Comments on: Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China?

By: Pakistan has sacrificed to fight terror, is a victim: China - Page 7

Pakistan has sacrificed to fight terror, is a victim: China - Page 7 — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:36:24 +0000

[...] like little fanboys like you on the forum. The Uighur massacre was real the UN was also involved. Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? | Andy Worthington Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In [...]

By: Donna

Donna — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:09:31 +0000

Hi Andy,
I’m sure you’re well-intentioned, but being an eye witness there in Urumqi during the riots. I saw from my hotel window mobs of Uighurs looting and beating up (and possibly killing) innocent Han bystanders, including women. Maybe there were Han retaliation as well. I didn’t see. But from all accounts from my network of expats in Urumqi, it was the Han Chinese, mostly civilians not involved in any riot that were killed and injured. I cannot believe that the media could present this story in a 180-degree turn. Now I’m starting to doubt Israeli atrocities in Gaza…

By: No Escape From Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court » World Uyghur Congress

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:07:32 +0000

[...] futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government, whose oppression of the Uighurs was distressingly revealed to the world last [...]

By: No Escape from Guantanamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court « EUROPE TURKMEN FRIENDSHIPS

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:16:22 +0000

[...] futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government, whose oppression of the Uighurs was distressingly revealed to the world last [...]

By: Uighur prisoner asks what is the difference between the US constitution and the Communist constitution? by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:17:17 +0000

[...] homeland. I think this is because the Chinese government does not want the outside world to know what happened in our homeland so they can strike harder against our people. Now, this has become our main [...]

By: Andy Worthington

Andy Worthington — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:20:01 +0000

Hankiz,
Thank you for getting in touch.
I found two sentences in your comment particularly disturbing: firstly, “The phone lines are still down and we have not spoken to any of our family members,” and secondly, “I have been asked to clean out my face book account on everything I posted about Uighurs by a family member because we didn’t want our family and friends in Urumqi be associated with us and be arrested.”
I am standing by to report further on the situation if any news makes it out of Urumqi.

By: hankiz

hankiz — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:29:21 +0000

Hi Andy,
Thank you for the report. I am Uighur and was born and raised in Urumqi. I can not believe those streets where Uighurs are shot to death are the streets that I used to walk to school and buy ice-creams. The phone lines are still down and we have not spoken to any of our family members. This has been a devastating experience. I have been asked to clean out my face book account on everything I posted about Uighurs by a family member because we didn’t want our family and friends in Urumqi be associated with us and be arrested. It is amazing that as a US citizen and thousands of miles away from China I am still controlled by them and can not speak freely because I am worried about the lives of the people in Urumqi.
Thank you again.

By: mui

mui — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:33:21 +0000

“During the 1990s, Mr. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said, about two million Han relocated to Xinjiang.”
Typical MO. Done to Tibetans, Mongolians and Xinjiang.

By: mui

mui — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:30:11 +0000

Scary stuff. On one hand, Mainland China is supposedly giving money to ethnicities to go back to the “ancestral lands” and live the “traditional life,” because they are afraid cultures are dissappearing. But what about the people of Xinjiang? Oh, but wait! There’s oil there.
Amazing how Bush just popped ETIM onto the Al-qaeda list. I heard stalin liked to put random names on pieces of paper too.
I can’t figure this writer out. This sounds like stenography to me: “But Mr. Wang is fully able to knock out the evildoers.” Then there is the next sentence: “He did so in 1997, quelling riots in Yining, near the Kazakhstan border, *at a cost in lives that remains unknown.”* Cost unknown, exactly, at least to western journalists.
Maybe the writer traded access for truth, but he seems a little passive aggressive about it. I could be wrong.
And In terms of humanity this is all wrong. How convenient to make people forget that the Eastern Turks helped create the Tang dynasty.The coverage seems all slanted toward making E. Turks look like faceless, worthless peoples, “nothing to see here, move on.”

By: Andy Worthington

Andy Worthington — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:09:34 +0000

Hi mui,
Good to have you back, and thanks for the link. That’s certainly one weird story, and appears to be close to a fascist paean, as you say.

I found these other passages interesting too:

“His familiarity with the oil industry may have played a role in his transfer to Xinjiang, an oil-rich region. But he made his mark there by combining relentless economic development with punishing social policies to remake Turkic Xinjiang in Han China’s image.

“Mr. Wang arrived in Xinjiang as the Soviet Union was dissolving, its central Asian pieces shedding their colonial chains. Millions of Han citizens transplanted by Mao after China’s army occupied the region in 1949 were leaving. Beijing feared that Xinjiang’s growing Muslim Uighur population would try to follow its Soviet neighbors into independence.

“Mr. Wang’s antidote was a heavy dose of modernization for the ancient Uighur culture. He opened the region’s oil and gas fields to drilling, laid pipelines east to the Chinese heartland and west to Kazakhstan, and turned the Production and Construction Corps, a creaky make-work project for mustered-out Han soldiers, into a moneymaker listed on the Shanghai stock exchange.

“Han workers began flowing back, lured by industry and government jobs that Uighurs say were disproportionately parceled out to Han migrants. During the 1990s, Mr. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said, about two million Han relocated to Xinjiang.

“At the same time, Mr. Wang tightly constrained Uighur culture and religion. He substituted Mandarin for Uighur in primary schools, saying minority languages were ‘out of step with the 21st century,’ and banned or restricted Islamic practices among government workers, including the wearing of beards and head scarves and rituals like fasting and praying while on the job.

“Yet Mr. Wang’s efforts intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Within months, he began a campaign against terrorism and separatism that he linked to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a little-known Uighur group. The Bush administration agreed, adding the group to its list of allies of Al Qaeda in 2002.”

Not a dose of criticism there at all, despite the blatant efforts to wipe out the Uighurs’ language and severely restrict their religion. Wow! And as for the Bush connection, it’s widely believed, amongst those who have studied the Guantanamo Uighurs’ cases, that designating the ETIM as a terrorist organization was designed to ensure Chinese support — or, at least, a lack of opposition — in the UN in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.