Investments instead of human rights: Massive pressure on journalists and human rights activists

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has accused China of having failed to learn the lessons of the battles between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Urumchi in July 2009. "Rather than respecting ensuring the human rights of the Muslim minority in the province of Xinjiang/East Turkestan, the China government is attempting to appease them. Making financial investments and improving the standard of living is intended to placate the Uighurs," criticized Ulrich Delius of the STP's Asia section. "Still today, the authorities are blocking the systematic distribution of critical information, and arresting journalists, bloggers and authors who criticize the regime and condemning to long prison terms." The continuing repression of Muslim Uighurs in northwestern China and persecution of Uighur human rights activists, many of whom are driven into exile, are creating massive tensions. "Xinjiang is a powder keg – one spark will be enough to set off mass protests," warned Delius.

Two years after the heavy fighting that went on between Han Chinese and Uighurs in Urumchi, in which at least 200 people were killed, the Chinese authorities are still unwilling to order an independent investigation of the causes, the course of events, and the consequences of the unrest. This although eyewitness reports contradict the official version events, which claims that Uighurs in exile controlled the unrest from abroad.

Chinese authorities are doing everything in their power to prevent any independent information from getting out concerning the crushing of the protests and the abuse and torture of those arrested. More than a dozen Web administrators, bloggers and journalists have been sentenced to more than ten years in prison in an attempt to block independent reporting. Chinese security agents have even spied on Uighurs in exile who have given information to foreign journalists, and have successfully exerted political pressure to have them extradited to China. As recently as June 2011 Beijing managed to have former teacher Ershidin Israel deported from Kazakhstan back to China. Ershidin told US journalists about the violent death of a Uighur political prisoner. Now he is facing the death penalty in China for "terrorism." Twenty Uighurs, who fled to Cambodia with the aid of Christian missionaries to escape the unrest in Urumchi, were deported to China on 19 December 2009 and since then have been missing without a trace.

The Chinese government hopes that new free trade zones, financial aid for the rural population and investments from abroad will curtail the resentment of the Uighurs. "Prosperity rather than freedom - this is a recipe that may work in other regions in China to secure the power of the Communist party, but this campaign will fail in Xinjiang, because the Uighurs there are embittered over their treatment as second-class citizens." Beijing systematically disregards the legally established autonomy of East Turkestan, violates freedoms of religion, the press, and association, and supports the random destruction of millennia-old national treasures. "Without human rights there will be no stability in Xinjiang."