Uighurs must not be branded wholesale as "terrorists”

Following the attack on a police-station with 16 persons killed in the north-west of China the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) warned on Monday against branding Uighurs wholesale as "terrorists”. "The overwhelming majority of the approximately nine million Uighurs and the most important organisation of this Moslem minority reject violence as a means of protest against China’s violations of human rights in their homeland”, said the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius. Apart from this China’s problems in the region of Xinjiang / East Turkistan has nothing to do with international terrorism, but are created by domestic factors. "For no other of the 56 ethnic minorities in China suffers so much under arbitrary arrest and the death penalty as the Uighurs.”

On 9th July 2008 in the town of Kashgar five Uighurs were sentenced to death for political reasons. Two of the sentences were carried out immediately and the three others are to be carried out later. On the same day five Uighurs were shot by the police in the provincial capital of Urumchi when security forces closed with violence a religious service in a house. In the official government media the religious service was represented as a "conspiratorial meeting of Moslem terrorists” without any proof of the allegation of terror.

The Chinese security authorities have markedly stepped up their repression in East Turkistan since the beginning of the disturbances in Tibet in March 2008. Between March and June 2008 at least 760 Uighurs were taken into custody for political reasons. Since then a further 1,500 Uighurs have been arrested. In several towns of East Turkistan Uighur dwellings and more than 200 businesses have been searched in the past four weeks. The police have been searching among other things for photos of Rebiya Kadeer, the President of the World Congress of Uighurs, who lives in US exile. Anyone in possession of this photo of the former political prisoner has been arrested.

For several years official China has been at pains to paint the Uighurs wholesale as terrorists, criticised Delius. There are reports every month in the government media on new probable "terror attacks” of Uighur extremists, which have so far mostly been shown to be untrue. Reports of the presumed hijacking of an aircraft and the storming of a so-called "conspiratorial dwelling” of an alleged Moslem "terror cell” in Urumchi in the spring of 2008 produced nothing but shaking of the head on the part of international experts on terrorism. Examination of the eye-witnesses showed that neither of the stories was convincing.