Monday, June 21, 2010; 12:00 AM

BEIJING — Police came looking for Vali days after bloody ethnic riots broke out in the far west last year, saying they had video footage of him among fleeing protesters and later shouting at an officer.

The 22-year-old man was not home, and his father called to tell him to stay away. Vali hid for weeks before escaping to the Netherlands to join an estimated 150 other Uighurs – a Muslim minority group from China’s Xinjiang region – seeking refugee status.

“Once I got off the plane, I told the police that I need political asylum,” Vali said in a phone interview. “I told them everything that I had been through and said I can no longer live in China. If I have to go back I am a hundred percent sure that I will be dead.”

Nearly a year after the worst riots in China’s far west in more than a decade, his story and that of another asylum seeker interviewed by The Associated Press are among the few accounts to emerge of how some Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) got out amid a government crackdown.

At least 300 Uighurs are thought to have fled China since the July unrest, according to the World Uyghur Congress. Some slipped illegally into neighboring countries in Central Asia, which regularly extradite Uighurs back to China. Others with more money, such as Vali, paid thousands of dollars to criminal gangs and smugglers for plane tickets and visas.

China says some Uighurs are terrorists or criminals who pose a threat to the region’s safety, and has previously insisted that Uighur refugees be extradited back. Foreign governments weary of immigrants and wary of offending China are often unwelcoming or play down the presence of Uighurs.

Cambodia sent back 20 Uighur refugees to China in December despite international protests. Turkey, which has strong ethnic and linguistic ties to the group, has eased entry requirements, but its government is reluctant to talk about the influx of dozens of Uighurs.

The Netherlands is home to what is believed to be largest group in Europe, because many international flights pass through Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

The two Uighurs in Holland told the AP of the fear of being ensnared by a crackdown that has detained hundreds, often unaccounted for months later. Chinese media reports say at least 25 people, mostly Uighurs, have been tried and sentenced to death for crimes related to the riots.

The Uighurs told their stories on condition that only their last names be used, citing fears of retaliation against their families. Now they wait to see if they will be granted asylum – or sent home.

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On July 5, Vali was driving home when he stopped to let around 2,000 Uighur protesters pass as they marched southward in the city of Urumqi.

Armed police officers swarming in front of him suddenly opened fire in the direction of the protesters, sending them fleeing, he says. He panicked and drove through the crowd to get out. In the midst of the commotion, he says, his car was videotaped by state security.

Vali sped to his aunt’s house, where he spent the night huddled with her family on the living room floor, listening to the sounds of gunfire and explosions. “I was terrified,” he said. “None of us slept at all that night.”

As long-simmering tensions between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese majority exploded into violence, Uighurs smashed windows, torched cars and attacked Han. Uighurs say security forces fired at them.

The streets were eerily quiet the next morning as Vali went home. Armed police had set up checkpoints at every intersection, stopping him each time to ask where he was headed. He passed razed shops, burnt cars and cleaners hosing away pools of blood from the streets.

The government says the unrest killed nearly 200 people, mostly Han, by official count. Many Uighurs disputed the figures, saying they saw or heard that security forces fired on Uighurs during the protest.

Two days later, Han vigilantes stormed into Uighur neighborhoods to take revenge. Vali said he saw a group of Han Chinese paramilitary police beating about a dozen unarmed Uighurs just outside his house. When the Uighur men fell to the ground, Han protesters ran over and stomped on their bodies and faces, he said.

“I want to take them to the hospital,” Vali said he told police, who were blocking him from leaving his home.

“We will shoot you if you leave,” the police replied.

“Then shoot me,” Vali shouted, increasingly agitated. “Because I cannot just let these people lie there on the street to die.”

The confrontation was caught on videotape, he says. Not long after, police turned up at his home looking for him.

Vali’s father paid for his escape through the sale of their home. With 100,000 yuan ($14,700) in hand, Vali took a train from Urumqi to the southern city of Guangzhou. There he stayed for another two months while waiting for travel documents he had paid a Chinese gang 90,000 yuan ($13,200) to obtain on his behalf.

It was November by the time his escape route – a flight to Dubai, transiting in Amsterdam – was ready. A Chinese man dropped him off at the Guangzhou border control, but police detained and interrogated him for four hours before finally letting him go. He caught a bus to Hong Kong’s airport and made the flight.

“It was only after I arrived in Holland that I finally felt safe,” he said. “I thought the government would protect me.”

But Vali soon found the Dutch government was less sympathetic than he had hoped. The Dutch immigration service rejected his application, saying his account of problems with Chinese authorities following the unrest was not credible, and pointed to his ability to travel legally out of the country.

“If the police believe I didn’t take part in the protest, why would they come and look for me?” said Vali, who has filed an appeal. “Just for trying to seek political asylum, I will be in big trouble. It’s a big crime.”

Vali said he had also previously been in trouble with Chinese authorities over religious issues – he was expelled from high school in 2004 after a teacher spotted him praying at a mosque, violating a prohibition on students taking part in religious activities. In 2007, he was detained for three days by state security for helping 7,000 Muslim Uighurs in Pakistan travel to Saudi Arabia for the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

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Patiguli, 29, hid at home during the riots, fearing for her boyfriend, who had called to say he was joining the demonstrations, as well as her grandmother, who was outside.

When police found her boyfriend at her home a few days after the unrest, they also detained Patiguli and her brother, holding them in separate locations and interrogating them for six days. Her mother, a businesswoman, had to bribe officials to secure the release of the siblings.

Patiguli never saw or heard from her boyfriend again.

Patiguli and her brother went into hiding for eight months while her mother paid traffickers to help Patiguli escape. Patiguli flew out of Shanghai on a flight that transited in a European destination she did not disclose, where she was picked up by a Chinese man and driven to a hotel to stay a night before driving again.

“This is Amsterdam. There is a police office on the second floor of this building. Go in there,” the man told her when they arrived at their final stop. He also wanted her passport and plane ticket, saying the Dutch would send her back to China if she still had them. “This would not be good for you, and it won’t be good for us.”

Patiguli walked into the building and applied for asylum. She later called Zainiding Tuersun, head of the Netherlands Uighur Association.

Zainiding says he knows of 150 Uighurs who have fled to Holland since the riot, and is closely tracking 70 cases. Of those, about 20 are likely to be given asylum, while another 30 or so have been rejected due to insufficient evidence of persecution, Zainiding said.

“The Dutch government does not understand the Uighur situation. It’s so difficult to get things sent out of China right now, doing that will put their families back home in serious danger,” said Zainiding. “The authorities here treat the Uighurs very coldly.”

The Dutch government says immigration authorities are treating the Uighurs like all other cases.

“Amongst others, the immigration service checks whether people have to fear their human rights will be violated when they go back to their home country,” Justice Ministry spokeswoman Karen Temmink said.

China says its citizens’ legal rights are fully protected. “The Chinese government resolutely opposes any country accepting illegal immigrants, for any reason,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Friday in a written response to a request for comment.

But Amnesty International says that in the past, the group has documented cases of returned Uighur asylum seekers in which some have been detained, reportedly tortured and in some cases sentenced to death and executed.

In January, Dutch officials came close to deporting a 20-year-old Uighur woman, forcibly putting her on a plane, before Zainiding and the Dutch Refugee Council managed to get the distraught woman off the flight and a reprieve on her case.

Many Uighur asylum seekers in the Netherlands have found it difficult convincing the Dutch government that they need asylum, said Laurence Verkooyen, Asian specialist at the Dutch Refugee Council.

“A lot of Uighurs say they were in the demonstrations in Urumqi, then the Dutch government says you don’t have any proof that you were in the demonstration,” Verkooyen said. “Or, they say you don’t have any proof that the Chinese government knows that you participated in the demonstrations.”

Patiguli says immigration authorities want evidence that she had been detained, or that her brother or boyfriend remained arrested, but contacting her family and asking for sensitive information would put them at risk of retaliation by Chinese authorities.

Patiguli’s mother, who gave her name as Ainihasan, told the AP her son had been missing for two months and she believed police had taken him away.

“I cannot contact him,” the 54-year-old woman said by phone from Urumqi, in tears. “I fear I have only one child left now. I beg the Dutch government to please help her. Please keep my daughter safe.”

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Associated Press writers Arthur Max, Toby Sterling and Bruce Mutsvairo in Amsterdam and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

AP Exclusive: Uighurs flee China after riots

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

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By Bettine Vriesekoop in Urumqi

• News – Protesters arrested after stoning Chinese embassy

Nalida, dressed in a black-and-white burqa, brought her hands to her face as she cried: “The police killed my husband. Hundreds of policemen entered our houses. They hit us with sticks and pipes and took our husbands and sons.”

She clenched her fists and screamed as she and hundreds of wailing Uighur women on Tuesday marched through the capital of the western Chinese province Xinjiang, which was the scene of violent clashes between Uighurs and police on Sunday afternoon.

“This is war now. We have been silent too long. The Chinese do not respect our way of life and our religion,” said Guli, a woman clad in a green burqa. “Our men, we don’t know where they are. They even loaded naked children into trucks.”

What happened?

On Sunday, 156 people were killed and over 1,000 wounded, according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Officials said they could not give a breakdown of how many of the dead were Uighurs and how many were Han Chinese.

Sunday’s riot started as a peaceful demonstration by Uighurs over a deadly fight at a factory in eastern China between Han Chinese and Uighur workers. It spiralled out of control, as mainly Uighur groups beat up people and set fire to vehicles and shops belonging to Han Chinese.

More than 1,400 were arrested in the worst ethnic violence in the often tense region in decades.

Agencies reported that the capital of China’s Xinjiang region degenerated into communal violence again on Tuesday, prompting the government to impose a curfew.

The Uighur women of Urumqi are mad after Sunday’s eruption of violence that, according to the Chinese state news agency, killed 156 and wounded 1,000 people. On Tuesday, hundreds of traditionally dressed Uighur women took to the streets, demanding the release of their husbands and sons. Some sought contact with a group of journalists visiting the city under the strict supervision of the Chinese authorities.

Discrimination

New confrontations with the police occurred. While sirens blared and police restrained the crowd with teargas, Uighur men carried off some of the women who had fainted. They desperately asked for medical assistance, but no ambulance appeared. “You see, the lives of our people mean nothing to them,” one woman said.

Ali, a scruffy-looking Uighur, waved a stick at the police. He said two of his brothers were taken away. “We have nothing to do with the riots, but the police doesn’t make a distinction because they have been discriminating against us for years.”

For another day, Urumqi was the scene of violence, and it wasn’t just the Uighur battling the police. Han Chinese people, who on Sunday were attacked by Uighur, were hitting back. As visiting journalists were being led through the city, international press agencies reported acts of revenge by hundreds of Han Chinese. A mob of 1,000 mostly young Han Chinese holding clubs and chanting “Defend the Country” marched through the city trying to get to an Uighur neighbourhood, according to the Associated Press.

Internet blocked

Dozens of police cars, armoured vehicles and ambulances were parked on the street where Sunday’s violence took place. Large parts of the city have been sealed off and barricaded by riot police. Telephone and internet lines have been blocked and the government has declared martial law. Only in the Haide hotel, where the ministry of foreign affairs has put up the visiting journalists, some internet connections were reinstated.

Who are the Uighur?

The Uighur are originally a nomadic people that settled in what is now the Chinese province Xinjiang in 840 and converted to Islam in the 15th century. Their language is a Turkish dialect.

The Chinese conquered the area in the 18th century. In 1933, an independent state of East Turkestan was declared with the support of the Soviet Union, but communist China re-established control in 1949. Since then, many ethnic Han-Chinese have moved to the area.

Xinjiang population is currently 45 percent Uighur and 40 percent Han-Chinese.Years of rapid development have failed to smooth over the ethnic fault lines in Xinjiang, where the Uighurs have watched growing numbers of Han-Chinese move in.

It is remarkable that the Chinese authorities even allowed foreign journalists to report the riots. During the Tibetan revolt in March last year, journalists were banned from the Tibetan territories under the pretext that the area was too dangerous.

The Sichuan earthquake in May and the Olympic Games in August seem to have led to greater openness in China. However, this new openness is firmly directed. In Urumqi, Han Chinese and moderate Uighur were pushed forward to tell their story. It was very different from that of the women protesting the disappearance of their men.

Complete surprise

Han Haiti, a Han Chinese man, stood before his burnt-down garage. “I can’t grasp it. This is horrible. I have worked seven years to built my business. Now everything is broken,” he told reporters. The Han Chinese have lived peacefully alongside the Uighur for years, he said.

A modern-looking Uighur women who identified herself as Halida agreed. “We never had any problems between Uighur and Han Chinese in my street,” she said. Residents said the riots came as a complete surprise when, at around two in the afternoon on Sunday, screaming Uighurs ran down their street. “They were throwing rocks, setting cars on fire and attacking Han Chinese,” according to Halida.

A communist party leader in Xinjiang, Wang Le Qquan, said on Tuesday that the situation in Urumqi was under control, but added that “the conflict is far from being resolved”.

www.nrc.nl

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