Nov 20, 2009

Opening Remarks

The Future of Uyghur-Han Relations in China: A Dialogue

Louisa Greve, Vice President, Programs – Asia, Middle East & North Africa, and Multiregional

The National Endowment for Democracy is grateful to our cosponsors for today’s event, the Uyghur American Association and the Laogai Museum.  It has been a pleasure to work with them to bring together our guests for our dialogue today on the difficult and important question of ethnic relations in China.  Uyghur American Association President Rebiya Kadeer and the Director of the UAA’s Uyghur Human Rights Project, Alim Seytoff, cannot be here today but join me in welcoming you to this discussion.

NED has supported programs related to ethnic issues in China since the early 1990s.  The principles guiding this support can be found in the NED’s founding document outlining the Principles and Objectives guiding our work.   It is the source of the definition of democracy that you see when you enter the front door of our office just outside this room.  This document, which has served as the foundation of NED’s support for 25 years now, it carefully emphasizes the importance of the guarantee of minority rights, inter-ethnic dialogue, and political accommodation among ethnic groups as crucial pillars of democratic systems.

NED’s first grants along these lines for China were made in the early 1990s, for Tibetan groups seeking to promote democratic values among Tibetans in exile and to propose democratic solutions to the problems faced by Tibetans in China.  The NED’s first grant for a project addressing the same concerns for Uyghurs was made in 2004, to the Uyghur American Association to launch the Uyghur Human Rights Project, directed at the time by one of our speakers this morning, Nury Turkel.  Three more Uyghur organizations have received NED support in the intervening years.  Their projects are designed to enable Uyghurs in free societies to serve as a “voice for the voiceless” – to raise awareness of the human rights situation for Uyghurs in China and to promote democratic solutions to the concerns of the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group in China. 

Just this week, during President Obama’s visit to Beijing, according to China’s government news agency Xinhua, Chinese President Hu Jintao Tuesday told President Obama that China “hoped the U.S. will … not allow separatists to use the U.S. soil to stage anti-China activities aimed to split the country.”

This statement reflects a misunderstanding of the guarantee of freedom of speech in democracies.  The U.S. Constitution protects all views, as long as they are expressed peacefully, and the U.S. government cannot stop people from airing them.

But for the record, neither the NED, nor any of its grantees working on Uyghur human rights issues, is advocating independence for Xinjiang/East Turkistan.  Rather, NED’s grantees advocate peacefully for the realization of Uyghurs’ democratic rights and freedoms.  They have frequently condemned violence – both violence used for political aims and the communal violence of ethnic hatred.  They are on the record, also, as strongly the supporting the human rights and civil and political rights of all citizens of the People’s Republic of China. 

In the case of the Uyghurs, the widespread violations of human rights in Xinjiang or East Turkistan are amply documented by independent human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch (October 20, 2009: We Are Afraid to Even Look for Them), Amnesty International (November 10, 2009: Hasty executions highlight unfair Xinjiang trials), Human Rights in China (2005: Religious Repression of Uighur Muslims -- Architecture of Xinjiang Suppression Detailed), and of course the Uyghur Human Rights Project of today’s cosponsor, the Uyghur American Association.

Our purpose today, therefore, is not to further enumerate the grievances and the violations of rights experienced by Uyghurs or Hans. 

Our purpose is to provide a civil and dispassionate forum to discuss an extremely difficult, even viscerally emotional, topic.  We hope our speakers and participants in the audience will speak honestly.  We hope all participants will aim to gain a sympathetic understanding of the complexity of the issues, both the sources of what happened on July 5 and its aftermath.  We hope all participants will focus on constructive suggestions for finding a path out of a very dark maze of negative trends. We do not expect miracles, but we do hope that our forum today will provide some start on that path, knowing that very long journeys must always start with a single step.

Now it is my pleasure and honor to introduce Harry Wu, who, as founder and executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation, has done heroic work over the past 17 years to expose the horrors of China’s laogai prison-camp system. He is also the founder of the Laogai Museum, which, under the direction of Nicole Kempton, is now hosting the special exhibition on the Uyghur experience.  And of course we invite you to visit the exhibit, very close to here – 6 blocks north on 11th Street.  Harry will now say a few words of welcome.

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