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.

—

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.

—

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.”

—

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

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Photo provided by a listener.

Kaynam Jappar, one of several Uyghurs recently attacked, shown in a Jan. 6, 2005 photo.

HONG KONG—Authorities in the central Chinese province of Hubei have detained at least one man in connection with the beating to death of two ethnic minority Uyghurs during an apparent shoplifting attempt.

“We are dealing with [the case] here. [The suspects] have been detained,” an employee who answered the phone at government offices in Hubei’s Wuxue city said.

“There will certainly be [charges brought]. This is a judicial procedure,” the employee said. “It will take one or two days to complete.”

The case comes less than two weeks after the stabbing death of a Uyghur waiter, Tursun, in the southern city of Shenzhen, and amid simmering tensions following deadly ethnic riots in the western region of Xinjiang last July.

Beijing has blamed exiled Uyghur dissident Rebiya Kadeer for instigating the riots, which left around 200 people dead.

Kadeer has accused Chinese police of firing on unarmed protesters demanding an investigation into earlier killings of Uyghurs, who live mainly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and are mostly Muslim, at a factory in southern China.

The Wuxue official said relatives and supporters of the dead Uyghurs had come to demonstrate outside the municipal government buildings and were quickly met by officials for “arbitration and ideological work.”

The situation has returned to normal, he said.

An official who answered the phone at the Wuxue municipal police station said a group of around 200 Uyghurs had congregated outside the government offices earlier in the week.

“A bunch of them went down to the area around the Power Guesthouse,” the official said.

“They are still there causing trouble.”

Meanwhile, a second government official said a cremation was planned within the next few days.

“The family has been handled very well indeed,” he said.

Media blackout

In the absence of official media reports, unconfirmed versions of the violence were spreading around Wuxue by word of mouth.

One resident surnamed Song said the Uyghurs were reportedly in the process of stealing something when they were killed.

“They weren’t going about ordinary business like work. They were stealing,” Song said.

“The Uyghurs who steal do so more blatantly than Han Chinese because the punishment they get is relatively light,” he added, repeating a view frequently expressed about Uyghurs on online forums.

Another resident, surnamed Guo, said a brawl had broken out after the Uyghur men tried to snatch a woman’s purse.

“Apparently there were some people from Xinjiang trying to steal a woman’s bag and she called some people over to beat them up,” he said.

“They beat one to death, and then injured another [critically]. He didn’t make it.”

Exiled Uyghurs speak out

Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, said the deaths of the two Uyghur men were the latest in a string of violent attacks by Han Chinese on Uyghurs, who are given biased treatment by state-run media.

“They are basically lying to cover up and whitewash cases in which Uyghurs are the victims, and try to make them look like ordinary criminal cases,” Raxit said.

He said killings of Uyghurs by Han Chinese will only increase unless the ruling Communist Party changes its official policy toward Uyghurs, which he described as one of enmity under the aegis of Beijing’s “war on terror.”

World Uyghur Congress leader Kadeer condemned the stabbing of Tursun last week, which she said was not “a random incident.”

Kadeer cited three other attacks on Uyghurs in recent months, including the death in detention of Shohret Tursun, a native of Ili prefecture, the unexplained death of musician Mirzat Alim, and the beating and subsequent hospitalization of Urumqi-based photographer Kaynam Jappar.

Shenzhen police have arrested seven Han Chinese men in connection with the Jan. 11 stabbing incident.

News of the Wuxue case appeared briefly online in China, but was quickly removed by censors. No official media have reported the case so far.

The head of a Hubei-based nongovernment group, Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch, said he had been contacted by local police and had been warned not to publicize the Uyghurs’ killings.

“They told me not to talk about it, and to leave it well alone,” said Liu Feiyue in a hurried and reluctant phone conversation.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Fung Yat-yiu, and in Mandarin by Qiao Long. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

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Men Held Over Uyghur Deaths

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AFP

Uyghurs at an Internet cafe in Urumqi, capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, April 1, 2008.

HONG KONG—Chinese authorities in the northwestern region of Uyghurs are maintaining tight controls over the Internet and long-distance phone calls, almost four months after ethnic clashes that left nearly 200 people dead.

The curbs appear to come as part of an effort to maintain stability after deadly rioting in July between Han Chinese and ethnic minority Uyghurs in the regional capital, Urumqi.

Uyghurs living in Central Asia, North America, and Europe meanwhile report that they are almost entirely unable to phone, text, or email relatives in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

“Communication is a big problem,” an Urumqi branch office manager for the Shen Ou Communications Equipment Co. said.

“We have to use alternative methods like express delivery to send out documents,” said the manager, who asked to be identified by his surname, Cao.

He said many Urumqi-based companies have now relocated to neighboring Gansu province, more than 1,000 kms (620 miles) away, where there is still a reliable Internet connection.

“Many companies have moved their offices from Urumqi to places like Lanzhou, in Gansu,” Cao said. “We communicate with them by telephone and fax.”

He said he is hoping that the Internet will return to normal in Urumqi by the end of the year.

“If we are not online, people cannot find us,” he said.

In a report Oct. 29, the nonprofit press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said its survey had found more than 85 percent of Web sites dedicated to the Uyghur community—in Uyghur, Mandarin, and English—were “blocked, censored, or otherwise unreachable” in Xinjiang.

The RSF survey in October examined around 100 Uyghur Web sites, portals, forums, blogs, and other kinds of online platforms.

Texting unreliable

An Urumqi-based Han Chinese office worker surnamed Zhang said that telephone networks, both fixed-line and mobile, are also often unreliable.

“Text messages cannot be sent out, and we cannot surf the Internet either. There is simply no Internet connection,” she said.

“Internet companies have suffered big losses. Xinjiang is going to be left behind again as a result of this,” she said.

An employee at an Internet telephony service provider in Urumqi confirmed that they had suffered huge losses following the riots.

“Our company’s service was immediately shut down,” he said. “No Internet service is running. The losses were big.”

Internet-based service providers have suffered the most during the information lockdown, according to a second local employee, surnamed Zhang.

“Those who depend on the Internet to do business don’t know what to do,” he said.

New law passed

One businessman said he is hanging on in Urumqi, trying to conduct his foreign trade business out of the offices of the Xinjiang Council for the Promotion of Trade.

After pulling the plug on the entire region’s Internet and phone services in the immediate wake of the violence in July, the Xinjiang authorities passed a law making it a criminal offense to discuss separatism on the Internet.

Xinjiang’s People’s Congress Standing Committee passed the “Information Promotion Bill” banning people in the region from using the Internet in any way that undermines national unity, incites ethnic separatism, or harms social stability.

Armed police now stand guard in public places around the XUAR and are detaining anyone found with footage of ethnic riots in July.

According to a 26-year-old American blogger living in Xinjiang, Dunhuang city in neighboring Gansu has become a mecca for businessmen from Xinjiang.

“Pretty much the first city outside of Xinjiang with Internet access, Dunhuang has become the place for all businessmen and foreigners to go to regain access to email and business contacts,” he wrote in an Oct. 19 posting.

“Hotels and coffee shops tell me they’ve seen a noticeable increase in Xinjiang traffic,” he wrote.

Long history

Urumqi residents have frequently reported being cut off from the outside world entirely, as the authorities block media and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Officials say terrorists, separatists, and religious extremists used the Internet, telephones, and mobile text messages to spread rumors and hatred during the ethnic violence, sparking one of the most comprehensive Internet shutdowns ever reported.

Clashes first erupted between Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs on July 5. Twelve people have since been sentenced to death in connection with the violence, which was the worst the country has experienced in decades.

New York-based Human Rights Watch last week said it has documented the disappearances of 43 men and boys in the Xinjiang region, but that the actual number of disappearances is likely far higher.

Police have meanwhile detained more than 700 people in connection with the unrest, according to earlier state news reports.

Uyghurs, a distinct and mostly Muslim ethnic group, have long complained of religious, political, and cultural oppression by Chinese authorities, and tensions have simmered in the Xinjiang region for years.

www.rfa.org

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If the Taiwan authorities grant a visa to Kadeer, they are likely to infuriate Beijing, which says she is a “criminal” who masterminded ethnic violence in her home region of Xinjiang in northwest China in July.

“Kadeer expressed her thanks for the invitation and said she will certainly visit Taiwan,” said Marie Lin of the Taiwan Youth Anti-Communist Corps following a telephone discussion with Kadeer on Tuesday.

“She is a very warm and gentle woman. We hope the Taiwanese people can see for themselves how Beijing attacks its dissidents with lies,” she told AFP.

Guts United Taiwan, another pro-independence group which joined the corps in inviting Kadeer, said Wednesday its leader, Freddy Lin, was now in Washington.

Lin, also the lead vocalist of Taiwanese black metal band “Chthonic,” was expected to meet the Uighur leader there later Wednesday local time to finalise the trip, according to Guts United Taiwan.

“Rebiya Kadeer hopes to be able to carry out face-to-face exchanges with various groups in Taiwan at an appropriate time,” said Dilxat Raxit, a Sweden-based spokesman for the World Uighur Congress, which Kadeer heads.

When asked if now was an appropriate time, he said this depended on Taiwan’s ability to carry out “flexible and active diplomacy”.

The invitation puts Taiwan’s government — voted to power last year on a promise to improve ties with China — in a no-win situation, according to analysts.

China will be infuriated if Kadeer is granted a visa, while pro-independence groups at home and rights groups abroad will be angered if she is not.

“This is a decision-making dilemma for the government as whatever it does there will be criticism,” said George Tsai, a political scientist at Chinese Culture University in Taipei.

“If Taipei again steps on Beijing’s red line by granting Kadeer a visa, Beijing is likely to use its stick now rather than carrots.”

He said China could punish Taiwan by not signing a trade pact or financial cooperation agreement or by vetoing a Taiwanese plan to join specialised United Nations agencies.

Premier Wu Den-yih would not say Tuesday if the government would permit the visit, but said a decision would be announced by the end of the week.

China is already simmering over the screening this week in Taiwan’s second-largest city Kaohsiung of a biopic about Kadeer, triggering a wave of cancelled hotel reservations by Chinese tour groups.

“The Kaohsiung city government insists on screening the film to defend the freedom of speech,” said Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.

“This is not a reckless political move but a demonstration of social values in Taiwan,” she said in a statement.

Screening of the film was moved from a film library to a cinema on Wednesday due to the large crowd hoping to see it.

Meanwhile, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin was quoted by the state-run Central News Agency as saying he would support and welcome the screening of Kadeer’s film in the capital city.

Kadeer, who has lived in exile in the Washington area since being freed from a Chinese prison in 2005, denies orchestrating the July violence. About 200 people died when Uighurs and Han Chinese clashed.

The Kadeer film and a recent visit by exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama to Taiwan have strained cross-strait ties, which have otherwise improved markedly since President Ma Ying-jeou came to power here in 2008.

www.google.com

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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

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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

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