China admits arrest of 1295 Uighurs

The Chinese authorities have for the first time published official figures on the arrest of members of the ethnic group of the Uighurs. In the first eleven months of 2008 1295 Uighurs were taken into custody for "endangering the security of the State", reported the gazette of the Chinese public prosecutor's office on Sunday. "The high number of officially admitted arrests makes it clear that the Olympic Games in Peking brought no improvement in the human rights situation of the Uighurs", said the Asia consultant of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), Ulrich Delius. "However the actual number of Uighurs arrested for political reasons could be more than four times as many."

Especially in the run-up to the Olympic Games Uighur critics of the regime were arbitrarily arrested because the authorities feared that public protest during the sporting events could make a big impact on the media. Mass arrests began to take place following the violent attacks on police station by Uighurs in August 2008. "Unfortunately the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang do not distinguish between peaceful demonstrations of Uighur critics of the regime and the acts of violence of extremists, but hunt down wholesale as terrorists all Uighur critics of the regime on the grounds of their ethnic background", reported Delius.

1154 of those arrested have been charged or they have been sent to work camps in accordance with administrative regulations. The secretary of the Communist Party in the province of Xinjiang in the north-west of the country, Wang Lequan, called in August 2008 for more severe measures against regime critics and Uighur human rights workers. It was just on 20th December 2008 that two Uighur students, Mutellip Teyip, aged 19, and Miradil Yasin, aged 20, were arrested in the provincial capital Urumchi. They had distributed flyers which called out to a demonstration for which an application had not been made.

The official reason given by the Chinese authorities for cracking down on Uighur regime critics is the danger of terrorism breaking out in Xinjiang, or East Turkistan, as it is called by the Uighurs. "However the real reason for the uncompromising suppression of all free expression of opinion on the part of the Uighurs is their concern to secure their hold on a region which is so rich in minerals", said Delius. In 2008 Xinjiang became the second most important producer of oil in the People's Republic. In 1990 only seven million tons of oil were produced, but in this last year production rose to 27.4 million tons. There are likely to be in East Turkistan oil reserves of some 20.9 thousand million tons and gas reserves of 10.8 billion cubic metres.