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Rebiya Kadeer: A dissident abroad
Nobody knows China like Rebiya Kadeer. The 61-year-old Uyghur mother of 11 children survived five years in the country´s notoriously harsh prison system. She knows the People´s Republic from inside its parliament. And she even remembers how it feels to bask in the glory of being the seventh-richest person in the country. These days, Kadeer is fighting from abroad the Chinese government´s right to rule her people and Beijing´s lack of
commitment to human rights.
Kadeer is accusing Beijing of nothing less than committing "cultural genozide" against her people, the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, the former East Turkestan. The region was annexed by
China in 1949. "The Chinese government is forcefully transferring young Uyghur women into the Eastern parts of China in order to dilute the Uyghur culture", she tells REVIEW ASIA in an exclusive interview. One of the many reports she wrote since being released on March 17, 2005, reveals that she perceives herself to be engaged in a titanic power struggle. The piece is titled "Beijing & I". There she reveals that being thrown into Chinese prisons was not the only horror she confronted: "I have lived with a sense of terror for the fate of Uyghurs for the past few decades, and I have watched in horror as my worst fears have come true".
Rebiya Kadeer is China´s most prominent female dissident, even more so since she went into U.S. exile right after her release from five years in prison, where she witnessed constant torture of fellow Uyghur inmates. She was released three days before a scheduled state visit by U.S. Foreign Secretary Condoleezza Rice. Beijing would have liked Kadeer to fade into irrelevance in the U.S. capital, where many people, according to several surveys, wouldn´t be able to point out China on a map. But Mrs. Kadeer isn´t someone who silently slips from the radar screen. In 2006 the ex-entrepreneur, once China´s richest and most powerful woman, was nominated by Swedish parliamentarian Annelie Enochson for the Nobel Peace Prize. That has opened her a lot of doors in Western countries to excel in her second career: Lobbying for the difficult plight of the eight million Uyghurs in China´s Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), in the most Western part of
the country. Throughout the 1990s, until her arrest in 1999, Rebiya Kadeer persued her first career: She built up and ran a multimillion-dollar trading company and a department store in Urumqi, Xinjiang´s capital. And she never forgot that she herself was born into poverty. While piling up solid profits she turned out to be a passionate philantropist, organizing free classes for Uyghur children from poor families. The class rooms were set up in available spaces of her department store. And she started the "Thousand Mothers Movement" at the end of 1997. Her goal was to empower Uyghur women to start their own companies and liberate at least part of her people from fear and paralysis. China´s leadership was full of praise for the model Uyghur. She was appointed member of China´s National People´s Congress (NPC) and the People´s Political Consultative Conference. For the laundress turned millionaire this was a golden opportunity to improve her people´s fate in the XUAR from within the system. But the political mission didn´t last for long. In 1997, a massacre took place in Ghulja City, several hundred Uyghurs were killed, thousands arrested. Rebiya Kadeer went to Ghulja and investigated what had happened. In the process of doing so she was detained several times. Then she traveled back to Beijing to report to high-level Chinese officials what had happened and how wrong the massacre was. They simply ignored her. She realized, they wouldn´t change their policies. That was her breaking point. When she critizised China´s treatment of her people during an NPC session shortly after the disheartening experience and demanded that Beijing honour the autonomy conferred on the Uyghurs, she fell out of favor. Over night she was dangerous for a regime that is deeply concerned, the muslim minority with an ethnic turkish-persian background might develop a secessionist momentum and call for independence. A nightmare for Beijing because the province is strategically important. Xinjiang is rich in resources and it is a testing ground for China´s nuclear weapons. The story of this mother of eleven children is as eventful as that of the Dalai Lama, maybe even more volatile. The 61 year old Rebiya Kadeer, who is now fighting against Chinese oppression of her people from Washington, D.C., is often compared to the Buddhist leader. But if you listen to her, the soft-looking woman with the gentle smile can appear more like a tempest, even through a telephone line. Her sentences come sweeping like a tsunami, the staccato of her words reveals strong passion, but her vocabulary is - 2 -
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controlled and precise.
These days she may be even more emotional. Five of her eleven
children are still in Xinjiang, held as human collateral against even
minor political activities. And two of her sons, Ablikim and Alim,
are in jail. Ablikim who in April 2007 was sentenced to nine years
in jail for "instigating and engaging in secessionist activities", has
fallen seriously ill. "Ablikim´s situation is really terrible", his
mother says, "during a visit in December, which lasted only ten
minutes, Ablikim was not able to recognize his own father and his
own nephew. When he was talking about his situation in prison, he
fainted twice, I believe that my son was tortured in the prison". But
the terrible fate of her children in Xinjiang doesn´t stop her from
campaigning. "I will never give up", she says, "the suffering of my
children is not their own, it is symbolic of the suffering of all my
people".
Kadeer, who´s business im Urumqi was shut down after she left
and who´s employees were put under surveillance, feels that the
current situation of her fellow Uyghurs is worse than in years.
"Starting from May 1 in 2007", she says, "the Chinese government
confiscated the passports of all Uyghurs so that they cannot travel
overseas". There is no proof for why this campaign is happening,
but at the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington its manager
Amy Reger believes "it is intended to prevent them from making the
pilgrimage to Mecca".
According to Rebiya Kadeer China´s authorities recently also
started to forcefully disperse young Uyghur men into rural areas of
China. The country officially recorded 240,000 "instances" of such
transfers. "We are in the process of issuing a report on this
development, it´s a huge number", Mrs. Kadeer announces, while
she tries to illustrate the extent to which the campaign is shaking
her people: "When Uyghur parents meet other parents, they don´t
ask for the well-being of the other family any more because they are
so concerned about the children, whether they were taken into
prison or have been forcefully transferred".
The latest she heard out of China´s most Western province is that
"Uyghurs in some neighbourhoods in the rural areas are now
required to report their weekly activities to their local
administrative offices". Traditionally around the Chinese New Year
authorities crack down even harder against Uyghurs, Mrs. Kadeer
recalls, and this year was no exception: "In January, we received a
phone call of an Uyghur policeman in East Turkestan, he stated that
Chinese police has rounded up Uyghurs, arrested some and even
executed some", she says.
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The ex-politician, ex-business woman and ex-philantropist now
leads the more bureaucratic than exciting life of a lobbyist. "The
first thing I do in the morning", she begins to explain a typical
working day in Washington at the Uyghur American Association, "is
to gather all available information on what happened the day before
in our homeland". The rest of the day is spent with staff meetings in
the Association, with the briefing of US-Congressmen and State
Department experts, with chatting to friends and counterparts all
over the world and with contacting umbrella organizations like the
Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, who´s president she became
in November 2006.
The last couple of months have kept Rebiya Kadeer even more
busy. China´s intensifying crackdown against the rapidly growing
christian underground church is reaching the farthest corners of the
country, even Xinjiang. "Uyghurs are Moslems", Mrs. Kadeer says,
"so Beijing is labelling them as terrorists and is cracking against
them severely. In China many young people are now converting to
Christianity; the Chinese government is cracking down severely on
Uyghur christians as well; many young Uyghurs are becoming
christians and Beijing is afraid they will have links with the West".
Even more troubling for her is the massive campaign against any
form of dissent that is sweeping through China ahead of the
Summer Olympics in Beijing this year. "Two things have given the
Chinese government the golden opportunity to further persecute the
Uyghur people", Mrs. Kadeer says, "one is 9/11 and the war on
global terrorism, the government has used it as a cover to persecute
the Uyghur people as terrorists. And the second is the Beijing
Olympics. Since China was granted the Olympic Games it
intensified and accelerated the speed of the cultural genozide
against the Uyghur people".
The international community, she claims has missed at least two
good chances to press China for an improvement of its human rights
record. "If the international community had threatened to boycott
the Beijing Olympics, then the government would have allowed the
human rights situation to improve. But since the international
community did not do that, it´s not going to work". By being
inactive, Mrs. Kadeer claims, the international community
ultimately emboldened Beijing. "Because now the Chinese
government real izes that no matter if some groups boycott or not,
it´s going to host the Olympics anyway, and that´s why it is
violating human rights more than ever".
What would she have done differently ? "If the international
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community would have preconditioned a lot of changes for the
Chinese government before awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics,
then there would have been a lot of changes, but unfortunately this
is not the case".
It may sound as if the agile dissident is disappointed about the
support of Western countries for her case. But that is misleading.
Mrs. Kadeer gets "very close support from a number of countries in
Europe and America", she says. "Many of them have put the Uyghur
issue into their human rights dialogue with China and into their
parliamentary discussions".
Still, she isn´t optimistic about any political changes or reforms in
China. "I hope that the Chinese government will march into
democracy", she says, "but that´s not going to happen, they always
pay lip serice to words like democracy and human rights", Mrs.
Kadeer says in retropsect of the 17th National Congress of China´s
Comunist Party, held last October with lots of fanfare about
promoting more democracy.
Rebiya Kadeer´s return to her people in Xinjiang is blocked for the
time being. If she returned she would almost certainly be jailed
again. "My struggle is to go back to my country", she insists, "but
not before the oppression and persecution against my people stops
and before they have the right of self-determination. Rebiya Kadeer
knows that this will only be possible if democracy western style
comes to China. A development she obviously doesn´t think is
possible without external influences.
"So if the international community is genuinely interested in
resolving the conflict that we have with the Chinese government
then there will be some resolve. So, bold leaders in the world, that´s
what we are interested in". Even against these massive odds this
bold woman cannot imagine to fail: "My people will win", she says,
and it sounds more like a promise than a threat.
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