According to Xinhua, the state news agency, Mr. Hu visited rural areas and factories; a major oil center; and the regional capital, Urumqi, where the rioting occurred.

On Tuesday, he told government officials and security forces that stability was a top priority in the region. “The key to our work in Xinjiang is to properly handle the relation between development and stability in the region,” Xinhua quoted him as saying.

Reporters gathered in Xinjiang this week in anticipation of the start of trials related to the riots. But an official with the news media office of the local Communist Party headquarters said that he had no information that any such trials would take place this week.

The official, Li Hua, said Tuesday by telephone that a report on Monday in China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper, had incorrect information on the timeline for the trials. Some Chinese Web sites and foreign news organizations, including The New York Times, ran articles based on the China Daily report.

“Of course they have to be tried, just not according to the timeline of the China Daily story,” Mr. Li said, referring to the scores of men, mostly ethnic Uighurs, charged with taking part in the riots. Mr. Li said he had no information on exactly when the trials would start.

The China Daily article, published on the front page, said that more than 200 suspects had been formally charged with an array of crimes related to the rioting that began on July 5, and that trials were expected to start this week in Urumqi. The article cited an unnamed court official.

It also said the local police had gathered 3,318 pieces of evidence, including bricks and clubs stained with blood.

Some Chinese and foreign reporters have waited in Urumqi for the trials to start. In late July, China Daily had reported that the trials would start in August.

On Tuesday, Global Times, a newspaper published by the Communist Party’s main news organization, reported that the government had not yet set a date for the trial and that the number of suspects remained at 83. Global Times quoted Hou Hanmin, a spokeswoman for the Xinjiang regional government, saying that the China Daily report was “totally untrue.”

The announcement of a trial date on a matter as delicate as the ethnic riots would usually be reported first through Xinhua. But Xinhua had yet to report on any fixed date as of late Tuesday.

The conflicting reports appeared to be an indication of growing competition among official news organizations in China as senior officials encourage more aggressive reporting on topics of international interest.

On July 5, mobs of Uighurs, Turkic-speaking people who make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, stormed through the streets of Urumqi after clashes between Uighur protesters and riot police officers. The initial protesters had been holding a rally over the killing of Uighurs in an earlier ethnic brawl at a factory in southeastern China.

In the violence in Urumqi, at least 197 people were killed and 1,721 injured, most of them Han civilians, according to state news organizations. It was the deadliest ethnic riot in China in decades. The Han are the dominant ethnic group in China.

In the days afterward, Han vigilantes armed with sticks and knives went into Uighur neighborhoods to exact revenge.

Uighurs in Urumqi say the government has not given an accurate count of Uighur casualties.

source: www.nytimes.com

The post Chinese President Visits Volatile Xinjiang appeared first on uighur.nl.

When the Chinese hosted the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, officials promised an improvement in human rights and freedom of information. Instead, when protests erupted in Tibet, they crushed them with military force and sealed the region off. An authoritarian move but also a violation of the agreement Beijing had made with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to host the games, and the Olympic Charter. But, with billions of dollars tied up in the games, the IOC turned a blind eye. Once the opening ceremony began, people associated China with prosperity. Chinese leadership had achieved its objective: it influenced Westerners by aligning the interests of the West with the Chinese agenda.

Chinese authorities have been successful at influencing policy makers in the West in other ways as well. Take for example Xinjiang, a vast province in Western China that is the homeland of the Uyghur people, an ethnic and religious minority, who, like the Tibetans, contest Chinese rule of their land. After Sept. 11, 2001, the Chinese lobbied the U.S. to list an group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organization. The ETIM was supposedly comprised of ethnic Uyghurs, and just like that, the Uyghurs became associated with terrorism throughout the West.

The image of “terrorist” has been difficult for the Uyghurs to shed. We conducted a phone interview with Alim Seytoff, the general secretary of the Uyghur American Association in Washington, D.C. “Unlike Tibetans, Uyghurs are Muslims. After 9/11, if you are Muslim and you have a problem, usually everybody is suspicious of your struggle,” he said.

According to Seytoff, the West has become less vocal in its criticism of human rights abuses due to the pressures of the economic downturn. “Everybody needs to do business with China, and many countries are borrowing money from China, so of course they don’t want to offend China by taking a strong stand on human rights issues,” Seytoff said.

The U.S. has borrowed upwards of $1 trillion from China and we import about 2 percent of our gross domestic product from China. How independent is our media when we need to rely on the Chinese to support our government and living standard?

source:  www.stargazette.com

The post Can China manipulate Western media? appeared first on uighur.nl.

In 2005, the “Peace Mission” exercises featured large-scale combat operations by both forces.  Specifically these exercises involved:

A substantial naval contingent from the Russian Pacific Fleet, including a large BDK-11 assault ship; an anti-submarine vessel, the Marshal Shaposhnikov; the destroyer Burny; and diesel submarines.  The naval squadron joined with the Chinese forces to simulate a major amphibious landing on a beachhead in the Jiaodong [Shangdong] peninsula.  Russian bombers (TU-95S Bear strategic bombers and TU-22M3 Backfire long-range bombers) also staged an air landing near Qingdao City, including air cover by SU-27SM fighters armed with AS-15, 3,00 kilometer cruise missiles against naval targets.

As experts noted, this exercise sent Japan (and by implication the United States) a message regarding Russia and China’s capability to defend their interests in the Korean peninsula against both allies and second, in China’s case its capability to defend itself against Japan in any territorial disputes [2].  While such operations have been conducted against so-called “separatists” in the past, it is likely that the exercises were intended for other audiences as well.

Indeed, both sides had previously considered military intervention in North Korea both individually and jointly. “In conversations with JIR (Jane’s Intelligence Review) in 2003, Russian officials were candid about the scope of a “Ceausescu scenario” if conditions worsened in North Korea and Kim Jong Il lost control over some of the security forces” [3].  Russian officials also showed concern about a North Korean collapse by holding maneuvers with Japan and South Korea on a refugee scenario as far back as 2003 [4],  but they also made veiled statements in 2004 indicating their concern for the future of the DPRK’s regime [5].  Similarly, some Western experts claim that China made contingency plans for a possible invasion of North Korea in 2003, when it was alerted by rumors about a U.S. strike against the DPRK’s nuclear facilities, with the aim of installing a pro-Chinese regime that would forsake nuclearization, but he reported that China’s military chiefs said this was not feasible [6].

A noted Japanese military correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun, Shunji Taoka, recently suggested that the recent joint Sino-Russian exercises of 2009 in China’s Jillin province may be intended to intimidate the DPRK.  The five-day joint military exercise, dubbed “Peace Mission 2009,” took place from July 22 in the Russian Far East and the Shenyang Military Area Command in northeast China, and were intended “to verify operation plans and capabilities to respond to unexpected incidents under the unstable environment of countries and regions.”  The exercise involved paratroops, tanks, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships, fighter planes, and jet transports, which led Taoka to conclude that the scope of the operations extended beyond an anti-terrorist measure, which are the SCO’s remit.  Taoka further asserts that there may be a joint plan of action for “unexpected incidents” in North Korea and that these exercises verify that claim [7].

Indeed, the supposed terrorists that were targeted in the operation possessed combat aircrafts—a very uncommon asset for any terrorist force—and a major electro-magnetic operation took place, signaling a very intricate, large-scale,  and even atypical counter-terrorist operation [8]. These large-scale conventional exercises involving combined arms operations against terrorists in an urban setting,  while deploying missiles, air assaults, aerial bombings, air defense forces and ground attack all point to the fact that these operations could easily be duplicated to scenarios extending beyond Central Asia [9].  Not surprisingly, a number of commentators on international affairs have argued that the SCO either should or could take the lead in dealing with the North Korean issue [10].  Finally, at the latest SCO summit the six members agreed that Pyongyang’s threats were unacceptable [11].  Certainly venturing into the Korean issue would mark a major step forward for the SCO and by extension China and Russia in terms of their influence in Asia.

The Russo-Chinese interest in linking their relationship to developments in and around North Korea did not end here. The 2009 exercises had overt signs of attempts on both sides to connect those large-scale operations that both sides rehearsed to North Korean scenarios. In kicking off the exercises, Russian General Nikolai Makarov and Chinese General Chen Bigde, the two Chiefs of Staff of their respective armed forces, appeared together to address the press about the aim of the exercise. The Chinese were characteristically vague, but Makarov went further and said that “Russia and China should develop military cooperation in the wake of North Korean missile threats that prompted intensified military preparations in Japan and South Korea.”  That cooperation was necessary in addition to the “complicated’ situations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia as rationales for this cooperation [12].  Makarov went further and highlighted the need for interoperability in command and control of future common groups of Russian and Chinese troops.  While Chen Bigde denied that these exercises are targeted at a third party, Colonel Li Jiang, Deputy Chief of the Foreign Affairs Office of China’s Ministry of Defense stated:

“The world order must be multipolar, which would rule out the possibility of any diktat of any country with regards to other members of the international community.”  Consequently, it is not ruled out that, as was the case during the Mirnaya Missiya-2005 training exercises, a situation in which the armed forces of the two countries receive the order: “Not to allow the navies of third countries to have access to the place of conducting a peacekeeping operation” will be a scenario of the current peacekeeping exercises [13].

Since there are no navies or third party naval operations possible in Central Asia, the operation can only be applied to a Taiwan or Korea scenario.  Further, since it is quite unlikely that Russia would send forces to a PLA operation in Taiwan—and it is currently inconceivable that a “peacekeeping” operation is needed in Taiwan—this most likely applies to Korea and fears of a succession contingency involving violence in North Korea, or a United States and allied operation against it.  Since the United States has admitted that it has contingency plans for any crisis that may develop in the wake of a succession to Kim Jong Il (and presumably other threatening events), it is not surprising that both Moscow and Beijing have such plans of their own [14].  Yet, what is noteworthy is the fact that they have been rehearsing quite extensively what appears to be a plan for a joint operation there.  In view of this growing body of evidence, U.S. policymakers need to rethink the potential contingencies and purposes to which a Sino-Russian military partnership may be applied.  Furthermore, determine whose interests would most be served by a military intervention in Korea?  Only after having answered that question could we then ask ourselves—given the answer to the first question—using Bismarck’s analogy of alliance, who then is the rider and who is the horse in this partnership, Russia or China?

source: http://www.uhrp.org

HUMAN RIGHTS IN EAST TURKISTAN Uyghur Foundation Stichting Oeigoeren Nederland Stichting Uighur Jurat Barat  Stichting Uyghur Oost-Turkestan Uyghur Logo Nederlanders Holland Europe HUMAN RIGHTS  Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Erkin Alptekin Rebiya Kadeer

The post Peace-Mission 2009: A Military Scenario Beyond Central Asia appeared first on uighur.nl.

Kazakhstan is home to the largest Uighur community outside China. About 500 people, many wearing the blue badges with white crescents of the Uighur independence movement, gathered at a mosque for a traditional ceremony.

In Xinjiang’s worst ethnic unrest in decades, Uighurs staged protests in the regional capital Urumqi on July 5 following a clash among migrant workers at a factory in south China that had led to two Uighur deaths.

The Urumqi violence left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 wounded, mostly members of the China’s ethnic Han majority, according to Chinese authorities.

Han Chinese launched revenge attacks on Uighurs in Urumqi days later. About 1,000 people, mostly Uighurs, have been detained in an ensuing crackdown by security forces.

Han migration into Xinjiang, home to Muslim Uighurs who speak a Turkic language and whose culture has strong links to Central Asia, has helped fuel the conflict.

“What is our goal? We want an independent state,” Kakhraman Khodzhaberdiyev, a vice president of the U.S.-based World Uyghur Congress, told the Almaty meeting.

“The current autonomy (of Xinjiang) is not real and we demand that its status be changed as a first step.”

Another Uighur community leader, Abdulla Ushurov, attacked what he said were Chinese attempts to portray Uighur protests as purely criminal riots.

“You cannot say that a group of people just started crushing everything,” he said.

“These are being described as criminal acts but it is a century-long fight for independence.”

Police in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, also home to a significant Uighur minority, detained two Uighur leaders after a similar rally this week, saying it had not been given official permission.

The Almaty city government had permitted the Thursday meeting.

source: www.reuters.com

ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS IN EAST TURKISTAN Uyghur Foundation Stichting Oeigoeren Nederland Stichting Uighur Jurat Barat  Stichting Uyghur Oost-Turkestan Uyghur Logo Nederlanders Holland Europe HUMAN RIGHTS  Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Erkin Alptekin Rebiya Kadeer

The post Kazakhstan’s Uighurs rally to mourn Xinjiang dead appeared first on uighur.nl.

The Prime Minister defended the granting of a visa to Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, a decision Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has conceded had angered China.

“The Government I lead is one where Australia makes decisions on who it issues visas to or not,” Mr Rudd said today.

The strongly worded statement of sovereignty comes during a difficult period in the Sino-Australian relationship, starting with the arrest of Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu.

The Australian reported this morning that Beijing had snubbed Resources Minister Martin Ferguson while he was in China this week to sign a $50 billion gas deal.

Ambassador Geoff Raby’s failure to arrange top-level meetings for Mr Ferguson is understood to have been a reason he was recalled to Canberra for urgent talks.

Yesterday, Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop said the Government had failed to work constructively with China regarding the visit of Ms Kadeer.

“The Liberal Party is now saying that when it comes to Australia’s visa policy that we’ve got to get a permit slip from another country,” Mr Rudd said.

He said Australia’s relationship with China was challenging, and would be for some time, accusing the Opposition of using the Kadeer issue and Mr Hu’s arrest to play domestic politics.

“What we’ve seen instead from the alternative government of Australia is a determination to play domestic politics with this relationship on this and so many other aspects of it,” Mr Rudd said.

source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au

ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS IN EAST TURKISTAN Uyghur Foundation Stichting Oeigoeren Nederland Stichting Uighur Jurat Barat  Stichting Uyghur Oost-Turkestan Uyghur Logo Nederlanders Holland Europe HUMAN RIGHTS  Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Erkin Alptekin Rebiya Kadeer

The post Rudd defends granting of visa to Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer appeared first on uighur.nl.