Jul 1, 2010

The World Must Listen: the intensifying repression of Uyghurs one year after July 5

Statement from Rebiya Kadeer, read by Omer Kanat, Vice President, World Uyghur Congress, during the event "Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices from the 2009 Unrest in Urumchi" held at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Washington, D.C.

Thank you for joining us today.  Your presence here today ensures my people that their pain have not gone unnoticed, that their cries for help have been heard, that their plight has not been forgotten.  We Uyghurs know suffering intimately.  The Chinese government has been persecuting us for six decades.  Many of our Uyghur brothers and sisters have been arrested, locked up for years, brutally tortured, and even executed for simply expressing their political or religious beliefs.  Just about every Uyghur family has a member who has been in prison for his or her political or religious activities.   They have labeled us as terrorists and religious extremists for simply exercising our human rights.  Since September 11th, they have re-branded their persecution of us as part of the global war on terror.  In doing so, they have used the fact that we happen to be Muslim.
 
The Chinese authorities have aggressively tried to make us forget that we are Uyghur and forcibly assimilate us into Chinese culture.  They have taken a multifaceted approach toward achieving this end.  They have repressed our practice of Islam.  They have phased out instruction in our language from our schools.  They have given our children a grossly distorted account of our history.  They have banned our history books and destroyed our historical sites.  Our culture is literally in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth. 

The authorities have economically marginalized us and made us second-class citizens in our own land.  When the Chinese government boasts about how much they have developed the region, we ask the international community to look at who has benefited from the development.  This development has benefited the Han Chinese who have resettled to the region, not the Uyghurs who are indigenous to the region.  Uyghurs -- including college graduates who are fluent in Mandarin Chinese -- are systematically subjected to discrimination for both government jobs and private sector jobs.  And the discrimination is blatant; it’s on-the-face discrimination.  It’s reflected in job announcements and at job fairs.  And while the authorities recruit Han Chinese from inner China to take jobs in East Turkestan, the authorities use intimidation, deception, and threats to recruit Uyghurs, particularly young Uyghur women and girls, to work in factories in eastern China.  We don’t believe that their focus on young Uyghur women is accidental or coincidental.  We believe that it is part of the authorities’ efforts to threaten our continuity as a people because they are taking these women out of their communities at the time that they would be getting married and starting families.

Just when we thought that our suffering couldn’t get any worse, it did – starting on July 5, 2009.  The upcoming one-year anniversary of July 5th is our reason for convening here today.  July 5, 2009 has gone down as one of the darkest days in our history.     On that day, Uyghurs in the city of Urumchi, the regional capital of East Turkestan [also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China] took to the streets and exercised their human right to peacefully protest.  The spark for the protest was government inaction on the killing of at least two, but possibly several dozen, Uyghur migrant workers, by Han Chinese mobs at a toy factory in the city of Shaoguan, in the southern province of Guangdong.  However, the roots of the protest were much deeper than that one incident.  When those Uyghurs took to the streets, they were not only protesting that one incident.  They were protesting all of the repression, persecution, and discrimination that they have endured for years.

The protest had been organized over the internet as a peaceful demonstration.  The protesters were mostly young men and women.  Some of them carried Chinese flags for fear of being labeled as separatists as the Chinese government regularly equates peaceful dissent by Uyghurs with separatism.  The protesters asked for an investigation into the Shaoguan killings, expressed sympathy with the families of those killed and injured in Shaoguan, and asked to meet with government officials but none came out to meet with them.  The authorities blocked students on some university campuses from leaving school grounds on July 5th in order to prevent their participation in the demonstration.

Chinese security forces moved in and used extreme force and violence to disperse and suppress the protest.  Security forces used tear gas and stun batons on the demonstrators.  Witnesses interviewed by Amnesty International indicated that security forces also fired on the demonstrators, as well as beat and kicked them.   Uyghur organizations abroad and media outlets received similar witness accounts.  Witness accounts received by Uyghur organizations abroad also indicated that protesters fled to other points of the city, where they were forced into several enclosed areas from which they could not escape and the police indiscriminately shot and killed Uyghur protestors in these enclosed areas and arrested those who remained.

Ethnic unrest and violence followed the brutal suppression of the protest, as well as one of the most repressive crackdowns by the Chinese government on Uyghurs in history. 

Since the July 2009 protest and the ethnic unrest that followed, the authorities have arrested thousands of people , many of them during mass detentions, including mass roundups of young Uyghur men.  An untold number of Uyghurs, including teenaged boys, have been subjected to enforced disappearances.  Human Rights Watch has made many inquiries to the Chinese authorities about the many Uyghur disappearance cases it has documented and the authorities have failed and refused to provide any information on these cases.

The Chinese authorities have ensured that defendants prosecuted in connection with the July 2009 events have been denied due process.  Among other things, they have given judges and prosecutors special instructions on how to handle the July 5th cases.  They have handpicked the judicial personnel assigned to the trials according to political criteria.  They have warned human rights lawyers against taking protest-related cases, which further means that defendants have not had access to legal representation of their choice.  

The Intermediate People’s Court of Urumchi has arbitrarily sentenced at least 24 Uyghurs to death after trials plagued with the aforementioned politicization and lack of due process.  At least 8 of these Uyghurs have already been executed.  For those 8 Uyghurs, all of the following happened within 4 weeks.  They were tried, convicted, and sentenced.  Their sentences were upheld by 2 appellate courts and they were executed.  The speed with which these legal processes have taken place, especially in the context of capital cases, is emblematic of the lack of due process. 

The authorities have flooded East Turkestan with troops.  Our people are living in a police state.  Our people are living in an open-air prison.  We need your help, your compassion, your advocacy.  Let’s use this anniversary to renew our commitment to achieving for the Uyghurs the rights to which every human being are entitled.