Stop the Chinese state terror! Peking’s policies of compulsory assimilation is destroying the identity of the Uighurs

The Society for Threatened Peoples GfbV (Göttingen/Berlin) accused the Chinese government on Friday of trying to wipe out the ethnic group of the Uighurs in the autonomous province of Xinjiang/East Turkistan. "Peking is using the term "autonomous” as lip-service to gloss over the policy of forced assimilation and the destruction of Uighur identity and culture”, criticised the GfbV chairperson, Tilman Zülch, during a demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in Berlin against the bloody crushing of the protests of the Uighurs in the north-west of China. Through the systematic settling of Han Chinese the Uighurs, who traditionally call the province Xinjiang "East Turkistan”, have become a minority in their own country. Together with the smaller ethnic groups of the Kazaks, Kirgiz, Mongols and Tajiks they make up just half the population.

The approximately twelve million Uighurs, who are in the overwhelming majority Moslems, are not only deprived of their freedom of religion and of movement. They also suffer from a restrictive language policy and massive discrimination in work-life. All attempts at resistance are nipped in the bud.

Peking is now planning to raze to the ground the cultural and religious central point of the Uighurs, the old city of Kashgar, so that they can control the inhabitants more effectively”, said Zülch. 85 percent of the over 2000-year old city with its winding alleys is to be torn down, 200,000 people will be resettled in soulless tenement blocks. The first bulldozers are already at work, destroying irreplaceably the most important Islamic city of central Asia.

The GfbV has documented the plans and background of the destruction of this "treasure on the silk road” in a new 30-page report (download at www.gfbv.de). The merciless policy of suppression by Peking serves to ‘align’ (‘gleichschalten’ as in Nazi Germany) the two largest autonomous regions of China, East Turkistan and Tibet, criticised Zülch. Hand in hand with this goes the exploitation of the minerals to be mined there – without the people living there receiving a fair share.

Zülch regretted that the German government has been in the interest of economic relations very reticent in criticising the human rights policies of Peking. The much-acclaimed German-Chinese dialogue serves merely to cover up the ills. There are in China up to the present day work camps and re-education camps with hundreds of thousands of inmates, among them democrats, activists for human and civil rights, spokespersons for persecuted religious minorities and suppressed minorities like the Uighurs and Tibetans. Torture is practised in Chinese prisons. The approximately twelve million Uighurs suffer particularly under the excessive use of the death penalty. At least 700 have been executed for political reasons since 1997.