the snap of a hypnotist, his neck seemingly unhinged over my armrest.

Just as his head nearly settled upon my chest, a young boy in the seat behind me began screeching. This alternated with kung-fu kicks to the back of my seat. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, a toddler dropped a doody on a seat across the aisle.

When the flight attendant was called for cleanup, she gagged mid-mop and ran to the bathroom to vomit.
That's when I felt something wet drip on my arm. Then again. When I looked up, it was like a scene pulled right from a Hitchcock film.

There, racing through the cracks in my overhead compartment was - blood. Neat little lines of hemoglobin slowly raining down on me. I ripped off my seat belt and jumped to the aisle - ready to scream like a little girl, when the flight attendant barked at me to find another seat.

As much as I wish them to be, these were the least of my problems.

As I moved to a new seat, I collapsed, head in hand. I wondered how, in seven short days, this trip had gone so wrong.

For the millionth time, I replayed that moment. The moment I'd realized someone had gotten away with my passport, $2,600 in cash - and most depressingly - my chance at riding to Tibet with my co-rider and new friend Christoph Fladung.

He had quite simply been one of the best touring cyclists I'd ever had the good fortune to ride with.

It'd all begun a week earlier on the western-most edge of China's Xinjiang Province.

Directed off the road by a pair of Kyrgyz border officials, we pulled to the center of a dilapidated bordertown - a derelict village whose population lived entirely within the rusted-out hulls of trucks, railroad cars and tumble-down shipping containers.
Human waste gathered in muddy pools next to stinking heaps of garbage that fretting dogs picked upon. When we reached the center, a sizable crowd began to gather.

Dirty and listless, they closed in with curious stares.

"Is there someone here I could talk to about purchasing property?" I asked sarcastically.

"Let's go," Christoph followed, "I'm not really in the social mood right now."

After brief border formalities, and a 40-mile ride across a virtual no-man's land, the sun began to sink, before casting brushstroke shadows across the twisted folds of land.

When we came upon a river, we searched for a place to camp. That's when a diminutive Kyrgyz sheep herder, watching his herd, called from an overlooking bluff.

After a short conversation, he showed us to his home where he invited us to stay for the night.
Two days later, we reached the Uyghur city of Kashgar.

The Uyghurs, or ethnic separatists, as the Chinese government refers to them, originated from a Turkic-Uzbek ancestry. Arriving from Mongolia, they'd ushered in Islam, then swept out the Tang Dynasty around the 9th century.

When the Manchu Army invaded the area in 1865, China had recaptured an oil-rich chunk of desert. A new hunk of real estate roughly the size of Alaska.

Since that time, the government has flooded the area with Han Chinese, purposefully diluting the Uyghur population from 90 percent, to less than 50.

But if anything, the Uyghurs are resilient. Their culture booming within Kashgar's Sunday Market. Less a market than an explosion of Uyghur merchants gathered 50,000 strong.

When Christoph and I arrived, it was like a mind warp back in time.

Wandering first through the Animal market, we were instantly overtaken by the dirt, dung and debris - all of which flung from the surrounding livestock. Then came the calls of the herdsmen, who haggled, balked, or constantly counted their money.

Many of these same animals met their fate in nearby food-stalls - a massive conglomerate of tarp-covered cookeries that billowed with a bluish-white smoke.
Vendors brandished flaming sticks of shash-lik (shish-kebab), the most popular of which being liver on a stick. Charred goat heads lay slung in a bowl ready for consumption, next to large spirals of sheep intestines piled high with cornmeal.

That afternoon, deep within the market, we perused an endless array of fruits, vegetables, fabrics, crafts, carpets, metalworks, and knives, until we finally found ourselves within a large spice market. Once there, medicine men and maniacs boasted freakish potions, and their unique abilities to heal. A partial list of these concoctions included: dried snakes, lizards, frogs, starfish and live scorpions - their purposed sting a part of some sadistic healing regiment.

When we finally tumbled from the market, our brains rattled like marbles in a jar.

Dizzy from the height of it all, I made my way to a hotel phone to share the experience with a friend.

That's when it happened.

I'd simply set my money belt down on the counter and walked away. By the time I realized what I'd done, it was gone. My passport, documents and three months worth of budget ... gone.

As it had many times during the last year, my trip had changed on a dime.

My raced back to the words of a best friend, a compliment before I left. He said, "Rick, if there is one person who is not afraid of change, that would have to be you."

I stood for a moment in realization of the change that had occurred, I struggled hard to believe his words.

Then came a hell week.

Seven days later, I had taken four flights. More than 8,000 miles later, I had frequented two police stations, eight banks, five government offices where I filled out countless forms.

I was harassed by police, swindled by cab drivers, taken by merchants, laughed at by children and cursed at by an elderly woman.

When I was done I returned to Kashgar from the east coast cities of Hong Kong and Guanzhou.

When I finally reached the light of my dingy hotel room, I came upon my bike, sitting dusty, locked and lonely. As I opened the lock, I thought of Christoph.

He had bent over backwards trying to help me before he'd left.

But pushed for time on his ever dwindling visa, he finally realized it was time to move on.

Waiting for me might have meant jeopardizing one of his life's dreams; cycling from Germany to the base of Mount Everest.

That night, as I crawled into bed, I wondered about MY dream. I was halfway through this roller coaster bicycle journey around the world. I wondered what other obstacles I would come across, and to what heights I would once again soar.

As I did, I recalled something I said to Christoph just before saying goodbye.

I said, "I have no idea how long it will take me to return Christoph, but if its humanly possible ... I will see you on that hill."

Editors note: This is the latest in a series of journal entries written by former Nevada Appeal photographer Rick Gunn about his two-year bicycle journey around the world. Along the way, he is raising awareness for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. To donate, go to wish.org.

To read more of his entries and see more photos go to rickgunnphotography.com, or nevadaappeal.com and click on the Wish Tour icon.

Where in the world is Rick Gunn?

WHEN: July 28-Aug. 10, 2006

WHERE: China - Kashgar, Urumqi, Guanzhou, Hong Kong, Urumqi

MILEAGE LOG: 10,550-10,650 miles

ELEVATION: 0-3,200 feet

Source

China's Uyghur Muslims

2006-08-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

ASHIFA KASSAM
CBC News Viewpoint | August 28, 2006
After years of experience in the field of human rights and social justice issues in Canada, Ashifa Kassam started to wonder how others around the world have been coping with their own challenges. With the intent of satisfying her curiosity, she is currently traveling across continents to volunteer with various grassroots development organizations. Originally from Calgary and educated at Queen's University, this freelance writer and activist aims to tell stories that will take readers far beyond tourism.

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Devotional chants ring out all around me. The walls of this ancient mosque resonate in harmony with these chants, rewarding the hundreds of people deep in prayer with an atmosphere of surreal calm.

This calm contrasts sharply with the hectic city that lies just beyond the mosque's steps. Chaotic, narrow lanes that lead into the mosque are crammed with vendors selling everything from Muslim food to Chairman Mao memorabilia. Giant billboards adorned with skinny models and Mandarin phrases stare down at the pedestrians who crowd the streets. Kites fly above the whole scene, painting the last bit of untouched landscape with dozens of bright colours.

I am in Xian, once the capital of China and home to the Great Mosque of Xian. Built in the 18th century, this mosque is the hub of activity for the more than 60,000 Muslims who live in Xian. As this is one of the largest mosques in China, it is the most prominent clue regarding the story of Muslims in China. It is estimated that there are anywhere from 20 million to 40 million Muslims currently living in China.

The first recorded arrival of Muslims in China was in 650 A.D. Although the Muslim envoy failed at their mission to convert Emperor Gaozong of Tang China to Islam, the emperor demonstrated his respect by ordering the construction of the first Chinese mosque in the Tang capital city of Chang-an.

During the remainder of the Tang dynasty, and during the Song and Yuan dynasties, a steady stream of Muslims arrived from the Arab world, driven by trade opportunities along the Silk Road. This immigration slowed drastically during the Ming dynasty, isolating the Muslims in China from the rest of the Islamic world. As a result, these Muslims increasingly adopted the Chinese language, dress and surnames. The mosques of China, which are built using traditional Chinese architecture laden with Arabic devotional inscriptions indicate the extent to which these Muslims have integrated into Chinese society.

Collectively referred to as the Hui minority, these Muslims have been granted a certain degree of religious freedom in Communist China. But not all Muslims in China have been so lucky. In the northwest corner of China lies the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), home to the Uyghur Muslim population. The most recent Chinese government census put the population of Uyghur Muslims in the XUAR at nine million, but Uyghur exile groups claim there are closer to 18 million Uyghur Muslims living in the region.

Similar to the Tibetans who live in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, the Uyghurs are the indigenous majority of the XUAR. Their unique culture is revealed by their Central Asian heritage, their distinct language and their devotion to Islam. Like the Tibetans, the Uyghurs claim their culture has been systematically eroded by the Chinese government since the People's Republic of China (PRC) declared the XUAR part of China in 1949. As in the case of the Tibetans, this claim has been echoed by human rights organizations ranging from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch.

But unlike the Tibetans, the Uyghurs have no charismatic leader-in-exile or celebrities in Hollywood to champion their cause. For this reason, few around the world ever hear the story of the Uyghur people.

In the late 1930s and late 1940s, the Uyghurs managed twice to declare an East Turkestan republic in the XUAR, but those successes were short lived. Since falling under Beijing's control, nationalist sentiments have continued to simmer in the XUAR, especially as the PRC continues their persecution of this ethnic group from every possible angle.

As Islam is the major feature underpinning the Uyghur culture, the PRC has taken strong measures to curb the religious practice of these Muslims. In contrast with the freedoms granted to the Hui minority, in the XUAR the PRC controls where religious gatherings may be held, who can be a cleric and what version of the Qu'ran may be used. Fasting is prohibited, in spite of being mandatory for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan. Communist party members and anyone under the age of 18 are forbidden from participating in any religious activity. In order to enforce these rules, government officials keep all mosques in the XUAR under constant surveillance.

Other aspects of the Uyghur culture have been targeted as well. Many prominent Uyghur writers and poets are in jail, and history books that do not conform to the PRC-approved version of history have been banned. Despite the Uyghurs being the majority in the XUAR, the Chinese government recently changed laws to force all schools in the region to teach students in Mandarin rather than in Uyghur.

The Uyghurs have also been economically marginalized since the PRC began providing incentives for the Han population — the ethnic group that comprises the majority of China — to move to the resource-rich XUAR. In 1949, the official census placed the number of Han at six per cent of the population in the XUAR, but by 1978 that figure had climbed to 40 per cent. The Hans are always favoured for jobs and Uyghurs are often paid less than Hans who work the same jobs.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the treatment of the Uyghurs has worsened under the banner of the PRC´s commitment to the United States-led war against terror. Citing the strong nationalist sentiments that continue to exist among the Uyghur population in the XUAR, the PRC has labelled these peaceful farmers as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state. This classification is used to justify the continued marginalization of these people, in the name of "fighting terror."

This has led to an increasing number of arrests in the XUAR, most recently that of a Canadian citizen.

Huseyincan Celil fled China in the mid-1990´s and became a Canadian citizen in 2001. In absentia, China sentenced him to death on charges of organizing a political party to work on behalf of the Uyghur people. During a recent visit to relatives in Uzbekistan, he was extradited to China. The resident of Burlington, Ont., is now being held in a secret Chinese prison awaiting his sentence.

The Uyghur Canadian Association, arguing that Celil´s role in organizing the Uyghur people to demand their rights through non-violent means is protected by the UN´s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has appealed to the Canadian government to intervene on Celil´s behalf.

The Canadian government has tried to talk with the PRC about Celil, but their attempts have been met with silence. This silence doesn't bode well for Celil, and typifies the problem with silence that has plagued the Uyghur people for the last half-century.

For despite the fact that the Uyghurs remain the only people who continue to be executed on political charges by Chinese authorities, despite the rampant human-rights abuses that continue across the XUAR and despite the fact that the UN High Commissioner recently expressed her concern over the treatment of the Uyghurs by the PRC, the persecution of the Uyghurs in China remains a story that rarely finds an audience.

Source

Freedom in a Cage Consider the Uighurs

2006-08-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

He compensates for lack of brain with compassion. Consider Mr. Bush's treatment of the Uighurs.

Among the detainees at Guantánamo were five Uighurs captured in Afghanistan after 9/11. The men were natives of Xinjiang province of China. They had the misfortune to travel to Afghanistan before 9/11 for reasons having nothing to do with Osama bin Laden An even greater misfortune was their decision to go to Pakistan after 9/11where they were welcomed by villagers who invited them to dinner and then took them to a mosque where the men (who thought they were going to pray) were turned over to the Americans for an unspecified sum of money. The Americans sent them off to Guantánamo.

Once in Guantánamo the five men were subject to the mercy of the military tribunals that were set up by the Bush administration to help it decide whether the people it had imprisoned were enemy combatants. The military tribunal concluded they were not. Nonetheless, they were held at Guantánamo for an additional year because George Bush didn't know what to do with them. If returned to China they were threatened with imprisonment because Uighurs have had a long standing conflict with the Chinese government over its treatment of Uighurs, whom it considers terrorists. Although Mr. Bush has no problem calling people terrorists or enemy combatants and then summarily depriving them of any rights, the law does not permit the him to repatriate prisoners to countries where they may be subject to the kind of treatment they were subject to when being watched over by Mr. Bush.

The question, therefore, was where could the men go. The obvious answer for the Uighurs was they should go to the United States since they were only 90 miles away. Mr. Bush did not think they would make good neighbors and did not want them coming here.

A state department official claimed that the United States asked more than 100 countries to let the five men stay with them and all of the countries refused. Some were afraid of offending the Chinese and others may have logically concluded that if the United States didn't want them neither did they. One country was an exception-Canada.

The lawyers for the men were conducting negotiations with Canada to convince that country to grant them entry and resident status since that country has a large Uighur population and the men would have felt comfortable living there among their own people. Then a strange thing happened.

In addition to negotiating with Canada on behalf of their clients, the lawyers filed a lawsuit to compel the United States to let the men enter the United States. The case was heard in a federal district court and at its conclusion the judge said that the detention of the Uighurs was illegal and disgraceful but he lacked the power to force the government to admit the men to the U.S. The men appealed. The justice department did not want the appellate court to issue an opinion because (a) it did not want to be criticized by yet another court and (b) it feared that the court would enter a ruling requiring the government to deal fairly with those it had unfairly imprisoned by requiring it to admit them to the United States.

The appeal was scheduled to be heard on a Monday in May. Taking its cue from the criminal who, preferring freedom to conviction, gets out of town before he can be tried, the government got the Uighurs out of town before the court could enter an unfavorable ruling. The only country that was willing to accept the men in a big hurry was Albania. On the Friday before the Monday hearing the men were placed aboard an airplane surrounded by 20 armed guards, shackled to the floor of the plane in case they decided to become enemy combatants during the flight and shipped off to Albania.

With the men safely out of the country, the government rushed off to court and told the court the men were in Albania and, therefore, no longer subject to the court's jurisdiction. The court agreed and dismissed the case. The government was relieved since it no longer had to fear judicial chastisement for its inhumane treatment of detainees.

In his most recent news conference Mr. Bush said: "if we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I'm concerned." Thanks to Mr. Bush the Uighurs now live in freedom in a barbed wire enclosed refugee camp in Albania where no one speaks their language. They get free room and board and 40 Euros a month. In addition to his brain, it would appear that Mr. Bush has also lost his soul. That news will not surprise the Albanian Uhguirs. No one else will be surprised.

Christopher Brauchli is a lawyer in Boulder, Colorado. He can be reached at: Brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. Visit his website: http://hraos.com/

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China, Kazakhstan hold anti-terrorism drill

2006-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

By Parisa Hafezi
BEIJING, Aug 26 (Reuters) - China and the Central Asian energy power Kazakhstan held a joint "anti-terror" drill involving armed helicopters and anti-riot vehicles on Saturday, the official Xinhua news agency cited police officials as saying.

In a display of growing security ties between the two countries, around 700 police personnel were taking part in the second phase of joint exercises in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang, Xinhua cited the police as saying.

The drill, part of a three-day exercise which began in Kazakhstan's Almaty region on Thursday, aimed at maintaining security and stability across the border, Xinhua cited an official from the Ministry of Public Security as saying.

The exercise was the first of its kind undertaken by the two countries under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which groups Russia and China with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Xinhua said.

Those taking part would simulate a battle in which the enemy would be forced into a narrow valley. Both traditional and modern methods of combat would be used, it said.

Law enforcement bodies and special forces from the two countries have also taken part in the exercises, according to Xinhua.

Kazakhstan shares a 1,700-km (1,060-mile) border with Xinjiang, where the Uighur population has bridled under Beijing's strict controls on Islamic religion and culture.

Late last year, Kazakhstan began sending oil to energy-famished China along a new pipeline. The vast Central Asian state's oil output is expected to nearly triple to 3.5 million barrels per day by 2015, making Kazakhstan an increasingly important player among world oil producers.

Copyright © 2005 Reuters

Double Opportunity in China's Far West Beijing seeks growth, analysts say, but also control of separatistsBy

2006-08-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Don Lee, Times Staff Writer
August 28, 2006

KASHGAR, China — Not too long ago, Kashgar was a sleepy town with mud houses, largely unchanged since Marco Polo trekked through in the 13th century.

But now this frontier town and other outposts in China's far west are booming with oil, cotton, coal and trade. Trains, new highways and an international airport are bringing thousands of people from neighboring Pakistan who want to take in the tourist sites and buy inexpensive Chinese goods.

A few months ago, oil from Kazakhstan arrived in the region by way of a new 600-mile pipeline financed by energy-hungry China. Trade with neighbors Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is breaking records.

China's soaring economy is most often illustrated by gleaming skyscrapers in coastal cities. But the nation's economic growth is also evident in other ways: Like America's Westward Ho of the 1800s, Beijing's Go West campaign of the last decade is transforming vast swaths of Central Asia by opening up the western hinterlands, populated by millions of ethnic minorities.

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese have flocked here, hoping to cash in on construction jobs and business ventures.

The Chinese government, analysts say, is pushing west with two clear motives: to spread economic development, and to keep in check Tibetans and, here in the Xinjiang region, the Uighurs, Muslims of Turkic descent. About 9 million Uighurs live in Xinjiang, and over the years separatist groups have clashed with Chinese forces, demanding independence and religious freedom.

For now, Beijing seems to have strengthened its economic and political grip on the region. Although China has been a caldron of unrest, with 87,000 protests nationwide last year, there has been no large-scale rioting in Xinjiang in two years, experts who track such activity say.

Human rights groups have accused the Chinese government of taking advantage of the U.S.-declared war on terrorism to increase its repression of Uighurs. Beijing has denied the claim, even as it has cracked down on Uighur activists and successfully lobbied the United States to label as terrorists a group of militant Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Although Beijing has used guns and force to restrain Uighurs, its arsenal of late has included people such as Wong So Nok, a merchant from Shenzhen in southeastern China.

Marco Polo is said to have found Kashgar an oasis when he arrived in 1275 on his journey along the Silk Road.

When Wong arrived in 1998, there were more donkey carts than taxis on the city's mostly dirt roads. Kashgar and other areas of Xinjiang were still smoldering from rioting, bus bombings and slayings that left scores of victims.

Today, the 50-year-old Wong sits behind a stately desk overseeing the construction of an international trading center similar to the giant wholesale market in Yiwu in the eastern province of Zhejiang, where more than 3,000 foreign traders flock daily.

Some of those traders in Yiwu travel from Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Wong's $50-million International Trade City in Kashgar will shorten their trip.

"We're creating a bridge to Central Asia," Wong said.

Beijing has spent $15 billion on roads, dams and power lines. State-owned energy companies have kicked in billions more, helping to pay for the 600-mile pipeline from Kazakhstan's Caspian coast.

Beijing's efforts to tap Kazakhstan's growing oil production in the Caspian Sea fields could present a challenge to U.S. energy interests there, some analysts said.

Some U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern that America is increasingly being isolated in the region while China cements relations.

Beijing is making a similar effort to develop and exert greater influence in Tibet. Last month, China inaugurated a train line to the snowcapped plateaus of Tibet.

Xinjiang may be the linchpin of Beijing's push westward. The region is the size of Alaska, occupying one-sixth of China's land. Its climate and terrain are as varied as California's, with deserts and towering mountains. Xinjiang produces coal, cotton, fruits and wine.

Although government figures on migration aren't available, at least 180,000 Chinese from one distant province alone, Zhejiang, are estimated to have settled and started businesses in Xinjiang, many in the last decade.
The Han Chinese account for more than 90% of China's population and about 40% of Xinjiang's almost 20 million residents, according to the latest figures from Beijing. Western scholars think there are many more Han Chinese in Xinjiang than official statistics show.

Their influx has transformed Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. Apart from Arabic signs in Uighur enclaves, Urumqi resembles most Chinese cities, with an abundance of pale apartment buildings, a People's Square in the center of town and KFCs sprinkled throughout.
Residents say Beijing's ongoing campaign has chilled Uighurs' hopes for an independent state. Many Uighurs declined to be interviewed, fearful of reprisals from police. Others said that it was better to toe the line and secure economic gains, rather than spend time on political activities that would be quickly quashed.

The Uighurs in Xinjiang are in a "silent, pragmatic period," said Joanne Smith, a Uighur expert at Britain's Newcastle University. Xinjiang government officials declined to comment.

In Kashgar, narrow alleys that meander through earthen houses are redolent of lamb and naan, sold by bearded old men in skullcaps. Young craftsmen and their fathers sit in stalls, fashioning bronze pots and Turkish long-neck lutes.

Inside a small storefront up a narrow alley, Abilkem, a lanky 22-year-old with a thin mustache, was behind a counter facing a bank of nine red telephones, three of them used for international calls.

Abilkem, who, like many Uighurs, goes by one name, said business had been bustling with tourists and foreign visitors.

The most frequent calls are to Pakistan, for which Abilkem charges 40 cents a minute. He said he made a $100 profit each month.

The Chinese may not understand the Uighurs entirely. But Wang Shaoming, a senior manager at Xinjiang Esquel Textile, a Hong Kong group with factories in Xinjiang, measures economic progress by the shirts on his back.

Wang moved to Urumqi as a boy in 1966 with his parents, who, like millions of Chinese soldiers, were sent to Xinjiang by Mao Tse-tung to support economic and military projects in the west.

After graduating from college in the mid-1980s with a major in textiles, Wang began work in the garment trade. At the time, he said, China didn't have the know-how to make quality shirts. He earned enough to buy one or two cotton shirts. The 45-year-old says he now wears cotton Oxfords like socks, changing them every day.

Xinjiang Esquel's factory in Urumqi supplies the fabric for the shirts, processing local and imported cotton, including pima from California.

But if Wang can afford a closet full of shirts, his 1,000 factory workers can't.

Most city dwellers in Xinjiang earned about $1,000 after taxes last year, up 8% from 2004. But average urban income nationwide rose 11% to $1,300. Between Han Chinese and Uighurs, the divide is wider.

Some Uighur merchants are prospering from a rise in Chinese tourists and expanding trade with Central Asia. But many Uighurs, especially the elderly, can't communicate in Mandarin; they speak a Turkic language and read Arabic. That makes it tough to get jobs at Chinese companies.

State-owned enterprises are known to restrict Uighurs from growing facial hair or praying in the workplace. Uighurs say some employers require them to pay for jobs.

Officially, the unemployment rate in Xinjiang, like many provinces of China, has been 4% for years. But the streets tell a different story.

In Kashgar's People's Park, Uighurs young and old sit forlornly on benches under trees in the middle of a hot afternoon. Chinese merchants sell drinks and snacks. A lone Uighur peddles plum juice for 5 cents a bowl.

Across the street, an 85-foot stone statue of Mao, said to be the tallest in China, reminds everyone who is in charge.

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Chinese legislature mulls pact with Pakistan to fight terror

2006-08-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Beijing, Aug 22: All-weather friends, China and Pakistan, are all set to enhance cooperation in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism under a bill tabled for deliberation today in China's top legislature.

The Sino-Pakistan cooperative agreement on combating the "three evil forces" would be China's second such international pact after the agreement with Kirghizia, Kazakstan, Tadzhikistan and Uzbekistan to safeguard regional peace and stability.

Briefing lawmakers of the standing committee of the national people's Congress, Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei said the bill to ratify the agreement was necessary as terrorists had threatened the lives of Pakistanis and Chinese working and living in Pakistan.

The agreement would help safeguard china's national interests and promote cooperation between the two countries, he said.

The 18-article agreement defines terrorism, separatism and extremism, and outlines the scope of cooperation between the countries. The bill will be submitted for a final vote after deliberation on august 27, Xinhua News agency reported.

A number of Chinese engineers working in Pakistan in china-assisted projects have been targeted by terrorists in recent times.

Moreover, china has accused members of the East Turkistan Islamic movement in northwest china's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of undergoing training in Pakistan and Afghanistan to separate the oil-rich region from Chinese rule.

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In Marco Polo's steps

2006-08-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

In Marco Polo's steps
Branches of the legendary Silk Road travel through exotic Central Asia

By Elizabeth Dalziel
The Associated Press

ALONG THE SILK ROAD, China From the ancient oasis towns of Central Asia, we retraced the epic journeys traveled along the Silk Road, through desolate mountains and deserts, through busy bazaars and crumbling mud-brick towns.
Along the way, we followed the footsteps made by camel caravans to and from Central Asia and Europe by Marco Polo, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.

In ancient times, this legendary road a series of routes collectively known as the Silk Road was China's link with Central Asia and Europe.

Travelers crossed through several different branches. One was up the Gansu corridor to Dunhuang on the edge of the Taklamakan desert. Another began on the fringes of the Gobi desert following the Tianshan, or Heavenly Mountains, and heading to the oasis trading post of Turfan before arriving at Kashgar, at the foot of the Pamirs.

Our group of three myself, my mother and a friend opted for a haphazard itinerary that started off with an airplane journey from Beijing to Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang autonomous region.

From there, we flew to Kashghar and then jumped on a train that took us past the Taklamakan desert and dropped us 22 hours later in Turfan, famous for its grapes and melons.

Finally, we headed to Dunhuang, famous for its ancient Buddhist cave paintings, where we also rode in camel caravans as they did in ancient times.

Although some evidence points to a trade in jade along China's portion of the Silk Road, as far back as 7,000 years, the establishment of the trade route really occurred about 2,000 years ago.

Silk, one of China's prime exports, was of course moved to Europe and elsewhere via the route, as were exotic animals, ivory, gold and plants. It also facilitated the flow of new ideas and languages between far-flung cultures.

Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region in China's far west, seemed a world away from Beijing. The ethnic Uighur (also spelled “Uygar”) language, dress, the faces and the food all seemed more attuned to Central Asia than East Asia.

Still, images like the enormous statue of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong in Kashghar's center square reminded us of Beijing's grip on this region. Thousands of miles away, it shares the same time zone as the capital.

Kashgar has been a trading center for over 2,000 years, and this business drive continues to energize the city with endless negotiations at the famous bazaars, in the old town, and just about in any street corner.

Culinary adventures

If you want to haggle for a camel, or check out a horse's teeth before purchase, you are just a tractor's ride away from the livestock market. The Kashgar animal market is a wide, open space crowded with shouting hawkers, food stalls, and merchants shearing their sheep here, hair flying in the air.

There's another market for carpets, fine silks and other textiles. It's open daily in a formal building but sprawls with impromptu stalls out from every side.

One of the great aspects of travel in China is the food, and the Silk Road is no exception. At the livestock market, peddlers hawk Xinjiang's famous sweet melons, watermelons, and homemade vanilla ice-cream churned in wooden buckets.

You can also try “opke,” a broth made from goat's intestines and head. Less adventuresome travelers might want to try Xinjiang's staple delights such as kebabs, rice pullao, dumplings, noodles and a variety of flat breads or nans. You can also find a culinary cousin of the Jewish bagel the “girde” nan, which is cooked in an open pit oven.

We enjoyed choosing a freshly-slaughtered goat at the butcher's stall and then taking it to a nearby cook who boiled it into a delicious soup before our eyes.

To nourish your mind, you will find many wonderful archeological treasures at museums and digs along the Silk Route, excavated after hundreds of years from the Central Asian sands.

China, the United Nations and neighboring Central Asian countries plan a program aimed at reviving the ancient Silk Road by boosting investment, trade and tourism. The two-year Silk Road Project involves the governments of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Source

China's Suffers Worst Drought in 50 Years

2006-08-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

August 22, 2006 04:30 PM - Alex Pasternack, Beijing, China

The common expression "it flows like water," which is used to describe a supposedly limitless resource (ha!), probably never had much relevance in places like east Africa or rural China, and it certainly doesn't now. For the second week, southwest China is experiencing its worst drought in 50 years, leaving over 18 million people in fifteen Chinese provinces and regions suffering from drinking water shortages and affecting more than 130 million hectares of cropland and more than 17 million livestock. In the megalopolis of Chongqing, the water level in the legendary Yangtze river -- China's longest -- hit 3.5 meters (11.5 feet), its lowest in 100 years. According to the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources, "The severe drought will not ease up and is very likely to get worse."

Most surprising perhaps are the sudden numbers of "climate refugees" who are being transported to the western Xinjiang region as part of an emergency government program.

The "cotton exodus" started on Aug. 19 and will last until Sept. 5. Twenty-six trains will leave from Chongqing and another eight will carry 10,000 farmers from Chengdu, capital of the neighboring Sichuan Province...
Unmentioned however (in a story that has already largely gone unmentioned outside of China, and been given a positive spin on news cycles in China) are the causes--like reckless agricultural techniques, nearsighted land planning and high end-user consumption, aside from high temperatures--as well as the longer-term effects of the drought. Scarce and polluted urban water supplies will be further taxed, and widespread water table depletion and grain shortage, of the sort that Lester Brown has been making noise about for years, will get even worse.

And that's not to mention the social and political implications of direct and indirect climate migration: thousands of people may have to be moved (see the Three Gorges Dam) to make way for massive water-relocation projects in the coming years, while the continued migration of ethnic Chinese into Xinjiang could further indirectly threaten the Muslim Uighur minority that has long called for independence of the region they refer to as "East Turkestan." Just as it might be argued that drought in the Sudan was partly to blame for the ongoing genocide in Darfur, so it may be said that China's drought is abetting the country's repressive minority policies.

In Chinatown, perhaps the darkest, sexiest movie on the topic of water management, the nefarious water baron tells Jack Nicholson's detective Jake, "You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't." But this ain't Chinatown, and we can know. Huge environmental disasters like this aren't common, but unless we all see them as warning signs, they could be.

In addition to rainmaking, Beijing has also announced a huge environmental clean-up ahead of the 2008 Olympics. Also see : : Drought Marches on in the U.S.: On the Role of Climate Change : : 50 Ways to Save Water and : : The Long Hot Summer: When Water Matters and : : The THtv Conversation with Lester Brown. Also, Jay Z is now tackling the world's "99 [water] problems"

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Strict Control of China's Uighur Muslims Continues

2006-08-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

Strict Control of China's Uighur Muslims Continues
2006-08-16

Below is a press release from Forum 18
In China's north-western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, control over Muslim religious believers is much stricter than over believers of other religions, Forum 18 News Service has found. However, the authorities' control over Dungan mosques is less strict than over mosques used by Uighurs, a Turkic people mainly found in Xinjiang but also in Central Asian states. (The Dungans are a Chinese Muslim people also found in Central Asian states.)

The reason for this is that the Chinese government presumes - with some justification - that Uighur religiosity has a connection with advocacy of a separate Uighur state. The Chinese government's great sensitivity on this topic has been highlighted by the recent detention in Uzbekistan and deportation to China of a Canadian citizen and refugee from China, Huseyincan Celil, who is a Uighur activist and imam. On the surface though, there is within Xinjiang an apparent state tolerance of religious belief alongside tight state controls (see F18News 4 April 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=537).

Many Uighur's are Muslims, which shows itself in, for example, the widespread refusal by Uighur's to go to a Chinese restaurant because the food is not prepared according to Muslim requirements. Many devoutly Muslim Uighurs told Forum 18 that they do not think that they have the right – in Islam – to accept living under the rule of China, because "the Chinese are heathens." By comparison, in Central Asia when it was part of the Soviet Union, such arguments were not heard amongst devout Muslims, who had no hesitation in going to Russian restaurants.

Every Friday morning Xinjiang's imams are obliged to go to their local state Religious Affairs Bureau, to discuss the text of their Friday sermon with officials, Forum 18 learnt. At these Friday meetings, imams receive only "general instructions and may improvise" in their sermons. During the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the authorities force Muslim schoolchildren to have lunch. State employees are under similar pressure. "I am a deeply believing Muslim, but I have to hide this from my colleagues," one local Muslim teacher who preferred not to be named told Forum 18. "As a school teacher I cannot wear a beard and perform the namaz [Muslim prayers] at work. During Ramadan I have to eat with the other teachers in order to hide my faith." The teacher added that praying at home, without revealing this to others, would not cause problems (see F18News 29 September 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=662).

One medresseh [Islamic religious school] teacher told Forum 18 that the private teaching of religion to children is banned. "Children may receive a religious education only after the age of 15 in the medresseh in every district of Xinjiang or in the Islamic university in Urumqi," the teacher, who asked not to be named, told Forum 18 in Kashgar in late July 2006 (see F18News 15 September 2004 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=411). "When students are admitted their political views are investigated. During their studies, alongside religious subjects the students also study the policy of the Chinese Communist Party." This ban on the Islamic religious teaching of children is not applied rigorously outside Xinjiang (see F18News 1 September 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=641). In response, Uighur parents often take their children to other parts of China, where they can study freely at a medresseh.

Similar prohibitions on the religious education of children also apply to the state-controlled Patriotic Catholic Church in Xinjiang (see F18News 28 March 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=532).

The strictness of the authorities' control over Muslims also depends directly on the level of religiosity of Uighurs in different districts of Xinjiang. For example, in Hotan and Kashgar there is a notice at all mosques to the effect that state employees and children are not allowed to attend the mosque. In the yard of the mosque, detailed instructions are posted about what one is not allowed to do in the mosque (see F18News 28 September 2004 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=421). And in Hotan, where the population is more religious than in Kashgar, the number of instructions is greater.

However in Urumqi, Ghulja (the capital of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, bordering Kazakhstan) and in Turpan (Eastern Xinjiang), as well as in the Altai, - all regions in the north of Xinjiang - there are no such notices. The reason for this appears to be that the local Uighurs are less religious than those in the south. In Urumqi, Forum 18 observed children present at the mosque. "In principle the ban on children attending the mosque is not applied too strictly and children sometimes attend the mosque with their parents," the imam of the Usman mosque in Kashgar, Emed haji Yusuf, told Forum 18 on 30 July.

By contrast, in Hotan the ban on children attending the mosque is applied very strictly. For example, during the Friday prayers police guard the mosques to ensure that children do not attend.

The Chinese government also wages a strict campaign against Islamic movements such as Sufism and Wahhabism (followers of the form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia). Sufism is found mostly in southern Xinjiang (in Hotan and Kashgar). The Sufi zikr ceremony (ritual songs and dances) is banned, as are rituals at the graves of devout Muslims (see F18News 26 September 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=659). Books by Sufi authors are banned and Chinese scholars assert in their research that Sufism is a distortion of Islam. It is possible that the reason for this position is that, in the 19th century, it was members of the Sufi brotherhoods who resisted Chinese forces most fiercely. (There was a similar situation in Central Asia and the Caucasus during the 19th century Russian conquest.) In contrast, in the neighbouring Central Asian states Sufism is often encouraged by the governments, since the Sufi form of Islam which has become intertwined with local traditions is seen an effective alternative to fundamentalists.

Just as in Central Asia, so-called Wahhabis appeared in Xinjiang in the 1990s when local Muslims had the opportunity to go on the haj pilgrimage to Mecca, which is obligatory in Islam for those who are able to perform it. "The Wahhabis were very easy to spot," imam Emed haji Yusuf of Kashgar's Usman mosque told Forum 18. "They performed the namaz a little differently from us. However, about five years ago the authorities banned this movement on the grounds that it was causing division among Muslims. After this the 'Wahhabis' completely ceased their activities."

Some Muslims in southern Xinjiang are sympathetic to Wahhabism, Forum 18 found, but unlike in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan they have been frightened into inactivity by the Chinese government's strict policy. As a result, unlike in Uzbekistan, in Xinjiang there are no recorded cases of criminal prosecutions against Wahhabis.

Three years ago the authorities conducted a major reconstruction of the area around Kashgar's main Id-ha mosque, demolishing many small mud-built restaurants and tea houses where Muslims met to talk after prayers. In their place, modern buildings with a hint of Islamic architectural style were built. Many Uighurs complained to Forum 18 that, since the reconstruction, the famous district around the mosque "has lost its original spirit". Similar reconstructions have affected other towns in Xinjiang, such as Hotan.

In Urumqi, the old mosque was demolished and rebuilt as part of a shopping mall, including a Kentucky Fried Chicken branch and Carrefour supermarket, as Quentin Sommerville of the BBC World Service noted on 29 November 2005. One Uighur told him that "It really isn't appropriate. We come here to worship - but sometimes we can't hear our prayers because of the music and singing from the bazaar."

It is notable that the Chinese government's policy of assimilating the Uighurs has had an impact. The authorities are investing significant sums in the region's economy and encouraging Uighurs to become involved in business ventures, which many perceive there to be no alternative to. The BBC World Service was told by one Uighur that "it's getting more and more difficult for us to earn money now. Uighurs are doing anything they can to make a living - there's no alternative." The change in the economy is noticeable: ten years ago few cars were on the streets, while today they form the main means of transport.

This economic revival helps to assimilate the Uighurs, many of whom now want to send their children to Chinese-language schools, something unimaginable ten years ago. Several Muslims who told Forum 18 in recent years that they found it impossible to coexist with ethnic Chinese have since opened their own businesses. Now, they have told Forum 18 that they are prepared to submit to the Chinese government's religious and ethnic policies, to advance their own economic position. (END)

For more background information see Forum 18's Xinjiang religious freedom survey at http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=414; the previous 2003 Xinjiang religious freedom survey is at http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=143.

For analyses of other aspects of religious freedom in China, see http://www.forum18.org/Analyses.php?region=3

A printer-friendly map of China, including Xinjiang, is available from http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/atlas/index.html?Parent=asia&Rootmap=china

Source

Quick change in China

2006-08-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Rick Gunn
August 17, 2006

Editor's note: This is one in a series of journal entries from Rick Gunn, a South Lake Tahoe photographer, detailing his two-year bicycle journey around the world. Along the way, he is soliciting donations for The Make-A-Wish Foundation. To donate, go to wish.org. To read his complete "Wish Tour" journal, go to rickgunnphotography.com.

I'd never planned to fly in China.Flying here was for the seasoned masochist, or those with a goal of a nervous breakdown. But there I was, stuffed knees to chest, within the ridiculously scant space of a Chinese airliner.

Reeling at the depth of my most recent misfortune, my flight began when a passenger approached and clocked me in the head with his briefcase.
Just after he stepped on my foot, he took the seat next to mine. Almost immediately, without so much as a word exchanged between us, I was certain of three things about the man: that he loved garlic, didn't use deodorant and possessed an almost inexhaustible ability to produce gas.

After lift off, I was engulfed by the feature film (a Chinese documentary about the mating habits of Grouper-fish), before I caught my new friend as he began to drift to sleep, as if by the snap of a hypnotist, his neck unhinged over my armrest. Just as his head nearly settled upon my chest, a young boy in the seat behind me began screeching. This alternated with kung-fu kicks to the back of my seat. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, a toddler dropped a doody on a seat across the aisle. When the attendant was called for cleanup, she gagged mid-mop, and ran to the bathroom to vomit.

That's when I felt something wet drip on my arm ... then again. When I looked up, it was like a scene from a Hitchcock film.

There, racing through the cracks in my overhead compartment - was blood. Neat little lines of hemoglobin slowly raining down on me. I ripped from my seat belt and jumped to the aisle, ready to scream like a little girl. The attendant barked at me to find another seat.
Just after he stepped on my foot, he took the seat next to mine. Almost immediately, without so much as a word exchanged between us, I was certain of three things about the man: that he loved garlic, didn't use deodorant and possessed an almost inexhaustible ability to produce gas.

After lift off, I was engulfed by the feature film (a Chinese documentary about the mating habits of Grouper-fish), before I caught my new friend as he began to drift to sleep, as if by the snap of a hypnotist, his neck unhinged over my armrest. Just as his head nearly settled upon my chest, a young boy in the seat behind me began screeching. This alternated with kung-fu kicks to the back of my seat. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, a toddler dropped a doody on a seat across the aisle. When the attendant was called for cleanup, she gagged mid-mop, and ran to the bathroom to vomit.

That's when I felt something wet drip on my arm ... then again. When I looked up, it was like a scene from a Hitchcock film.

There, racing through the cracks in my overhead compartment - was blood. Neat little lines of hemoglobin slowly raining down on me. I ripped from my seat belt and jumped to the aisle, ready to scream like a little girl. The attendant barked at me to find another seat.
And these were the least of my problems.

As I moved to a new seat, I collapsed, head in hands. I wondered how, in seven short days, this trip had gone so wrong. And for the millionth time, I replayed that moment. The moment I'd realized someone had stolen my passport, $2,600 in cash and, most depressingly, my chance at riding to Tibet with my co-rider and new friend, Christoph Fladung.

It all begun a week earlier on the western edge of China's Xinjiang Province.

Directed off the road by a pair of Kyrgyz border officials, we pulled to the center of a dilapidated town - a derelict village whose population lived entirely within the rusted-out hulls of trucks, railroad cars and shipping containers.

Human waste gathered in muddy pools next to stinking heaps of garbage that fretting dogs picked. When we reached the center, a sizeable crowd began to gather. Dirty and listless, they closed in with curious stares. "Is there someone here I could talk to about purchasing property?" I asked sarcastically.
"Let's go," Christoph followed, "I'm not really in the social mood right now."

Two days later, we reached the Uyghur city of Kashgar.

The Uyghurs, or ethnic separatists, as the Chinese government refers to them, originated from a Turkic-Uzbek ancestry. Arriving from Mongolia, they'd ushered in Islam, then swept out the Tang Dynasty around the 9th Century.

When the Manchu Army invaded the area in 1865, China had recaptured an oil-rich chunk of desert, a hunk of real estate roughly the size of Alaska.
Since that time, the government has flooded the area with Han Chinese, purposefully diluting the Uyghur population from 90 percent to less than 50 percent.

But the Uyghurs are resilient. Their culture booms within Kashgar's Sunday market - it is less a market than an explosion of Uyghur merchants gathered 50,000 strong.

Wandering first through the animal market, we were instantly overtaken by the dirt, dung and debris - all of which flung from the surrounding livestock.

Many of these same animals met their fate in nearby food stalls - a massive conglomerate of tarp-covered cookeries that billowed with a blueish-white smoke.

That afternoon, deep within the market, we perused an endless array of fruits, vegetables, fabrics, crafts, carpets, metalwork and knives, until we finally found ourselves within a large spice market. Once there, medicine men and maniacs boasted freakish potions, and their unique abilities to heal. A partial list of these concoctions included: dried snakes, lizards, frogs, starfish, and live scorpions - their purposed sting a part of some sadistic healing regiment.
We finally tumbled from the market, our brains rattling like marbles in a jar. Dizzy from the height of it all, I made my way to a hotel phone to share the experience with a friend.

That's when it happened.

I'd simply placed my money belt down on the counter and walked away. By the time I realized what I'd done, it was gone. My passport, documents and three months worth of budget. Gone.

My mind raced back to the words of a best friend, a compliment before I left. He said, "Rick, if there is one person that is not afraid of change, that would have to be you."

As I stood for a moment in realization of the change that had occurred, I struggled hard to believe his words.

Then came a hell week.

Seven days later, I had taken four flights, covering more than 8,000 miles. I had frequented two police stations, eight banks, five government offices, and had filled out countless forms. I was harassed by police, swindled by cab drivers, taken by merchants, laughed at by children and cursed at by an elderly woman.

When I was done, I returned to Kashgar from the east coast cities of Hong Kong and Guanzhou. I finally reached the light of my dingy hotel room, and came upon my bike, sitting dusty, locked and lonely. As I opened the lock, I thought of Christoph.

He had bent over backward trying to help me before he'd left, but pushed for time by his visa, he finally realized it was time to move on. Waiting for me might have meant jeopardizing one of his life's dreams: cycling from Germany to the base of Mt. Everest.

That night, as I crawled into bed, I wondered about my dream. I was halfway through this roller-coaster bicycle journey around the world. I wondered what other obstacles I would come across, and to what heights I would once again soar.

As I did, I recalled something I said to Christoph just before saying good-bye.

I said, "I have no idea how long it will take me to return, Christoph, but if it's humanly possible ... I will see you on that hill."

Breakout

July 28 - Aug. 10, 2006

Kashgar, Urumqi, Guanzhou, Hong-Kong and Urumqi

Mileage log: 10,550-10,650

Elevation: 0-3,200 feet

Source

Uzbekistan, China Discuss Judicial Cooperation

2006-08-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2006 -- Members of the Supreme People's Procuracy of China today had talks in Tashkent with Bahtyor Jamalov, the deputy chairman of the Uzbek Supreme Court, and Prosecutor-General Rashitjon Kadyrov.

Uzbek state-controlled media say the Chinese delegation is in Tashkent for two days.

The sides reportedly agreed to enhance the judicial cooperation initiated in 2000, including within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The SCO is made up of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

All six countries have in the past pledged to cooperate in the fight against what they call separatism and religious extremism.

Uzbekistan earlier this year extradited to Beijing Huseyincan Celil, an ethnic Uyghur with Canadian citizenship, wanted for his alleged involvement in an armed attack on Chinese government officials.

China last week (August 10) reported Celil's trial was under way.

Source

Canadian Uyghur Activist Goes On Trial

2006-08-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

August 11, 2006 -- The Chinese Foreign Ministry has announced that it has put on trial a Canadian Muslim activist on terrorism charges.

Huseyincan Celil, a Uyghur activist was recently deported to China from Uzbekistan.

Beijing claims the 37 year-old Celil is involved in a 2000 armed attack on a government delegation in predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region, home to China's Uyghur minority.

A Canadian Embassy spokeswoman in Beijing said her government has received assurances from China that it will not seek the death penalty for Celil.

China refuses to recognize Celil's Canadian citizenship.

The Uyghur activist was arrested in Uzbekistan on March 27 while visiting relatives who live there.

Tashkent extradited him to China in June, alleging that he is a Turkish citizen known as Guler Dilaver.

Kyrgyzstan in turn says it wants Celil for the 2000 murder of an Uyghur community leader.

(AP)

Canuck's terror trial begins: Muslim activist could face execution in China if found guilty

2006-08-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

BEIJING -- A Canadian Muslim activist who was extradited from Uzbekistan to his native China in March has gone on trial on terrorism charges, the Chinese foreign ministry said yesterday.

Huseyin Celil's family was told last week that if convicted, he could face execution as early as yesterday, the Washington, D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project reported on Tuesday.

Jennie Chen, a Canadian Embassy spokesman, said yesterday, however, that the government had received assurances from China that it will not seek the death penalty for Celil.

Celil -- whose family lives in Burlington -- "is a Chinese citizen suspected of being involved in East Turkestan terrorist activities," said a man on duty at the foreign ministry's press affairs office who refused to give his name.

TORTURED, ESCAPED
"This case is being tried and no verdict has yet been reached," he said.

Celil was wanted in China for his involvement in a campaign for the rights of the country's minority Muslim Uyghurs. He was arrested in China and tortured, but escaped from prison in 2000 and fled to Uzbekistan and Turkey before reaching Canada, where he was given citizenship.

China's government says the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, based in the western region of Xinjiang, is waging a violent separatist campaign.

AL-QAIDA LINKS

Beijing also says the group has links to al-Qaida and has received arms and training from the terror network.

Diplomats and foreign experts are skeptical and say bombings and other violence linked to the group by China actually stem from personal disputes. Celil was detained in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in March, while visiting his wife's relatives.

He was travelling on a Canadian passport when he was detained, Chen said.

The Canadian government had earlier called on Uzbekistan not to extradite Celil.

Source

Liberal MP Defends Rights of Canadian Citizen Facing Execution in China

2006-08-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

August 11, 2006

OTTAWA – The Honourable Bryon Wilfert, Official Opposition Critic for Foreign Affairs (Asia-Pacific) today called on the Government of Canada to seek assurances from the Chinese government that they will not seek the death penalty in Huseyincan Celil case. Reports indicate that Mr. Celil could face imminent execution.

Mr. Celil, a Canadian Citizen from Burlington, Ontario was extradited from Uzbekistan to China in June in spite of a Canadian diplomatic note which was sent by Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay.

According to reports, Mr. Celil founded a political party in China to work on behalf of the Uyghur Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region. He was recently sentenced to death in China for human rights work he did on behalf of the Uyghur community.

“I addressed this issue in June as well as raised my concerns with the Ambassador of China that Mr. Celil’s life is in danger and we need to take steps to ensure that he receives fair treatment,” said Mr. Wilfert.

Mr. Wilfert is calling on the Chinese government to provide updated information on Mr. Celil’s condition and to promise that the Canadian will not be executed.

“I would like assurance as well from the Canadian government that it will take all steps necessary to ensure this Canadian citizen will receive appropriate treatment and that any proceedings will be held in an open forum,” said Mr. Wilfert.

Source

Travelling China's ancient Silk Road

2006-08-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

By ELIZABETH DALZIEL

ALONG THE SILK ROAD, China (AP) - From the ancient oasis towns of central Asia, we retraced the epic journeys travelled along the Silk Road through desolate mountains and deserts, through busy bazaars and crumbling mud-brick towns.

Along the way, we followed the footsteps made by camel caravans to and from central Asia and Europe by Marco Polo, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.

In ancient times, this legendary road - a series of routes collectively known as the Silk Road-was China's link with central Asia and Europe.

Travellers crossed through several different branches. One was up the Gansu corridor to Dunhuang on the edge of the Taklamakan desert. Another began on the fringes of the Gobi Desert following the Tianshan, or heavenly mountains, and heading to the oasis trading post of Turfan before arriving at Kashgar, at the foot of the Pamirs.

Our group of three - myself, my mother and a friend - opted for a haphazard itinerary that started off with an airplane journey from Beijing to Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang autonomous region. From there, we flew to Kashghar and then jumped on a train that took us past the Taklamakan desert and dropped us 22 hours later in Turfan, famous for its grapes and melons. Finally, we headed to Dunhuang, famous for its ancient Buddhist cave paintings, where we also rode in camel caravans as they did in ancient times.

Although some evidence points to a trade in jade along China's portion of the Silk Road, as far back as 7,000 years, the establishment of the trade route really occurred about 2,000 years ago in Roman times.
Silk, one of China's prime exports, was of course moved to Europe and elsewhere via the route. But so were exotic animals, ivory, gold and plants. It also facilitated the flow of new ideas and languages between far-flung cultures.

Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region in China's far west, seemed a world away from Beijing. The ethnic Uighur language, dress, the faces and the food all seemed more attuned to central Asia than east Asia.

Still, images like the enormous statue of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong in Kashghar's centre square reminded us of Beijing's grip on this region. Thousands of kilometres away, it shares the same time zone as the capital.

Kashgar has been a trading centre for over 2,000 years, and this business drive continues to energize the city with endless negotiations at the famous bazaars, in the old town, and just about in any street corner.

If you want to haggle for a camel, or check out a horse's teeth before purchase, you are just a tractor's ride away from the livestock market. The Kashgar animal market is a wide, open space crowded with shouting hawkers, food stalls, and merchants shearing their sheep here, hair flying in the air.

There's another market for carpets, fine silks and other textiles. It's open daily in a formal building but sprawls with impromptu stalls out from every side.

One of the great aspects of travel in China is the food, and the Silk Road is no exception. At the livestock market, pedlars hawk Xinjiang's famous sweet melons, watermelons and homemade vanilla ice-cream churned in wooden buckets.

You can also try "opke," a broth made from goat's intestines and head. Less adventuresome travellers might want to try Xinjiang's staple delights such as kebabs, rice pullao, dumplings, noodles and a variety of flat breads or nans. You can also find a culinary cousin of the Jewish bagel - the "girde" nan, which is cooked in a open pit oven.

We enjoyed choosing a freshly-slaughtered goat at the butcher's stall and then taking it to a nearby cook who boiled it into a delicious soup before our eyes.

To nourish your mind, you will find many wonderful archeological treasures at museums and digs along the Silk Route, excavated after hundreds of years from the central Asian sands.

China, the United Nations and neighbouring central Asian countries plan a program aimed at reviving the ancient Silk Road by boosting investment, trade and tourism. The two-year Silk Road project involves the governments of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Source

Canadian's execution date passes

2006-08-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

Canadian's execution date passes
China was expected to kill activist yesterday
Supporters say he's alive, press Ottawa for help
Aug. 11, 2006. 06:23 AM
SURYA BHATTACHARYA
STAFF REPORTER

A Burlington Muslim leader facing possible execution in China is still alive and pressure is building on Ottawa to secure his release, his wife and supporters say.

It was widely feared that Huseyincan Celil, 37, a political activist who has fought for the rights of the Uighur ethnic minority in northwest China, would be executed yesterday.

But on Wednesday, in a statement read over the telephone to a news agency, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Celil's case "is being handled according to law and no verdict has been reached yet."

Gloria Nafziger, refugee co-ordinator with Amnesty International Canada, said Celil's trial is proceeding and "one can assume he is alive."

Responding to China's statement, she said: "It has been six weeks since he's been held by Chinese authorities, and China did not give any specific details on what it means.

"There is no consular access. He is being held incommunicado and we have no information on where exactly he is being held."

Chinese authorities imprisoned Celil in the mid-1990s as he worked with Uighurs, Turkish-speaking Muslims accused by China of fomenting a violent separatist movement.

He escaped after being held without charge until 1998 and fled to Uzbekistan and Turkey before coming to Canada as a refugee in 2001. Celil became a Canadian citizen last year.

He was arrested in March in Uzbekistan, which extradited him in June to China where he is accused of taking part in a terrorist attack on a government delegation in Xinjiang in 2000 and of murdering a Uighur in Kyrgyzstan, according to an Uzbek news agency.

His supporters vehemently deny the accusations.

Celil's wife, Kamila Telendibaeva, is due to deliver their fourth child Aug. 20. Even if there's no execution, she worries whether his health can survive prison.

"How they can give him the death penalty?" she said. "He is a Canadian.

"We all want his release. He did not do anything wrong. We want to see proof or evidence about why he is a terrorist," she said. "All he did was speak up against China."

She is pressing the Stephen Harper government to secure her husband's release with help from two opposition MPs.

Liberal Omar Alghabra (Mississauga-Erindale) and New Democrat Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park) are calling on Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay to intervene in the case.

"All Canadians should be concerned about this situation," Nash said.

"Celil came here as a refugee. Now we have stood by and allowed him to be extradited to a country that uses the death penalty.

"This is not how we treat Canadians abroad."

MacKay has previously said his office has had trouble dealing with China on this issue, which has refused to recognize Celil's Canadian citizenship.

The Uyghur Canadian Association is also rallying support for Celil. "The terrorism charges against him are groundless, baseless and bogus," said Mohamed Tohti, the group's president.

According to Amnesty International, China is by far the world's biggest user of the death penalty, executing at least 1,770 people last year.

Source

China denies imminent execution of Uighur-Canadian

2006-08-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

Reuters
Published: Wednesday, August 09, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - China denied on Wednesday a report that it was about to execute a Uighur-Canadian activist it accuses of terrorism, saying his trial was not yet over.

China has waged a harsh campaign in recent years against what it says are violent separatists and Islamic extremists pressing for an independent nation of "East Turkestan" in its far-northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for 8 million of the 19 million people in Xinjiang.

Huseyincan Celil, who fled China in the 1990s, was due to be executed on or before Thursday for "separatist or terrorist activities," Amnesty International said in an emailed statement.

China accuses Huseyincan of taking part in a terrorist attack on a government delegation in Xinjiang in 2000 and of murdering a Uighur in Kyrgyzstan, an Uzbek news agency said in June.

Huseyincan, 37, was arrested in Uzbekistan in March and was extradited in June to China, which refused to recognize his Canadian citizenship obtained last year, London-based Amnesty said.

"Huseyincan is a Chinese citizen suspected of having taken part in East Turkestan terrorist activities," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

"The case is being handled according to law and no verdict has been reached yet," he said in a prepared brief statement read to Reuters by telephone.

Canada has tried to obtain further information on Huseyincan's case from China but has been unsuccessful, Amnesty said.

Source

Wife: China to execute my husband

2006-08-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

Ottawa still trying to confirm which prison holds Canadian
By The Canadian Press

TORONTO — Foreign Affairs is scrambling for information Friday after word that a Canadian man being held in China could be executed as early as next week, the Globe and Mail reported.

Canadian Huseyin Celil’s sister in China called the imprisoned man’s wife in Burlington, Ont., on Tuesday, saying he was being held in a prison in western China and could be executed by Aug. 10.

Celil’s wife, Kamila Telendibaeva, said a police officer from the Kashgar area leaked the details to her sister-in-law, who has been trying to find his whereabouts for weeks.

Celil was arrested in Uzbekistan in March while visiting his wife’s family.

In June, he was extradited to China, where he could face the death penalty for an alleged involvement in "separatist" activities.

Until now, Canadian officials had no idea where Celil was being held because the Chinese government wouldn’t disclose the location.

It also wouldn’t recognize Celil’s Canadian citizenship, which he earned in November of last year.

"She was crying when she called me," said Telendibaeva. "I told her not to cry because there is still time. Time is running out but we can still save him."

Government officials were tipped off about the phone call on Wednesday by Mohamed Tohti, a friend of Celil and president of the Uyghur Canadian Association.

"After I got the shocking news from Kamila I shared this information with government officials," said Tohti, who has been in close contact with Conservative MP Jason Kenney, the parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Kenney said Friday he found the reports very troubling and the government would do everything possible to confirm their truth.

"Should we confirm the veracity of these reports, the government will obviously express its concern in the most serious terms possible," said Kenney.

Sources told the Globe that a Canadian consular official in China was dispatched to find out more information about Celil’s condition and to confirm the allegations about the possible execution order.

But critics say the government isn’t doing enough.

"Foreign Affairs needs to act with great speed; Mr. Celil is in danger," said Chris McLeod, the imprisoned man’s lawyer.

In 1994, Celil was arrested in China on charges of forming a political party, his wife said. After serving just a month in prison, he escaped, eventually buying false documents to enter Uzbekistan. He eventually landed in Turkey before being granted refugee status in Canada in 2001.

Meanwhile, in China, a court sentenced him to death in absentia for his alleged role in the anti-government political movement.

Source

Canadian in China faces execution, Ottawa told

2006-08-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

Foreign Affairs seeks facts after finding out death penalty imminent for terror suspect
SCOTT ROBERTS

With a report from Gloria Galloway in Cornwall, Ont.

The Department of Foreign Affairs was scrambling for information yesterday after receiving word that a Canadian man, Huseyin Celil, being held in China could be executed as early as next week, The Globe and Mail has learned.

His sister in China called the imprisoned man's wife in Burlington, Ont., on Tuesday, saying he was being held in a prison in Xinjiang province and could be executed by Aug. 10. Mr. Celil's wife, Kamila Telendibaeva, said a police officer in the eastern Chinese city of Kashgar leaked the details to her sister-in-law, who has been trying to find his whereabouts for weeks.

"She was crying when she called me," Ms. Telendibaeva said. "I told her not to cry because there is still time. Time is running out, but we can still save him."

Mr. Celil (pronounced je-lil) was arrested in Uzbekistan in March while visiting his wife's family. In June he was extradited to China, where he could face the death penalty for an alleged involvement in so-called separatist activities.

Until now Canadian officials had no idea where Mr. Celil was being held, because the Chinese government would not disclose the location. His sister has heard conflicting reports of him being held in either Kashgar or Urumqi. It also refused to recognize Mr. Celil's Canadian citizenship, which he got in November of last year.

Born in China's far-western Xinjiang province, Mr. Celil is a Uighur, a Muslim, Turkic-language minority that has long fought with the Chinese government for greater freedom. Chinese officials say Mr. Celil is a terrorist who, among other things, helped assassinate a political leader in Kyrgyzstan, an allegation his family and his lawyer deny.

Canadian government officials were tipped off about the phone call on Wednesday by Mohamed Tohti, a friend of Mr. Celil and president of the Uyghur Canadian Association.

"After I got the shocking news from [Mr. Celil's wife] Kamila, I shared this information with government officials," said Mr. Tohti, who has been in contact with Conservative MP Jason Kenney, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's parliamentary secretary.

Mr. Kenney, who was attending a Conservative caucus retreat yesterday in Cornwall, Ont., said that he found the reports troubling and that the government was doing everything possible to confirm them.

"Should we confirm the veracity of these reports, the government will obviously express its concern in the most serious terms possible," he said. Sources told The Globe and Mail that Mr. Kenney met with Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay for 30 minutes on Thursday to discuss the issue, and that a Canadian consular official in China was dispatched to find out more about Mr. Celil's condition and to confirm the possible execution order.

Mr. Harper may also soon become involved in the case. Sources said he would place a phone call to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao or President Hu Jintao if it were confirmed that Mr. Celil faces death.

For weeks, Canadian officials trying to gain information about Mr. Celil's detention have been frustrated by their Chinese counterparts.

"Foreign Affairs needs to act with great speed; Mr. Celil is in danger," said Chris McLeod, the imprisoned man's lawyer. "The government simply isn't doing enough. They need to send an envoy now. The Prime Minister needs to intervene in a very direct way. Whether that means recalling our ambassador, something needs to be done."

In 1994, Mr. Celil was arrested in China on charges of forming a political party, his wife said. After serving a month in prison he escaped, eventually buying false documents to enter Uzbekistan. He made his way to Turkey before being granted refugee status in Canada in 2001.

Meanwhile, in China, a court sentenced Mr. Celil in absentia to death for his alleged role in the anti-government political movement. His wife believes the conviction will allow the Chinese to speed up a possible execution.

"How can I raise my children, if I don't have a husband and they don't have a father?" said Ms. Telendibaeva, who is to give birth to her fourth child in less than three weeks. "He will be killed if we don't act now."

Before his arrest, Mr. Celil was an imam at a Hamilton mosque and studying accounting at Mohawk College.

Mr. MacKay said yesterday he met with China's foreign minister when the two were in Malaysia recently and raised the Celil case. As a result, Mr. MacKay said Canadian embassy officials met with Chinese officials in China and "have secured from them that he will not be executed.''

Canada will continue to push for consular access, Mr. MacKay added, and as Mr. Celil goes through the court process, Ottawa will do "what we can to ensure that his rights are respected and that he is given due process.''

Source:

The U.S. can't help all oppressed people

2006-08-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

But America is
the hope to many,
Uyghurs included

Monday August 07, 2006
A few weeks ago, I had never heard of the Uyghur culture. Today I wonder how many other folks in the world, besides the Uyghurs, want America to save them.

Last week, I wrote about St. Albans native Bob Rogers, a "new bohemian" who travels the world on a tandem bicycle named Zippy with Claire, his wife.

Since then I have spent considerable time reading his journals on his Web site at www.newbohemians.net.

But by far the most intriguing entry in his journal is of a meeting he had with a Uyghur man in western China in 2005.

The Uyghur people are not Chinese, who are primarily of the Han culture.

The Uyghurs belong to one of those cultures that the Chinese have overwhelmed and subjugated in the same way they took control of Tibet.

The Uyghur man Bob wrote of in his journal was 47.

"He says he was a boxer and a basketball player. He is fat now in a successful businessman sort of way. Proof of prosperity.

He orders his Han staff around like a stereotypical Ugly American, though he is a Chinese citizen. However, he is not Han."

The man was rankled by the fact that his neck of the woods had lost its autonomy at the hands of both the Chinese and Russians.

Bob said it was clear the man believes America is the answer to all his problems.

"He raises both hands high into the air, lifting up an imaginary something to great heights. ‘America,' he sighs. ‘America.'

"Then his beatific smile turns into a snarl. ‘China!'

"He turns up a little finger and spits on it, an ultimate insult. ‘China bad.' Spit. " ‘America!' his voice softens again."

"Then the man snarls at the thought of Saddam Hussein. In doing so, he shows solidarity with another small ethnic minority, the Kurds of northern Iraq."

Eventually, the man raises his glass of beer to President George Bush. That's when it becomes clear to Bob that "He really thinks (he is not alone among Uyghurs) that America will someday restore the Uyghur homeland of western China to them."

His reaction, of course, begs the question: Just how many oppressed cultural minorities in the world hope and fervently believe that America as the "policeman to the world," will liberate them? And how many of those ethnic groups will become embittered when it doesn't happen?

"Poor man," Bob wrote. "Even an ego as big as George W. Bush's would not consider attacking China.

"The commercial dragon is awakening and that is generally good for the world economy.

"The sleeping dragon of the Chinese military might is not something to be awakened, not for a few million Uyghurs-sheepherders, horse and camel wanderers of the steppes and deserts of China.

"No, the Uyghurs will be free when they free themselves and the Han will probably never allow that. They will dominate and eventually overwhelm with sheer population numbers as they have done to the Tibetans.

"The dragon sleeps, but is still a dragon nonetheless."

Peyton may be reached by e-mail at davepeyton@davepeyton.com.

Source

China and Russia request extradition of five persons from Albani

2006-08-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

Tirana, 15:25

China has reiterated the request for extradition of five Chinese Muslims released from Guantanamo Bay and now in Albania, but this time Russia backed the request.

According to Albanian media, the request for extradition was sent from the session of the Organization for Central Asian Security. The call referred to Washington also, since Albania accepted those men upon USA's request.

The five men -- from the largely Muslim Uighur minority that dominates China's far western Xinjiang region -- were released from U.S. military detention and sent to Albania where they have asked to be treated as refugees.

In the meantime, however, one of the released detainees said that he and his compatriots would prefer to get back to their USA and reunite with their relatives, since they could hardly adjust in Albania.

Tirana's refusal to extradite them strained Albania-China relations.

Source

Ceku-Berisha rift over Uighur Muslims

2006-08-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

Tirana, 10:34

There have been misunderstandings between the Prime Ministers of Albania and Kosovo, Sali Berisha and Agim Ceku, over China's request for extradition of Chinese Muslims.

China urged Albania to extradite five Chinese Muslims (Uighur minority group), saying they are terrorists, not political refugees. The United States recently released the five men from its prison at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba. They arrived in Albania recently seeking asylum.

The Albanian government has said it will process the men's asylum applications according to local and international law. That decision has upset China, which says the men were part of a separatist group fighting to create an independent Uighur homeland in Xinjiang province.

Tirana's daily Gazeta Sqiptare quotes Kosovo's PM Agim Ceku as saying the Bejing-Tirana rift could harm Kosovo status process. Ceku fears that China, which is permanent member of the UN Security Council, might veto any decision or hamper the status process.

Berisha, on the other hand, stressed that the United States voiced firm guarantees that there will be no problems over China's veto-rights.

Source

China : Chongqing farmers picked to pick cotton in Xinjiang

2006-08-04T18:54:00.000-07:00

August 2, 2006

Chongqing, one of the largest cities of China Republic is to send 100,000 farmers to pick cotton in Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Region of western during the September-November season.

Farmers, mostly middle-aged women are expected to pick 70-80 Kilogram of cotton per day earning RMB3,000 after their stint. More than 600,000 farmers belonging to various parts of China travel 3,000 Kilometer to pick cotton in China.

Xinjiang is the biggest cotton base in China with an annual cotton production of over 1.5 million tons annually. Cotton output is expected to reach 2.5 million tons by 2015.

Source

Group celebrates traditions, fine arts of Central Asian countries

2006-08-04T18:50:00.000-07:00

By Christina Stigliani
Thursday, August 03, 2006

The Bloomington-based Silk Road Ensemble presented its 14th annual Silk Road Festival Sunday afternoon at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. The event began in the theater lobby with exhibits from a dozen countries of the Silk Road region, the historical route that connected the East and West from Turkey to China. The event was manned largely by students studying these languages in the IU Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European and Central Asian Languages.

Graduate student Eric Schluessel explained the displays of clothing and weapons of the Uighurs, an ethnically Turkic Muslim people of western China. Holding up a small knife he said, "A Uighur man gives this to his wife when he goes away on a trip so she can protect herself in his absence."

Other exhibits also included weaponry as well as popular music and art, clothing and jewelry.

The performances began several minutes late due to technical difficulties, and one act had to be postponed until later in the program, but once the singers and dancers reached the stage, the nearly full house received them enthusiastically. Standout performances included Kyrgyz folk songs by Munara Mailybekova, classical Indian dance from the State of Orissa by Nazanin Pallavi, Alevi mystical music sung and performed on the stringed saz by Ozan Jemali and traditional music by three young Mongolian siblings using the piano, the horse-head fiddle and the astonishing voice of the older teenaged brother, an accomplished throat singer.

Following an intermission, the professional musicians of the popular Silk Road Ensemble took the stage to present pieces from North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. A medley of Azerbaijani folk songs prompted audience members to begin bellydancing in front of the stage, and the final piece, a pop song in the Lebanese dialect of Arabic, ended the evening on an upbeat note.

Shahyar Daneshgar, director of the Silk Road Ensemble and a lecturer in the IU Department of Central Eurasian Studies, thanked the audience for coming in the extreme heat and humidity of that afternoon, especially the performers and guests from Central Asia who wore traditional heavy felt robes and hats to the festival.

"550 people came, and the theater was practically full. It's amazing that so many people came out in this heat, and I think the program this year was wonderful," he said.

Audience members surveyed after the show were unanimous in their enjoyment of the music and dances.

"Every piece was too good to pick just one favorite, but I really liked the classical Indian dancer and the Middle Eastern music, especially the Iranian songs," said Katrina Bristow of Iowa City, Iowa, who was in town to visit her daughter at IU.

"I loved the diversity of the program in bringing so many different cultures together, especially the Indian dancer and the Kyrgyz lady's singing," said Mohammad Kaviani, associate director of the Center for Economic Education at IU Purdue University-Indianapolis who drove to Bloomington with his family for the event. "It's great that the Bloomington community can have this experience."

Source

Canadian may face death in China, family learns

2006-08-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

SCOTT ROBERTS

Globe and Mail Update

The department of Foreign Affairs was scrambling for information Friday after word that a Canadian man being held in China could be executed as early as next week, The Globe and Mail has learned.

Canadian Huseyin Celil's sister in China called the imprisoned man's wife in Burlington, Ont., on Tuesday, saying he was being held in a Kashgar prison and could be executed by Aug. 10 Mr. Celil's wife, Kamila Telendibaeva, said a Kashgar police officer leaked the details to her sister-in-law, who has been trying to find his whereabouts for weeks.

“She was crying when she called me,” said Ms. Telendibaeva. “I told her not to cry because there is still time. Time is running out but we can still save him.”

Mr. Celil (pronounced je-lil) was arrested in Uzbekistan in March while visiting his wife's family. In June, he was extradited to China, where he could face the death penalty for an alleged involvement in “separatist” activities.

Until now, Canadian officials had no idea where Mr. Celil was being held because the Chinese government wouldn't disclose the location. It also wouldn't recognize Mr. Celil's Canadian citizenship, which he earned in November of last year.

Born in China's far-western Xinjiang province, Mr. Celil is a Uighur — a Muslim, Turkic-language minority group that has long fought with the Chinese government for greater freedom.

Chinese officials say Mr. Celil is a terrorist who, among other things, helped assassinate a political leader in Kyrgyzstan - an allegation his family and his lawyer staunchly refute.

Government officials were tipped off about the phone call on Wednesday by Mohamed Tohti, a friend of Mr. Celil and president of the Uyghur Canadian Association.

“After I got the shocking news from Kamila I shared this information with government officials,” said Mr. Tohti, who has been in close contact with Conservative MP Jason Kenney, the parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Mr. Kenney, who was attending a caucus retreat in Cornwall, Ont. on Friday, said he found the reports very troubling and the government would do everything possible to confirm their truth.

“Should we confirm the veracity of these reports, the government will obviously express its concern in the most serious terms possible,” said Mr. Kenney.

Sources told The Globe that Mr. Kenney met with Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay for 30 minutes on Thursday to discuss the issue and that a Canadian consular official in China was dispatched to find out more information about Mr. Celil's condition and to confirm the allegations about the possible execution order.

Mr. Harper may also soon become involved in the case. Sources said he would place a phone call to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao or President Hu Jintao if it is confirmed that Mr. Celil faces death.

For weeks, Canadian officials have been frustrated with their Chinese counterparts as they attempt to gain information on Mr. Celil's detainment.

“The Uzbeki authorities advised our government that, prior to his extradition to China, they had received assurances from the (People's Republic of China) that he would not face capital punishment pursuant to his apparent conviction in absentia,” said Mr. Kenney.

“We would certainly hold the Chinese government to that undertaking and our officials bare working actively to verify his whereabouts and take the next steps,” he said.

It is also an obligation of China to provide consular access to Mr. Celil, said Mr. Kenney, something the Chinese government has so far refused.

But critics say the government isn't doing enough.

“Foreign Affairs needs to act with great speed; Mr. Celil is in danger,” said Chris McLeod, the imprisoned man's lawyer. “The government simply isn't doing enough. They need to send an envoy now. The Prime Minister needs to intervene in a very direct way. Whether that means recalling our ambassador, something needs to be done.”

In 1994, Mr. Celil was arrested in China on charges of forming a political party, his wife said. After serving just a month in prison, he escaped, eventually buying false documents to enter Uzbekistan. He eventually landed in Turkey before being granted refugee status in Canada in 2001.

Meanwhile, in China, a court sentenced Mr. Celil to death in absentia for his alleged role in the anti-government political movement. His wife believes the conviction will allow the Chinese to speed up a possible execution.

“How can I raise my children if I don't have a husband and they don't have a father,” said Ms. Telendibaeva, who is due to give birth to her fourth child in less than three weeks. “He will be killed if we don't act now.”

Before his arrest, Mr. Celil was an imam at a Hamilton mosque and studying accounting at Mohawk College.

With files from Gloria Galloway in Cornwall.

Source

China Urges Albania to Hand Over Five Uyghurs

2006-08-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

China Urges Albania to Hand Over Five Uyghurs

Beijing had once again urged Tirana to extradite the five Chinese Muslims (Uyghurs) suspected of terrorism in China

Media in Tirana say Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Albania last weekend to hand over the five East Turkistan terrorist suspects rather than give them political asylum.

There has been no official response from Tirana so far, however, Albania media say the country undergoes a big diplomatic rift, which could severe the relations between Albania and China.

Tirana announced that the five Uyghurs had been issued asylum two weeks ago, and now they are treated as political refugees.

The five men, from the largely Muslim Uighur minority that dominates China's far western Xinjiang region, were released from U.S. military detention few months ago and sent to Albania, where they have asked to be treated as refugees.

Official Beijing qualified those men as suspected East Turkistan terrorists now harboring in Albania and requested their extradition.

Source

Missing in China

2006-08-04T18:45:00.000-07:00

Still no word from Canadian human rights activist facing death penalty in China
By Sharda Vaidyanath
Epoch Times Ottawa Staff Jul 27, 2006
Despite weeks of pressure from the Canadian government, China has yet to release Canadian citizen and Burlington resident Huseyincan Celil, who was arrested because of his political activism on behalf of human rights in China's Xinjiang Province and who faces a possible death sentence.

Foreign Affairs spokesperson Pamela Greenwell confirmed that he is in Chinese custody but specifics about his whereabouts and well-being are still unknown. Greenwell said that "the communication is ongoing to secure Consular visits."

The Chinese consider Celil "a terrorist" and that is very worrying, said Alex Neve, Secretary General of Amnesty Canada, which launched a letter writing campaign on Celil's behalf in April when he was extradited by Uzbekistan to China.

Celil, 37, was visiting his in-laws in Uzbekistan, accompanied by his wife and children, when authorities arrested him on March 27, and secretly deported him to China roughly a month ago. Neve said, "obviously he didn't think the risk was serious." Amnesty is in touch with his family and the situation for his pregnant wife is "very stressful." Neve said.

Neve added that the Canadian government needed "a very intense and comprehensive strategy" to deal with this case and that Canadians must maintain high level pressure to secure Celil's release. Neve said, "It is precisely at such a time when you are held in incommunicado detention that the risk of serious human rights abuses, most particularly torture, exists." He explained that torture was very commonplace in China, a country that he said routinely victimized weak detainees.

Celil, who worked for the human rights for the Muslim Uighur minority of China's northwest Xinjiang Province, fled China's persecution of that community in 1994 and was sentenced to death in absentia for his political activism. He came to Canada in 2001. After obtaining refugee status, he subsequently became a Canadian citizen, settling with his family of four young children in Burlington.

In many ways, Xinjiang Province suffered a fate similar to Tibet since the predominantly Han Chinese took control of the province in 1956. The discrimination and lack of rights the Uighur Muslim minority faced pushed them towards separation from Mainland China. Huseyincan Celil fought for freedom from Communist control of his people and province and is therefore considered a threat to China.

Uzbekistan, much like other central Asian republics, has a security arrangement with Beijing to turn in outspoken separatists or political activists. According to the Amnesty International website, China is using the War on Terror that began after the September 11 attacks to harshly suppress many political dissidents.

Source

Gitmo Uighurs granted asylum

2006-08-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

ALBANIA
Gitmo Uighurs granted asylum
TIRANA -- Albania has granted asylum to five Chinese Uighur Muslims released from the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, a government official said Wednesday.
The asylum requests by the Uighurs, who were resettled in Albania after being released from the detention camp in Cuba in May, had been approved earlier this month, an Interior Ministry source who requested anonymity told Agence France-Presse.
At the time of their release to Albania, China demanded that the five be handed over, describing them as members of a grouping the United Nations listed as a terrorist organization.

Source:

Xinjiang Uyghur Muqam Art Ensemble visits Tashkent

2006-07-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

Xinjiang Uyghur Muqam Art Ensemble of the People's Republic of China will hold concerts on the stage of Turkistan Palace on 29-30 July in Tashkent.

The concerts were organised with the assistance of the Chinese Embassy in Uzbekistan as well as Chinese Association for Foreign Cultural Affairs and its branches in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Chinese National Cultural Center in Uzbekistan, Uyghur National Cultural Center, as well as Chinese companies and restaurants operating on the territory of Uzbekistan. Han Zhengtang will head the delegation to arrive in Tashkent. Among other members of the delegation will be his deputies Ai Niwaer Abuduxukuer, Zhang Lili, and others.

The programme scheduled for the nights is very extensive. It includes the playing of national musical instruments, performance of folk songs – all accompanied by dancing. Both collective and solo songs will be performed. Overtures, collective songs and dances will be performed in the first part of the concert. During the second half, solo songs, as well as excerpts from the Uyghur drama "Unchem" will be performed. One of the most impressive dance items will be "motley dance". In general, Uyghur artists will perform over 20 pieces. Upon complete of their tour in Uzbekistan, the ensemble will leave for Kazakhstan.

Source: UzReport

Wal-Mart in fight for China's market

2006-07-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

By Don Lee
Los Angeles Times
URUMQI, China - In this remote region along the old Silk Road, Carrefour is on the march.

The Paris-based retailer has already opened two stores in Urumqi, one in the northern end where many ethnic Chinese live and another next to a mosque in the Muslim section populated by Uighurs. This fall, Carrefour will open a third mega-store in the city of 2 million, selling groceries alongside its other goods.

What about Wal-Mart Stores?

``I can't imagine they will come here,'' Christian Roquigny, who manages Carrefour's Uighur store, said as he walked past a golden-domed mosque.

Roquigny boasted that his store sold no pork and was certified as halal, or permissible under Islamic dietary law. Wal-Mart managers, he said, aren't given the same flexibility to adapt.

As the world's leading retailers battle for new markets around the globe, they are increasingly setting up in places like Urumqi, where Carrefour's average checkout total is just over $5.

Wal-Mart and Carrefour, the world's No. 1 and No. 2 retailers, have stepped up their expansion in China in recent years, virtually matching each other, store for store, in many locales.

Carrefour's operation in this western city demonstrates why the French company has raced ahead of its multinational rivals in the world's most-populous nation. By joining with Chinese partners, adapting to local culture and employing a supply chain that includes 18-wheel trucks and three-wheel bicycles, Carrefour has become the biggest foreign retailer operating in China.

It operates 79 stores in 32 Chinese cities compared with 60 locations in 30 cities for Wal-Mart. Last year, Carrefour's sales in China totaled $2.2 billion, compared with $1.2 billion for Wal-Mart, according to the Commerce Ministry in Beijing.

Wal-Mart is accelerating its store openings in China -- it plans to open at least 18 this year, six more than Carrefour -- and analysts are reluctant to bet against the Bentonville, Ark.-based discount retailer given its enormous resources. Its global sales last year reached $285 billion, triple that of Carrefour's. Wal-Mart bought $18 billion in goods from Chinese manufacturers last year.

But as a retailer in China, Wal-Mart is a small fish. Its strategy of offering tian tian ping jia, or ``everyday low prices,'' hasn't had a big effect on Chinese mom-and-pop shops that are used to cutthroat pricing. Wal-Mart has been unable to replicate its super-efficient logistics system in China largely because it lacks scale.

Even Wal-Mart's staunch anti-union stance is being challenged, ironically, in a country where unions have little power. Government-backed trade union officials in China have been trying to organize workers at foreign enterprises and have been especially critical of Wal-Mart's resistance to the idea.

Carrefour has more international experience than Wal-Mart. The French company operates in 29 countries, about double the number for Wal-Mart. Both chains have struggled in Asia, however, pulling out of countries such as South Korea. And despite their push in China, Chinese retailers dominate.

The more stores it can open, the better chance Wal-Mart can leverage its mass scale to squeeze prices lower and drive efficiencies in purchasing, inventory management and distribution.

Source:

Wife begs China to release husband facing execution

2006-07-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

Former activist accused of terrorism

Canadian consulate has had no success
Jul. 21, 2006. 01:00 AM
JESSICA LEEDER
STAFF REPORTER

The pregnant wife of a Burlington man detained in China and facing a death sentence says allegations her husband is a terrorist are "lies" and the Canadian government should not stop trying for his release.

"My husband is not a terrorist. It's all lies. He just spoke against China," Kamila Telendibaeva told reporters at a rally outside the Chinese Consulate in Toronto yesterday. Clutching a Canadian flag in her right hand with a sign begging for her husband's freedom stretched across her belly, the eight months pregnant Telendibaeva said her three children are begging to know when their father, named Huseyincan Celil, will come home.

She's at a loss for what to tell them.

Since March, Celil has been cut off from his family. He was arrested by government officials while trying to renew a visitor's visa during travels to Uzbekistan, where his wife's family lives.

Attempts by Canadian consular officials to have him released were unsuccessful.

At the time, Celil's family said they thought he was arrested because of Uzbekistan's close ties to China, where Celil, who was born in China, spent his younger years working as a political activist in Xinjiang province.

In the mid-1990's, Celil was imprisoned for his activism, and his connections to the Uyghurs, a minority group of Turkish-speaking Muslims who have been accused by China of leading a violent separatist movement. He escaped, and was eventually given refugee status in Canada. Meanwhile, the Chinese government sentenced him to death in absentia.

As soon as he was arrested in Uzbekistan, his family feared he would end up in the hands of the Chinese government. In spite of much lobbying on the part of Canadian officials, Uzbek authorities quietly deported him to China last month.

The Chinese have yet to reveal where they're holding Celil, who became a Canadian citizen last year. He has had no access to consular officials, lawyers or his family.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay told Reuters yesterday his office has had trouble dealing with China on the issue.

"When you mention his name — we've approached the ambassador, we've approached the foreign minister — what they say is `Oh, do you mean that terrorist, that Uyghur terrorist?'" said MacKay. "(The Chinese) are not very forthcoming with information about Mr. Celil," he said.

Although Celil has been accused of having multiple aliases, using one of them to assassinate a political leader, and committing terror-related crimes in Kyrgyzstan and China, he has not been formally charged.

"He only has one name," his wife Telendibaeva said yesterday, dismissing the allegations.

Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International in Canada, said he hoped Prime Minister Stephen Harper would find a moment at last week's G-8 Summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to personally lobby Chinese President Hu Jintao for Celil's release. Neve said he suspects Celil is being tortured and regardless of the allegations against him, he should be afforded his rights.

"On a simplistic level, it doesn't matter who the person is ... a criminal or a saint, no one should ever be tortured," he said. "If the Chinese are not prepared to bring legitimate charges against him, it kind of says to the rest of us this is not about legitimate criminal prosecution, this is about persecution."

Mohamed Tohti, president of the Uyghur Canadian Association, said he fears Celil's case will be overshadowed by the situation in Lebanon, and he'll be left to languish in prison.

"Canadians in Lebanon, sooner or later, they will come home," he said. "The life of another Canadian is at stake. This is an emergency. There is great urgency for his family," he said.

In Burlington, Celil's wife has been quietly preparing for the arrival of the couple's fourth child.

But she said she hesitates to think of the birth — or of potential names for the child — in her husband's absence.

Telendibaeva said her Hamilton-based lawyer, Chris MacLeod, has applied for a visitor's visa to China. He plans to try to find Celil himself.

Source: Toronto Star

Uyghur Asylum Seeker Extradited from Germany

2006-07-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Germany is the first democratic country to forcibly extradite Uyghur asylum seeker to China.

On 13 July 2006 the German authorities forcibly deported the 42-year-old Uyghur asylum seeker Mr. Muhtar Tiliwaldi, to China.
At 12am the detainee was accompanied by two police from a holding centre for deportees to Frankfurt Airport, where he will be escorted to China.

Mr. Muhtar Tiliwaldi arrived in Germany in 1998 seeking political asylum. Unfortunately his application was rejected, alongside the applications of 100 other Uyghurs. From 2001 to 2006 he lived with “exceptional leave to remain” in Mainz. On 16 June 2006 he was arrested by the German police and held in the police holding centre for deportees.

Despite the protest of the two associations, the Eastern Turkestan Europa Union and the World Uyghur Congress, he was deported yesterday to China.

“This first violent extradition of an Uyghur asylum seeker to China from a democratic country like Germany upset me”, said Dolkun Isa, President of the Eastern Turkestan Europa Union. “I am deeply worried for Mr. Tiliwaldi as there is a high risk that he will be tortured in China. This event has dismayed every Uyghur living in Germany and Europe. This is the first time that an Uyghur can’t feel safe in a western democratic country”.

Every attempt by Uyghurs [in China] to preserve their own traditional culture and religion is described as “separatism” and criminalised.
Chinese government reactions to Uyghur demonstrations are very harsh. This may entail the arrest and imprisonment of peaceful Uyghurs. Use of torture, summary trials, and death sentences are also common.

East Turkestan is the only region in China in which, as far as Amnesty International can ascertain, political prisoners are executed. Since 1997, at least 210 people were sentenced to death and at least 190 were executed, according to Amnesty International.

In the past years thousands of people were arbitrarily arrested, many of them are still in custody.

According to Amnesty International, torture of political prisoners in Eastern Turkestan occurs systematically. It remains the only region in China where such methods are still used.
Amnesty International has, for many years, documented the increasing number of forced deportations of Uyghur asylum seekers and refugees to China from neighbouring countries like Nepal, Pakistan, Uzbekistan or Kirgizstan.

Amnesty International notes that many deported Uyghurs face gross human rights violations such as torture, unfair trials or even execution.
The Eastern Turkestan Europa Union is profoundly worried about the situation in East Turkestan as the actions of the Chinese authorities have increased tensions in the country.

The Chinese government must finally understand that it is their unfair domination of East Turkestan of the past 57 years that has been the prime cause of numerous unrests.
The Uyghurs are the biggest minority in China, with 25 million people.

Source
World Uyghur Congress

China mum on fate of detained Canadian

2006-07-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

Demands for legal consular access denied more than three weeks into disappearance
GEOFFREY YORK

BEIJING -- More than three weeks after a Canadian citizen vanished into Chinese police custody, Chinese authorities are rejecting all of Canada's requests for information on the fate of the 37-year-old man.

The prisoner, Huseyincan Celil, was allowed into Canada as a political refugee in 2001 and became a Canadian citizen. But he was arrested in Uzbekistan on March 27 and extradited last month to China, where he could face the death penalty for alleged "separatist" activities in a Muslim province.

For three weeks, the Canadian government has been trying to get access to Mr. Celil to give him the consular service that any imprisoned Canadian is entitled to receive. But Chinese authorities are refusing to give any details of his whereabouts, even though they are obliged under international law to permit consular access to a foreigner who is detained in their custody.

The Globe and Mail has also made repeated requests for information about Mr. Celil to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Ministry of Public Security over the past several weeks, but both ministries have refused to comment.

The only hint of his fate has come from a Chinese newspaper, which mentioned his case as an example of China's fight against "terrorism."

The Canadian embassy in Beijing has confirmed that it has failed to obtain any details of Mr. Celil's fate or whereabouts, even after three weeks of requests and a formal diplomatic note -- one of the toughest actions that a government can take without affecting its relations with another country.

"We are making every effort to obtain immediate consular access to Mr. Celil in China," a spokeswoman for the Canadian Foreign Ministry said recently. "We will continue efforts to confirm Mr. Celil's well-being and to ensure he is afforded due process and his rights are protected."

Mr. Celil was arrested in China in the mid-1990s for his work on behalf of the Uighur people, the Muslim minority in the Xinjiang province of western China. He was sentenced to death in absentia for founding a political party to work for the Uighurs. After escaping from China, he travelled to Turkey and came to Canada as a refugee in 2001.

Chris MacLeod, the lawyer for Mr. Celil's family in Burlington, Ont., says the Canadian government is not taking enough action in the case.

"It's very troubling," he said in an interview. "A Canadian citizen is being punted around like a football. He travels to Uzbekistan and finds himself in the interior of China. It's unbelievable."

Mr. MacLeod is seeking a visa to enter China to search for Mr. Celil. He also wants Canada to send an official envoy to China to pursue the case.

"Diplomatic notes just aren't going to solve this," he said. "Canada hasn't taken any significant steps yet. We're a country of immigrants and refugees, and there should be an onus on the Canadian government to take a clear stand in protecting him. We should be a safe haven for people who are persecuted elsewhere."

Mohamed Tohti, president of the Uighur Canadian Association, said the Chinese government seems to be saying that Mr. Celil is still a Chinese citizen, even though the Chinese constitution specifies that someone who gains citizenship in a foreign country automatically loses Chinese citizenship.

"If this loophole opens, there are a million Chinese-Canadians who could be punished by China," he said.

Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in China who is now a political scientist at Brock University, said the Chinese authorities are using the Celil case to send "a message of disdain" to the new Conservative government in Ottawa.

"China has developed greater confidence of its role in the world in recent years," Mr. Burton said in an interview, "and sees Canada as less and less important to its national interests."

He criticized the Canadian embassy for failing to act strongly enough. "I cannot but think that if Mr. Celil was not a Uighur-Canadian, the embassy would be much more vigorous in pursuing this matter."

Source:

Canadian's detention in China sparks furor

2006-07-21T16:38:00.000-07:00

Critics rally outside consulate in Toronto, as secrecy envelops Huseyin Celil
SCOTT ROBERTS

With a report from Reuters

At least once a week three-year-old Abdul Celil picks up the telephone and pretends to talk to his father, Huseyin.

With nothing but a dial tone at the other end, the boy asks how his daddy is and when he's coming home.

He never gets an answer so he asks his mother. She tells him soon but fears that may be a lie.

The truth is Kamila Telendibaeva doesn't know when or even if her husband is coming back to their Burlington, Ont., home. She doesn't even know if he's alive.

"That's my worst fear," she said yesterday outside the Chinese consulate in Toronto.

"I don't know if he's being tortured or killed. I can't talk to him. I don't even know where he is. No one does."

Mr. Celil (pronounced je-lil) became a Canadian citizen last November.

This year he travelled to Uzbekistan to visit his wife's family. He was arrested in March and extradited last month to China, where he could face the death penalty for "separatist" activities.

He is being held in China under a veil of secrecy. Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said Beijing will not say where Mr. Celil is and won't even acknowledge his Canadian citizenship.

He hasn't spoken with his family or his lawyer since his arrest.

Critics are calling the official Canadian response too slow and too weak.

"The Canadian embassy in Beijing has not done everything I wish they would do to express our distress," said Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat based in China.

"I feel the ambassador should be more involved in the case. We need to be speaking to the foreign ministry and finding out where Mr. Celil is and ensure his rights are being respected."

Ms. Telendibaeva, who is seven months pregnant with her fourth child, said she is exhausted by efforts to find her husband.

At a protest yesterday, she joined about 20 people shouting "Shame on China" in an effort to raise awareness about the case.

Mr. Celil was born in China's far-western Xinjiang province. He is a Uighur -- a Muslim, Turkic-language minority group that has long fought with the Chinese government for greater freedom.

Before his arrest, Mr. Celil was an imam at a Hamilton mosque and studying accounting at Mohawk College. Family and friends say he is a devoted husband.

Cihan Aydin describes him as a mentor.

"He's just so peaceful and is always looking to help people however he can," said Mr. Uildirim, 30, who asked Mr. Celil to be the imam at his wedding.

"He taught me a lot and was there when anyone needed him."

Chinese officials say Mr. Celil is a terrorist who, among other things, helped assassinate a political leader in Kyrgyzstan.

In 1994, he was arrested in China on charges of forming a political party, his wife said. After serving just a month in prison, he escaped, eventually buying false documents to enter Uzbekistan.

That is where the couple met, while he was working as a fabric salesman in 1998. They married a year later and spent two years in Turkey before coming to Canada as refugees in 2001.

Meanwhile, in China, a court sentenced Mr. Celil to death in absentia for his alleged role in the anti-government political movement.

Amnesty International yesterday slammed the Chinese government for failing to uphold basic human rights. It also called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to personally address the issue before the situation deteriorates.

"I think we are worried that we are not yet seeing a firm and assertive response now that [Mr. Celil] is in China," said Alex Neve, general secretary of Amnesty International Canada.

"We need our highest levels of government involved."

Mr. MacKay wouldn't disclose the government's next move, only saying it's doing everything it can.

"The Chinese won't acknowledge it . . . When you mention his name -- we've approached the ambassador, we've approached the foreign minister -- what they say is 'Oh, do you mean that terrorist, that Uighur terrorist?' " the Foreign Minister said.

In the meantime, Ms. Telendibaeva waits and worries about her husband's fate.

"I don't know what to do any more," she said. "I want him to see his baby but I don't know if he will. We need help. I think the government is our only hope."

Source:The Glob and Mail

INTERVIEW - Iran, China contemptuous of rights issues - Canada

2006-07-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Iran contemptuously ignores Canada when it tries to raise the case of a prominent philosopher jailed on suspicion of espionage, Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay complained on Thursday.

Canada is also having trouble persuading China to allow access to a human rights activist who Beijing says is a terrorist, MacKay told Reuters in an interview.

Ottawa wants Iran to either charge or release Ramin Jahanbegloo, a philosopher and writer with Canadian and Iranian citizenship who was arrested in Tehran in May.

MacKay said both China and Iran were "very difficult to deal with" when it came to human rights.

"Iran has taken the approach of they just essentially ignore us. It is sad in this world of diplomacy that they show out-and-out contempt for Canada," he said.

"This guy (Jahanbegloo) is a world-renowned academic. He hasn't -- and this is the bizarre thing in my assessment of the case -- written anything that could be construed as inflammatory attacks upon his own government."

Canada has had poor relations with Iran since 2003, when Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi died in custody in Tehran after being arrested.

MacKay said he had not seen a report in a Canadian newsmagazine this week that said Jahanbegloo had allegedly made a video confessing that he planned to participate in a U.S.-backed revolution.

"This is certainly not a foreign practice to Iran, to have their captives confess to things that they're accused of," he said.

Canada has had little luck so far trying to help Huseyincan Celil, a Canadian citizen who is also a member of the Muslim Uighur minority. He was arrested in the central Asian nation of Uzbekistan in March and then deported to China.

"The Chinese won't acknowledge it ... When you mention his name -- we've approached the ambassador, we've approached the foreign minister -- what they say is 'Oh, do you mean that terrorist, that Uighur terrorist?'" said MacKay.

"(The Chinese) are not very forthcoming with information about Mr Celil."

Uighur activists say they fear China could put Celil, 37, on trial and then execute him. Celil has three young children in Canada and his wife is pregnant.

Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for about 8 million of the 19 million people in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang. Beijing has waged a long campaign against Uighur separatists, whom it labels terrorists.

Source: Reuters

Fleeing China, Landing in Guantanamo

2006-07-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

By Hauke Goos

In 2000, five men left their homes in northern China to escape the prospect of torture and imprisonment. They dreamed of a future in the United States. Caught up in America's war on terror along the way, they instead ended up in Guantanamo. It's been six years since they last saw their families.

They sit on their beds in a barracks on the outskirts of the city, waiting. The door is ajar, revealing a cloudless late spring day in Tirana, Albania, where it promises to be a hot day. None of the five men says a word. They've been waiting -- not just the entire morning, not just the entire day before, but the past five years -- for some country, any country, to agree to grant them political asylum.

They want to move on with their lives.

Through the window they see a white United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) Toyota pull into the courtyard. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting China today, where she'll meet with President Hu Jintao. They'll be discussing human rights, or so they say. Every politician who visits China these days is supposedly there to talk about human rights. But true or not, the news represents a shred of hope for the five men.

They're wearing short-sleeved shirts and brand-new sneakers. Abu Bakker Qassim, the oldest, has taken on the role of the group's leader. Adel Abdulhehim has three children back home in China. Akhdar Qasem Basit rarely speaks. Ahmed Adil was so frustrated with the endless wait that he finally wrote a letter to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ayub Haji Mohammed, the youngest, left his parents' home at 18 to study in the United States.

They look as if this weren't the first time they had dressed up in anticipation of finally beginning their new lives.

The men are Uighurs, members of a Turkic minority in China's far northwest Xinjiang Uygur region bordering Mongolia. The Uighurs dream of having their own country one day, East Turkestan. In the eyes of the Chinese government, that makes them potential terrorists.

A road to nowhere

The five men left their home six years ago, hoping to escape repression at the hands of Chinese authorities, hoping to find a better, freer life abroad. But then came September 11, and the men became entangled in the machinery of world politics. They were bombed and beaten, betrayed, accused and humiliated. They finally ended up in Guantanamo.

The driver of the white Toyota walks toward the office. The five men watch. They share three sleeping rooms and one toilet. The walls are painted a swimming pool green, the windows are barred and bare light bulbs hang from the ceiling. Albania's national refugee camp was once a military barracks. A uniformed guard stands at the door.

Human rights activists were still interested in the five Uighurs when they were prisoners of the Americans. But now that they have been released, they are more a practical problem than a moral one. The United States doesn't want them, they can't go back to China, and many other countries -- Germany included -- have refused to grant them asylum. Everyone, it seems, is worried about offending China, a powerful trading partner.

Ayub, the youngest, walks to the window, which frames a view of shimmering mountains in the distance. He is thin, wears his black shirt over his belt and sports the beginnings of a traditional Uighur man's black moustache. He points outside.

The camp is surrounded by a high wall, topped by rolls of barbed wire glinting in the sun. The men are free, but they remain prisoners -- five young men unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, five men who went to war without knowing it.

Abu Bakker Qassim, the eldest, used to think it was all a big misunderstanding. Back in Xinjiang, which he and the others call East Turkestan, he was trained as an upholsterer. After working in a state-owned leather factory, he started his own business. He is a quiet, affable man with large glasses. The inscription on his T-shirt reads "Athletic 76 - Boys of Europe."

Abu Bakker says his parents were nationalists, but their nationalism was impotent and silent. They were at odds with Chinese policies and dreamed of independence, but they never dared do anything about it.

Until February 1997, that is. That was when the Uighurs took to the streets in Yining, Abu Bakker's home town, demanding social and religious freedom. Abu Bakker, 28 at the time, didn't participate. He had married three years earlier and his new wife had given birth to a son a short time later. At the time, he preferred caution over nationalism.

Instead of marching, he witnessed how the police broke up the protests. "They were shooting at children and they used water cannons at temperatures of twenty below zero," he says. "They arrested tens of thousands." At least 10 people were killed and more than 190 injured.

For Abu Bakker, husband, father, small businessman, this demonstration was an eye-opening experience. He decided to express his views in the future, even publicly. Like others in Yining, he knew that the Uighurs had their own country once, between 1944 and 1949, and that they only wanted what they believed was rightfully theirs.

"Suddenly we began openly criticizing China. We didn't think it was a crime to be an Uighur, to earn money and to work for a better life."

Tortured in China

Abu Bakker was arrested in 1998, one year after the protests. He was tortured with electroshocks until he was finally willing to confess to practically any accusations. After seven months he was released, but his fears stayed with him. He was afraid for his family and his own life, constantly anticipating an ominous, nighttime knock at the door.

He decided to leave China. In January 2000, Abu Bakker went to Kyrgyzstan, where he sold Russian watches, ropes and bags in a local market. His plan was to earn enough money to bring his wife and child to Kyrgyzstan, so that they could continue on to Turkey, where many Uighurs live. And perhaps, he thought, they would move to America one day.

The United States is a promised land of sorts for most Uighurs. It has a few Uighur communities, Radio Free Asia is based there and there is even an Uighur-American Association, founded in Washington in 1998. The US is seen as tolerant, and many Uighurs believe that those who make it there can fight for the Uighur cause without having to risk their lives in China.

Abu Bakker met Adel Abdulhehim -- the man with three children back home -- in Kyrgyzstan. Six years younger than Abu Bakker, Adel had already been imprisoned a number of times. His brother-in-law was one of the organizers of the February 1997 demonstration and was later executed. The two men decided to go to Turkey, where they had an Uighur acquaintance who owned a leather goods factory.

In mid-2001 they traveled through Tajikistan, then crossed the border into Pakistan. To save money, they decided to travel by bus, which meant they would need a visa for Iran. Because Pakistan often sends Uighur refugees back to China, the two men decided to wait for the visa in neighboring Afghanistan. They had heard about a group of Uighurs who lived in a camp not far from the Afghan city of Jalalabad, just across the border, where they hoped to stay until their visas arrived.

There are two opinions about this camp. Abu Bakker and the other men describe it as little more than a collection of run-down huts. But for the US government, it's an al-Qaida camp where Muslim terrorists are trained to do battle against America.

The two men met two other Uighurs in the camp, Akhdar Qasem Basit and Ahmed Adil. Ahmed, 26 at the time, had come to Afghanistan via Kazakhstan and Pakistan. He had hoped to earn money for his visa in Pakistan, but life there was more expensive than he had anticipated, and his funds ran out after a year. He wanted to go to Germany or Canada. Like Abu Bakker, Akhdar, 27, comes from Yining. He left when he ran into trouble with Chinese intelligence.

A man in the camp had a radio. But to avoid further dampening an already gloomy mood, he only reported good news, which meant that the men didn't find out what had happened in the United States on September 11, 2001. But the man with the radio did tell Adel that al-Qaida had attacked America, and that the US wanted the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, who was allegedly hiding in Afghanistan. The two men were convinced that this conflict had nothing to do with them. They were merely guests in Afghanistan, and America was their ally.

But their certainty ended abruptly when American troops bombed the camp in October, forcing them to flee into the mountains. They had almost no food and sought shelter from the cold in caves. Ayub Haji Mohammed, the youngest in the group, had joined them shortly before they left the camp. His father had become modestly affluent with his clothing and textile business. The family planned to send Ayub to school in the United States, where they had distant relatives. But first they sent him to friends in Pakistan, from where he was to travel to the promised land.

What the men didn't know was that they were hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora, where the Americans believed bin Laden was also hiding. After persevering for two months, they decided to return to Pakistan, in a grueling, three-day trek across a landscape of snow-capped peaks.

The set-up

They received a warm welcome -- unusually warm, as they later realized -- in a village on Pakistani soil. But when they arrived they were exhausted, hungry and naïve, and gratified that the villagers had even slaughtered a lamb in their honor. After the meal they were taken to the local mosque. They were told that the police were searching the village and that they would be taken -- on Toyota pickup trucks -- to a safe place. "It was a trap, but how were we to know?" says Abu Bakker today, standing with the other men in the courtyard of the Albanian refugee camp. They may be safe now, but they have trouble understanding why every step along the way was a step in the wrong direction.

That night they were first taken to a Pakistani police station and then to a Pakistani prison. The Americans had offered a ransom for Muslims suspected of supporting al-Qaida.

"We were surprised," says Abu Bakker, "but we were also hopeful. We thought that if we identified ourselves as Chinese Uighurs, the Pakistanis would send us back to China. So we told them we were Uzbeki Afghans, hoping that they would turn us over to the Americans." China, they believed, was their enemy, and America their friend and ally.

"We were blindfolded and our hands were tied," says Ahmed. The captured Uighurs were then loaded into buses and taken to Kandahar. "Kandahar was worse than the Chinese prison," says Abu Bakker. "Soldiers in Kandahar beat up Ayub, the youngest in our group. They forced his arms behind his back and beat him on the knees."

The men were interrogated, yelled at, beaten and then interrogated again.

"Do you speak English?"

"No."

"Why don't you motherfuckers speak English?"

If they answered "yes," the soldiers would shout: "Where did you motherfuckers learn to speak English?"

After a week, one of the Uighurs noticed the US flag on a soldier's uniform. "We're in the hands of the Americans!" he told the others, clearly relieved. "We are safe!" They told the American soldiers about the Uighurs' struggle for freedom. "You have the wrong men," they kept telling their captors. "We don't have a problem with you. In fact, we have a common enemy: China."

After six months in Kandahar, the five Uighurs -- gagged, bound, blindfolded and hooded -- were taken to the airport, where they were given earplugs and loaded onto a plane.

Lost in Cuba

When they landed in Guantanamo in mid-2002, the men were given prisoner numbers 260, 276, 279, 283 and 293. By then they were considered terrorism suspects, but they had no idea why. The men had landed at a US naval base, but it was essentially a no-man's land where foreign citizens were ineligible to file legal complaints in US courts. The closer the men came to the promised land, the more they perceived it slipping beyond their reach.

They were neither prisoners-of-war nor criminals, but "enemy combatants." There were no charges, no hearings, no defense attorneys. According to US President George W. Bush, they could be held indefinitely, or for the duration of his "War on Terror." They were repeatedly interrogated. Are you associated with the "Islamic Movement of East Turkestan?" they asked. The Chinese government claims the Uighurs have connections to bin Laden, who it claims supports and directs the Uighurs' struggle for independence. The "Islamic Movement of East Turkestan," say Chinese authorities, is essentially an arm of al-Qaida.

To this day, Abu Bakker and the others deny having been members of the group. They are upholsterers, students, small businessmen, but not terrorists, they say. In fact, they believe that the "Islamic Movement of East Turkestan" is a phantom organization, invented and kept alive by the Chinese secret police.

Ayub, the youngest, suffered the most at the hands of the Americans. He has a food allergy and had been told to avoid eggs, bread and fish. After a doctor at Guantanamo confirmed the allergy, guards adhered to Ayub's dietary requirements by simply withholding the foods to which he is allergic. On some days they would place an empty plate into his cell. When Ayub asked why they had brought him an empty plate, they told him that it was his special diet -- doctor's orders. Why couldn't they bring him something else, he asked? No idea, the guards replied, suggesting he take up the matter with their superiors.

Ayub became very thin, at times weighing as little as 52 kilograms (115 lbs.). "When I sat down I was sitting on bones," he says. "I had no fat left and hardly any muscles." He began a hunger strike at least six times, "but it really didn't make any difference."

Once a few soldiers took pity on Ayub and brought him an apple. Ayub took it into his cell. Guards found the apple a short time later, but the stem was missing.

"Where's the stem?" they asked. "Where did you hide it?"

He said he didn't know. He asked them if they thought he had wanted to make a skeleton key with the stem. Ayub spent the next 28 days in solitary confinement.

In late 2004, a few months after the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo are entitled to have their cases heard in a US court, the prisoners had their first opportunity to appear before a military tribunal and respond to the charges that had been brought against them. At issue was their status as "enemy combatants" -- and their future.

Ayub, emaciated and worn down from months in solitary confinement, was suspicious. He was taken to a small room and told to sit on a white plastic chair. The chairman of the tribunal entered the room and sat down on a slightly raised, black leather chair in front of Ayub, whose feet were chained to a bolt set into the floor.

The tribunal accused him of traveling to Afghanistan to learn how to use weapons, and then fleeing to Pakistan with a group of armed Arabs. The minutes of the hearing show that, throughout the interrogation, Ayub believed that the Guantanamo tribunal was operating in the same way as a normal court.

"You said that you went to Afghanistan, but not for weapons training," says the clerk. "In that case, what was the reason?"

"I already said all that two and a half years ago," Ayub replies. "It's all in the records. I've already told you everything."

Ayub, Abu Bakker, Adel, Ahmed and Akhdar were given the status "no longer enemy combatant," which meant they were no longer considered dangerous. It was good news, but no one told the prisoners, who by then had been in Guantanamo for two and a half years.

They were also unaware that there was growing criticism in the United States of interrogation methods, the treatment of detainees and of Guantanamo in general. By then, human rights organizations had begun acting as intermediaries for lawyers eager to represent the prisoners.

Boston attorney Sabin Willett signed up because, as he says, he refused to allow the Bush administration to undermine the basic tenets of the US constitution. In March 2005, Willet filed a petition on behalf of Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdulhehim, hoping to force the government to finally allow his clients to stand trial.

The plight of the Uighurs

With his prominent jaw and forelock, Willett, a Harvard graduate and partner in a respected Boston law firm, bears a passing resemblance to the young John F. Kennedy. A crime novelist in his spare time, Willett has a refined sense of timing and dramatics. "There is probably no group of Muslims anywhere in the world more pro-American than the Uighurs," he told a court. "The Uighurs have always suffered under religious and political persecution by the Chinese communists. I can remember the days when, in this country, we had a great deal of sympathy for someone with that kind of history." Willett wanted to protect his country's constitution against his government. And he was the first person who truly wanted to help the five Uighurs since they had left China.

Four months later, Willett was allowed to visit his clients in Guantanamo for the first time. When he discovered that they had long since been cleared of charges, he filed an emergency petition with the US Supreme Court. But no country was willing to accept the Uighurs. US officials say they spent two years searching for a suitable country to grant the men asylum, but that every one of the more than a hundred governments they contacted turned down their request.

On January 19, 2006, Ahmed wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "I find it difficult to imagine how a country like the United States, which claims that it promotes and protects the democratic rights of oppressed peoples, can treat someone the way I have been treated. I wonder whether the American government will keep me imprisoned here forever if it is unable to find a country that will accept me. Is this justice?"

A hearing was scheduled in Washington for May 8. It was a potentially precarious trial for the US government. Faced with the prospect of the court ordering the Uighurs to appear in person, which, by bringing them onto US soil, would have given the men the right to apply for political asylum, the government was suddenly in a hurry to take action.

An officer visited the five Uighurs in early May. "The US government has finally found a country that will accept you," he announced.

"Which country?" they asked, hoping it would be Germany. Munich has Europe's largest Uighur community, and the prospect of being sent there appealed to the men.

The officer said he had no information about that.

The Albanian abyss

Throughout the twelve-hour flight, the Uighurs were terrified that they were being returned to China. At approximately 9 p.m. local time, they landed at Mother Theresa Airport in Tirana, the capital of Albania, one of Europe's poorest countries. It was three days before the scheduled hearing in Washington.

The men had never been to Albania. They had no idea the country even existed, and they are now probably the only Uighurs in the entire country.

Sabin Willett, their attorney, received an email informing him of their release, but by then the Uighurs had already landed in Tirana.

In the country's national refugee camp, the five men were housed in a building next to the toilets. The camp has a volleyball net, a laundry and a small library. An Arab-English dictionary lies on Ayub's night table. "I am an experienced diver," Ayub reads, and smiles.

A bus is available to take them to downtown Tirana whenever they wish. But they have no money and no contacts here, so they walk aimlessly around the city -- five aliens in Albanian rush-hour traffic. They try to get a sense of what it feels like to be free, but it isn't easy.

A few days after arriving in Albania, Ahmed calls his mother in China. He hasn't seen her in seven years.

His aunt answers the telephone. "Salam alaikum," Ahmed says. She passes the phone to his mother.

"Is that you, mother?" Ahmed asks.

Then the two weep.

Ahmed asks about the family. They both know that Chinese intelligence is probably listening in on the conversation.

Abu Bakker saw his wife again two days earlier -- on a DVD. His family had managed to get the disc sent to Guantanamo, where he wasn't permitted to watch it because camp officials were unable to find a translator who could confirm that the contents were harmless. In the end, the DVD was sent to Tirana with the five Uighurs.

Abu Bakker stared at the screen. The recording shows his family and some friends sitting around a table, praying to God to protect Abu Bakker. He saw his father, who is since dead, and he saw his wife and his brother playing soccer in the snow with Abu Bakker's children. The children are twins, and his wife was pregnant with them when he left China. The two are now six years old. Abu Bakker has never seen them.

Ahmed, Ayub, Abu Bakker and the other former Guantanamo prisoners are calm and patient and without hatred. They still hope to see their wives and children again.

But their greatest wish, they say, is to live in the United States.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Source:

Kazakhstan: Environmentalists Say China Misusing Cross-Border Rivers

2006-07-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

By Gulnoza Saidazimova

Environmentalists in Central Asia and Russia are concerned about China's use of water from the Ili and Irtysh rivers. Both rivers originate in China and flow into Kazakhstan, while the Irtysh continues on into Russia. China has been using more and more of the water as the population grows in China's western provinces. Officials in Beijing say they plan to divert more water from both rivers to develop the oil industry in western China. The plan seems to be fueling tension between the two countries. Environmentalists warn that China's overuse of the river water may lead to an ecological catastrophe for Kazakhstan.

PRAGUE, July 13, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Kazakh environmentalists say the country's environmental safety and water security are at risk.

The problem lies in China's use of two rivers -- the Ili and the Irtysh -- both of which begin in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which borders Kazakhstan.

"There will be ecological refugees. We'll have a lifeless desert here. A great catastrophe is ahead of us. It will be worse than Aral."More People, More Water

In an effort to fight separatism by the Uyghurs, who are Turkic-speaking Muslims, Beijing announced a "Go West" policy in 2000 that has led to many hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese being resettled in the XUAR, vastly increasing the population in the province.

Meanwhile, Beijing is exploring for oil fields in the country's west as fields in China's northeast are producing less oil and extraction is becoming more expensive.

Amid China's thirst for oil, the oil fields in Xinjiang are virtually untouched. The Turpan field, one of three large fields, is estimated to have 10 billion tons of oil. But the fields are deep in the desert and development will require people and equipment, the kind of development that requires water.

Mels Eleusizov, the head of Kazakhstan's Tabighat (Nature) movement and a former presidential candidate, tells RFE/RL that China's use of the Ili and Irtysh rivers raises concerns.

"Those lands are semideserts like [those in] Kazakhstan," he said. "They demand lots of water. [China] is developing irrigation [and] industry there. The population has been rising. Respectively, more water will be extracted from the two rivers that begin in China -- the Ili and the Irtysh. The decrease of water is a serious problem [for Kazakhstan]."

Lake Balkhash

The Irtysh River rises in China's Altay Mountains, where it is called the Black Irtysh, before crossing into Kazakhstan. It then flows into Lake Zaisan and to the Russian city of Omsk, eventually joining the Ob River.

The Ili River rises in Xinjiang and also flows into Kazakhstan, terminating in Lake Balkhash. It is one of Balkhash's three main sources that provide 80 percent of the lake's water.

Balkhash is the 16th largest inland lake in the world and the second largest in Central Asia. A great source of fish, Lake Balkhash also provides water for irrigation and government infrastructure, including hydropower, supplying electricity for towns in southern Kazakhstan.

Its water level, however, has declined since the 1960s due to increased usage.

Another Aral Sea?

Eleusizov says that because of China's overuse of the two rivers, Lake Balkhash may have a fate similar to that of the Aral Sea -- which has been turned into a deadly desert and caused an ecological catastrophe.

Yet Beijing still intends to divert waters from the Ili and Irtysh.

One project is the Black Irtysh-Karamai canal in the XUAR. The 22-meter wide, 300-kilometer long canal is to carry water from the upper Irtysh River to an oil-rich region close to the Uyghur town of Urumqi.

Eleusizov says the diversion of that water will have tragic implications for the environment.

"Even if China will take only 15 percent of the water from the two rivers, there will be a new 'Aral' -- Lake Balkhash," Eleusizov said. "Then there will be more harm. There will be ecological refugees. We'll have a lifeless desert here. A great catastrophe is ahead of us. It will be worse than Aral."

Russian environmentalists share Kazakh experts' concerns.

Aleksei Yablokov is the president of the Center for Ecological Policy of Russia and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He tells RFE/RL from Moscow that China's overuse of water from the Irtysh has already affected some Russian regions.

Russia Impacted As Well

"Russian environmentalists and authorities have long been monitoring the situation around Irtysh with growing alarm," Yablokov said. "China has intensively increased use of the Black Irtysh for irrigation. Now, the amount of water flowing [into Russia] seems to be half as much as [it used to be]. It has effected not only Kazakhstan, but also Russia."

Among the negative impacts is the Ob River becoming nonnavigable in the Siberian city of Omsk.

Officials in Beijing, however, say that they consider all of the environmental implications of water projects on the Ili and the Irtysh rivers.

Earlier this year, the Chinese government announced the first-ever moratorium on fishing in the Ili River. China's Xinhua news agency reported on May 18 that 20 tons of fish were put in the Ili. The report also said that the XUAR administration has increased forest protection in order to prevent soil erosion along the two rivers.

Eleusizov and Yablokov, however, say that their concerns have fallen on deaf ears as China as well as officials in Kazakhstan and Russia have been reluctant to discuss the problem.

Murat Auezov, a former Kazakh ambassador to China, tells RFE/RL that he has little hope that officials in Beijing will change the country's water policies.

"The subject is very serious," Auezov said. "It is not the first year that we have discussed it. [It can't be solved swiftly] because such a grandiose phenomenon as China is involved."

Environmentalists also say that the international community should put pressure on Beijing. Eleusizov and Yablokov add, however, that that won't be easy as China is not a participatory to the 1992 United Nations Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes. Kazakhstan and Russia ratified it in 2001 and 1993, respectively.

Source:RFE/RL

Language center seeks expansion

2006-07-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

Publish Date:07/14/2006
Story Type:National Affairs;
Byline:June Tsai

In 2005, National Chengchi University cut the ribbon on a new language center for students interested in learning foreign languages besides English and Japanese. After 18 months in operation, administrators at the center called a press conference July 1 to show off the results of its curriculum and seek support for expanding the program.

Czech, Hebrew, Uighur and Persian are just some of 24 languages for which courses are available at the center. The multilingual program is divided into four groups of courses, covering Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages, as well as one for the Altaic, Semitic, Uralic and Austro-Asiatic language families.

The program includes integrating educational resources and providing instruction to students from other universities, as well as interested members of the community and other adult learners.

In addition to offering classroom courses, the center is preparing an online component, with open courses in the languages currently available only in the classroom. It has completed recording seven preprogrammed language courses, including Mongolian, Thai, Vietnamese and Malay.

The Ministry of Education is sponsoring the multilingual program at NCCU, which is located in a suburb of Taipei. The ministry is considering funding similar projects at universities in central and southern Taiwan.

Speaking at the recent press conference, Education Minister Tu Cheng-sheng said that, although English is now the most prevalent and useful language around the world, "mastering many languages is the key to having a greater understanding of the human civilization." Tu encouraged students to learn more than one foreign language.

Chen Chao-ming, the program director and the dean of NCCU's College of Foreign Languages and Literature, explained that the most difficult part of running the program is in finding qualified teachers and being able to attract enough students to offer a class.

A university official said in a telephone interview that it is considering changing the university's qualification requirements for lecturers at the multilingual center. According to the official, there has been more interest from prospective language learners from outside the university system than from among college students, especially for the courses in Spanish, Arabic, Korean and Russian. These classes often fill up quickly.

Source:

Chinese police detain activist lawyer

2006-07-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

By ELAINE KURTENBACH
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

SHANGHAI, China -- Police have detained a Chinese activist lawyer one month after he was released from three years in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets, a rights group said Thursday.

Zheng Enchong's wife, Jiang Meili, was also briefly taken into police custody late Wednesday, Human Rights in China said in a statement.

More than a dozen police officers burst into Zheng's Shanghai home Wednesday evening demanding that Jiang report to a police station on suspicion of "impeding officials of state organs in execution of their duties," the rights group said.

The police searched Zheng's home and confiscated documents and a computer owned by Jiang's brother, the New York-based group said.

Later in the evening, more police and state security officials arrived and summoned Zheng to the police station, accusing him of the same offense, Human Rights in China said. Jiang has since returned home, but Zheng remains in custody.

Zheng served three years in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets while helping Shanghai residents sue a prominent real estate developer. He had been under house arrest since his release in June, and authorities warned him not to speak to the media.

But Zheng, who has insisted on his innocence, said he was determined to report corruption and human rights violations related to Shanghai development projects.

The report of his detention could not immediately be confirmed. Calls to Zheng's home went unanswered Thursday morning and his lawyer could not be reached.

Officers at local police stations refused comment. A woman at the Shanghai city police bureau said she was unclear about the case and said a written inquiry should be submitted through the city's Foreign Affairs Office.

Authorities frequently prosecute activists under vaguely defined charges such as subversion or revealing state secrets. Chinese authorities have refused to release details of their case against Zheng. His trial and appeal were closed to the public.

Separately, two sons of a U.S.-based activist for China's Uighur Muslims were arraigned on charges of tax evasion in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region in China's far west, the Uyghur American Association said. One son faced an additional charge of plotting to overthrow the government.

The association did not say whether Kahar Abdureyim, 42, and Alim Abdureyim, 31, entered a plea. The group said Alim confessed under torture to charges of attempting to split the state.

Under China's criminal procedure law, the trial should begin within one month. Attempts to reach the public security bureau in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, were unsuccessful.

A third son, Ablikim Abdureyim, was still being interrogated in detention after being charged last month with subversion, the association said.

Their mother, Rebiya Kadeer, is president of the Washington-based association, and has been an outspoken critic of China's treatment of Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who have a language and culture distinct from the rest of the country.

Once a prominent businesswoman, Kadeer was arrested in 1999 in Xinjiang on her way to meet U.S. government researchers. She was sentenced to eight years in prison but was given early release in March 2005, and allowed to leave for the United States.

Beijing claims it is fighting an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang, where Uighurs are the dominant ethnic group and refer to the territory as "East Turkestan." It blames Uighur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence.

The government says the separatists are linked to al-Qaida, but diplomats and foreign experts doubt that.

Source:

Kazakhstan-China cross-border oil pipeline starts operation

2006-07-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

Beijing, July 12: China has started receiving crude oil from neighbouring Kazakhstan through a 962 kilometre long cross-border pipeline, marking the beginning of the commercial operation for China's first direct oil import pipeline, the state media reported today.

Crude oil from Kazakhstan poured into a petroleum tank in Alataw Pass, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region yesterday evening through the cross-border pipeline.

Currently, the oil flux is only around 120 cubic metres per hour due to the valve failure in a Kazakhstan, Zhu Minjie, a customs officer at the Alataw Pass said.

It will take 15 days to fill up the 50,000-cubic-metre oil tank before the oil is piped to Dushanzi in Karamay where the country's largest oil refinery plant will become operational in 2008 to produce 5.5 million tons of refined oil a year, Zhu was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.

The pipeline was jointly developed by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the Kazakh State Energy Company, Kazmunaigaz and it is designed to transmit 20 million tonnes of oil a year, 15 per cent of China's total crude oil imports for 2005.

The first phase of the pipeline will transmit 10 million tonnes of oil a year, a figure that will double when the entire project is completed in 2011. The total length of the pipeline would then be around 3,000 kilometres.

China has set up an oil station at the Alataw Pass, from where the crude oil from Kazakhstan enters China.

Source

A malodorous market night

2006-07-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Jul. 12, 2006. 06:36 AM
JENNIFER BAIN

It's the stinkiest story ever told.

The wall of smell hits us when we park in a grassy field in Markham, climb out of our hermetically sealed vehicle and take our first few eager steps toward the Toronto Night Market.

We're assaulted by the unmistakable and unforgettable odor of smelly tofu, an Asian hawker dish fondly likened to sewage, garbage — or worse.

So this is what event president Urban Lee meant when he insisted: "When you get here, you've got to start smelling some of the food. The ambience of the market is not just the sounds — it's the smell."

It's the fifth annual Toronto Night Market. Held last Friday and Saturday, the market (a concept imported from Asia) has flown under the radar of too many food lovers. It takes over the parking lot of Metro Square and New Century Plaza, two Chinese malls in Markham, and attracts 20,000 people.

Until this year, the event was called "Nite It Up! Asian Night Market," but organizers changed it to sound more welcoming to all Torontonians.

Food vendors are the stars. This year there were 33. Hawkers fill out the remaining stalls, selling trendy must-haves like (happy) voodoo dolls from Hong Kong and cellphone decorations. There's a stage for non-stop singing and dancing.

And here's something remarkable: this market is run not by savvy businesspeople (like the ones who handle the Richmond Night Market in B.C.), but as a charity fundraiser by 40 high school and university students.

The kids are in a non-profit group called Power Unit (the youth affiliate of the Dove Intercultural Society). Their goal is to develop leadership skills through "practical entrepreneurial experience." Everyone else's goal is to eat well, and to eat often — no easy feat as it's breathing-room only before the sun even sets. (The market ran 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., with a few extra hours on Saturday afternoon for older folks who hate crowds.)

Too bad we didn't peruse the program in advance. In it, Stephanie Tam writes a "health alert" advising people to ingest only water for the two days leading up to the market. She wisely suggests converting bills to coins (so you don't waste time waiting for change), getting friends to hit separate lineups (so you can try more things and line up less), and to "eat slowly and continuously, using your digestion time to watch the show, shop or play games."

As for "the morning after," Tam suggests purging your digestive system by drinking several ounces of olive oil and eating lots of bananas, treating your aching feet to a pedicure, and washing all your clothes to get rid of the stinky tofu smell.

Which brings us back to the tofu. The China Daily reports that a man recently caused chaos on a plane when his smelly tofu packet burst and caused fellow passengers to almost vomit.

And yet, stinky (a.k.a. smelly) tofu is a popular street treat in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan.

I avoided it when I lived in Hong Kong, fearing it was simply tofu deep-fried in rancid oil.

In fact it's tofu fermented in a brine made from things like dried shrimp, mustard leaf, bamboo shoots and Chinese herbs. It's deep-fried, doused with a soy-chili sauce and served with shredded veggies.

In China, vendors have apparently been arrested for faking stinky tofu by adding gunpower and rotten fish to the brine. But competing Toronto Night Market vendors Wei's Smelly Tofu and Mother Bean Smelly Tofu proudly serve the real deal.

I line up 15 minutes for a serving, only to discover the tofu's fermented with dried shrimp. I'm allergic — and off the hook.

But none of my four market companions will take a bite — even Jim Leff, the New York co-creator of Chowhound.com (a site "for those who love to eat").

"I can't get it within two feet of my face without feeling deeply, deeply nauseous, which shames me greatly," Leff admits. (Read ChowTour 2006 next week.)

Instead my posse slurps bubble tea, fibre basil seed juice, and juice from young coconuts. We eyeball fish balls, squid balls and even a poutine truck, but opt for grilled sausages, Taiwanese egg wraps and Uyghur-style cumin-and-chili grilled lamb kebabs.

Uyghurs are Turkic Muslims whose land was annexed by China and renamed the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Here it's Chinese doing Uyghur/Xinjiang-style cooking.

"More people who come from China like Xinjiang food," reports stall owner Richard Zhu, who's opening the New Xinjiang Restaurant on Hwy. 7 this fall. "You can see our sales are huge."

Politics aside, things end on sweet and smelly notes.

First sweet, courtesy of candied cherry tomatoes on a stick made by local entrepreneurs Daniel Chan and Alex Lau.

Finally, smelly, courtesy of the stinky tofu stench that permeates our clothes and hair.

It washes out. And if all this tofu chatter has piqued your curiousity, Wei's Smelly Tofu owner Sharon Wei serves her creation at Wei's Taiwanese Food takeout spot in Scarborough.

Source: Toronto Star

A savage or a saint?

2006-07-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

Standing in the shadow of an enormous new statue of Genghis Khan in Ulan Bator’s central square, 16-year-old Tselmeg offered an unusually balanced opinion of Mongolia’s all-conquering warrior. “He established the Mongol Empire and he tried to unite the world, so surely he was good,” the ninth-grade student said as she squinted her eyes under a peak cap bearing the logo of a US sporting brand. "At the same time, he was brutal and he killed many people. But overall, I’m very proud of him.”

Tselmeg converged along with thousands of other Mongolians on the central square this week for the unveiling of the statue, part of national festivities to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongol Empire. The week has been a time for unrestrained joy among Mongolians, with fond reflections of their empirical past magnified by the enormously diminished state of their nation in the 21st century.

At the height of the Mongol Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, its territory covered more than 35 million square kilometres (14 million square miles), stretching from Southeast Asia through central Asia and into Eastern Europe. In contrast, Mongolia today is a deeply poor nation of just 2.8 million people, with less than 1.5 million square kilometres of land and completely surrounded by modern-day powers Russia and China.

“Genghis Khan is a living, legendary hero for Mongolians,” the president of Chinggis Khaan University, Kh Lkhagvasuren, told AFP. “For Mongolians, he’s almost like Jesus Christ. They feel very close to him. They feel attached to him.” The near-worshipping of Genghis Khan in Mongolia is in contrast to the reputation of him in the Western and Muslim worlds as a savage barbarian.

Genghis Khan conquered more land than any other man in history and set the stage for his descendants to lead campaigns of previously unimaginable success. To take just one example, the Mongol warriors took control of Baghdad, the heart of the Arab world, in 1258, achieving in just two years what the European Crusaders could never do. All this, according to the popular theory in the Western and Muslim worlds, was due to unparalleled savagery by the Mongolian hordes, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people and the destruction of cities and civilisations.

However a much more positive view is emerging in the West through scholars such as American anthropologist Jack Weatherford, who wrote the 2004 New York Times best seller: ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World’. Much of Weatherford’s work focused on the positive legacy of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, achievements he believes have been overlooked over the past 800 years of demonisation.

Two of Genghis Khan’s greatest legacies were his commitment to religious freedom and establishing the concept of diplomatic immunity, Weatherford told AFP. Genghis Khan’s establishment of trade routes between Asia and Europe should also be taken into account when assessing his life, according to Weatherford. “So far as we know when Genghis Khan was born no-one had ever heard of Europe or ever been there and as far as we know no-one from Europe had ever been to China,” Weatherford said. “And yet by the time he died the far east and China and the far west of Europe had been united in a way that has not been broken until this day.”

Weatherford attributed Genghis Khan’s dark reputation in the West to a lack of understanding, from 800 years ago to today, about Asian cultures and thought. “A large part of it is ignorance of the east rather than prejudice although prejudice is a factor,” Weatherford said. “It’s hard to believe that a man (from Asia) could be so thoughtful and could have created so much… it’s more out of ignorance than anything else.”

In Mongolia, Genghis Khan’s legacy is assessed firstly by the fact he subdued and brought the constantly warring nomadic tribes of central Asia into the Mongol Empire. “For Mongolians, his great achievement was he united all the separate tribes on the steppe under one nation,” Lkhagvasuren from Chinggis Khaan University said. “On the world stage, his greatest achievement was he connected the east and the west, Asia and Europe, by founding the Silk Road. And it wasn’t just goods that crossed the world. It was an exchange of everything, ideas and skills.”

For good or bad, Lkhagvasuren and others point out that one of the Mongols’ most important legacies was the unifying of warring tribes, cities and civilisations. Most significantly the borders of modern-day Russia and China were basically established under the Mongols. “Because of Mongolians, there is now China and Russia,” Lkhagvasuren said. As Weatherford pointed out in his book, Genghis Khan’s grandson, Khubilai, did what no Chinese person could do in unifying the country when he overthrew the Sung and created the Yuan dynasty. In doing so, he created a China that encompassed the Tibetan, Uighur and Manchurian civilisations, with the nation five times as large as the area inhabited by Chinese speaking people.

Source:

The UK is moved by the thrilling art of Uygur Muqam

2006-07-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Chinese Embassy in the UK held an entirely new sort of music salon in the evening on July 5th, featuring the performance by Xinjiang Uygur Muqam Arts Ensemble coming to London for the Muslim Music Festival in the English capital, with some 200 guests from various circles of politics, economy, culture, science and technology as well as education participating in the music feast.

Muqam refers to the traditional and grand Uygur classical music suites, incorporating song, music, poetry and folk custom. With the ethnic clothes, artists from Xinjiang gave a performance by sitting on the ground. Five main actors were foremost exponents of Uygur Muqam. All in their 60s or 70s, they sang joyfully in a loud voice while playing ethnic instruments such as satar, tanbr, zawap, etc., giving all the audience an account of their life and happiness with the original music form. Being more natural and revealing people's true feelings, the outstanding music artwork without any decoration drew the audiences' attention quicker than any other modern music forms. Even some governmental staff in western suits present could not help dancing with the lively music.

Invited by a corporation specializing in cultural cooperation in the UK, Xinjiang Dolan Muqam Arts Ensemble came to London for the 21st Music Village Festival-Salaam which featured the theme of peace. The general director of the cultural feast said that London had already held the 21st Summer Art Festival, which aimed at creating an open platform and promote the melting and exchange of arts between various ethnic groups. One year after the July 7th London bombings, they held a Muslim Arts Festival with peace as the theme, which collected Muslim artists from 11 foreign countries as well as UK. It was a grand feast of special significance for Muslim culture and arts outside the Islamic world.

The director also noted that this was the first time they had invited Chinese arts ensemble because China was a country with the rapid economic growth and a rich culture, and the theme for Arts Festival London 2008 would be China. It was not only because of the Sino-UK cultural exchanges but also because of the dwellers of some 100 different ethnic minorities living in London. There should be a platform which could help people better understand Chinese arts.

The Art of Muqam spread among the Uygur people, and recorded and verified the history of mutual exchange and blending of music and dance between various ethnic groups along the ancient "Silk Road", and has long been enjoying the laudatory title of ¡°gems of Chinese arts¡± and "pearl along the 'Silk Road'". Additionally, it has been enlisted into the inventory of the World Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Muqams carried forward in Gaimaiti, Turpan and Hami are of distinct ethnic characteristics, and are dubbed as the essence of Muqam. Adiya, head of the Xinjiang Dolan Muqam Arts Ensemble and a postdoctoral researcher with Institute of Ethnic Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) said the eldest folk artist was 76, and all of them were farmers who were not able to read. But they carried forward the art of Muqam handed down in a direct line from the masters.

Xinjiang Dolan Muqam Arts Ensemble and other folk artists from other countries present the cultural feast entertained audiences with splendid performance at Kew Garden, Royal Botanic Garden, on July 1st and 2nd. According to the statistics by the organising committee of the festival, there were some 20,000 audiences present at the cultural feast. Among all the performances, the exotic Dolan Muqam won the attention of most audiences. Sonorous singing, bold and unconstrained melody, festive singing and dancing, cheerful movements of dancers were full of power and artistic appeal. During the 30-minutes performance, the theatre burst into the warmest applause. All the audiences present have been intoxicated deeply with such an ancient art. One audience said with feeling that the art of Muqam was quite different from the Chinese music in his imagination, and that Chinese culture was too rich.

By People's Daily Online

TIBET: THE LOST KINGDOM

2006-07-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK - Last weekend, train `Qing 1’ left Beijing and began a two-day, 4,000km journey that took it across heat-seared deserts, over the forbidding Kunlun mountains and the vertiginous, 5,072 meter high Tanggula Pass, through the 5 km Fenghuoshan tunnel at 4,900 m, and finally to Tibet’s holy city, Lhasa, six kilometers high in the heart of the mighty Himalayas.

The five-year, US $3.68 billion rail project is one of the world’s engineering marvels and a triumph of state central planning. The most challenging portion of the world’s highest railway runs 1,000 km from China’s western Qinghai region to Lhasa at an average altitude of 4,000 meters. Five hundred km are built on permafrost, which freezes in winter and turns to bog in summer. China claims not a single worker died in the project.

Beijing says the new line will end Tibet’s isolation and open it up for tourism and economic development. This is certainly true.

China deserves high praise for this epic achievement.
But supporters of Tibetan independence are decrying the new railway. They claim it will deliver a final blow to Tibet’s vanishing freedom and cultural identity. Beijing scoffs at these claims, insisting it is bringing education, health, social justice and freedom to underdeveloped Tibetans.

Who is right? Historically, Tibet was a semi-independent vassal of China’s Emperors. Communist China invaded the strategic Tibet plateau in 1950, proclaiming `liberation of Tibet from feudalism.’ The great powers did nothing to stop this annexation. An anti-Chinese revolt stirred up by CIA failed after the US abandoned the Tibetan resistance.

In the 1960’s, Beijing detached and gave half of historic Tibet’s land and people to two neighboring regions.
What remained was dubbed the Tibet Autonomous Region with a population of about 2.6 million ethnic Tibetans.

Contrary to the belief Tibetans are docile, unwarlike people, Khampa tribes fiercely resisted Chinese occupation. Major revolts against Chinese rule have erupted over the years, with Tibet calling for the return of their beloved exiled leader, the Dalai Lama.

During China’s frightful Cultural Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans were killed or died of starvation, and many national treasures destroyed or pillaged.

When China troops arrived in Tibet, they found a feudal society plunged in profound superstition. The all-powerful Tibetan priesthood lived off hundreds of thousands of illiterate serfs. Tibetans subsisted without education or health care in the most squalid conditions, washing only three times in their life: at birth, marriage, and death.

China undeniably brought basic schooling, medical care, electricity, roads and phones. Feudalism was eradicated. Totalitarian rule replaced the draconian Buddhist theocracy. Most important, Chinese Han settlers began pouring in. Tibet quickly became – and remains - a key strategic military zone for Beijing in the Himalayan border confrontation with India.

On my last trip to Tibet, anti-Chinese riots broke out in
Lhasa. They were harshly suppressed. Tibetans came up to me, tearfully pleading for pictures of their Dalai Lama. It was heartrending. Particularly since meeting the Dalai Lama had inspired my book on the Himalayas, `War at the Top of the World.’

Today, Chinese outnumber Tibetans in Lhasa and are approaching parity outside. I call this `ethnic inundation.’ China has practiced it in many other non-Han regions, submerging its 56 recognized minorities – peoples like Manchu, Hui, Miao, and Yao – with millions of Chinese settlers.

Westerners wring their hands over the plight of Tibet. But next door Uighurs, a Turkic people of China’s western Xinjiang region resisting floods of Han Chinese settlers are branded `Islamic terrorists’ by Washington. A Canadian citizen of Uighur birth, Huseyincan Celil, recently seized by Communist Uzbekistan, is being deported to China to face charges of `anti-state activities’ for advocating Uighur independence. Ottawa has done nothing.

Tibet will never regain independence unless China disintegrates. Sadly, Tibetans seem fated to become extras in a tourist theme park while millions of Chinese move up the new railroad to the top of the world.

Source:Eric Margolis

China’s Islamic Frontier

2006-07-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

China’s Islamic Frontier
By Robert T. McLean

On June 27 the government of Uzbekistan transferred Huseyincan Celil, now a Canadian citizen, to Chinese custody to await execution. While authorities of the People’s Republic of China charge that Mr. Cecil is guilty of killing Chinese delegates in Kyrgyzstan in 2000, the evidence suggests that Cecil was in fact in Turkey at the time under the direction of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The Toronto Star noted that the man “was sentenced to death in absentia for founding a political party to work on behalf of the Uighur people in Xinjiang province.” Beijing’s insistence on the execution of a man who is likely to be purely a human rights activist is not difficult to explain, but rather illustrative of the anxiety the Chinese Communist Party maintains over the country’s Muslim west.

If China’s west is to be won, it will largely take place in the following decade. The Xinjiang Autonomous Uighur Region, located in China’s northwest, is home to approximately eight million Uighur Muslims – there are several million Hui, Kazakh, and Tajik Muslims as well – and is the likely flashpoint should any ethnic separatist movement threaten the mainland’s territorial integrity. The region’s most radical group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), not only has ties to al-Qaeda, but is also providing the government in Beijing with a pretext for solidifying their control over the province’s Uighur population.

The vast majority of the limited debate that has occurred in the United States on this matter has mistakenly focused on the question of whether the Chinese do indeed have a terrorist problem, and in either conclusion, whether the CCP has manipulated the situation to consolidate their hold on the country’s restive population. While both issues must be taken into account when examining the situation in Xinjiang, the aspect that best encompasses the question of China’s Islamic west is the frontier factor.

The total population of Xinjiang remains relatively sparse. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, only about 20 million live in Xinjiang despite the fact that the province constitutes about one-sixth of China’s total landmass. The region’s expanding importance to China’s economy, the Islamic presence in the region, and the threat of separatist and terrorist organizations have led Beijing to conclude that the country’s northwestern frontier must be tamed.

The government’s handling of their Muslim citizens in the Chinese west has been both authoritarian and effective. Under the “Strike Hard” campaign begun in the mid-nineties, those who have studied in madrassahs abroad are monitored by Chinese authorities, and all material considered subversive is confiscated at the border from those returning from the Central Asia or the Middle East. Executions of suspected terrorists are frequent, while arrests are often made for the slightest potential infraction. Last year more than 18,000 were arrested in Xinjiang for what Beijing classifies as “endangering state security.”

As is the case with all religions in China, few decisions by Muslim leaders are made independent of CCP interference. There is one Islamic seminary in China and all imams must be graduates of this state-run institution. Imams are employees of the state and few actions are conducted without supervision by the official security apparatus or their informers. Such efforts are not limited to Chinese territory. About 350,000 Uighur immigrants live in neighboring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and Beijing has called on these Central Asian states to maintain a firm control of these populations to ensure that none come to pose a threat to China’s hold on Xinjiang.

The People’s Republic of China is among the world’s foremost violators of human rights. This has created a dilemma for Washington in both conducting the war on terror and in its relations with Beijing. In a diplomatic row between the two countries in May, Chinese officials harshly condemned the United States’ decision to send five Chinese Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay to Albania rather than back to their home country. Foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao revealed his displeasure when he noted: “This act by the US and Albanian sides is a gross violation of international law and we are strongly opposed to this.” Pressure from Beijing was so strong not to accept these Chinese citizens that Albania was the sole country of more than twenty not to be intimated by the PRC’s demands.

In a piece in The Wall Street Journal on June 27, Uighur human rights activist Rebiya Kadeer detailed the nefarious methods used by the PRC in maintaining their uncontested authoritarian rule over Xinjiang. Ms. Kadeer was arrested in 1999 for sending newspaper clippings to the United States and planning to meet with a U.S. congressional delegation in the Xinjiang capitol of Urumqi. After the Bush administration secured her release in March 2005, a stern warning was issued. “Before I left Beijing, Chinese officials warned me that if I spoke out against the plight of the Uighurs, my children and my business would be ‘finished,” wrote Kadeer. Earlier this month Chinese authorities followed through on their word when they beat Ms. Kadeer’s children – allowing the female to call the mother during the beatings so she could hear the suffering – and latter arrested the three on charges of “plotting to split the state” and tax evasion.

While China’s leadership may falsely categorize those seeking human rights and greater autonomy as terrorists, and their methods of control fail to follow acceptable norms, it is clear that the PRC faces a real and legitimate terrorist threat. Islamists in Xinjiang maintain extensive ties to international terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda. The leading terrorist organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), maintains communications with jihadist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of its more experienced members fought with the mujahadeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and safe houses and cells have been uncovered everywhere from Germany to Pakistan. In fact, in late June, Chinese diplomats in Pakistan wrote the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they had information that members of ETIM were operating in Pakistan and maintain plans to kidnap them.

Not only do Xinjiang Islamists operate in a diverse variety of states, but foreign extremists have sought refuge in the radical sectors of China’s Uighur community as well. Chinese authorities have captured Taliban militants in Xinjiang, and there have been reports that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan maintains a cell in the province. It is also worth noting that outside terrorist groups come to Xinjiang not because of a perceived regional lawlessness, but because they expect to find elements in the Muslim community that will harbor them.

Extremist groups in Xinjiang also look to foreign terrorist organizations to draw inspiration for their propaganda efforts. According to Rohan Gunaratna and Kenneth George Pereire in the most recent issue of the China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, “ETIM, and associated groups, have learned from groups, such as the Chechen terrorists, to exploit Western human rights and humanitarian associations, to assist various activities.” Thus, the organization’s principle propaganda outlet is strategically based in Munich where the group hopes to capitalize on European liberalism.

On occasion ETIM has released videos that appear to emulate those produced by al-Qaeda. Footage of the airliners crashing into the World Trade Center has been celebrated in these videos and one such propaganda piece claims that the group has brought down a Chinese plane. While this claim has not been substantiated and is likely a fabrication, some analysts believe that the PRC’s efforts to contain ETIM’s profile – as well as limit the dissemination of information that could discourage human and capital investment in the region – provide for the possibility that such an event could have occurred.

The Chinese labeled ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism, and extremism may be a burden to the leadership in Beijing, but they also play to the CCP’s benefit. Chien-peng Chung, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, noted in CEF Quarterly: “For all their collective malfeasance, it must be admitted that the ‘three evils’ offer rather good mass media propaganda for the PRC government to keep ethnic demands on the defensive, dismiss foreign scrutiny … and perhaps most importantly, sustain the unity of the Han Chinese ethnicity.”

The Han Chinese – the national majority constituting 92 percent of China’s population – are just beginning to settle China’s northwest in large numbers, but the demographics of Xinjiang have already greatly been altered in the last half-century. As was noted by the BBC, in 1950 Uighurs made up 94 percent of Xinjiang’s population, whereas today they are estimated to be just less than half. Nevertheless, Chinese officials maintain that they possess no plans to dilute the influence of Muslim Uighurs in the province as one official recently suggested: “There's very little difference in the ethnic balance between now and the early 1950s,” and Beijing’s encouragement of westward migration “certainly isn’t an issue of moving Han people to Xinjiang.”

Beijing’s lack of sincerity in their statements regarding the demographic implications of the Han Chinese settlement of the country’s northwest frontier is an inevitable result of the government seeking to avoid alarming Xinjiang’s Uighurs. The state has taken measures to contain any such future developments where “reactionary” elements may attract widespread support. This is largely being accomplished by Han migrations to Xinjiang. As Chien-peng Chung stated in his aforementioned work, “the government has been promoting an unstated but deliberate policy of ethnic encirclement by authorizing Han settlements in neighborhoods separate from, but close to, Uighur” communities.

The emphasis on maintaining a firm grip on the situation in Xinjiang is not only aimed at preventing a popular secessionist movement, but it also represents a concerted effort to ensure the economic stability of the region. The province of Xinjiang is becoming increasingly important to China’s economic growth, and its geographic location bordering Central Asia and Pakistan ensures the region’s vital role as a gateway for energy resources. While the Xinjiang is a significant producer of domestic coal and oil, it is also essential for the expanding quantities of oil and natural gas imported from Central Asia that must pass through the province on their way to China’s high consumption eastern cities. With Beijing’s efforts to secure energy resources across the globe, it is doubtful they will ease their grip on Xinjiang anytime soon.

China is settling its west and is likely to achieve success in bringing both economic prosperity and repression of regional autonomy to Xinjiang. Beijing and the region’s Islamic terrorists will continue to clash, and as Henry Kissinger stated during the Iran-Iraq War, it’s a shame they both can’t lose. But one thing is for certain: there will be many more Huseyincan Celil’s caught in the struggle for China’s Islamic frontier.

Source:FrontPageMagazine.com

Chinese influence on neighboring states leads to extradition, suppression of Uyghurs

2006-07-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

Press backgrounder
For immediate release
July 5, 2006, 06:50 EDT
Contact: Uyghur Human Rights Project +1 (202) 349 1496

The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) is deeply concerned about a recent spate of Uyghurs reportedly being returned to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from central and southern Asian states. These individuals are apparently being forcibly returned at the request of Chinese government authorities, where they are likely to then face arbitrary detention, torture, and even execution.

On June 26, UHRP reported the return to the PRC of Huseyin Celil from Uzbekistan; Amnesty International in London also recently reported that two other Uyghurs, Yusuf Kadir Tohti and Abdukadir Sidik, were recently returned to the PRC from Kazakhstan.

These three cases are almost certainly not the only instances of people being returned to the PRC. However, they are notable for coming to light in the immediate wake of a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) member states in Shanghai in mid-June. As the SCO marks a decade of existence, China has been putting pressure on neighboring countries, and particularly members of the SCO, to forcibly return Uyghur Muslims suspected of “separatist” activities, including asylum-seekers and refugees.

Under the formation and expansion of the SCO, central Asian nations have placed an emphasis on placating China, which is growing rapidly in terms of the economic and political influence it exerts on central Asia. China has recently been providing central Asian countries with hundreds of millions of dollars in credits. It has also been entering into lucrative business deals with members of the SCO. For instance, China’s National Oil and Gas Exploration and Development Corporation (CNODC) announced on June 15 that it would spend $210 million to explore for oil and gas in Uzbekistan.

Last month, Chinese President Hu Jintao met with the leader of Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiev, in Beijing. During their meeting, in addition to cementing agreements related to transportation and the export of electricity from Kygryzstan to China, the two leaders agreed to crack down on extremism, and specifically on “East Turkistan terrorist forces.”

In 2004, Uzbek authorities agreed to Chinese demands to further suppress any Uyghur activities in Uzbekistan that were related to the advocacy of human rights, political rights and cultural rights for Uyghurs in East Turkistan. In June 2004, Hu signed an agreement with Uzbek president Islam Karimov which stated that the two countries would “continue to adopt powerful measures to fight all forms of terrorism, including terrorism waged by the so-called “East Turkistan terror groups” in order to engender peace and tranquility in the two countries and in the region.”

China’s influence within the SCO with regard to the Uyghur people appears to be extending to nations with “observer” status as well. Pakistan’s current “observer” status with the SCO, as well as the 2003 remarks of President Musharraf that he would not allow anyone to use Pakistani territory to “carry out anti-China activities”, raises concerns that Pakistan will begin persecuting innocent Uyghur Muslims, or sending them back to East Turkistan, in order to please China.

In an ominous development, the Pakistani news media has recently been reporting on warnings that were received by the Chinese diplomatic mission in Pakistan that members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) are planning to kidnap senior Chinese diplomats and consular officers there. According to a June 26 report in the Pakistan-based newspaper Daily Times, Chinese diplomats said members of terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, were providing support to ETIM activists for the kidnapping.

Earlier this week, reports published by Pakistani and Indian newspapers published news reports citing Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu as saying that China would seek international cooperation to “strike at members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM)”, whom she said are “seeking to separate the oil-rich Xinjiang from the rest of the country.” Furthermore, Jiang stated that “striking at the ETIM forces is an integral part of international cooperation in counter-terrorism activities.”

Chinese authorities have previously taken similar actions to “warn” foreigners of the threat of attacks on them by al Qaeda-linked Uyghur groups. For instance, last year, as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom visited East Turkistan, Chinese officials announced that ‘elements of al Qaeda were targeting the Commission itself during its visit.” However, as was later stated by the Commission’s chairman, enquiries by U.S. embassy staff in Beijing determined that these claims were totally false and an apparent attempt to intimidate the visiting members of the Commission.

In another example, in August 2005, Wang Lequan, Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), claimed at a press conference that Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur businesswoman, human rights activist and former prisoner of conscience who is now president of the Uyghur American Association, “[...] had met with heads of terrorist groups abroad to plot to sabotage the celebration for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the XUAR”. This accusation was not supported by any evidence. Instead, it appears that the Chinese government was simply attempting to “demonize” Ms. Kadeer, in reaction to the peaceful human rights advocacy she had undertaken on behalf of the Uyghur people since her arrival to the U.S. in March 2005.

In the wake of September 11, lacking any evidence of terrorist attacks occurring in the past few years, the Chinese government has attempted to create an illusion of a terrorist threat from the Uyghurs in order to garner international support for its ongoing suppression of Uyghurs under the pretext of the “war on terror”. Chinese officials have generated unsubstantiated accounts of a terrorist danger from so-called Uyghur militants, and have presented these accounts to foreign governments, such as the government of Pakistan.

Regardless of the accuracy of the latest warnings delivered to Pakistan by the Chinese authorities, various inconsistencies are present in China’s recurring arguments. China’s own reporting on the nature and extent of violence in East Turkistan has often been exaggerated and contradictory. For example, a document issued by China’s State Council Information Office in 2002 presents an image of the situation in East Turkistan that is largely inconsistent with Beijing’s position prior to September 11. The document portrays a wide variety of separatist groups in East Turkistan as being closely connected and unified as part of a pan-Islamic network, when in fact these groups are highly fractionalized and diverse.

According to the group Human Rights Watch, the document lacks any independent intelligence to support its conclusions, and there are problems in the document’s treatment of events in the 1990s. For instance, while its preface claims that terrorist acts killed 162 (and injured 440) over the past decade, the document itself enumerates only 57 deaths. Most of these people died in small-scale incidents with only one or two victims.

Prior to September 11, China publicized an opinion on East Turkistan that painted a picture of the opposition as small in number and doomed to fail. Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan, together with Abdulahat Abdurishit, said at a trade fair in Urumqi on September 2, 2001, that the situation in Xinjiang was “better than ever in history.” While mentioning separatism, they stressed that “society is stable and people are living and working in peace and contentment.”

These types of statements appear distinctly inconsistent with China’s post-9/11 assertions regarding Uyghur separatism, and they appear to strongly suggest that China modifies its portrayal of Uyghur separatist forces, and of Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan in general, according to its political goals.

UHRP fears that Huseyin Celil, a naturalized Canadian citizen who fled China several years ago, is at extremely high risk of arbitrary detention, torture, and even execution.

Amnesty International reported on June 27 that Yusuf Kadir Tohti and Abdukadir Sidik were being held in incommunicado detention in China after being forcibly returned from Kazakhstan on May 10. The two men are at risk of serious human rights violations, and possibly the death penalty, if their ‘crimes’ are deemed to be ‘serious.’

Chinese authorities have recently mounted a crackdown on the “three evil forces” of “separatist, terrorist and religious extremists” in East Turkistan. This has resulted in serious and widespread human rights violations directed against the region’s Uyghur community, prompting many of them to flee the country.

Source: UHRP

Mudslide kills 10 in Turpan

2006-07-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

Winny Wang
2006-07-05
A MUDSLIDE in Turpan, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, hit the Lanzhou-Urumqi railway, killing 10 workers and injuring one yesterday, Xinhua news agency reported today.

Rescuers have repaired the destroyed stretch and train services are back on schedule.

Yesterday afternoon, mountain torrents in Turpan caused the mudslide to fall on the railway, breaking one side of the railway bridge, halting trains from passing.

Workers from the China Railway 21st Group, who were working in at a nearby construction site, were immediately evacuated from the scene, but 11 workers were caught in the mudslide. Five of them died on the scene and one was injured. The rescuer found another five bodies this morning.

Source: Shanghai Daily

Kyrgyz Uyghurs Protest At Chinese Embassy

2006-07-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

BISHKEK, July 5, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Representatives of ethnic Uyghurs living in Kyrgyzstan today demonstrated in front of the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek to demand the release of an ethnic Uyghur held in a Chinese jail.

Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen, was detained by Uzbek authorities in Tashkent in March and later deported to China.

Beijing accuses Celil of involvement in an attack six years ago on a state delegation in China's western Xingijang Province, the home of Turkic-speaking Uyghurs.

The demonstrators handed over a petition to a Chinese Embassy official and dispersed peacefully after about one hour

Source:RFE/RL

Family losing hope for missing Canadian

2006-07-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

Harper has yet to respond, they say
Ex-activist may be in Chinese prison

Jul. 5, 2006. 08:56 AM
JESSICA LEEDER AND HEBA ALY
STAFF REPORTERS

After 100 days since Huseyincan Celil was taken into foreign custody, questions still swirl around his disappearance, his whereabouts and the Canadian government's response.

The Chinese-born Muslim refugee is a Canadian citizen and father of six who has been shuttled between captors so secretively that his family isn't even sure he's still alive.

Aside from comments from Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay that his office began trying months ago to secure Celil's release, Ottawa has barely acknowledged the fact the Burlington imam and former political activist is a prisoner whose prospects turned grim when he apparently surfaced in Chinese custody last week. He faces a death sentence there.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not responded to a letter sent last week by Celil's Hamilton-based lawyer, Chris MacLeod, requesting he send a special envoy to secure Celil's release. Harper's help, Celil's family says, is their only hope.

Sandra Buckler, Harper's spokeswoman, said the letter was received. She could not say how long it will take Harper to respond, adding that response time varies depending on how many ministries are involved.

The case against Celil, who became a Canadian citizen last year, is confusing and complex. It involves allegations that he has multiple aliases, and that he used at least one of them to assassinate a political leader and commit terror-related crimes in Kyrgyzstan and China.

Celil's lawyer has deemed the allegations bizarre, and says he has documents to prove his client's innocence. It's unclear whether Ottawa has its own information on Celil's alleged crimes, or whether, over the past 100 days, he's simply slipped further into the cracks.

The saga of Celil's captivity began when the 37-year-old was arrested on March 27 in Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan. He was there with his wife visiting relatives who travelled to see him from nearby China, and was taken into custody when he tried to renew a visitor's visa.

Celil's family said they suspected he was arrested because of Uzbekistan's close ties with China.

Celil was imprisoned in China in the mid-1990s, allegedly for political activities in Xinjiang province. He was connected to the Uyghurs, a minority group of Turkish-speaking Muslims who have been accused by China of leading a violent separatist movement.

After he escaped, Celil was admitted to Canada as a refugee in 2001. While he and his wife were beginning their new life in Hamilton, a Chinese court sentenced Celil to death in absentia.

When he was arrested in Uzbekistan last March, his family began to fear for his life, worrying he would be extradited to China and killed. But for nearly three months, Uzbek officials kept Celil in custody.

They allowed him three consular visits with Canadian representatives. He had no family contact.

But his future was quickly clouded by a statement issued by the Uzbek Embassy in London, suggesting Celil has multiple aliases, including "Guler Dilaver," a Turkish citizen wanted by neighbouring Kyrgyz law enforcement officials for "for membership in terrorism groups, kidnapping, taking hostages and illegal weapon possession."

A pro-government website alleges Dilaver was involved in a May 2000 attack on a state delegation in Xinjiang province. It also alleges he is responsible for the March 2000 killing of Nigmat Baizakov, former head of the Uyghur Society in Kyrgyzstan.

Celil's lawyer argues the charges are a "ruse" because Celil was in a different country at the time.

Seven month's pregnant with the couple's fourth child, Celil's wife, Kamila Telendibaeva, said she was told Uzbek authorities were waiting to see if her husband's fingerprints matched those on file in China and Kyrgyzstan before deporting him.

Last week, Uzbekistan confirmed it had turned Celil over to Chinese officials. Telendibaeva began wondering if her husband is even alive. Last week, she began pleading for help. "Only the Canadian government can help to bring my husband back," she said. "They have to do more. They have to do more."

MacLeod said if he doesn't receive a response from the Prime Minister's Office by the end of the week, he'll make the trip to China himself. He said a high-level intervention is necessary not only to free Celil, but also to ensure the safety of other Canadian immigrants travelling abroad. "They need to know that when they get a Canadian passport, they can actually safely leave this country for other countries."

The Canadian government insists it is doing what it can.

Last Tuesday, a diplomatic note — the strongest instrument governments can use to communicate without damaging relations — was hand-delivered to Chinese officials asking about Celil's whereabouts. So far, there has been no official response.

With files from Michael Mainville, the Star's stringer in Moscow

Source: Toronto Star

Shanghai - 6 and regional strategies

2006-07-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Written on June 30th, 2006 in Editor's page

By K.N. Pandita - 15 June 2006 summit meet of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is variously interpreted in political circles. In Washington inquisitive circles would want to know if it is the Chinese version of the now - defunct Warsaw Pact to counter NATO?

The declaration issued after the summit, reflects SCO’s unexplained fears, expectations and warnings. Russia and China, two dominant members of the organization, would like to reassure Washington that the SCO is not intended to be an anti-US bloc, and in a sense, complements her agenda of war against terrorism. However, the hyperbole is difficult to receive easy acceptance.

Indian Prime Minister was the only head of the government among the three observer members (India, Pakistan and Iran) who did not attend the summit. This seemed a very calculated move.

President Musharraf of Pakistan, who had arrived a day earlier in Shanghai, did some robust lobbying to earn SCO regular membership for his country. However, Pakistan’s staunch ally China had little at hand to disarm Russian diffidence that Musharraf could stop proliferation of radical terror in his country.. At the same time, China, with her experience with Uighur radical elements cannot dismiss these apprehensions in a casual manner.

Apart from this, India was given to understand from the deliberations of previous five meetings of the organization that if at all the SCO was inclined to admit Pakistan as a regular member, it would do so only if India was also admitted. In reality at least the Central Asian members of the SCO did not restrict their approach to Indo-Pak relationship phenomenon exclusively on parity basis. Thus President Musharraf’s plea that Pakistan served a bridge between the West and the South East had no serious takers as such.

New Delhi’s perception was that the presence of the Indian PM at the summit would tempt the permanent members to seriously consider admitting both India and Pakistan as regular members of the SCO. Indian PM’s absence neutralised Pakistan hard lobbying for Pakistan’s permanent membership. It means that confident of its influence with the Central Asian member states of the organization, New Delhi fount it more in her interests not to insist on her regular membership. Observers believe that India does not want to do anything that would have an adverse impact on the Indo-US nuclear deal which is now before the US Congress for final decision. This indicates a significant re-orientation of regional strategies.

This is not the only baffling question with the SCO. Of late, Iran has emerged the new “rogue state” in Asian continent because of her uranium enrichment programme. Both Russia and China are reluctant to admit Iran as a permanent member for fear of incurring US’ displeasure. Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s reiteration of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme at the Shanghai summit was counterproductive, to say the least. In particular, President Nursultan of Kazakhstan could not accept the plea that Iran needed a nuclear deterrent. In a letter to the Iranian President, he recalled that his country had voluntarily withdrawn nuclear stockpiles after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His contention was that he had demolished that type of concept by dismantling over two thousand nuclear warheads set up in Kazakhstan during Soviet power.

While Russia and China, as dominant members of SCO might be trying to reduce the influence of the US in Central Asia, yet at the same time Russia would want US’ exit only from Central Asia and not from South East Asia. This stand does not go in line with China’s policy either in Central Asia or in south East Asia.

It, therefore, appears that despite shared anti-American feelings, the members of SCO harbour serious difference of opinion among themselves.

The second part of the study is what is the reaction of the US to this configuration? Responsible circles in Washington believe that although the declaration signed by six members does speak of diversity of civilizations and respect for development etc. yet statements like that of the Iranian President saying “We need strong organization to protect us from unreasonable foreign interference” clearly showed that the organization could work in concert against the interests of the US.

US sees Kazakhstan as a moderating force in the SCO. It will be reminded that the US courted Kazakh President Nursultan soon after the implosion of the Soviet State. US Vice President Dick Cheney visited Kazakhstan in May last and had sweet words for the Kazakh President. Evidently Nursultan is doing something of a balancing act between what a commentator wrote “the bear, the dragon and the eagle”.

For the first time in her post-independence history, India has become pro-active in Central Asia by establishing an air base at Ainy (also Farkhor) to the north of Tajik capital Dushanbe. When fully operational, the Indian bas is expected to host between 12-14 MiG-29 fighter bombers, according to various reports. India’s intention to open its first base located on foreign soil was first reported in 2002. At that time, some reports claimed, that the Ayni facility was already operational, and, therefore, could have been used for operations against either Islamic militants operating in Central Asia or Pakistan.

Indeed, the origins of this base lie in Pakistan’s closure of its air space to India during their crisis of 2001-02, and India’s resolve to get around this restriction for both its commercial and military aircraft. Evidently, the presence of the Indian air force in Ainy could not be possible without the consent of both Russia and the US. It has to be reminded that Russia has an air base in close proximity of Ainy where the Indians are making a toehold. To say that the ultimate objective of the Indians is to attack Pakistan from the rear in a situation of exigency, is not warranted by the situation on the ground. What must have motivated Russia and the US to agree to India’s idea of establishing a base in Tajikistan appears to be part of their counter-terrorism strategy. Moreover, India like China is oil hungry and Kazakhstan and one or two more Central Asian states are having hydrocarbon reserves from which India would like to benefit. The building of Karakoram Highway by China connecting its western border with Karachi sea port has remained a thorn in India’s side. Commentators had predicted a counterbalancing act on the part of New Delhi. (The writer is the former Director of Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir, Srinagar).

Source:

A Chinese Lesson for Big Retailers

2006-07-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

In this remote region along the old Silk Road, Carrefour is on the march. The Paris-based retailer has already opened two stores here, one in the northern end where many ethnic Chinese live and another next to a mosque in the Muslim section populated by Uighurs. This fall, Carrefour will open a third mega-store in this city of 2 million, selling groceries alongside its other goods.

What about Wal-Mart Stores Inc.? "I can't imagine they will come here," Christian Roquigny, who manages Carrefour's Uighur store, said as he walked past a golden-domed mosque, nodding to men coming out after Friday afternoon prayers.

Roquigny boasted that his store sold no pork and was certified as halal, or permissible under Islamic dietary law. Wal-Mart managers, he said, aren't given the same flexibility to adapt. As the world's leading retailers battle for new markets around the globe, they are increasingly setting up in places like Urumqi, where Carrefour's average checkout total is just over $5.

Wal-Mart and Carrefour, the world's No. 1 and No. 2 retailers, have stepped up their expansion in China in recent years, virtually matching each other, store for store, in many locales. But the nearest Wal-Mart to Urumqi is 1,400 miles to the east.Carrefour's operation in this western city demonstrates why the French company has raced ahead of those of its multinational rivals in the world's most-populous nation. By joining with Chinese partners, adapting to local culture and employing a supply chain that includes 18-wheel trucks and three-wheel bicycles, Carrefour has become the biggest foreign retailer operating in China.

It operates 79 stores in 32 Chinese cities compared with 60 locations in 30 cities for Wal-Mart. Last year, Carrefour's sales in China totaled $2.2 billion, compared with $1.2 billion for Wal-Mart, according to the Commerce Ministry in Beijing. "Carrefour's management is quite flexible and their localization is better," said Huang Guoxiong, a business professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing. Localization is an industry term for adapting a store to local tastes and preferences.

Wal-Mart is accelerating its store openings in China — it plans to open at least 18 this year, six more than Carrefour — and analysts are reluctant to bet against the Bentonville, Ark.-based discount retailer given its enormous resources. Its global sales last year reached $285 billion, triple that of Carrefour's. Wal-Mart bought $18 billion in goods from Chinese manufacturers last year.

But as a retailer in China, Wal-Mart is a small fish. Its strategy of offering tian tian ping jia, or "everyday low prices," hasn't had a big effect on Chinese mom-and-pop shops that are used to cutthroat pricing. Wal-Mart has been unable to replicate its super-efficient logistics system in China largely because it lacks scale.

Even Wal-Mart's staunch anti-union stance is being challenged, ironically, in a country where unions have little power. Government-backed trade union officials in China have been trying to organize workers at foreign enterprises and have been especially critical of Wal-Mart's resistance to the idea.

None of Wal-Mart's stores in China is unionized, says Huang Jianling, the company's public relations manager in China. She declined to say whether any of the retailer's 30,000 workers in China had expressed interest in forming a union. By comparison, about three-quarters of Carrefour's 34,000 employees in China are union members.

Wal-Mart beat Carrefour to China by a few months, sending executives to the Middle Kingdom in 1994. But it wasn't until two years later that Wal-Mart opened its first super-center in Shenzhen, an industrial city that borders Hong Kong. After building a cluster of stores in China's southeast, Wal-Mart started to push up the coast and sought to break into Shanghai.

But when it approached authorities, Beijing instead offered a license in Shenyang, in the gritty northeast region near North Korea, says Paul French, founder of Asia Access, a market research firm in Shanghai. Shanghai officials didn't go out of their way to help, either. Some grumbled that Wal-Mart waltzed into town and began pressing for favorable terms, playing one district government against another.

Carrefour, meanwhile, bypassed Beijing and cut deals directly with local governments. "They would go to the local mayor, the [Communist] party guy and say, 'I'll bring you a Carrefour store, pay taxes, create jobs, pay rent,' " French said. Local officials were thrilled. Beijing later caught on and slowed Carrefour's growth, but by then the retailer had already locked up some of the best sites in cities such as Shanghai.

Source:

Business delegation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region visits Uzbekistan

2006-07-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

A delegation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region led by deputy chairman of department on foreign trade and economic cooperation Li Zhdin Yuan [transliterated] is paying visit to Uzbekistan.

The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Uzbekistan organised the visit to continue development of bilateral relations between Uzbek and Chinese businesses, as well as attraction of Chinese investments in development of production at small and private businesses.

The delegation included 16 people, including head of departments and bodies of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, head of large Chinese companies, engaged in production of construction, textile, food and other industries.

On 3 July, a cooperation exchange between Uzbek and Chinese businesses was held at the Hotel Dedeman Silk Road. The sides had opportunity to discuss perspectives of business cooperation and attraction of foreign investments.

In accordance with trade-economic agreement, signed between Uzbekistan and China in January 1992, the countries set the most favourable regime.

Zhan Di [transliterated], secretary on trade-economic issue of Chinese Embassy in Uzbekistan, said the Chinese investments to Uzbekistan is small, but China supports Chinese companies, working in Uzbekistan.

He said according to the statistics for last years, the foreign investments of China to Uzbekistan comprised US$30 million and added that it is small figure and said the sides should make efforts to increase potential.

Li Zhdin Yuan said Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Uzbekistan has wide opportunities in economic cooperation, establishment of partnership relations in petrochemical industry, joint utilisation of natural resources.

China is one of the largest trade partners of Uzbekistan. Trade turnover between countries comprised US$485.5 million in 2005 and US$196.1 million in the first quarter of 2006. Some 83 companies with Chinese investments operate in Uzbekistan, of which 19 have 100% Chinese investment.

Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Uzbekistan said in its release that within the framework of the visit, the delegation will visit Chinese embassy in Uzbekistan, met leadership of Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Uzbekistan, organisations in Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand regions and Tashkent city.

The delegation will also held meetings and negotiations with leadership of enterprises and companies of Samarkand, Bukhara, Termez and Tashkent, where will be presented investment and export potentials of various sectors of Uzbekistan. The sides will also considered issues on current affairs and perspectives of trade-economic cooperation between businesses of two states.

Situated in the northwest of China, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was known in China as the Western Territory in ancient times.

Its 1.66 million square kilometers represent about one-sixth of the total territory of the country, making it the largest of China's regions and provinces.

Xinjiang also has the longest boundary among China's provinces and autonomous regions and shares 5,600 kilometers of frontier with Mongolia in the northeast, then Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the west, and then Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in the southwest.

Source: UzReport

China to seek international cooperation in combating terrorism

2006-07-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

Beijing, July 3. (PTI): China will seek international cooperation to strike at members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), who are seeking to separate the oil-rich Xinjiang from rest of the country.

The ETIM is an anti-China secessionist group, which has been engaged in conducting terrorism since long, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu said.

The United Nations Security Council has named ETIM as a terrorist group and has imposed sanctions on it under resolution 1267, Jiang told PTI when asked to comment on reports that China has sought increased security for its diplomats in Pakistan.

Striking at the ETIM forces is an integral part of international cooperation in counter-terrorism activities, she said adding that China will cooperate with other countries in combating ETIM forces.

The ETIM is a separatist organisation in Xinjiang, China's westernmost province inhabited by Uyghur Muslim tribals, which has long been facing a separatist movement.

ETIM seeks separation of Xinjiang from China on grounds of their Islamic identity. The independent 'Eastern Turkistan's envisaged by the ETIM includes parts of Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Xinjiang in China.

China keeps a tight watch on restive Xinjiang, especially after the 9/11 terrorist strikes on the United States, and has launched to contain the activities of ETIM, including urging Pakistan and Afghanistan to cooperate.

Source: Hindu

Wilfert Comments on Canadian Citizen Facing Execution in China

2006-07-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

June 30, 2006

OTTAWA – The Honourable Bryon Wilfert, Official Opposition Critic for Foreign Affairs (Asia-Pacific) today called on the Government of Canada to seek assurances from the Chinese government that Huseyincan Celil will have access to a Canadian diplomatic representative and that there is a prompt resolution to this issue.

Huseyincan Celil, a Canadian Citizen from Burlington, Ontario was extradited from Uzbekistan to China in spite of a Canadian diplomatic note which was sent by Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay.

According to reports, Mr. Celil founded a political party in China to work on behalf of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province. He was recently sentenced to death in China for human rights work he did on behalf of the Uyghur community.

“Despite a diplomatic note from Minister MacKay, the Uzbekistan government sent Mr. Celil to China knowing that his life could be in danger,” said Wilfert.

Mr. Wilfert joins the Department of Foreign Affairs in calling on the Chinese government to provide Canadian diplomatic personnel immediate access to visit Mr. Celil in jail.

“I would like assurance from the Canadian government that it will take all steps necessary to ensure this Canadian citizen will receive appropriate treatment and that any proceedings will be held in an open forum,” said Wilfert.

Source: Liberals

Xinjiang prepares files for karez

2006-06-30T05:04:00.000-07:00

Xinjiang Karez Research Association has prepared detailed files for each karez in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and all the files of karezs are recorded in the book of "Karezs in Xinjiang".

The records the information of each karez, such as name, location, wellhead, the year of digging, overall length, total vertical shafts, the largest flow in history and the current flow and so on. Color photographs of water outlet and head of each karez are also included as references.

Besides these, the dried or disappeared karezs have also been recorded in the book, which represent nearly 80% of the total number of karezs.

By People's Daily Online
Source

Kashgar to review relations with Central, Southern Asia

2006-06-30T05:02:00.000-07:00

30.06.2006 14:15:07
Custom bodies of four border points of southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region announced readiness to optimize customs operations with neighbouring states of Central and Southern Asia, Jahon reported.

Chief of customs department of Kashgar May Waipin [transliterated] said the customs operations of border points Turgat, Hundjerab and Irkishtan will be focused in Kashgar, city located in route of Great Silk Road.

Waipin said this measure will allow to increase efficiency of customs and will stimulate deve;opment of economic and trade relations of southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with external world.

The report said some 250 investment projects were realized in Kashgar and the volume of trade turnover increased by 36% year-on-year in 2005.

Last year, trade turnover of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region made up US$7.94 billion. The region signed agreements on trade-economic cooperation and protection of investments with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Source: UzReport

Political repression intensifies as Tibet railway opens

2006-06-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

ICT[Friday, June 30, 2006 10:35]
The world's highest railway across the Tibetan plateau opens Saturday (1 July) in Lhasa in an increasingly repressive political climate. Security is tight in Lhasa this week as the government steps up its patriotic education and "strike hard" campaigns, and Tibet's Party chief emphasizes a "fight to the death struggle" against the Dalai Lama and his supporters.

Completion of the 1,142 kilometer rail link from Golmud (Ge'ermu) in Qinghai province to Lhasa in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) despite the high cost and considerable technical difficulties reflects the Beijing leadership's political and strategic objectives in the region. Described by the official press as the "center-piece" of China's high-profile campaign to develop the Western regions, the $4.1 billion rail link1 connects Lhasa with Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou via Xining, bringing Beijing much closer to achieving the goal set by Mao Zedong over 40 years ago to integrate Tibet with China.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, a former Party chief of Tibet, is rumored to be boarding the first train to Lhasa as Beijing draws attention to its technological and engineering achievements in constructing the railroad, approximately half of which is built on permafrost, or frozen earth. New methods have been pioneered in order to build a fixed track on the unstable, moving ground of the high plateau.

In the buildup to the railroad opening, senior Party leaders have intensified their focus on the "anti-separatist struggle" in Tibet, indicating their determination to crack down on any dissenting views and actions. At a meeting last month in Lhasa, the new TAR Party Secretary Zhang Qingli called for the intensification of the political "patriotic education" campaign, as he said the Party is engaged in a "fight to the death struggle" against the Dalai Lama and his supporters.2 Zhang, who was formally appointed as TAR Party Secretary on May 26 from a senior post overseeing the immigration of Chinese into ethnic Uyghur areas in Xinjiang (East Turkestan), described the Dalai Lama as "the biggest obstacle hindering Tibetan Buddhism from establishing normal order".

TAR Party leaders also focused on the need to "strike hard" against any possible "illegal activities along the railroad" and to "assure the harmony and stability of the Qinghai-Tibet area, particularly the safe operation of the railroad" through legal mechanisms, at a conference in Lhasa on June 15.3 Over the past ten years in Tibet, administrative and legal mechanisms have been developed by the Chinese government that enable them to clamp down on any activities such as religious practice or peaceful protest that could be described as a threat to social stability and national unity, while claiming that they are operating according to a "rule of law".

This report is accompanied by new images of the development of Lhasa and the construction of the railway, demonstrating its impact on the Tibetan landscape and people. The Qinghai-Tibet railway is the most visible and costly element of China's "Great Leap West" (Chinese: xibu da kaifa),4 a high-profile political campaign, initiated by the then Party Secretary and President Jiang Zemin in 1999-2000. This drive to develop the Western regions of the territory claimed by the People's Republic of China affects 56% of China's land area and almost a quarter of China's population, including Tibetans, Uighur Muslims and other "national minorities".

Full report accessible at www.savetibet.org

Source:

Uzbekistan deports Canadian activist to China

2006-06-30T04:56:00.000-07:00

Friday, June 30, 2006 6:53:46 AM ET

By Shamil Baigin

TASHKENT (Reuters) - Uzbekistan confirmed on Friday it had deported to China a Canadian rights activist -- an ethnic Uighur accused of terrorism by Beijing -- despite calls from Ottawa for his return.

Huseyincan Celil, who fled China in the 1990s, was arrested in Uzbekistan in March. His supporters say he may face the death sentence if tried in China, which has waged a long campaign against Uighur separatism.

Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for 8 million of the 19 million people in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang.

"Uzbekistan has extradited to China a terrorist who has committed a number of crimes in that country and who is also wanted by Interpol," Uzbekistan's state-backed press-uz.info news Web site reported.

Interpol and officials in China and Uzbekistan were not available for comment. The Web site is often used by the Uzbek authorities to make statements on sensitive issues.

Countries in Central Asia like Uzbekistan have used what they see as the threat of extremism and separatism as an excuse to crack down on political dissent or ethnic minority rights, analysts say.

Uighur activists say they fear China could put Celil, 37, on trial and execute him. Celil has three children in Canada.

China accuses Celil of taking part in a "terrorist attack" on a government delegation in Xinjiang in 2000, as well as murdering an Uighur in Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbek news agency said.

Canada has pressed Uzbekistan to let him go on humanitarian grounds. Canada angered Uzbekistan last year when it agreed to resettle 50 Uzbek refugees who fled to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan after Uzbek security forces fired on crowds in the town of Andizhan when they put down an uprising.

Separately, Amnesty International called on China to release two Uighurs who it said were forcibly returned from neighbouring Kazakhstan in May and now faced "serious human rights violations" including torture and possibly the death penalty.

"Over recent years, Amnesty International has monitored growing numbers of forced returns of Uighurs to China from several of its neighboring countries, including those of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan," it said in a statement.

At least 1,770 people were executed and 3,900 sentenced to death in China in 2005, Amnesty said, adding that "the true figures, which are classified as a 'state secret', are believed to be much higher."

Source: Reuters

Pak-based China militants alarm Beijing

2006-06-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

Amir Mir
Thursday, June 29, 2006 23:18 IST
ISLAMABAD: The rebels of the pro-independence Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) have extended their network of terrorist activities as the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad has officially apprised the Pakistan government of an ETIM plan to kidnap senior Chinese diplomats and consular officers stationed in Pakistan to highlight their cause.

The ETIM is a Chinese militant separatist group founded by the Turkic speaking ethnic majority of eight million whose traditional homeland lies in the Xingjian Uighur Autonomous Region in north-west China, which is usually called XUAR.

Having investigated the threat, the Pakistani intelligence agencies confirmed that a group of Chinese terrorists has entered the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The agencies further informed Pakistani Ministry of Interior that the would-be Chinese kidnappers had first travelled to Jalalabad to finalise their kidnapping plans.

According to the Chinese intelligence findings, already shared with the Pakistani agencies, when the Taliban regime reigned in Afghanistan, over 2,000 of ETIM terrorists present in Afghanistan at that time established an independent brigade associated with Al Qaeda which imparted terrorist training to them. And many of them returned to Xingjian to foment trouble for the Chinese government. According to the Chinese intelligence findings, the ETIM used to receive money, weapons and support from Al Qaeda. After the US-led Allied Forces attacked Afghanistan in 2001, most of the ETIM separatists retreated to Pakistan, and began collaborating with some local extremists groups to further advance their separatist agenda through jehadi means.

Taking notice of their suspicious activities, the Pakistan government had to order recently the removal of two Uighur camps called Kashgarabad and Hotanabad near Islamabad which had been there for many years following the liberal Chinese policy of allowing the Uighurs to perform Hajj via Pakistani route, but being misused by the separatists.

The fact that some Al Qaeda linked terrorists had penetrated these camps was admitted recently by none other than General Pervez Musharraf when he announced on the state-run Pakistan television that Uighurs had been found among the terrorists killed in the Waziristan tribal agency while fighting the Pakistan Army.

Source:DNA

Uzbekistan deports a Canadian Uyghur to a deeply uncertain fate in China (For immediate release of UAA)

2006-06-29T10:45:00.000-07:00

For immediate release
June 23, 2006, 15:00 EDT
Contact: Uyghur Human Rights Project +1 (202) 349 1496

The Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been informed by officials in Uzbekistan that , a Uyghur and naturalized Canadian citizen who fled China several years ago, has been sent back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by the Uzbek authorities. The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) fears he is at extremely high risk of arbitrary detention, torture, and even execution.

Concern for Mr Celil’s fate is greatly heightened by the fact he is mentioned by name as an accomplice to Ismail Semed in Ismail Semed’s sentencing document – Ismail Semed was sentenced to death on separatism charges in October 2005, and may already have been executed (see, UHRP: Uyghur sentenced to death on political charges in East Turkistan, April 7, 2006).

Huseyin Celil’s forced return to China sometime in the past few days means he is almost certain to face charges of “splittism” relating to the political and religious activities he engaged in when he was still in East Turkistan (the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in the north west PRC), and during his first years of exile in Central Asia.

“This is terrifying news,” said Alim Seytoff, Director of UHRP. “We were worried Uzbekistan were going to send him to Kyrgyzstan to face false charges, but for him to be sent to China to face false charges – this really is the worst case scenario.”

A father of six with a heavily pregnant wife, Mr Celil is a highly respected and charismatic Imam in Hamilton, who went to Uzbekistan to try and meet up with three of his young children who had traveled to Tashkent from China to see him.

Mr Celil was initially detained in Tashkent on March 27, 2006, reportedly at the request of the Chinese authorities. He was also wanted by the Kyrgyz authorities on suspicion of committing serious crimes in 2000. However, he was able to conclusively prove that he was in Turkey when those crimes were committed in Kyrgyzstan, and it appears his extradition to China went ahead after the Uzbek authorities were satisfied he was not responsible for those crimes in Kyrgyzstan.

It is clear from Ismail Semed’s sentencing document that the only evidence against him and other people named in the document – including Mr Celil – is the testimony of individuals interrogated by Chinese police. UHRP is extremely concerned that many of the testimonies cited as evidence to sentence Mr Semed to death and to implicate Mr Celil were extorted through torture.

Furthermore, two of the people whose testimony was cited as evidence were themselves executed in 1998, obviously making any cross-examination of prosecution witnesses impossible. As such, UHRP believes it will be impossible for Mr Celil to have a fair trial.

Another alleged accomplice to Ismail Semed named in the sentencing document, Kurban Yasin, who once shared a detention cell with Mr Celil in Kyrgyzstan on immigration charges, was also sent back to China and executed, according to UHRP’s sources, having been accused of activities very similar to those ascribed to Mr Celil in the sentencing document.

Background

Mr Celil is the latest in a long line of Uyghurs known to have been sent back to China from neighboring states to face arbitrary detention, torture and possible execution. For instance, Ismail Semed was himself extradited from Pakistan in 2003, and in May of this year, fears were raised that two Uyghurs from East Turkistan, Yusuf Kadir Tohti and Abdukadir Sidik, may have been secretly sent back to China from Kazakhstan at the request of the Chinese authorities. Both men reportedly had computer disks containing information of ‘an extremist character’ when detained in Kazakhstan.

Mainly under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the PRC has brokered agreements with most of its immediate neighbors for Uyghurs suspected of involvement in any political activities against the Chinese government to be returned to the PRC. Indeed, one of the main stated functions of the SCO under the the guidance of PRC has been to curtail and control the political activities of Uyghurs in the region.

Uyghurs are regularly sent back to the PRC following the minimal assurances that they will be handled in accordance with international human rights law. Deporting or extraditing people to face possible torture and execution severely undermines the principle of non-refoulement in customary international human rights law.

Even those states which are not members of the SCO regularly return Uyghurs to the PRC, apparently concerned with avoiding ‘upsetting’ China as it fast becomes the dominant presence in Central Asia.

As an example of these concerns, the Pakistani press reported this morning that the Chinese embassy in Islamabad had expressed concern that “members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) are planning to kidnap senior Chinese diplomats and consular officers” in Pakistan.

The Pakistani authorities reportedly responded to China’s claim by saying the police will “hunt down the ETIM members […] as soon as possible”, raising fears that the Pakistani police will unfairly target Uyghurs in the country.

Source: UAA

Canadian Huseyin Celil Faces Persecution and Death in China

2006-06-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

By Syed B. Soharwardy

Al-Jazeerah, June 28, 2006

Conservative government should protect all Canadians.

Canadian Govt Shares the Responsibility for Any Harm to Huseyin Celil.

Calgary - The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (ISCC) strongly protests against the transfer of a Canadian, Huseyin Celil to China where he faces persecution and death. Huseyin has been a very vocal opponent of Chinese government’s policies on human rights. Huseyin Celil, citizen of Canada, arrived in Canada as a Convention Refugee from China. He is of Uygur descent, and acted as a political leader in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China. He was born in 1969 in Kashgar, the former Eastern Turkistan Republic that was occupied by the Communist Chinese regime in 1949 and incorporated into China in 1956. He advocated for the rights of the Uygur people in Xinjiang.

Based upon the requests from Chinese government, Huseyin was arrested in Uzbekistan during his visit. It has been now confirmed that Huseyin has been handed over to Chinese authorities.

Canadian Muslims have been asking the conservative government to intervene and stop the transfer of Huseyin Celil from Uzbekistan to China. However, the conservative government has shown that they are not interested in protecting every Canadian. They protect the ones they select based upon its citizen's religion, ancestry or political background.

ISCC urges all Canadians to protest against the failure of conservative government and ask the government to treat all Canadians equally. ISCC demands that the Canadian government must intervene immediately, ensure Huseyin Celil safety, and negotiate with Chinese government for his safe return to Canada.

For any questions, please contact Syed B. Soharwardy at toll free (866)-208-6898 OR email contact@islamicsupremecouncil.com

Born of America's Indifference, Eurasian Alliance Comes of Age

2006-06-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

By M. K. Bhadrakumar
June 30, 2006

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the only major international organization from which the United States is excluded.

The organization rebuffed an American attempt last year to gain observer status, while granting such status to Mongolia, Pakistan, India and, perhaps most irritatingly to Washington, Iran. The alliance's summit last year, held in the Kazakh capital of Astana, pushed for a withdrawal of American troops from Central Asia and sought to debunk the dogma of democratization that led to the region's so-called color revolutions. And the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is gaining a name as a regional alliance that could frustrate NATO's drive to expand further eastward into the former Soviet republics.

To all appearances, perhaps, anti-Americanism in action — a Chinese-Russian alliance built to rival NATO and working for the elimination of American influence in Central Asia. Washington, in this view, must somehow render the Shanghai Cooperation Organization ineffectual, and the sooner the better.

Curiously, there is hardly any effort to assess the alliance's raison d'etre outside of an American prism — even though the "Shanghai spirit" was in the air before the current chill in Washington's relations with Moscow and Beijing, before the September 11 terrorist attacks, before the establishment of an American military presence in Central Asia, before the American intervention in Afghanistan and before the American-backed color revolutions in Moscow's backyard.

The "Shanghai spirit" dates back to the second half of the 1990s. At the time, Boris Yeltsin's Russia was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Euro-Atlanticism. Moscow believed that even though the Cold War had ended, the United States was not only determined to expand NATO eastward, but was also working hard diplomatically to rollback residual Russian influence in Eurasia. In 1996, Yeltsin began looking up Russia's "Eurasianist" heritage.

By the second half of the 1990s, as the Clinton presidency was drawing to a close, American influence in Central Asia reached an all-time high, though admittedly there was always a sense of disquiet among Central Asians about American intentions in the region. The Central Asians could sense that American policy lacked transparency. They could perceive, for example, that the United States was only paying lip service to the Tajik peace settlement signed in the mid-1990s — though the centrality of the settlement to regional security was unquestionable — because it emanated out of Russian- and Iranian-led talks.

Nonetheless, expectations were high that Washington could produce the panacea for the aches and ailments faced by the post-Soviet economies. Thus, American companies were given privileged access to oil deposits, gold mines and cotton fields. American diplomats were encouraged to behave like little viceroys — and at times they did.

Then came the Taliban's capture of power in Kabul in 1996, after which the first incipient signs of discord began appearing. American diplomacy in 1996 and 1997 was actively aimed at convincing Central Asian states that the Taliban had no political agenda of exporting militant Islam to their region, that the Taliban was a purely indigenous Afghan movement and that the Taliban's radicalism would wear off once it was ensconced in power in Afghanistan. American diplomacy encouraged Central Asian states to have dealings with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

By 1998, however, the Taliban were gate-crashing into the Amu Darya region on Afghanistan's northern border, and Islamist elements in Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan, began linking up with the Taliban. With neighboring Afghanistan having become a revolving door for militancy and international terrorism, Central Asians began turning to Moscow and Beijing for help and understanding.

China and Russia completely shared the perception prevalent in Central Asian capitals. Governments in the region saw interlocking links between the Taliban and Al Qaeda and local threats from Chechen rebels, Uyghur militants in China's Xinjiang province and Islamists in eastern Uzbekistan.

It was a colossal failure of American policy to have dismissed these threat perceptions as nothing more than propaganda. Washington was much too quick to believe that authoritarian regimes in the region were simply aiming to squash political dissent by raising the specter of political Islam, and that Russia was exaggerating the threat in order to regain geostrategic control over Central Asia.

Arguably, the ambivalence in America's attitude toward the Taliban was the root problem of American diplomacy in the latter part of the 1990s. Washington kept hoping that the Taliban could serve as an instrument of American policy in the region. Nonetheless, when the United States sought to establish regional military bases in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, neither Russia, China nor any of the Central Asian states made much of an issue of Washington's previously soft stance on the Taliban.

Central Asia took America's war on terror seriously, and as a result American credibility was somewhat revived in the region between 2001 and 2003. But that, and much more, was lost with the overthrow of Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, which was nothing less than a seminal event in the region.

Washington underestimated the shock waves that Shevardnadze's ouster produced. If, despite all that the wily Georgian had done for nearly two decades in the service of America's geopolitical goals, Washington could rubbish "Shevvy" just like that, then how could any Central Asian take America's friendship at face value? The so-called rose revolution reawakened doubts many had about American intentions in the region.

Within weeks, Uzbekistan — Central Asia's strategic hub — sought membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Furthermore, it asked to host an organizational summit in June 2004 in Tashkent, and requested that the Uzbek capital be picked as the home of the alliance's anti-terrorism center. That same month, Uzbekistan signed a strategic partnership treaty with Russia — which Vladimir Putin is on the record as saying was brought forward on the personal initiative of Uzbek President Islam Karimov.

Since the June 2004 summit in Tashkent, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has gone from strength to strength. It simply stepped into the geopolitical vacuum resulting from the collapse of American policy in the region — but it is important to note that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization did not engineer the collapse.

Today, the "Shanghai spirit" gives Central Asian states a newfound strength in facing up to challenges posed by color revolutions, terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. All this is thanks to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which, unlike Washington, has yet to make demands on their national sovereignty.

It is a pragmatic arrangement. Kyrgyzstan, for instance, can stand up to the United States and insist that an annual fee of $2 million is a measly amount for the American military's use of the Manas air base. Without the alliance's call for a withdrawal of American troops from the region, the Kyrgyz government in Bishkek might not have mustered the political courage to stand up to Washington.

It is perhaps a sign of the alliance's maturity that at its summit earlier this month in Shanghai, there was no mention of American military bases in region. Last year it issued its demand for withdrawal against a crisis-ridden regional backdrop, including the so-called tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the uprising in Uzbekistan's eastern Andizhan province. The alliance has since moved on, and now simply signals to Washington that it should not interfere in internal Central Asian affairs.

Beijing, too, reaps real strategic benefits from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. By bringing in China's neighbors, the alliance helps Beijing keep a strict check on Uyghur activists in the restive Xinjiang region. Furthermore, China has successfully tapped the organization for stimuli to bilateral cooperation with Central Asian countries. Considering that until recently China loomed large in the Central Asian consciousness as a hostile power, the soft power that China wields today is extraordinary.

In general, for both China and Russia the alliance is a handy diplomatic lubricant, serving both as a clearinghouse of Chinese-Russian cooperation in Central Asia and as a reality check on their vaulting regional ambitions. But it is in the economic sphere that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization poses perhaps the toughest challenge to American interests.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at the alliance's summit this month likely heralds closer cooperation on energy issues between Tehran, Moscow and Beijing. This development could have a serious impact on the East-West balance of power. And whereas the United States failed to capitalize on its early entry into business activities in Central Asia — American companies stuck to select areas like oil, gas, minerals and cotton — the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is spearheading infrastructure and manufacturing projects that hold out the promise of both job creation and revenue generation.

Yet for all the economic and strategic potential the alliance holds for its members, it cannot easily transform into military alliance. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is highly unlikely to become Eurasia's regional security umbrella — and as such, the only rationale for trying to label it an anti-American alliance is to deflect attention away from the flaws in Washington's Central Asia policy.

M. K. Bhadrakumar served in the Indian Foreign Service for 29 years, including postings as ambassador to Uzbekistan and to Turkey.

Source:Forward Forum

PM to aid detainee in China

2006-06-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Nolan
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jun 28, 2006)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's right-hand man says he's willing to travel to China to help secure the release of a Burlington man facing a death sentence for human rights work.

"Absolutely," Calgary MP Jason Kenny -- Harper's parliamentary secretary -- told The Spectator last night.

"I will do anything to help and I know the prime minister will support that."

Kenny said Ottawa has already told China it views seriously the imprisonment of Huseyincan Celil, 37.

Celil, who faces a death sentence for his work on behalf of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province, was extradited to China after he was detained in Uzbekistan while visiting family in March.

It is not known when he was sent to China, but Uzbekistan informed Canada on the weekend the father of six had been handed over.

Kenny, who had spoken out against Uzbekistan's detention of Celil, said government officials contacted a counter-terrorism expert meeting with Chinese officials in Bejing to have the person inform China that Canada views Celil's imprisonment with importance.

"She made it clear this was not a garden variety consular case for us," the Calgary MP said. "We've communicated to the Chinese this is a priority case."

While Celil was sentenced to death in absentia for his political work, Kenny said the Uzbekistan government told Canada it had assurance from China Celil would not be subjected to capital punishment.

"Obviously, we're going to hold China to that," said Kenny.

The Chinese have not yet confirmed they have Celil, but Kenny said Ottawa does not believe Uzbekistan is misleading Canada.

Celil fled China in 1994 after he was jailed for his political work.

China and Kyrgyzstan accuse him of terrorist acts in 2000, but family and friends says he was in Turkey under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He came to Canada in 2001 and is now a citizen.

"I believe this is a case of him being a political prisoner," Kenny added. "They have a political interest in him."

dnolan@thespec.com

Source: Hamilton Spectator

Canadian citizen extradited to China could be put to death

2006-06-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

Last Updated Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:07:30 EDT
CBC News

Uzbekistan has extradited a Canadian citizen to China, where he faces a death sentence.

Huseyincan Celil was sentenced to death in China for human rights work.

The 37-year-old was sentenced in absentia for founding a political party to work on behalf of the Uighur people, a minority ethnic group in the Xinjiang province.

A father of six, Celil fled China in the mid-1990s. He came to Canada in 2001 from Turkey as a refugee and became a Canadian citizen.

The Burlington, Ont., resident has been held in an Uzbekistan jail since March. He was arrested in March while trying to renew his visitor's visa in the capital Tashkent.

A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs said the department informed Celil's family of the development on Monday and is trying to confirm where Celil is being held.

Celil and his wife have three children in Ontario and he has three more in China, a family friend told the Hamilton Spectator in April.

The same friend said Celil was in Uzbekistan in an attempt to try to get his three children out of China, but didn't explain how.

Canadian Could Face Execution in China

2006-06-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Burlington man extradited to China for human rights work

By Caylan Ford
Epoch Times Calgary Staff

A Canadian citizen who fled persecution in China over a decade ago has been extradited by Uzbekistan back to China, where he may now face a death sentence.

Huseyincan Celil, a 37-year-old Burlington man and a father of six, was wanted by Chinese authorities for his work on behalf of the Muslim Uighur minority of Xinjiang province. He fled China in 1994 after being imprisoned and tortured for his human rights work, and was later sentenced to death in absentia by Chinese authorities for founding a political party to advocate for Uighur rights. In 2001, he moved to Canada as a refugee and subsequently gained citizenship.

In March, Celil was arrested by Uzbekistan authorities while visiting in-laws with his wife and three children. Canadian officials had demanded that he be returned to Canada and arranged consular visits with him. But after disappearing about two weeks ago, foreign affairs learned from Uzbek officials that Celil had been extradited to China. Foreign Affairs informed Celil's family about the extradition on Monday.

Foreign Affairs spokesperson Kim Girtel says the department is unaware of Celil's current whereabouts, and that the Chinese authorities have not yet confirmed that they have Celil. Once confirmed, she says, Canada will demand a consular visit for him.

Meanwhile, Jason Kenney, parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, has said he would be willing to personally make the trip to China to help secure Celil's release. "I will do anything to help and I know the prime minister will support that," he told the Hamilton Spectator. Uzbekistan reportedly told foreign affairs that Chinese authorities guaranteed they would not subject Celil to capital punishment. Clive Ansley, a Victoria-based lawyer and expert on the Chinese legal system, says he doubts China will honour such a promise.

"I certainly wouldn't put much faith in it myself. The Beijing government has a history of violating almost every international treaty they've ever signed, and these treaties certainly [weigh more heavily] in law than diplomatic promises," he says. Ansley also notes that capital punishment isn't the only way to have someone killed in the Chinese system.

"China routinely has people murdered in their prison system. They turn criminal inmates on people they want to get rid of. I would hope the Canadian government would intervene in any way it could on behalf of a Canadian Citizen."

The region of Xinjiang was occupied by the Chinese Communist Party when it took power in 1949, and was incorporated into China as a province in 1956. According to groups like Amnesty International, its ethnic population of Uighur Muslims has been subjected to discrimination by China's majority Han ethnicity, and the region's traditional culture and language have been suppressed by the communist regime. Like in Tibet, some Uighurs continue to call for independence from China, resulting in ongoing tensions in the region.

Celil has been outspoken in his opposition to repression by Chinese authorities, and has demanded freedom from what he has labelled the colonial imperialism of the Chinese government.

The communist regime accuses him of being involved in a terrorist plot in 2000, but Amnesty International spokesperson Elizabeth Berton-Hunter says those charges can't be verified, and notes that Celil was in Turkey at the time.

Source:The Epoch Times

Canada presses China over deported Uighur activist

2006-06-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada is pressing China to reveal what it has done with a Canadian citizen who is also a member of the Muslim Uighur minority, Canada's foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Huseyincan Celil, who friends say fled China in the mid 1990s, was arrested in the central Asian nation of Uzbekistan in March. Uzbekistan has told Ottawa it deported Celil to China, the ministry said.

Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for about 8 million of the 19 million people in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang. Beijing has waged a long campaign against Uighur separatists, whom it labels terrorists.

Uighur activists say they fear China could put Celil, 37, on trial and then execute him. Celil has three young children in Canada and his wife is pregnant.

"When we were informed by Uzbekistan that Mr. Celil was extradited to China, Canada made immediate representations to the Chinese government ... we will continue to press China to confirm that he is in fact being held there," said foreign ministry spokeswoman Kim Girtel.

The Uighur Human Rights Project, an activist group based in the United States, said it feared Celil was "at extremely high risk of arbitrary detention, torture, and even execution."

Girtel said Ottawa had formally asked Uzbekistan to release Celil on humanitarian grounds.

Canada angered Uzbekistan last year when it agreed to resettle 50 Uzbek refugees, who fled to neighboring Kyrgyzstan after troops quelled an uprising.

Source:Reuters

Not just meat on a stick

2006-06-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

China Daily

Not just meat on a stick
(City Weekend)
Updated: 2006-06-26 10:54

Ah, chuanr. What would life in Beijing be without them?

These Central Asian-influenced treats are lip-smackingly succulent and make a great snack in between meals, or, with a few cold dishes and a frothy beer or two, make a meal in and of themselves. There are some great venues around town for trying kebabs from all over the world, starting with all those wonderful chuanr stands that dot the city.

Often little more than a grill and a couple plastic tables, Beijing chuanr stands serve up a Uyghur version of the dish - lamb chunks spiced with cumin seed, chili powder and salt. Wash your chuanr down with some cold Yanjing beer, for there is no finer companion to a stick o' meat than a glug o' brew. Beijing-style chuanr, eaten on the fly amongst the amiable and drunken company of neighborhood denizens, should be savored as an authentic piece of Beijing daily life.

If you'd rather not crouch on a plastic stool in the middle of traffic eating your chuanr, head to those local bastions of Middle Eastern cuisine: 1,001 Nights or Souk. Both places serve lamb or chicken skewers that go excellently with a vast selection of fresh and flavorful salads like fattoush (crisp-fried pita bits with tomato, cucumber, feta and olives) or tabbouleh (parsley, bulghur wheat, tomatoes and olives). Finally, the Iranian restaurant Rumi makes its kebabs the central focus of the menu. Leaner, chunkier and more substantial than most, Rumi's kebabs are seasoned with sumac (a dried, ground sour berry) and go well with a hearty serving of saffron rice.

1,001 Nights
Location: East end of Gongti Bei Lu, opposite Great Dragon Hotel, Chaoyang District
Tel: 010-65324050

Souk
Location: West gate of Chaoyang Park (in the alley behind Annie's)
Tel: 010-65067309
Opening time: 11am-late

EDITORIAL: Uighur terrorism in Pakistan

2006-06-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

EDITORIAL: Uighur terrorism in Pakistan

The Chinese embassy in Islamabad has reportedly complained that members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) are planning to kidnap senior Chinese diplomats and consular officers in the country. A letter has gone to the Foreign Office saying that some members of the ETIM had arrived in Pakistan and are planning to kidnap senior diplomats of the Chinese embassy. More significantly, it was pointed out that terrorist organisations located in Pakistan, including Al Qaeda, were providing support to ETIM activists for the projected kidnappings. It is also learnt that our intelligence agencies have submitted reports to the Ministry of Interior accepting that a group of terrorists has arrived in Rawalpindi and Islamabad but has been unable to select an appropriate target for kidnapping because of enhanced security. The would-be kidnappers, say these reports, had first travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to finalise their plans.

Needless to say, ETIM is on the UN list as an ancillary of Al Qaeda, and has killed 162 people in the decade ending 2001. As China’s closest regional ally, Pakistan should worry that despite strict measures taken in the recent past, the terrorist threat from Sinkiang has refused to die down and that the affiliation of the Uighur terrorists with our own groups has grown strong enough for the latest threat to the Chinese embassy.

One reason the Chinese have favoured Pakistan’s linkage with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) whose summit President Pervez Musharraf attended recently is that it contains a proviso binding member states to fight against Islamic fundamentalism. President Musharraf has gradually been briefed about the affiliations emerging between the Sinkiang terrorist outfits and our own religious parties who may be reaching out to them because of ETIM’s Islamic credentials. After receiving complaints earlier, the president had ordered the removal of two Uighur camps called Kashgarabad and Hotanabad near the capital. The centres had been there for many years following the liberal Chinese policy of allowing the Uighurs to perform Hajj via the Pakistan route. The terrorists had penetrated these camps. Islamabad’s policy toughened further after the president announced on TV that Uighurs had been found among the terrorists killed in Waziristan.

During a visit to China in 2001, President Musharraf met with the imam of the grand mosque in Xian and urged all Chinese Muslims to be patriotic, shun violence, and work for the good of China . During the same visit, he told Hu Jintao, then vice president, that Pakistan would wholeheartedly support China’s battle against the East Turkistan terrorist forces. During another visit in 2003, he reportedly told the current Chinese president that Pakistan would never allow anyone, including the terrorist forces of East Turkistan, to use Pakistani territory to carry out anti-China activities. Thereafter, Pakistan reportedly eliminated at least 19 ETIM members during a military operation, triggering an American-Uighur organisational protest to our ambassador in Washington. Uighur terrorists, trained in Pakistani camps, had been found attacking as far inland in Sinkiang as Urumchi.

There is no doubt that Pakistan will make all efforts to remove the threat being posed to the Chinese embassy in Islamabad. It is unfortunate that our own terrorists in the Tribal Areas and Balochistan have killed Chinese citizens coming to Pakistan to assist us in our development projects. If the Uighur terrorists are a part of the Talibanisation sweep, and it seems they are in the NWFP and FATA, then the issue is more complicated than it seems. This means that the MMA will be found inclined to speak in favour of the ETIM because of its Islamic credentials and not care too much about Islamabad’s concerns relating to the threat to the Chinese diplomats. As far as China is concerned there is almost a national consensus on the issue of the Uighur terrorists. Therefore if Islamabad takes tough action it will be more acceptable than action so far taken against the other terrorists in the Tribal Areas. *

Source:Daily Times

Afghan president leaves Xinjiang concluding China tour

2006-06-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai left Urumqi Wednesday, concluding his four-day state visit to China.

During his stay in Urumqi, capital of China's northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Karzai visited several businesses.

In a meeting with Ismail Tiliwaldi, chairman of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Karzai said that some high-tech enterprises in Xinjiang impressed him very much in utilizing solar and wind energy.

The rapid economic growth in Xinjiang is another good example of China's success, on which Afghanistan can draw some experience, Karzai noted.

Tiliwaldi expressed his hope of strengthening cooperation with Afghanistan as it shares border with Xinjiang.

At the invitation of Chinese President Hu Jintao, Karzai arrived in Beijing on Sunday for a four-day state visit to China.

Source: Xinhua

Exiled Uyghur Dissident Says Family Detained in Retaliation

2006-06-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

2006.06.23
WASHINGTON—U.S.-based Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer has said the arrest of her three adult sons by authorities in China amounts to retaliation by officials angered by her criticism of Chinese rule in the region.

“My family in Urumqi has been notified in writing that my three sons have been arrested and my daughter is under house arrest,” Kadeer told RFA’s Uyghur service.

”The Chinese government is acting shamelessly. They know my children are innocent, and they also know that people around the world won't believe the accusations against my children,” she said.

“My children never committed tax fraud. They have never been involved in politics, they owe nothing to anyone, and they are well-mannered in their business and trade with other people.”

Pressure through family
Officials in the predominantly Uyghur region of Xinjiang, contacted by telephone, declined to comment on the matter.

Kahar Abdureyim, Ablikim Abdureyim, and Alim Abdureyim were officially charged last week in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, where Kadeer was once lauded as a model businesswoman and later imprisoned for her pro-independence views.

Beijing claims it is fighting a war on terror in the troubled region, where Chinese rule is deeply unpopular, and where Uyghurs enjoyed two brief periods of self-rule as East Turkestan during the 20th century.

The authorities have charged Kahar with evading taxes, Ablikim with conspiracy to overthrow the government, and Alim with tax evasion and attempts to split the country, according to the Uyghur American Association, of which Kadeer is president.

She said any attempts to silence her through her family back in China would fail.

“Since the Chinese authorities arrested me on Aug. 11, 1999, a new Rebiya Kadeer has been born. The new Rebiya Kadeer is a part of the world.”

The new Rebiya Kadeer is voice of the twenty million Uyghur people, the voice of women who had forced abortions, the voice of the forcibly aborted child.

Rebiya Kadeer
Self-described voice of millions
“The new Rebiya Kadeer is voice of the 20 million Uyghur people...Rebiya Kadeer is the voice of political prisoners, and of innocent people who died without a voice in prison. She is the voice of innocent children sold to human-traffickers and drug-traffickers,” she said.

“The new-born Rebiya Kadeer does not belong just to herself and to her family,” Kadeer said.

Kadeer, a self-made millionaire jailed for criticizing Beijing’s heavy-handed rule in mostly Uyghur Xinjiang, was recently elected president of the nonprofit Uyghur American Association.

She vowed to work for “human rights and religious freedom for the Uyghur people in East Turkestan."

Kadeer was handed an eight-year jail term in 1999 en route to meet with a team of U.S. congressional researchers.

She was paroled and exiled to the United States in 2005, and she has said she was warned to keep her criticism of China to herself or her adult children still in Xinjiang “would be finished.”

The Chinese authorities have accused Uyghur independence activists of terrorism and blamed them for more than 260 terrorist acts in Xinjiang over the last 20 years in which 160 people have died and 440 have been injured.

But human rights groups say China has used its support for the U.S.-led war on terror to justify a wider crackdown on Uyghurs characterized by arbitrary arrests, closed trials and the use of the death penalty.

Original reporting by RFA’s Uyghur service. Director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

Source: RFA

Kyrgyz Supreme Court Upholds Death Sentence

2006-06-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

(RFE/RL)
23 June, 2006 -- A lawyer in Kyrgyzstan says the country's Supreme Court has upheld a death-sentence verdict given her Uzbek client over the killing of an Uyghur business leader in 2001.

Nina Zotova told reporters in Bishkek today that the Supreme Court reached its decision on June 22.

In early 2002, a lower Kyrgyz court had sentenced Otabek Ahadov to death and another three Uyughur (Uyghur) exiles to lengthy prison terms in what rights groups say was a politically motivated case.

Zotova today said her client initially confessed to killing businessman Nigmat Bazakov under duress and that he was denied a lawyer at the early stage of the investigation.

Rights campaigner Dilobar Khudaibergenova today said her group, Women Against the Death Sentence and Torture, would appeal the Supreme Court's verdict to international institutions.

(AKIpress, 24.kg, ferghana.ru)

Source:

The East Turkestan Islamic movement in China

2006-06-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

Uighur discontent must be addressed to stem the time of the jihadi movement in China.

By Kenneth George Pereire for for the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (23/06/06)

International attention tends to focus on countries where terrorist spectaculars have occurred, or where there are ongoing high-profile conflicts. The drama and, corresponding attention, often overlooks what is perceived as ‘lesser-known conflicts.’ The situation in Xinjiang in Western China, an area bordering Afghanistan is a case in point. In this remote region, the indigenous Muslim Turkic-speaking Uighurs are feeling pressured by the non-Muslim Han Chinese immigrants to the region, as well as restrictive Chinese political controls on their religion. As with Mindanao and Southern Thailand, the key issue in this case appears to be religious and cultural freedom. Muslims in Xinjiang have a long list of grievances with the government, including what they perceive as state interference in religious worship.

Jihad in Eastern Turkestan?
The grievances are not entirely confined to China. Some Uighurs remain in indefinite custody at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Barring the release of five Uighur men from Guantanamo in early May 2006 and their subsequent transfer to Albania for resettlement, many Uighurs continue to be wrongfully detained.

The failure of the Uighurs to be released from Guantanamo Bay is also symptomatic of post-11 September measures by coalition forces and the “War on Terror” label. Countries facing difficulty in containing their own domestic small-scale skirmishes, insurgencies and separatism choose to label their own domestic problems as part of the larger “War on Terror.” This allows them to link a local problem to the larger global jihad, thus enabling a broader range of counter-measures to be deployed.

In the case of the Uighur community, worrying trends are emerging. Since the late 1990s, the secular orientation of the Uighur groups has begun to change. After the 11 September attacks, the Uighur groups are significantly influenced by the developments in the global jihad arena.

One sign of this is a recently released hour long video entitled “Jihad in Eastern Turkestan”, posted on a Middle Eastern website which indicated that the Uighurs are indeed increasingly influenced by the global jihad phenomenon. The video is effective in communicating Uighur operational capability and is obviously inspired by groups such as al-Qaida and its affiliates. The video illustrates Uighur militants displaying their weapons and combat training prowess with rocket-propelled grenades, M-16s, AK-47s, detonators and small rockets.

The video also features a clip of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center building on 11 September, suggesting that Uighur militants are drawing inspiration from al Qaida attacks. In a dramatic ending, the video showcases the faces of their enemies - the Chinese leaders. The video is believed to have been the work of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the most potent of the Uighur groups in Xinjiang today and the one with the closest ties to al-Qaida.

The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)
The aim of ETIM has always been to set up an independent Turkic state by the name of East Turkestan for Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, Western China. ETIM is one of the major beneficiaries of covert funding from the Uighur diaspora population. It has used this funding to acquire a wide range of weapons including automatic weapons and explosive devices.

ETIM has carried out numerous attacks in and around Xinjiang since 1996, including a number of unconfirmed reports of bombings against utilities and railway lines. In February 1997, serious rioting broke out in Yining after police attempted to arrest two suspected insurgents; many were killed and demonstrations spread to Urumqi, Kuqa and Hotan. Just days later, three bombs detonated on buses in Urumqi, killing seven people and injuring at least 60 others.

Since then more attacks have taken place, including clashes between ETIM militants and Chinese security forces, assassination attempts, attempted attacks on Chinese key installations and government buildings. These have however either gone unreported or been classified as mere ‘accidents.’ With ETIM now genuinely seeking to realign its goals with that of the wider jihadi community, more sensational attacks are likely.

ETIM’s al Qaida Link and the threat to China
Al-Qaida’s biggest success has been its ability to inspire and influence local Muslim groups in Asia, Africa and the Middle East to imbibe its ideology of global jihad. By providing finance, training, weapons and ideology, Al-Qaida has been able to empower local Muslim groups to fight their governments and the non-Muslim populace.

Al-Qaida invited a number of Chinese Muslims to train in their camps in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in the 1990s. At least one Pakistani group associated with al-Qaida, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) provided assistance to ETIM. HUJI leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar cemented the ETIM link with the Taliban and al-Qaida. ETIM is also now in contact with both the Iraqi and Afghan jihadist groups. As a consequence of the war in Iraq, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi’s group is now expanding its operational and ideological influence on jihad groups globally. This reach is believed to be extending despite Zarqawi’s death and his successor, Abu Hamsa Al Muhajir will probably cement the link.

Some ETIM members based in Europe are closely studying the Zarqawi group’s tactics and technologies. Al Qaida and Zarqawi’s group will influence ETIM and its affiliates to take the fight beyond Xinjiang.

Other reports also note that Hasan Mahsun, alias Ashan Sumut, the second leader of ETIM, sent several members into China in February 1998, to establish a dozen training bases in Xinjiang and inland regions to train more than 150 militants. Hasan Mahsun was killed by Pakistani troops on 2 October 2003, when the army raided a suspected al-Qaida base in South Waziristan, along the Afghan border. However, others have stepped up to replace Mahsun.

Although the Chinese security forces and the intelligence service have been effective against ETIM and other groups by conducting numerous arrests and clampdowns, the Uighur militants’ presence overseas - from Central Asia to West Asia and in Europe - is enabling the groups to survive. ETIM and its associates are also quite adept at improvising and acquiring weapons from criminal sources. ETIM has emulated groups, such as the Chechen terrorists, to exploit Western human rights and humanitarian concerns

Future implications
Al-Qaida and other global jihadist groups will continue to work with ETIM and with other Uighur groups. In the not too distant future, there is a possibility that ETIM may even adopt suicide tactics in China. Unless the Uighur grievances are addressed, the potential for a greater radicalisation of the Uighur conflict along the Islamist path can pose a real challenge to the Chinese government.

Reprinted with permission of the IDSS. Copyright (c) 2006 Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Blk S4, Level B4, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 63979

Source:

Exile Asks U.N. To Probe China Rights Abuses

2006-06-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Reuters Jun 22, 2006

BEIJING - The new U.N. Human Rights Council should probe the record of one of its members, China, which continues to lock up and harass dissidents and minorities, an exiled Uighur activist said on Thursday.

Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for about 8 million of the 19 million people in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Beijing has waged a long campaign against Uighur separatists, whom it labels terrorists and accuses of staging a series of bombings, uprisings and assassinations since the 1980s and of training and fighting alongside the al Qaeda network.

Human rights activists accuse Beijing of using its support of the U.S.-led war on terror to legitimise its crackdown on Uighur activists.

"China's election (to the Council) is quite ironic coming at this time when nothing is getting better," said Dilxat Raxit, a Swedish-based Uighur dissident from the World Uighur Congress, which wants independence for Xinjiang.

"Not only is China continuing to persecute petitioners, dissidents, religious people, reporters and human rights activists by locking them up, the situation is actually getting worse," he said in an emailed statement.

"We want the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate China's record and push it on the road towards protecting human rights."

The 45-member U.N. Human Rights Council started work on Monday, replacing the widely discredited Human Rights Commission.

Source:

UN Waffles on Human Rights in Central Asia and China; ICC on Kony and a Hero from Algiers

2006-06-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee at the U.N.

UNITED NATIONS, June 14 -- What is the place of human rights among the UN's other goals? If Central Asia is the test, the results are decidedly mixed. Wednesday at the noon briefing, Kofi Annan's spokesman read out a statement from the UN's refugee agency UNHCR, urging the Kyrgyz government not to deport four Uzbeks who "arrived in Kyrgyzstan in the immediate aftermath of the violent events in Andijan in May 2005." Uzbekistan's Karimov regime has pursued all opponents, getting a dozen returned for example from Ukraine.

Inner City Press has repeatedly asked UNHCR headquarters in Geneva for some update on those deported from Ukraine. "There is no update," has been the response. Another refugee from the region, imam Hseyincan Celil who was pursued for raising his voice for China's Uighur minority, was disappeared in Uzbekistan in April and has not been heard from since. (CBC radio report here; Uzbek response here.) His relatives fear he will be deported or "refouled" to China, for more permanent disappearance. Nevertheless, UNDP has said that Uzbekistan is making much progress toward the Millennium Development Goals.

If UNHCR is the left hand and UNDP is the right, Kofi Annan's Secretariat is supposed to be the heart or head or both. But on Monday, the Secretary-General sent an unequivocal message of congratulations to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a entity through which China has gotten deportation and "refoulement" commitments from the Central Asian states and Russia, and soon perhaps others. As reported, Mr. Annan praised the SCO's efforts against "terrorism, separatism and extremism." Of course, Uzbekistan's Karimov would say his pursuit of opponents is just that, part of the war on terror. That's what China says of the Uighurs, using the loaded term East Turkestan.

At Wednesday's noon briefing, Inner City Press asked the spokesman about this, and about Undersecretary General Gambari's current trip to Tajikistan. "Is the issue of human rights being raised?" Perhaps Kofi will be addressing these issues this week, mid-way through his last year as S-G.

Ambassador Bolton's meeting with the UN Staff Union, which Inner City Press Tuesday night predicted, from hallways sources, would take place in the Indonesia lounge on Wednesday, did in fact take place. It was after 3 p.m., however, and not at 10 a.m. (parallel universe reported on below). At 3:45, the president of the Staff Union and the ubiquitous Judge Geoffrey Robertson emerged, saying it was a good first meeting. Judge Robertson added, in response to Inner City Press' question about what other member states they'd meet with, that there would be several.

Then John Bolton stepped up to the impromptu Fox News camera and graded Mr. Annan incomplete. At a stakeout on the Hariri investigation earlier on Wednesday, Professor Bolton said that Mr. Brammertz' characterization of Syria's cooperation as "generally satisfactory" was only praise in a pass - fail grading system. He was also asked by AP about his previously-highlighted remark that Malloch Brown's speech was the worse mistake by a senior UN official since 1989; AP asked him to contrast to Rwanda. Bolton called that "incompetence and a lack of political will," versus the speechmaker's "flat out mistake."

Inner City Press asked Ambassador Bolton if the United States supports a Freedom of Information Act at the United Nations, and John Bolton appeared to say yes. A flamboyant colleague points out that the Deputy Secretary-General began speaking of a UN FOIA six months ago. Another, of pragmatic stock, says that it's not who speaks first, but who gets the job done. We'll see.

From the Department of Parallel Universes, in the Indonesia Lounge mid-morning Wednesday, at least three candidates for election to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women were campaigning by meeting with representatives of the voting member states. The candidate from Slovenia had a staffer from the Slovene mission working the phones. "Myanmar can't make it? We have a lunch at one. Vietnam? Excellent." To those she met with, she made the identical small talk. "I lobbied you on the Human Rights Council, and now I'm back asking for this. But my candidate -- I mean, our candidate -- has a long history of advocating for women."

In opposition to these smooth campaigns, on a couch with a phone was a slight woman of proud bearing, alternately speaking Arab, French and English. She met with a staffer from Ireland's mission, and asked him about the status of woman in his country. In response later to a reporter's questions, she explained that in her previous service as vice-chairperson of CEDAW, she noticed that while predominantly Muslim countries were invariably questioned about women's rights to abortion and in marriage, such questions were rarely put to the representatives of "Christian countries." And so she asked the questions, even to countries whose vote she seeks for re-election.

Her name is Meriem Belmihoub-Zerdani, a lawyer in Algiers who had been in New York since mid-May. Of her service on CEDAW she says that the problems of women in the developed and the developing worlds are not the same. "They asked Eritria for employment statistics, when the average woman has six or seven children and lives only into her 40s, often dying of AIDS." As she spoke on this topic, on a bench in the basement outside Conference Room 2, there were tears in her eyes. "The world can get along," she said. And hearing her, one believes it.

Near press time, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court emerged from the Security Council to take the press' questions. Inner City Press asked his position on arresting Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti and the three -- or two -- other Lord's Resistance Army indictees. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo repeated that Sudan has agreed to make such arrests. A colleague just back from Juba pointed out that "it is not Sudan, it is not the central government there." The colleague's reporting was detailed, and raised during her absence in perhaps garbled form, to move the story forward.

Inner City Press asked directly what the Chief Prosecutor thought of the photograph of South Sudan's vice president handing Joseph Kony money, variously described as five or twenty thousand dollars. Trailing down the second floor hallway Mr. Moreno-Ocampo and his former spokesman, Inner City Press asked about Peter Karim, who according to DPKO holds the seven Nepali peacekeepers. What will happen next remains to be seen. Meanwhile in DR Congo, not only do the seven UN peacekeepers remain in captivity -- now there is plague. A colleague reporter just back from Kinshasa recounts that the plight of the peacekeepers was not mentioned after the meetings with President Kabila, nor with this "ex-warlord" vice presidents.

Source: Inner City Press

UN's Selective Vision on Somalia and Wishful Thinking on Uighurs

2006-06-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

UN's Selective Vision on Somalia and Wishful Thinking on Uighurs

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee at the U.N.

UNITED NATIONS, June 19 -- The United Nations conflicted positions on Somalia were on display Monday, as Kofi Annan's envoy Francois Lonseny Fall took questions from reporters. Inner City Press asked about the reports that 300 Ethiopian troops have entered Somalia. Mr. Fall said he's heard the reports, and that it may be because the Islamic Courts militia were moving toward Ethiopia and Baidoa, the seat of the transitional government.

Inner City Press asked if it is Mr. Fall's understanding that Ethiopia would intervene to defend the Somali town of Baidoa from the Somali Islamic Court militia. We have asked the international community to defend the transitional government, Mr. Fall answered. Does that mean the UN would tacitly approve of Ethiopian intervention? No answer was given. Nor to questions about whether the United States was or is funding the warlords. That's about the past, Mr. Fall said. We should look ahead to the future.

Somali refugees per UNHCR

Inner City Press asked Mr. Fall to confirm or deny reports that some of the warlords left Mogadishu on a U.S. ship. Mr. Fall said that he understands that two warlords have left Mogadishu. On the question of Puntland's deal with Australia-based Range Resource, Mr. Fall said that Puntland and the transitional government in Baidoa reached a deal two weeks ago, and that the UN urges Somali's to work together to defend their national wealth. But Range Resource has reportedly used armed men to stake its claim. Mr. Fall's generalities fell, perhaps understandably, short of the mark in answering these issues.

UN's Wishful Thinking on Uighurs

So too the response by the UN's refugee agency UNHCR to Inner City Press' inquiries, last week and this, into the plight of the five Uighurs from western China who were moved in May from Guantanamo Bay to Albania. Last Friday Inner City Press asked:

Inner City Press question: This is about some lower profile individuals. There are these five Chinese Uighurs that were in Guantanamo Bay, and the US released them, and now they're in Albania. There were reports of the US trying to find them another place, other than Albania. I don't know if the UN system or UNHCR has any. do they have any role? Are they aware of them?

Spokesman: I don't know what their status is vis-à-vis UNHCR, but we can ask.

Over the weekend, Inner City Press emailed UNHCR in Geneva and New York with just this question. On Monday from UNHCR New York, this response:

From: vargas [at] unhcr.org
To: matthew.lee [at] innercitypress.com
Sent: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:12:15 +0200

"Our understanding is that it was a bilateral agreement between the USA and the Albanian government that enabled the group to enter Albania on humanitarian grounds. it is also our understanding that Albania will address the concerns of this group within the framework of their law and in respect of due process. we have no reason to fear that this will not be done in a fair and transparent manner."

This answer was reiterated, after Inner City Press re-asked the question at Monday's noon briefing, by Kofi Annan's spokesman's office: "We understand the Albanian authorities will address the concerns of the group within the framework of their law."

This seemed and seems strange, given that Albania has reportedly already denied political asylum to the five Uighurs. In an interview, Albania's National Commissioner for Refugees Argita Totozani explained: "Their future is not here," she said. "There is not a Uighur community (here). They don't speak any Albanian ... There is no integration possibility for them here. We realized their future is not in Albania."

So Inner City Press has asked:

--Is denial of political asylum because the applicant doesn't speak the language of the country applied-to in keeping with international law?

--Is keeping them incommunicado in keeping with international law?

--Any comment on the report of Kazakhstan sending back Uighurs to China?

Response is awaited. And while there was no update given about the seven UN peacekeepers held hostage in Eastern Congo since May 28, Inner City Press has asked for a response to UK Channel 4's footage of the destruction of Kazara in Ituri, and has been told that the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations is looking into the matter and will provide a response. Other issues have been raised. We'll see

UN's Annan Concerned About Use of Terror's T-Word to Repress, Wants Freedom of Information

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee at the U.N.

UNITED NATIONS, June 15 -- The UN's Kofi Annan, with six months left in his term, answered twenty media questions on Thursday. Most dealt with the issues of UN reform, and the triple B's of Bolton, budget and Mark Malloch Brown. As question 19 out of 20, from Minute 51:15 through 55:50, Inner City Press asked about the Secretary-General's recent praise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's members' initiatives against separatism, in light for example of Uzbekistan's imprisonment and torture of opponents. The full Q & A is below.

Mr. Annan responded that he has been speaking with the High Commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, about Uzbekistan and both the bulk of those fleeing and specifically the four Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan; he used the terms of art enforced refoulement, "particularly if they may be at risk if they are sent back against their will." The Secretary-General said he has in the past spoken with the President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov; perhaps that is needed again. Mr. Annan said he's increasingly concerned with the "excesses" he's seen in the fight against terrorism. "It's been too easy for some governments to put the T word on someone and then move against them and expect that nobody asks questions," he said, an apt description of China's use of the "E.T." word, East Turkestan, as well as the usual lack of questions about Xinjiang and places like it at the UN.

On Inner City Press's second question, which Mr. Annan called the third, whether he support and will implement a Freedom of Information Act during his final six months, Mr. Annan asked for clarification, which was given by reference to the UN Staff Union's report on internal justice and even the calls for transparency from US Ambassador Bolton. "Yes," the Secretary-General said, "I think we should be more forthcoming."

He mentioned that some documents would have to be withheld, concerning confidential communications with heads of state. That should be no obstacle or excuse: all FOI laws have exemptions, for pre-decisional and other information, within an overarching presumption of a fight to information, such as that contained, too vaguely, in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Minutes later, Inner City Press asked Ambassador Bolton if he might work with Kofi Annan on a Freedom of Information mechanism. The response was not yes, but neither was it no. Amb. Bolton referenced his meeting Wednesday with the Staff Council, and said he'd follow up.

In more marginal news, just before the Kofi Annan briefing, journalists were cleared from Room 226 so that a bomb-sniffing dog could go through. Later by the 46th Street entrance, the dog and his handler were interviewed. The former's name is Storm. Meanwhile Sandy Berger floated off the UN grounds with a big name tag on, and no documents in sight. In the basement, the plasma TV sign for a meeting of the Friends of the International Criminal Court said, "Closed meeting." Some friends...
Later at the Security Council stakeout, the Palestinian Permanent Observed answered Inner City Press' request for an update on whether a funding mechanism for the Palestinian Authority, previously discussed at the UN, has been found. No, was the answered, talks remain ongoing in Brussels.

Pakistan's UN envoy Munir Akram played diplomat upstairs before the UN Correspondent's Association. When Pakistan come forward with its candidate for Secretary-General, now that India has? It is complicated, he said, while stating that no country with eyes on a (permanent) Security Council seat should also field a candidate for Secretary General. Inner City Press asked Ambassador Akram about Baluchistan, the few English language articles regarding which invariably use the adjective restive, as well as about mass evictions of the poor in Karachi.

On the former, Amb. Akram spoke dismissively of "three Sardars" who used to work with the government, but who then wanted more money. Amb. Akram said that their Baluchistan Liberation Army has funding and arms from "outside sources." When Inner City Press pointedly asked if that means India, Amb. Akram declined to answer. The evictions, he said, probably relate to attempts to give the poor more rather than fewer property rights -- a position not shared by close observers.

Finally, Inner City Press asked Amb. Akram if Pakistan would consider as its S-G candidate the human rights lawyer, previously UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir. "I suppose not," Amb. Akram answered dryly. Later over a Pakistani lunch he spoke of Somalia, calling it "Taliban Two." Given the links between Pakistan's ISI and Taliban One, the irony was as pungent as the spinach, yoghurt and rice. Let the Games continue.

June 15, 2006 Question and Answer

Inner City Press question: This is a question about Asia and human rights. The media in China and Central Asia reported your remark earlier this week that you praised the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in its meeting for its work against terrorism, extremism and separatism. And it said that you praised this, as I am sure you know, UNHCR has criticized Uzbekistan for requiring that people be deported and locking them up. China has cracked down on its Uighur minority. So I wonder if you have any guidance for the balance between human rights and fighting terrorism and, totally separately, whether you would consider supporting a freedom of information act at the United Nations in the six months that remain to you, maybe even imposing it in the Secretariat, as an experiment? Those are two different questions.

The Secretary-General: May I ask for clarification on your third question? What do you mean by “freedom of information act at the UN”?

Inner City Press clarification: Okay, I’m sorry. The Staff Union report that just came out suggested that documents be made available not just on a whim, but as a right, to the media or to the public, as many Member States have such a law. I think Mr. Bolton has said, and a variety of people have said – and I think you even said in your reform proposal that you would favour something like that. So I just wanted to hear whether you would actually implement it.

The Secretary-General: I think, on the question of effective action against terrorism and civil liberties and human rights, my position is very clear: that there can really be no tradeoff between effective action against terrorism and civil liberties and human rights of the individual, and that if we undermine human rights, if we undermine the rule of law in our fight against terrorism, then we are giving the terrorists a victory they could never have won alone. And this is why I’ve been quite concerned about some of the excesses I’ve seen around the world when it comes to the fight against terrorism. It’s been very easy for many Governments to just put the T-word on someone and then move against them, and expect that nobody asks questions. So we have to be very, very careful not to undermine the basic rule of law in the fight against terrorism.

As to my message to the others, I think it was a gathering that was going to talk about security and the fight against terrorism, and it was to encourage them in that direction. I’m very much aware of the High Commissioner’s difficulties with the Government you mentioned. I’ve had the opportunity to speak to the President myself at the time when the bulk of them were allowed to leave. And we are working on the four, and in fact the High Commissioner, Mr. Guterres, spoke to me about it, that we should make sure that there’s no enforced refoulement, particularly when they may be at risk if they are sent back against their will. And not only that: he has made arrangements with other Government that are willing to accept these four. So, it’s not that they will be stateless; we have homes for them. So we are asking the Government to hand them over to the High Commissioner for Refugees; and Mr. Guterres has worked very hard and has homes for them, and I urge the Government to let them go.

On your freedom of information act – or, freedom of information in the sense of making information available – I think, as an Organization, we are pretty open. In fact, sometimes I say this is one of those buildings, [if] you have two copies, consider it published. And it’s all over. But I think we should be more forthcoming. We should release as much information as we can. Of course, there are certain informations that you cannot release, because it does cause problems. Sometimes, some of you have asked

me what is the nature of your conversations with this President or that Prime Minister or others, and I’ve had lots of confidential discussions and others that I cannot release till much later. And so, we do have rules where certain things are embargoed for a certain period. But beyond that, we should be open and forthcoming. [Q19 of 20 in www.un.org/apps/sg/offthecuff.asp?nid=887]

Source: Inner City Press

Karzai, China’s Hu pledge closer ties

2006-06-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

BEIJING –– China and Afghanistan pledged on Monday to strengthen cooperation on security and support efforts to fight terrorism and international crime, during a visit to Beijing by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Karzai and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao signed a cooperation agreement after talks in the Chinese capital, where he is on a four-day visit following a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Central Asian security forum.

“China is also willing to offer intellectual support for Afghanistan’s social and economic reconstruction process and improve cooperation on education, culture and human resource development,” China’s official Xinhua news agency quoted Hu as saying.

Afghanistan welcomes the role of Chinese companies in its reconstruction, Karzai said.

China has been deepening ties with Central Asia, in part due to concerns about stability on its borders, particularly in its oil-rich north-western region of Xinjiang, which is home to an ethnic-Uighur Muslim population.

Hu said he and Karzai would fight what China calls the “three evil forces of terrorism, separatism and extremism”.

Human rights groups say Beijing has been using the mantra to crackdown on Uighurs seeking greater autonomy.

During his visit, Karzai will also tour Xinjiang, which China fears could be destabilised by activists seeking to create an independent state they call East Turkestan. ––
Source: Reuters

China applies pressure to Uyghur separatists

2006-06-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on 15 June seems likely to tighten the net around the efforts of China's Muslim Uyghur community to achieve independence from Beijing.

By Breffni O'Rourke for RFE/RL (15/06/06)

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Alekseyev has said SCO members will sign an agreement aimed at stopping cross-border movement of people "implicated in terrorist, separatist, and extremist activities".

He said that the SCO summit plans also to create a joint database of separatist, extremist, and terror organizations - a list that is bound to include Uyghur pro-independence groups.

The independence movement seeks to reestablish the Turkic Uyghur entity called "East Turkestan" in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. East Turkestan was essentially made part of China in the 19th century, and officially so by communist authorities in 1955.

Placating China
Uyghur activists are blamed for a series of bombings and other violence in Xinjiang. The SCO moves appear designed to make it harder for separatists to find shelter in neighboring Central Asian states, some of which have Uyghur communities of their own.

The Uyghur American Association spokesman in Washington, Ben Carrdus, says the Central Asian states are not keen to antagonize China by being seen to play host to Uyghur radicals.
"Placating the People's Republic of China to a large extent is quite a concern of the Central Asian republics, and they do have to keep one eye on the purse strings," Carrdus says.

Another analyst, Christian Le Miere of Jane's security journal "Country Risk," says Central Asia is indeed attentive to China's massive economic expansion.

"China is particularly concerned [to ensure] that there is stability on its western borders, and that there may be oil and gas reserves within Central Asia that it can utilize for its fast-growing economy," Le Miere says.

"And the Central Asian countries recognize, for their part, that China is a growing market and will begin to rival Russia in the next few decades for [dominance] of the sphere of influence in Central Asia," the analyst adds.

Repression, harassment of China's Uyghurs
As the political developments unfold at the Shanghai summit, there are reports of continuing Chinese action against Uyghurs. The Uyghur American Association says Tudahun Hoshun has been held since March on allegations of trying to "split the state".

The association says Hoshun was hung from a ceiling, beaten, and starved for three days because he did not memorize the jail regulations in Chinese - a language he reportedly does not speak.

In another case, Chinese police were reported to have detained the three adult children of the president of the Uyghur American Association, Rabiya Kadir. Officials were quoted as saying they owe millions of dollars in taxes, but the move is being interpreted as a way of ensuring that the Kadir family did not speak with a US congressional delegation that visited Xinjiang.

Kadir is a businesswoman widely regarded as an Uyghur success story until authorities accused her of possessing separatist propaganda. Kadir lost a seat on a parliamentary advisory body after she refused to condemn her husband, whom Beijing accuses of supporting Xinjiang independence. She now resides in the United States.

The US State Department has expressed "deep concern" about the fate of the Kadir children, and said it had urged Chinese officials to look into the matter, and to secure their release.

China exaggerating Uyghur threat?
Spokesman Carrdus of the Uyghur American Association says there seems little to justify the "extremely high alert" maintained by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang against the possibility of armed violence. He says little violence has been attributed to the Uyghur separatists over the years.

"There really does seem to be extremely little to justify the high, high state of alert which the Chinese authorities are on, when this alert means so many people are being detained arbitrarily - [and] there are numerous, consistent, and [indeed] constant reports of torture, all being perpetrated in the name of terrorism awareness," he notes.

Carrdus says the Chinese have been "quick to rebrand" any sort of nationalist or separatist sentiments from Uyghurs as terrorism.

The same theme is taken up by the US-based organization Human Rights Watch, which says in a statement issued today that some SCO member countries have magnified domestic dissent into terrorism, and used abusive means to combat it.

Human Rights Watch says the SCO has helped China gain international acceptance for its portrayal of Uyghur strife as inspired by, and linked to, international Islamic terrorism.

So China is eager to use the SCO to help stifle the simmering Uyghur discontent. But it is also using bilateral means to strengthen its hand against the separatists.

On 10 June, Chinese President Hu Jintao received Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev in Beijing. The two leaders agreed to crack down on extremism, and specifically on the "East Turkestan terrorist forces," so as to maintain regional peace and stability.

Hu signed a similar agreement in April with Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov.

Copyright (c) 2006. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20036. Funded by the US Congress.

Source:

Tensions grow around Asian'anti-American' security group

2006-06-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

2006/6/17
By Nick Coleman SHANGHAI, AFP

An Asian security grouping led by Beijing and Moscow looked increasingly at odds with the United States on Friday after a series of anti-U.S. comments made at its summit here.
Critics also questioned the effectiveness of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which held its annual leaders' summit here Thursday, and its respect for human rights.

The SCO groups China and Russia with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and was founded in 2001 to combat terrorism and foster regional ties. India, Iran and Mongolia are observer states.

Although President Hu Jintao extolled the "Shanghai spirit" of "mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality and mutual consultation," some observers said the group's real role was as murky as the mist-shrouded Shanghai skyline.

The presence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who warned the leaders at the summit to be wary of foreign "domineering powers," was one of the highest-profile indications of anti-U.S. sentiment within the SCO.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov and other leaders also spoke out against outside "interference" in their countries' political systems, leaving little doubt that their main target was U.S. and Western efforts to spread democracy.

Russia's Kommersant daily newspaper said the group's "main ideological message" was growing anti-Americanism.

The U.S. State Department stopped short of calling the group anti-American but spokesman Sean McCormack said the presence of Ahmadinejad ran counter to the group's goals of combating terrorism.

Commenting on Ahmadinejad's visit, a White House spokesman said Iran could be expected "to test the unity" of the six countries including China and Russia that recently offered incentives to Tehran to end its nuclear program.

Russian President Vladimir Putin denied, at a late-night gathering of journalists, that the Shanghai group was taking aim at other states.

Putin likened the United States' military presence in Central Asia to a "bull in a China shop" and said it was no surprise that Uzbekistan had decided to close a U.S. air base there last year.

But he insisted the SCO was "open to all" and had evolved "naturally" as a forum that had resolved China and Russia's border disputes after decades of tension.

However, a leading Russian research center doubted the real effectiveness of the SCO in either combating terrorism or boosting economic cooperation.

"Connections between all these states are basically bilateral. This organization is more beautiful in appearance than in reality," Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of Moscow's Panorama center, said.

A Kyrgyz journalist attending the summit said the SCO had failed to resolve instability along Kyrgyzstan's border. Recent armed raids on border posts in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have left several people dead.

"There isn't even communication between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan's intelligence services. What has this organization really done?" asked the journalist, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"Kyrgyz people barely know what the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is," he said.

A Chinese political analyst predicted that the SCO would grow in influence in time but was limited at present by a lack of finances.

"It needs a long time. These countries are developing countries, not rich ones," said Jia Qingguo from Beijing University's school of international studies.

Human rights activists also renewed their criticism of the SCO over China's crackdown on its Uighur minority in the northwest of the country.

Central Asian states continued to deport Uighur subversives to Beijing where they face almost certain arrest and worse, they said.

"At Beijing's request, some Central Asian members ... effectively silenced independent Uighur organizations on their soil and forcibly repatriated refugees wanted by China," said the New York-based Human Rights Watch in a statement.

"Some have been executed .... China has provided no details about the alleged activities of these 'terrorist forces,'" Human Rights Watch said.

Source:The China Post.

Muslim activist's wife calls for release of her children

2006-06-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

AP , BEIJING
Saturday, Jun 17, 2006,Page 4

The sons of a US-based Muslim activist have been charged with tax evasion and plotting to overthrow the Chinese government, a rights group said yesterday.

Kahar Abdureyim, Ablikim Abdureyim and Alim Abdureyim were officially charged on Tuesday in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region in China's far west, the Uighur American Association said in a statement.

Their mother, Rebiya Kadeer, is president of the Washington-based association, and has been an outspoken critic of China's treatment of Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who have a language and culture distinct from the rest of the country.

"I demand the Chinese government to release immediately my three sons because they are all innocent," Kadeer said in the statement.

"The Chinese government has no right to punish them on false charges," she said.

Telephones were not answered yesterday at the public security bureau in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

Beijing claims it is fighting an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang, where Uighurs are the dominant ethnic group and refer to the territory as "East Turkestan." It blames Uighur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence.

The government says the separatists are linked to al-Qaeda, but diplomats and foreign experts doubt that.

Once a prominent businesswoman, Kadeer was arrested in 1999 in Xinjiang on her way to meet US government researchers. She was sentenced to eight years in prison but was given early release in March last year, and allowed to leave for the US.

Last month, Chinese authorities detained Ablikim, Alim and Kadeer's daughter, Rushangul, in an apparent attempt to keep them from talking to a visiting US congressional team.

This week, authorities charged Kahar with evading taxes, Ablikim on conspiracy to overthrow the government and Alim on tax evasion and attempt to divide the country, Kadeer's group said.

Kahar was handcuffed and chained and brought from the city of Aksu to Urumqi on a minibus guarded by police, it said. It did not give more details on the arrest of the other two sons.

Kadeer's younger brother and daughter, Rushangul, are under house arrest, the group said, and her grandchildren are not allowed to go to school.

"By unlawfully detaining and arresting my innocent children, China is once again demonstrating to the world where it stands in terms of human rights," Kadeer said.

"China is telling the whole world that it can do anything to any Uighur at any time for any reason with impunity," she said.

Source:

Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit Opens

2006-06-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

June 15, 2006 -- The leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are meeting in Shanghai for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The meeting marks the fifth anniversary of the group that aims to bolster regional cooperation and serve as a counterweight to the United States.

Participants are due to sign a number of security and transportation agreements, and discuss ways to help Afghanistan combat drug trafficking.

The controversy over Iran's nuclear program is also expected to be on the agenda.

"We know the EU-3 [Britain, France, and Germany] have submitted a package for a solution to the Iran nuclear issue and have briefed Iran on it," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told journalists on June 14. "We know Iran is looking into this very seriously. We hope all parties will have a positive response to this, and that they can adopt a pragmatic and flexible attitude and can create the conditions necessary to return to discussions."

Iran has observer status in the SCO and has recently announced that it intends to join the body.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, speaking at the opening of the summit, called on SCO members to resist "domineering powers" in international affairs.

Ahmadinejad also said Iran is prepared to host a meeting of SCO energy ministers to promote cooperation in developing energy resources.

China's National Oil and Gas Exploration and Development Corporation (CNODC) announced today it will spend $210 million to explore for oil and gas in Uzbekistan. The company planst to sign a number of joint ventures with the Uzbek state energy company, Uzbeknegtegaz.

"Shanghai Security News" says the two sides have agreed to drill in five unspecified locations.

Kazakhstan is expected to take over the SCO secretariat from China.

Mongolia, and Pakistan -- which, like Iran, have observer status -- will be represented by their presidents. India -- which also has observer status -- has sent a high-ranking government delegation. Afghan President Hamid Karzai will attend as a guest.

On the eve of the summit, China signed a deal to build a highway in Tajikistan and announced a financial plan to build a hydroelectric station in Kazakhstan. Beijing also secured Uzbekistan's support against China's Muslim Uyghur separatist minority.

(compiled from Xinhuanet, Central Asian, and Russian news
agencies)

Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

The Uighurs' Ordeal...

2006-06-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

By FIKRET ERTAN

The US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba still dominates world agenda.

With the incidents that are taking place in the prison (the latest being three reported suicides), reports in the media, reactions to these reports and mounting world outrage, the Guantanamo Bay Prison will most probably remain on the agenda until its is closed. It is not very clear how many people are being held at the prison right now, but I think there were 468 inmates as of last week. If we subtract the three detainees who died recently of apparent suicides, we can say 465 inmates of various nationalities continue suffering through the ongoing ordeal. However, we can also say that some detainees are being released from time to time.

The detainees recently set free are five Uighur Turks from Eastern Turkestan. These five men, released on May 5, are today at a temporary refugee shelter in the vicinity of the Albanian capital, Tirana.

Many people know almost nothing about these men freed after being detained approximately four years; only a few American newspapers mentioned this issue in some articles, that’s all. As for the Turkish press, a report on these Uighurs appeared only in Zaman daily’s foreign news page on May 7. After speaking well of Zaman as the only newspaper that showed interest in these men, let me also express appreciation for another assistance rendered.

This appreciation definitely goes to Albania, and its Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who granted these five men temporarily political refugee status and welcomed them. Berisha undoubtedly angered China by receiving these men with open arms. As a matter of fact, there was a report that the Chinese ambassador to Tirana keeps pressuring Berisha, saying that these five men are suspected of terrorist links and should definitely be returned to China, nonetheless, it is said that Berisha will never hand them over to Beijing.

It is also reported that not only has Berisha refused to hand these men over to China, he is also holding talks with various countries in order to transfer them with full refugee status to another country. As a matter of fact, the head of Albania’s Interior Ministry’s refugee department, Argita Totozani, said, “The Uighurs have no future here; they cannot earn a living because there is no Uighur community here.They cannot speak Albanian. They cannot speak Chinese, hence, they cannot integrate here,” and indicated that they were looking for another country where these men can integrate. Canada tops the list among these countries. Totozani also confirmed that the Uighurs’ American lawyer said his clients are hoping to find another host country where it would be easier for them to integrate, and that would either be the United States or Canada.

It is hard to say right now how this search will end, because it is a reality that from the very beginning the US did not grant these men refugee status and does not want them in the country; Canada’s approach to this issue is not known at the moment. In fact, refugee status for these men should have been granted by Turkey, but I think but this was avoided for the sake of good relations with China.

These five men, waiting today at a refugee shelter in Tirana for another country to accept them, are definitely counting days like “prisoners of fate.” An American newspaper reported that Albanian officials treat them very well. They are allowed to leave their shelter, go sightseeing and at times eat at a Turkish restaurant in Tirana.

In one of these reports it was stated that they went to an Internet cafe to search for news about themselves and there they watched a video clip of the 9/11 attacks they had never seen until that time. Kasim, one of the Uighurs, is quoted as saying, “What a terrible event. If this had not happened, we would not been in Guantanamo prison today,” after seeing the planes crash into the World Trade Center.

This is an absolute truism. If the 9/11 attacks had taken place, these Uighurs would not have been suffering these pains. September 11 has ruined the lives of so many Muslims and continues to do so...

June 15, 2006

06.16.2006

e-mail:f.ertan@zaman.com.tr

Source: Zaman

Albanian Gitmo 5 seek asylum elsewhere

2006-06-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 12:23 PM

TIRANA, Albania-Lawyers for five Chinese Muslims released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay have asked Albania to suspend asylum procedures, saying their clients are hoping to find another host country where it would be easier for them to integrate, an official said Wednesday.

Lawyers said the five Muslim, members of China's Uighur ethnic minority, are afraid to venture out of a refugee shelter in Tirana's suburbs, and worry they would not be able to earn a living in one of Europe's poorest countries.

"They believe the Uighurs have no future here; they can't earn a living because there is no Uighur community" that could help them to integrate, said Argita Totozani, head of the ministry's refugee department.

In handling the asylum case, the ministry has had difficulty finding an interpreter and setting a hearing, she said.

"I have been informally asked through an e-mail from the U.S. lawyers of the five Uighurs to slow down or suspend the asylum procedure until they find another country to take them," she said.

The Foreign Ministry denied reports that they may remove the Uighurs from the camp. The ministry said it was still processing their request for asylum.

"The five Uighurs are welcome in Albania and it (government) has clarified its stand with the government of the People's Republic of China," the ministry said in a statement.

Prime Minister Sali Berisha told a visiting Chinese delegation last week that his country had accepted the five Muslims for humanitarian reasons after they were released from Guantanamo last month.

U.S. forces detained the five Uighurs during the invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

U.S. authorities say they pose no terrorist threat to the U.S. but might face persecution if returned to China.

China has demanded the five be returned, saying they are suspected of having links to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which it accuses of waging a violent separatist campaign in China's northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang, and of being close to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network.

Albania has said U.S. officials assured them the men had no terror links, and urged China to present evidence for its suspicions.

Journalists have not been allowed access to the five refugees, who are being housed at a refugee center in the suburbs of Tirana.

China and Albania have been allies since 1961, when the tiny Balkan country broke ties with the Soviet Union.

Source: Serbiana

Canada may welcome detainees

2006-06-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

Cleared of links to terrorism, many Guantanamo inmates fear returning to homelands

Glen McGregor, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Some prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp who have been formally cleared of links to terrorism may soon be attempting to emigrate to Canada.

Lawyers have been discussing the possibility that Canada would take in at least one of the prisoners the U.S. military no longer considers a threat, however his name wasn't being released for fear of jeopardizing ongoing diplomatic negotiations.

Repatriating former Guantanamo inmates has proved difficult for the U.S. Although they have been classified as "No Longer Enemy Combatants" or NLECs, many do not want to return to their countries of origin after years in detention. They fear the taint of the infamous prison will lead to imprisonment or other reprisals if they are sent home.

The challenge for the U.S. is to find countries with good human rights records willing to welcome detainees it once suspected of terrorism ties. That leaves the detainees in something of a legal limbo -- no longer considered enemy combatants, but unable to leave prison.

Earlier this year, the U.S. managed to place five former Guantanamo inmates in Albania, but only after about 100 other countries declined, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The men were all Chinese nationals but were ethnic Uighurs. They were captured in Pakistan by bounty hunters and transferred to the detention centre in Cuba.

Because the Chinese government considers Uighur separatists to be terrorists, the U.S. decided to seek another destination for them.

Canada was among the countries initially asked to provide asylum, according to a lawyer who represented three of the Uighur men.

"I do believe that Canada was one of the countries that was contacted," said Michael Sternhell.

"I think that for reasons that probably are obvious, the State Department was never willing to share with us what negotiations they were having."

The Pentagon has said there are still more than 120 Guantanamo prisoners who are no longer considered a threat or who can be transferred to custody in their home countries.

Four men have been formally cleared of terror charges by a combat status review tribunal and are being held in Camp Iguana, a smaller detention centre at Guantanamo. They could leave if the U.S. can find a place to send them.

Lawyers for one of the men have been speaking to Canadian authorities about the possibility of taking him in, perhaps as a refugee claimant. The Department of Foreign Affairs would not discuss the case, saying it does not comment on refugee claims that may or may not have been received. The U.S. State Department also declined to comment.

A refugee claimant from Guantanamo would likely first require the Canadian government to give approval through diplomatic channels, as a claim cannot usually be made from outside the country. The government could, however, issue a minister's permit allowing a person to come into the country or make special arrangements for an out-of-country claim from Guantanamo.

But the optics of allowing even innocent former terror suspects to immigrate is politically dicey for the federal government, particularly after the 17 arrests in the alleged Toronto bomb plot.

The prospect of Guantanamo detainees coming to Canada has arisen before and was reportedly discussed by the Liberal cabinet last year, with no final decision made.

Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International Canada, says he has heard of "unspecified discussions of an unknown number of Guantanamo cases" coming to Canada.

"The bottom line is, if prisoners upon release are facing return by the U.S. government to a country where they are going to face human rights violations, that's completely unacceptable," he said.

"It's very important for other countries, including Canada, to step in so they have a safe place to go."

The pressure on the U.S. to find a home for released prisoners will likely mount as international condemnation of Guantanamo builds. The European Parliament this week voted in favour of a motion calling on the U.S. to close the camp, following the suicides of three prisoners.

Among the prisoners who have been cleared and currently are in Camp Iguana are:

- Zakirjan Hassam, a carpenter who is either of Russian or Uzbeki nationality. He was captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo in May 2002. In 2004, a U.S. military tribunal cleared him of terrorism links.

- Fethi Boucetta, an Algerian doctor who moved to Pakistan to avoid compulsory military service. He was cleared by a tribunal in May 2005.

- Ala Abdel Maqsud Muhammad Salim, an Egyptian national who later moved to Saudi Arabia. He was arrested in Pakistan while working for an aid organization and handed over to the U.S., according to a Washington Post report. His lawyer claimed in court that Mr. Salim was interrogated by Egyptian authorities and threatened that he would be harmed when returned to Egypt.

Source:
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006

US withdraws terror threat warning in China

2006-06-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States has withdrawn a warning about possible terror threats in China just one week after issuing the alert, following discussions with the Chinese government, the embassy said on Friday.

"After further investigation and coordination with the Chinese authorities, the United States Government has determined that the information provided on June 9, 2006 no longer warrants a heightened level of concern," it said in an emailed statement.

"Our warden notice of June 9, 2006 is therefore retracted," it added, giving no further details.

The U.S. had warned of a possible threat to its interests in China, especially in the three major cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, as well as clubs, restaurants and other places that are popular with U.S. citizens.

The warning gave no details, but came days after the killing in Iraq of al Qaeda militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air strike in Iraq.

China has not traditionally been a hotbed of terror attacks, but the government has accused ethnic Uighurs in its mostly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang of using violence to agitate for an independent East Turkestan state.

Beijing has waged a campaign against Uighur activists in an attempt to crack down on separatist sentiment. Human rights groups say the crackdown has led to arbitrary arrests and closed trials.

Source:
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

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