Rebiya Kadeer rallying again for increased pressure on China

Just over a year since she was last here, the Human Rights House in Oslo yesterday received Rebiya Kadeer, the leading Uyghur minority human rights and democracy defender. Seemingly recovered from the car ramming outside her home in Washington DC in January, her message was unmistakeably clear: If the world doesn´t put pressure on the People´s Republic of China to change its policies towards its minorities, within twenty years, they will all be threatened with eradication. (31-OCT-06)

This article has been written by Carl Morten Iversen of Norwegian PEN and Niels Jacob Harbitz of HRH-F. Harbitz, who has prepared the article for publication, has also taken the pictures of Kadeer.

Kadeer, the President of the Washington DC-based International Uyghur Rights and Democracy Foundation, is in effect also the leader of the coalition of close to 30 exile organisations all working for the Uyghur cause under the umbrella of the Uyghur Wourld Council. Right now, she is touring Europe to rally for support of the Uyghur case. She has, among other things, been admitted eight minutes in the British Parliament to present her case. In Norway, she is attending both Amnesty International’s annual meeting and the Rafto Award’s 20th Anniversary Symposium. She is also catching the interest of Norwegian media, especially after the famous blunder made by the Chinese Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Zhang Yesui, left, earlier this autumn, who threatened the visiting Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs within the Norwegian Parliament that if Rebiya Kadeer was to be awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Norway could expect severe consequences for its relations with the People´s Republic of China. The Committee’s response was as surprising as it was impossible to accept or understand for Yesui: That the visiting Parliamentary Committee had nothing to do with the awarding of Nobel Peace Prizes and that the selection of laureates never has been, never will be any of the parliament’s business.
 

Historical background
The brief historical background to the Uyghur’s struggle, is as follows. What is still, as the map shows, called the Uyghur autonomous region, is, in fact, anything but. It was occupied by the People´s Republic of China in 1949 and has been subjected to increasingly severe suppression ever since. Located right north of Tibet, the two regions share much the same destiny. Ten years after the occupation of East Turkistan, the region the People´s Republic of China prefers to call Xinjiang, the People´s Republic of China also occupied Tibet. Unlike the Tibetans, whose predicament has been made world famous by Dalai Lama, the Uyghurs have, until the emergence of Rebiya Kadeer on the international stage, not had a world famous spokesperson of their own. The Rafto prize in 2004 did much to change this, and this year, the odds for Kadeer to follow in Dalai Lama’s footsteps and also be named the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate were among the lowest.

Gross discrimination and injustice
-At the time of the occupation, Kader explains, -East Turkistan enjoyed a significant degree of self-determination. The region was populated by approximately 97 % native Uyghurs, and only 3 % Han Chinese, including the army personnel taking part in the occupation. Today, what was once a vast majority has, by numerous strategic moves on the part of the People´s Republic of China, been turned into a minority, now down to only 30-40 % of the total population. The rest is made up of Han Chinese, often bribed to move there, living under very privileged conditions in the region, and naturally remaining loyal to Chinese authorities. Immigrant Chinese are allocated with the largest and best pieces of land, relegating Uyghurs to the status of poor, landless peasants on what was once their own soil.

Rich region, poor people
Kadeer is in no doubt why East Turkistan is so important to China: -Some 90 % of the oil and gas resources in all of the People´s Republic of China are to be found under East Turkestan soil. Furthermore, in addition to uranium, 103 other minerals of greater or lesser commercial value are also to be found in the region. Pipelines for gas stretches all across the People´s Republic of China and provide the full supply for both Beijing and Shanghai, among other places. In East Turkestan, however, the Uyghyr minority still cook and heat their homes on coal. Jobs on the oil and gas installations are also not available to us. Some international companies have invested heavily in the region, among them a Swedish and a Saudi company both involved in the search for more oil and gas fields, but the American Exxon pulled out in 2004, after nearly 40 years, for reasons I don’t know. Now, another Texan company has come in, Kadeer concludes.

-Quiet diplomacy is a waste of time. What is needed is a lot of noise
-Uyghurs, who are Moslems, suffer particularly harsh treatment, Kadeer continues, -under the excuse of the necessity of combatting terrorism. Even so, they have not received any kind of support from other Moslem countries. From the broader international community, though, and in particular from the US, UK, EU, Germany and Norway, the support is getting ever stronger, with all these countries or unions having raised the Uyghur issue directly with Chinese authorities. For these reasons, and judging from China´s noncompliant response, I have lost faith in so-called ‘quiet diplomacy’. On the contrary, what is needed, is as much attention as possible paid to the Uyghur case. To make the People´s Republic of China care at all about the opinions of the international community, there needs to be more noise, not less. the People´s Republic of China has received enormous amounts of help from its trade partners to become the economic superpower it is today. Now, these very same partners, obviously making good money themselves from getting the People´s Republic of China up on its feet and thus also developing and getting access to the Chinese market, must demonstrate their corporate social responsibility. This is what I think. Feel free to quote me on every word of it, Kadeer finished off, as she left for Bergen, the Rafto Symposium and the celebrations of the 20th Anniversary of the Rafto Award, the prestigeous human rights prize that she herself won two years ago.