Freedom remains elusive for exiled China’s Muslim leader
By P. Parameswaran
WASHINGTON: Twenty months after stepping out of prison, freedom remains elusive for Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled leader of China’s
Uighur Muslim minority and a top Asian nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
With about 100,000 Uighurs, including her three sons, languishing in jail for their political and religious beliefs, the 58-year-old grandmother says she remains a prisoner within herself.
“How can I enjoy freedom when my people, including my children, continue to be persecuted and jailed by the Chinese authorities and face a very hopeless and desperate future,” Kadeer asked in an interview with AFP in Washington.
But she said her nomination for the highly prestigious Nobel award to be announced this week was a recognition of the plight of Uighurs, the largest and overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic group in China’s far northwest Xinjiang region.
Winning the award however is not paramount, said Kadeer, speaking from her spartan office a few blocks from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue.
“My nomination itself is a recognition of the plight of the Uighurs and a timely reminder to the world of the human rights abuses our people endure,” said the mother of 11, wearing a traditional maroon Uighur cap as her greying hair plaits rest on each shoulder.
Kadeer is among 191 potential Nobel laureates, including another Asian frontrunner Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was nominated for his role in talks leading to the August 2005 Aceh peace agreement.
Kadeer was nominated by a Swedish parliamentarian for championing Uighur rights and for being one of China’s most prominent advocates of women’s rights.
“When I received news of my nomination, I was as excited as when I was released from the Chinese prison. It was, I remember, the same feeling,” Kadeer said. “Even those little shoeshiners on the streets of my homeland were very excited because they believed their destiny will change.”
Since her release in March last year after a six-year sentence, Kadeer, a millionaire businesswoman in Xinjiang, has seen unending troubles.
Her businesses, a source of training and employment for fellow Uighurs, have come under constant harassment from the authorities and are on the verge of collapse.
Her sons who helped run the establishments were allegedly beaten and thrown into jail. One of her daughters is under house arrest.
“In order to silence me, they first moved to destroy my business, they then thought it was not enough. They know I love my children and they love me so much too, so they went for them,” she said.
“It is an irony that in this 21st century, four children of a mother campaigning peacefully for the rights of her 10 million people can be thrown into jail just like that,” Kadeer said, choked with emotion.
Perhaps, she said, when the Chinese government released her from prison, “they expected me to just go home, cook and live like a housewife.
“But I have to let the world know what is happening to my people, who now live in one big open prison and face cultural genocide,” she said, citing forced abortion and sterilization, deprivation of education and an influx of mainland Chinese in her region.
While Kadeer calls herself the “daughter of the Uighur people,” Beijing denounces her as a terrorist and separatist and “not qualified” to represent the Uighurs in Xinjiang, which became an autonomous region of China in 1955.
Xinjiang is the only place in China where political prisoners are executed, said T. Kumar, Washington-based Asia Pacific director of advocacy for rights group Amnesty International.
Political prisoners are also subject to special forms of torture believed not used in other parts of China, he said.
“They include the use of unidentified injections which caused the victims to become mentally unbalanced and, in the case of male prisoners, the insertion of horse hair or wires into the penis,” he said.
“In Rebiya’s case, it is so unfortunate that her children are held hostage to silence her,” he said.—AFP
