China: 43 Detainees ‘Disappeared’ After Xinjiang Protests, Recent Report Shows

Human Rights Watch, October 21, 2009 -

(New York) – The Chinese government should immediately account for all detainees in its custody and allow independent investigations into the July 2009 protests in Urumqi and their aftermath, Human Rights Watch said in a new report on enforced “disappearances” released today.

The 44-page report, “‘We Are Afraid to Even Look for Them’: Enforced Disappearances in the Wake of Xinjiang’s Protests,” documents the enforced disappearances of 43 Uighur men and teenage boys who were detained by Chinese security forces in the wake of the protests.

“The cases we documented are likely just the tip of the iceberg,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Chinese government says it respects the rule of law, but nothing could undermine this claim more than taking people from their homes or off the street and ‘disappearing’ them – leaving their families unsure whether they are dead or alive.”

Last week, Xinjiang judicial authorities started trials of people accused of involvement in the protests. Nine men have already been sentenced to death, three others to death with a two-year reprieve, and one to life imprisonment.

Human Rights Watch research has established that on July 6-7, 2009, Chinese police, the People’s Armed Police, and the military conducted numerous large-scale sweep operations in two predominantly Uighur areas of Urumqi, Erdaoqiao, and Saimachang. On a smaller scale, these operations and targeted raids continued at least through mid-August.

The victims of “disappearances” documented by Human Rights Watch were young Uighur men. Most were in their 20s, although the youngest reported victims were 12 and 14 years old. It is possible that some Han Chinese also became victims of “disappearances” and unlawful arrests. However, none of the more than two dozen Han Chinese residents of Urumqi interviewed by Human Rights Watch provided any information about such cases.

According to witnesses, the security forces sealed off entire neighborhoods, searching for young Uighur men. In some cases, they first separated the men from other residents, pushed them to their knees or flat on the ground, and, at least in some cases, beat the men while questioning them about their participation in the protests. Those who had wounds or bruises on their bodies, or had not been at their homes during the protests, were then taken away. In other cases, the security forces simply went after every young man they could catch and packed them into their trucks by the dozens……. (more details from Human Rights Watch)

China Police Enforced Uyghur Family Burial in Xinjiang Province

Radio Free Asia, 2009-09-21 -

HONG KONG—Police in China’s remote Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region surrounded the home of an ethnic Uyghur man who died in police custody and forced the family to bury him without an inquiry into how he died, the man’s father said.

The burial on Sunday ended a tense standoff between police in remote Lengger [in Chinese, Langan] village and the family of Shohret Tursun, 31, whose badly bruised and disfigured body was released to his relatives on Saturday.

On Saturday, one villager said eight trucks of soldiers and two other armed vehicles had surrounded Tursun’s family home in Lengger [in Chinese, Langan] village in Qorghas [in Chinese, Huocheng] county, Ili prefecture—after the family refused to bury him as instructed without an inquiry.

“We locked the door of the room where we keep the body, but the police officers broke the lock,” Tursun’s father, Tursun Ishan, said in an interview. “There were too many…”

“There were police officers waiting in front of our door. From the cemetery to the house, it was full of police officers on the street. Since yesterday, there were police officers on each and every corner of the city. They wouldn’t let people from other neighborhoods join the funeral.”

“My two daughters were trying to prevent the police officers from entering, but the police were very harsh with them. We were forced to bury [the body],” Ishan said.

“They told me that he had a heart attack. But it was a lie. It is a lie. My son never had a medical problem in his life,” Ishan said.

“His body was full of wounds and bruises—his legs, belly, and back were covered with wounds and scars. His chest was full of bruises.”

Police continued to surround the family home and the cemetery shortly after midnight Tuesday, he said.

Ethnic rioting

Tursun, a member of the Uyghur ethnic minority and the father of a two-year-old, was among some 40 men from Qorghas detained around the time of deadly protests July 5 in the regional capital, Urumqi, villagers said.

The protests by Uyghurs, a largely Muslim Turkic people, followed alleged official mishandling of earlier ethnic clashes in far-away Guangdong province.

The July 5 protest sparked days of deadly rioting in Urumqi, pitting Uyghurs against majority Han Chinese and ending with a death toll of almost 200, by the government’s tally.

Tursun was detained July 6 in Urumqi. He was transferred to Ili on July 18 and Qorghas on July 23, he father said.

“If I had bribed the police officers, my son would probably be released,” he said. “I considered selling my land to save my child, but his wife and mother were afraid a bribe would make him look guilty.”

“Another boy in the same prison cell with my son was released after his family paid 30,000″ yuan, or about U.S. $4,400, he said……. (more details from Radio Fraa Asia)

Communist Party City Chief in Xinjiang Sacked After Mass Protests

Radio Free asia, 2009-09-05 -

Chinese armed police march along a street in Urumqi, Sept. 5, 2009. (via RFA)

HONG KONG— The top Communist Party official in the city of Urumqi, Li Zhi, has been removed from his post after days of mass protests in which five people died, sparked by a bizarre series of syringe stabbings.

The director of Xinjiang’s public security department, Liu Yaohua, was also sacked and replaced with Aksu prefecture party chief Zhu Changjie.

Authorities have meanwhile deployed thousands of riot police to the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where nearly 200 people were killed in July in fighting between Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs.

Unconfirmed reports said police used tear gas to disperse protesters, while other reports said the stabbings were continuing.

Protesters marched by the thousands Thursday and Friday demanding the resignation of Li and his boss, Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan, for failing to provide adequate public safety in the city.

No reasons were citing for the firings, but the rioting in July was the worst in Xinjiang in more than a decade. Uyghurs, who are ethnically distinct and largely Muslim, have long chafed under Beijing’s rule.

“I think it’s saying to local officials: don’t allow anything like this to happen.  The implicit message is: do whatever you need to make sure there are not such events, meaning–use repression, use policing, use infiltration and so forth,” Gardner Bovingdon, a professor of Central Eurasian studies at the University of Indiana told RFA on Saturday.

“Hard-liners are in the ascendant.   The July 5 protests and this new round of protests and the firing … all indicate that the government is going to go for still more rigorous political control,” he added……. (more details from Radio Free asia)

China’s Muslim Uyghurs Forbidden to Fast During Ramadan

Epoch Times Staff  Sep 1, 2009  -

Chinese authorities in Xinjiang Province have issued a notice that any Uyghur cadres or workers found not eating lunch during Ramadan could lose their jobs.

It is part of the campaign of local authorities in Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group, to force the Uyghur people to give up their religious rituals during the fasting month of Ramadan.

Ramadan is a holy month in the Islamic calendar, which begun this year on Aug. 22. It requires not eating during the daytime.

“Free lunches, tea, and coffee—that authorities are calling ‘Care from the government’ or ‘Living allowance’—are being offered in government departments and companies. But it is actually a ploy used to find out who is fasting,” said Dilxat Raxit, World Uyghur Congress spokesman, speaking to The Epoch Times.

According to Dilxat, Uyghur Communist Party cadres throughout Xinjiang had been forced to sign “letters of responsibility” promising to avoid fasting and other religious activities. They are also responsible for enforcing the policy in their assigned areas, and face punishment if anyone in these areas fasts.

For the first time, Dilxat said, the crackdown has extended to retired Communist Party members. Current cadres are required to visit them to prevent them from participating in the fast. If anyone violates the ban, local leaders will be held responsible and severely punished, he said.

Muslim restaurant owners are forced to sign a document to remain open and continue selling alcohol during Ramadan or have their licenses revoked, he said.

Uyghurs arrested during the July riots in Urumqi are also prohibited from fasting; those who insist on fasting will be force fed food and water while enduring insults for their misbehavior, he said in the interview.

Monks in mosques are forced to preach to others that fasting is a “feudal activity” and harmful to health, said Dilxat. Otherwise, their religious certification will be cancelled……. (more details from The Epochtimes)

China: All communications with Xinjiang cut for past six days

Reporters Without Borders, 10 July 2009 -

Several Uyghur students currently in Paris told Reporters Without Borders today they have been unable to contact their relatives in Xinjiang since 5 July, either through the Internet or by telephone.

At the same time, the China Digital Times website had published a list of 118 keyword combinations such as “Xinjiang blood”, “Han and Uyghur cannot live under the same sky”, “Uyghur and Han, demonstration” and “conflict, Han and Uyghur” that produce no result in search engines because they have been blocked by the Chinese authorities. See http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/0….

For more information on the censorship of independent news and information about Xinjiang, see the Reporters Without Borders press release of 7 July……. (more details from Reporters Without Borders)

Facebook Inaccessible in China After Violent Clashes in Urumqi

By Tim Culpan, The Bloomberg, July 9, 2009 -

July 9 (Bloomberg) – Facebook Inc.’s social-networking Web site was inaccessible in China as the government blocks information after violent clashes in one of its regions.

As of 1:36 p.m. Beijing time, there were at least 36 reports of Facebook.com being unavailable from China, according to Herdict.org, a project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which tracks Web outages. Local access to the YouTube.com video site of Google Inc. was also broken, and connections to Amazon.com Inc.’s online store were irregular.

China’s government, which maintains tight control over the Internet, media and information flow, severed access to e-mails and the Web this week in the western city of Urumqi in Xinjiang province amid ethnic clashes that left more than 150 people dead and 1,000 injured. Authorities blocked Google’s search engine last month amid criticism it spread pornography.

“The government wants to show it’s doing as much as it can to prevent links to information from overseas as well as from inside China,” Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, a Beijing- based technology consultancy, said by phone. “It won’t work.”

Facebook.com couldn’t be accessed from Beijing or Shanghai as of 11 a.m. local time, while connections were possible from Seattle and Brisbane, Australia, according to WebSitePulse.com. Yahoo! Inc.’s Yahoo.com Internet portal and Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail.com e-mail service were reachable from all four locations, according to WebSitePulse.com.

“It does appear to be running slowly” in China, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. “We’re looking into the matter, what the reason is for the service running slowly.”

‘Prisoner of State’

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online store, sells “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” the banned memoirs of the former chief of the Chinese Communist Party, who was under 16 years of house arrest until his death in 2005. He secretly taped his account of the infighting among party officials before they ordered the military to crush pro-democracy demonstrations on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Clicking on the book’s Web page from China blocks the whole site for at least 15 minutes, and it can be re-accessed once the Internet browser’s history is cleared.

This may mark the first time the government has totally suppressed access to Amazon.com, broadening previous restrictions on Web pages for individual books, Clark said. …… (More from Bloomberg)

US Commission raises concern about China religious persecution

Paolo Gallini, Religious Intelligence, 9th July 2009 -

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) expressed concern today over the continued persecution of Uighur Muslims and the Chinese government’s violent response to the Uighur protest in Urumqi in the Xinjiang autonomous region Sunday, that left more than 150 dead and thousands injured.
US Commission raises concern about Chinese religious persecution

Media reports from the scene said that Uighur protesters, with legitimate grievances, were forced to disperse by government security forces. When they failed to disperse, force was used that led to the deaths of more than 150 Uighurs. Reports also indicate that, amidst the violence, Han Chinese were killed by Uighur rioters.

In a swift statement, the Chinese government said its violent crackdown was in response to a protest by Uighur separatists who rioted, burning hundreds of shops and cars. More than 700 persons were detained.

“The heavy hand of Chinese government repression displayed at Tiananmen Square and last year against Tibetan protesters appears evident again. We call on the Chinese government to end its violent response to the protests and act with moderation and restraint in dealing with Uighur unrest in Xinjiang, and to allow peaceful demonstrations and greater religious freedoms,” said Leonard Leo, USCIRF chair……. (more details from Religious Intelligence)

RSF Worried by Uyghur blog editor’s arrest in China

Reporters Without Borders, 8 July 2009 -

Reporters Without Borders is very worried by yesterday’s arrest in Beijing of Ilham Tohti, editor of the Uyghur Online blog (www.uighurbiz.cn) and economics professor at Beijing’s Central Nationalities University, who had been relaying information about the rioting in Urumqi, the capital of the far-western province Xinjiang, since 26 June.

“The crackdown is not limited to Xinjiang,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The authorities have arrested an independent writer who was just posting reports on his blog. We think his arrest is a direct result of the role he played in informing the Uyghur community in China and abroad. We call for his release, which could help to stop the violence.”

This is the third time this year that Tohti’s blog has been blocked. The authorities pressured him to stop posting articles in March and June. On 12 March, for example, he posted this note: “I hope my readers will forgive me but I must remain silent for a while. I have to face a lot of threats and harassment. But whatever happens, I urge my friends to continue our struggle.”…… (more details from Reporters Without Borders)

Xinjiang: Why China Needs To Be Brutal

by John Lee, Foreign Policy, via npr.org, NPR.org, July 7, 2009-

After scolding the West for interfering in the internal affairs of Iran, Beijing’s public relations department will now be on the defensive following riots in Urumqi, the capital of the westernmost region of Xinjiang. Chinese state media has admitted that 140 people have been killed and almost 1,000 arrested. Hundreds had taken to the streets to protest the local government’s handling of a clash between Han Chinese and Uighur factory workers in far southern China in late June, in which two Uighurs died. The police responded to the rallies with force, claiming that the unrest was the work of extremist forces abroad and that a heavy reaction was necessary to bring the situation under control.

Given the region’s population of 20 million — barely 1.5 percent of the country’s people — many are wondering: Why has Beijing taken such a hard line in Xinjiang? The reason is summed up in one of the ruling party’s favorite mantras: “stability of state.” Unrest of even a small magnitude, the Chinese authorities believe, can spell big consequences if it spirals out of control.

Instability of the sort in Xinjiang today is hardly new for China. Behind Shanghai’s glamour and the magnificence of Beijing, there are large swaths of disunity and disorder. Taiwan, which mainland China still claims as its own, remains recalcitrant and effectively autonomous. Residents of Hong Kong want guarantees that Beijing will not dismantle the rights they enjoyed under British colonial rule. And traditional Tibetans, who fear a complete political and religious takeover by the ethnically Han majority, want cultural and administrative autonomy — even if most have abandoned hopes of achieving outright secession. Many of the 10 million Uighurs in Xinjiang want the same. The current violence is just the latest manifestation of their simmering anger.

There is widespread disorder even in provinces that pose no challenge to Beijing’s right to rule. In 2005, for example, there were 87,000 officially recorded instances of unrest (defined as those involving 15 or more people) — up from just a few thousand incidents a decade ago. Most protests are overwhelmingly spontaneous rather than political; they arise out of frustration among the 1 billion or so “have-nots” who deal with illegal taxes, land grabs, corrupt officials, and so on. To deal with the strife, Beijing has built up a People’s Armed Police of some 800,000 and written several Ph.D.-length manuals to counsel officials on how to manage protests. Those documents detail options to deal with protest leaders: namely the tactical use of permissiveness and repression, and compromise and coercion, on a case-by-case basis. The tactics are designed to take the fuel out of the fire. Sometimes leaders of protests are taken away; other times they are paid off; still other times they are given what they want.

Much of this is done quietly, which is perhaps why the current riots stand out. When it comes to what Beijing sees as separatist behavior, subtlety is no longer an option. Although their populations are relatively small, Xinjiang and Tibet together constitute one third of the Chinese land mass, and Beijing will not tolerate losing control over these territories. To be sure, the protesters in Urumqi and their supporters cannot spark an uprising throughout China. The protests will eventually be quelled, and their leaders will no doubt be dealt with brutally. But as the history of the Chinese Communist Party tells us, when the regime’s moral and political legitimacy is threatened, the leadership almost always chooses to take a hard, uncompromising line.

President Hu Jintao, who incidentally earned early brownie points within the party by leading a crackdown of political dissidents in Tibet in 1989, understands better than anyone that authoritarian regimes appear weak at their own peril. Losing face, he believes, will only embolden the “enemies of the state.” The Communist Party’s Leading Group on Foreign Affairs, which is chaired by Hu, has often spoken warily about the democratic “viruses” behind the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, and perhaps eventually Iran — the same kind that could conceivably take root in places such as Xinjiang and Tibet. This is why Chinese authorities are deeply suspicious of any group with loyalties that might transcend the state and regime or at least cannot be easily controlled by the state, such as the Falun Gong, Catholics, or independent trade unions.

It’s important to remember that, at home, the government’s hard line is not wholly unpopular. Most Chinese do not support the separatist agendas of Tibet, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. They would rather see a strong and unified China restored to historic glory. No wonder then that the Chinese state media has been quite upfront about reporting on the current unrest in Urumqi.

Chinese leaders learned much about control in their extensive studies of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their conclusion is clear: It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated attempts to be reasonable that brought down that empire. The current generation of Chinese leaders is determined not to make the same mistake. And that means no compromise in Xianjiang.

- npr.org

Up to 190,000 may have died as a result of China’s weapons tests

Michael Sheridan, Times Online, April 19, 2009 -

The nuclear test grounds in the wastes of the Gobi desert have fallen silent but veterans of those lonely places are speaking out for the first time about the terrible price exacted by China’s zealous pursuit of the atomic bomb.

They talk of picking up radioactive debris with their bare hands, of sluicing down bombers that had flown through mushroom clouds, of soldiers dying before their time of strange and rare diseases, and children born with mysterious cancers.

These were the men and women of Unit 8023, a special detachment charged with conducting atomic tests at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province, a place of utter desolation and – until now – complete secrecy.

“I was a member of Unit 8023 for 23 years,” said one old soldier in an interview. “My job was to go into the blast zone to retrieve test objects and monitoring equipment after the explosion.

“When my daughter was born she was diagnosed with a huge tumour on her spinal cord. The doctors blame nuclear fallout. She’s had two major operations and has lived a life of indescribable hardship. And all we get from the government is 130 yuan [£13] a month.”

Hardship and risk counted for little when China was determined to join the nuclear club at any cost.

Soldiers galloped on horseback towards mushroom clouds, with only gas masks for protection.

Scientists jumped for joy, waving their little red books of Maoist thought, while atomic debris boiled in the sky.

Engineers even replicated a full-scale Beijing subway station beneath the sands of the Gobi to test who might survive a Sino-Soviet armageddon.

New research suggests the Chinese nuclear tests from 1964 to 1996 claimed more lives than those of any other nation. Professor Jun Takada, a Japanese physicist, has calculated that up to 1.48m people were exposed to fallout and 190,000 of them may have died from diseases linked to radiation.

“Nuclear sands” – a mixture of dust and fission products – were blown by prevailing winds from Lop Nur towards towns and villages along the ancient Silk Road from China to the West.

The victims included Chinese, Uighur Muslims and Tibetans, who lived in these remote regions. Takada found deformed children as far away as Kazakhstan. No independent scientific study has ever been published inside China.

It is the voices of the Chinese veterans, however, that will reso-nate loudest in a nation proud of its nuclear status but ill informed about the costs. One group has boldly published letters to the state council and the central military commission – the two highest government and military bodies – demanding compensation.

“Most of us are between 50 and 70 and in bad health,” they said. “We did the most hazardous job of all, retrieving debris from the missile tests.

“We were only 10 kilometres [six miles] from the blast. We entered the zone many times with no protective suits, only goggles and gas masks. Afterwards, we just washed ourselves down with plain water.”

A woman veteran of Unit 8023 described in an interview how her hair had fallen out. She had lost weight, suffered chronic insomnia and had episodes of confusion.

“Between 1993 and 1996 the government speeded up the test programme, so I assisted at 10 underground explosions,” she said. “We had to go into the test zone to check highly radioactive instruments. Now I’m too sick to work – will the government help me?”

The price was paid by more than one generation. “My father was in Unit 8023 from 1967 to 1979, when his job was to wash down aircraft that had flown through the mushroom clouds,” said a 37-year-old man.

“I’ve been disabled by chronic immune system diseases all my life and my brother’s daughter was born with a heart defect,” he said. “Our family has spent thousands of yuan on operations over the decades. Two and three generations of our family have such illnesses – was it the nuclear tests? Does our government plan any compensation?”

In fact, the government has already responded to pressure from veterans’ groups. Last year Li Xueju, the minister of civil affairs, let slip that the state had started to pay “subsidies” to nuclear test personnel but gave no details of the amounts.

Such is the legacy of the decision by Chairman Mao Tse-tung, in 1955, to build the bomb in order to make China a great power.

Mao was driven by fear of the US and rivalry with the Soviet Union. He coveted the might that would be bestowed by nuclear weapons on a poor agricultural nation. Celebrations greeted the first test explosion on October 16, 1964.

The scientists staged a total of 46 tests around the Lop Nur site, 1,500 miles west of Beijing. Of these tests, 23 were in the atmosphere, 22 underground and one failed. They included thermonuclear blasts, neutron bombs and an atomic bomb covertly tested for Pakistan on May 26, 1990.

One device, dropped from an aircraft on November 17, 1976, was 320 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The last explosion in the air was in 1980, but the last underground test was not until July 29, 1996. Later that year, China signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and, once again, only the sigh of the winds could be heard in the desolation of the Gobi desert.

The financial cost remains secret, but the price of the first bomb was roughly equal to more than a third of the entire state budget for 1957 – spending that went on while at least 30m Chinese peasants died of famine and the nuclear scientists themselves lived on hardship rations.

Rare was the outsider who gained a glimpse of this huge project. One was Danny Stillman, director of technical intelligence at Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of America’s nuclear weapons. He made 10 visits to secret Chinese nuclear facilities during a period of detente and information exchange from 1990 to 2001.

“Some of the videos they showed me were of PLA [People’s Liberation Army] soldiers riding on horses – with gas masks over the noses and mouths of both the horses and the soldiers – as they were riding towards the mushroom cloud of an atmospheric surface detonation,” Stillman recalled.

“It was strange because the soldiers had swords raised above their heads as they headed for the radioactive fallout. I have always wondered how many of them survived.”

Stillman was also allowed to see the lengths to which the Chinese scientists had gone to experiment with annihilation in the desert.

Like the Americans, the Chinese placed caged live animals, tanks, planes, vehicles and buildings around test sites. Such were the remains gathered by the men and women of Unit 8302.

“The surprise to me was that they also had a full-scale Beijing subway station with all supporting utilities constructed at an undefined depth directly underneath,” said Stillman.

“There were 10,000 animals and a model of a Yangtze River bridge,” recalled Wu Qian, a scientist.

Li Yi, a woman doctor, added: “Animals placed two kilometres from the blast centre were burnt to cinders and those eight kilometres away died within a few days.”

China had borrowed Soviet blueprints and spied on the West, according to The Nuclear Express, a book by Stillman and Thomas Reed, the former US air force secretary.

It explains how China then exploited its human capital to win technological parity with the US for just 4% of the effort – 45 successful test explosions against more than 1,000 American tests.

“The Chinese nuclear weapon scientists I met . . . were exceptionally brilliant,” Stillman said.

Of China’s top 10 pioneers, two were educated at Edinburgh University – Cheng Kaijia, director of the weapons laboratory, and Peng Huan-wu, designer of the first thermonuclear bomb. Six went to college in the United States, one in France and one in Germany.

For all this array of genius, no Chinese scientist has dared to publish a study of the human toll.

That taboo has been broken by Takada, a physicist at the faculty of medicine at Sapporo University, who is an adviser on radiation hazards to the government of Japan.

He developed a computer simulation model, based on fieldwork at Soviet test sites in Kazakhstan, to calculate that 1.48m people were exposed to contamination during 32 years of Chinese tests.

Takada used internationally recognised radiation dosage measurements to estimate that 190,000 have died of cancer or leukaemia. He believes 35,000 foetuses were deformed or miscarried, with cases found as far away as Makanchi, near the Kazakh border with China.

To put his findings in perspective, Takada said China’s three biggest tests alone generated 4m times more radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor accident of 1986. He has called the clouds of fallout “an air tsunami”.

Despite the pall of silence inside China, two remarkable proofs of the damage to health have come from official Communist party documents, dated 2007 and available on provincial websites.

One is a request to the health ministry from peasants’ and workers’ delegates in Xinjiang province for a special hospital to be built to cope with large numbers of patients who were “exposed to radiation or who wandered into the test zones by mistake”.

The other records a call by a party delegate named Xingfu for compensation and a study of “the severe situation of radiation sickness” in the county of Xiaobei, outside the oasis town of Dunhuang.

Both claims were rejected. Residents of Xiaobei report an alarming number of cancer deaths and children born with cleft palates, bone deformities and scoliosis, a curvature of the spine.

Specialists at hospitals in three cities along the Silk Road all reported a disproportionate number of cancer and leukaemia cases.

“I have read the Japanese professor’s work on the internet and I think it is credible,” said one. No cancer statistics for the region are made public.

Some memories, though, remain indelible. One man in Dunhuang recalled climbing up a mountain-side to watch a great pillar of dust swirl in from the desert.

“For days we were ordered to keep our windows closed and stay inside,” recounted another middle-aged man. “For months we couldn’t eat vegetables or fruits. Then after a while they didn’t bother with that any more.”

But they did go on testing. And the truth about the toll may never be known unless, one day, a future Chinese government allows pathologists to search for the answers in the cemeteries of the Silk Road.

The dead of Dunhuang lie in a waste ground on the fringe of the desert, at the foot of great dunes where tourists ride on camels. Tombs, cairns and unmarked heaps of earth dot the boundless sands.

By local tradition, the clothes of the deceased are thrown away at their funerals. Dresses, suits and children’s garments lie half-buried by dust around the graves.

“People don’t live long around here,” said a local man who led me to the graveyard. “Fifty, 60 – then they’re gone.”

- Timesonline.co.uk : Revolt stirs among China’s nuclear ghosts

Bird flu outbreak in North-west China

AFP, Feb. 11, 2009-

BEIJING (AFP) — China has reported its first bird flu outbreak among poultry this year, with thousands of fowl destroyed in the nation’s far northwest to prevent an epidemic.

The alert was raised after 519 fowl died in the Xinjiang region that borders Central Asia, the agriculture ministry said in a statement posted on its website late on Tuesday.

They were confirmed on Tuesday to have died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu that is responsible for killing about 250 people around the world since 2003.

Emergency measures were introduced in Xinjiang, which included killing 13,000 more fowl, the ministry said, without specifying if the animals were chickens or other types of poultry.

The ministry said the situation was under control. Officials at the ministry’s media department were unavailable on Wednesday to comment further.

China previously reported that eight people were infected with bird flu across the country this year, five of whom died.

However until Tuesday, authorities said no outbreaks of bird flu had been detected in poultry, raising questions as to how people contracted the disease.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans, rather than from poultry to humans, with the potential to kill millions in a pandemic.

But there has been no evidence yet of this happening.

The fourth person to die of bird flu in China this year, a 31-year-old woman, was living in a city neighbouring Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi and contracted the disease on January 10, officials said previously.

However the outbreak among poultry reported on Tuesday was in Moyu county, about 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) away, indicating no obvious connection.

Twenty-five people have died from bird flu in China since the disease re-emerged in 2003, according to World Health Organisation figures.

- AFP

51 Christians Detained in Northwest China

ChinaAid, Jan 05 2009-

XINJIANG – At 1 p.m. local time on January 2, 2009, a house church in Shayibake District of Urimuqi city, Xinjiang Autonomous Region was raided by a number of Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers. Fifty-one Christians were detained for questioning, with forty-eight released later that day.

Authorities held three church leaders, Ms. Zhou Li, Ms. Zhu Jinfeng and Mr. Yang Miaofa, an extended time in PSB custody. Mr. Yang Miaofa was released after paying 500 yuan fine. Ms. Zhu Jinfeng suffered a longer detention before her eventual release. Ms. Zhou Li was sentenced to 10 days administrative detention. She is currently separated from her son who is almost two years old.

- Original: 51 Christians Detained in Xinjiang, One Young Mother Sentenced, from ChinaAid

China: Xinjiang Uyghur Woman Faces Forced Abortion

Radio Free Asia, 2008-11-13 -

HONG KONG—Arzigul Tursun, six months pregnant with her third child, is under guard in a hospital in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, scheduled to undergo an abortion against her will because authorities say she is entitled to only two children.

As a member of the predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority, Tursun is legally permitted to more than the one child allowed most people in China. But when word of a third pregnancy reached local authorities, they coerced her into the hospital for an abortion, according to her husband.

“Arzigul is being kept in bed number three,” a nurse in the women’s section at Gulja’s Water Gate Hospital said in a telephone interview. “We will give an injection first. Then she will experience abdominal pain, and the baby will come out by itself. But we haven’t given her any injection yet—we are waiting for instructions from the doctors.”

China’s one-child-per-family policy applies mainly to majority Han Chinese but allows ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, to have additional children, with peasants permitted to have three children and city-dwellers two.

But while Tursun is a peasant, her husband, Nurmemet Tohtasin, is from the city of Gulja [in Chinese, Yining] so their status is unclear. The couple live with their two children in Bulaq village, Dadamtu township, in Gulja.

Their experience sheds rare light on how China’s one-child policy is enforced in remote parts of the country, through fines, financial incentives, and heavy-handed coercion by zealous local officials eager to meet population targets set by cadres higher up……. (more details from Radio Free Asia)

With China’s crackdown, Muslim religion could be disappeared in 10 years

Ryan Anson, Foreign Service, San Francisco Chronicle, USA, Friday, November 7, 2008-

(11-07) 04:00 PST Hotan, China – Following a spate of political violence, security has been so tight around here that a 25-year-old Muslim jade dealer agreed to talk to a reporter only if they met 20 miles outside this historic Silk Road town in remote northwestern China.

“I wanted to study teachings like the Hadith,” said the man who identified himself only as Hussein, referring to a collection of the prophet Muhammad’s sayings. “I’m too old now. It makes me sad.”

As children, Hussein and millions of other young Uighurs never attended the religious schools known as madrassas or prayed at mosques because of a government ban on Islamic education for those under 18. Since Hussein never learned about religious laws governing marriage and family, he feels unprepared to have children, and he wonders whether future generations will be able to practice their faith before adulthood.

“Maybe in 10 years, there will be no more religion in Xinjiang” (province), said Hussein.

Human rights groups and Uighur exile organizations echo such concern.

Since the end of the Olympic Games in late August, the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uighurs with alleged separatist ties in this oil-rich province has escalated, according to Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Uighur American Association, based in Washington, D.C.

History of tension

Friction between Beijing and China’s largest Muslim minority community is hardly new. Uighurs have long chafed at restrictions on Islam, which include studying Arabic only at government schools, banning government workers from practicing Islam and barring imams from teaching religion in private.

But the latest round of unrest is the worst since an uprising in the town of Yining 11 years ago killed scores of people, observers and residents say. Since August, at least 33 people have been killed in a series of attacks and bombings……. (more details from San Francisco Chronicle)

Fake Attack Exposes Communist China’s Links to Terrorism

By D.J. McGuire, Via The Epochtimes, Oct. 6, 2008-

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is desperate to have the free world—especially the American people—believe that it, too, is battling radical Islamic terrorists. So when a report of a machete attack in Kashgar, East Turkestan (called “Xinjiang” by the cadres) made the news just before the Olympics, the Communists played it up for all it was worth.

Only now, after the Olympics have long since ended, are contradictory details coming out. According to witnesses, as reported by the International Herald Tribune, the actual incident involved a car crash and paramilitary officers playing the “terrorist” role—a situation eerily similar to a staged anti-terror raid in Urumqi earlier this year.

For the cadres, this couldn’t have come at a worse time. Candy in Great Britain, pork products in Japan, coffee in the United States, cereal in Hong Kong, all are the latest of imports and nations ensnared by Communist China’s melamine scandal. The cadres responded with nearly two dozen arrests, but reports of arrests and actual catching of guilty parties rarely go hand in hand where the CCP is concerned.

Of course, the Korean colony is doing its best to distract everyone, and there is the space walk to celebrate—now that it’s really happened, but these distractions are hardly making a dent with the avalanche of melamine outrages out there.

Even worse for the CCP, the traditional concerns of the democratic world about its internal practices (such as the treatment of dissidents) have now spread to its external actions, such as the aforementioned exports issue, the tightening grip on Africa, the Long Arm of CCP Lawlessness reaching into Western countries, and its overall military objectives.

Even with all of this, the cadres would normally feel confident in their ability to ride out the storm; after all, the world believes they’re battling al-Qaedists in East Turkestan. That’s why the International Herald Tribune story is so damaging.

As I’ve mentioned ad infinitum, Communist China’s ties to Islamic terrorism run long and deep. Whether it’s al Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Saddam Hussein, or the Taliban, if it’s a terrorist group or regime looking to strike America, it has a friend in the Chinese Communist Party.  For the Communist regime, it’s the perfect win-win: it gets allies willing to strike against the U.S. in ways it could never do, and said allies—for their own reasons—are more than willing, even eager, to take all the credit for themselves, leaving the cadres apparently blameless.

This truth, if it were ever to become widely known, would start the countdown to the end of the Communist regime. Washington would want nothing to do with a Communist tyranny that considers Osama bin Laden a tool to be used against America.

Even European capitals which have a history of accommodation and appeasement would think twice about the Beijing regime.

So, the regime tries to distract the rest of the world with its phony war in East Turkestan in the hope that no one pays close attention to either its brutal occupation or the fact that the native Uighur population is just about the most pro-American group of Muslims on Earth.

All of that gets blurred by local acts of “terrorism.”

That is, until the acts are exposed as forgeries, like the Kashgar “attack” now appears to be exposed.  Then the truth comes into view once more, and the truth is this: the Chinese Communist Party is not an enemy of radical Islamic terror; it is a benefactor of radical Islamic terror.

The Beijing regime does not stand with the democratic world; it stand against them.  America is not a friend, customer, or even a rival to the CCP; America is the enemy of the CCP.

The free world can not afford to ignore this reality; for the War on Terror will not end in Tehran, Baghdad, or Kabul, but in Beijing.  America and her allies will never be secure until China is free.

D.J. McGuire is cofounder of the China e-Lobby and the author of Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror.

- The Epochtimes

Claimed terrorist attack in China actually a fight among police officers: foreign tourists

By EDWARD WONG, New York Times, USA, September 28, 2008-

KASHGAR, China — Just days before the Olympic Games began in August, a truck plowed into a large group of paramilitary officers jogging in western China, sending bodies flying, Chinese officials said at the time.

They described the event as a terrorist attack carried out by two ethnic Uighur separatists aimed at disrupting the Olympics. After running over the officers, the men also attacked them with machetes and homemade explosives, officials said. At least 16 officers were killed, they said, in what appeared to be the deadliest assault in China since the 1990s.

But fresh accounts told to The New York Times by three foreign tourists who happened to be in the area challenge central parts of the official Chinese version of the events of Aug. 4 in Kashgar, a former Silk Road post in the western desert. One tourist took 27 photographs.

Among other discrepancies, the witnesses said that they heard no loud explosions and that the men wielding the machetes appeared to be paramilitary officers who were attacking other uniformed men.

That raises several questions: Why were the police wielding machetes? Were they retaliating against assailants who had managed to obtain official uniforms? Had the attackers infiltrated the police unit, or was this a conflict between police officers?

“It seemed that the policeman was fighting with another policeman,” one witness said. All of the witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of running afoul of the Chinese authorities.

Chinese officials have declined to say anything more about the event, which was the first in a series of four assaults in August in which officials blamed separatists in the Xinjiang autonomous region. The attacks left at least 22 security officers and one civilian dead, according to official reports.

On Aug. 5, the party secretary of Kashgar, Shi Dagang, said that the attack the previous day on the police officers, which also injured 16, was carried out by two Uighur men, a taxi driver and a vegetable seller. The Uighurs are a Turkic Muslim group that calls Xinjiang its homeland and often bridles at Han Chinese rule.

One man drove the truck, Mr. Shi said, and the other ran up to the scene with weapons. The attackers, who were arrested, had each tossed an explosive and when they were captured had a total of nine unused explosive devices, machetes, daggers and a homemade gun, he said.

He never mentioned attackers in security uniforms. Neither did reports by Xinhua, the state news agency. One publication, the North American edition of a Hong Kong newspaper, Ming Pao, did, citing police officials in Xinjiang, who now refuse to elaborate on the events.

Chinese officials have long sought to portray violence in Xinjiang as a black-and-white conflict, with separatist groups collectively known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement carrying out attacks. Officials cite the threat of terrorism when imposing strict security measures on the region.

But the ambiguities of the scene described by the witnesses suggest that there could be different angles to the violence. When asked whether terrorists were involved, a Uighur man who on Friday drove past the scene of the attack said, “They say one thing, we say something else.” Other Uighurs say the attackers were acting on their own, perhaps out of a personal grievance.

The three witnesses said they had seen the events from the Barony Hotel, which sits across the street from a compound of the People’s Armed Police, China’s largest paramilitary force, and another hotel outside of which the attack occurred.

One tourist took photographs, three of which were distributed by The Associated Press in August. He showed 24 others to The Times.

At around 8 a.m. on Aug. 4, the photographer was packing his bags by the window when he heard a crashing sound, he said. When he looked up, he said, he saw a large truck career into a group of officers across the street after having just hit a short yellow pole.

Chinese officials said later that the truck had barreled into 70 officers jogging away from the compound.

The photographer said that the truck then hit a telephone or power pole and slammed into the front of the other hotel, the Yiquan, across the street. A man wearing a white short-sleeve shirt tumbled from the driver’s side, he said.

“He was pretty injured,” the photographer said. “He fell onto the ground after opening the door. He wasn’t getting up. He was crawling around for four or five seconds.”

The photographer raced into the hallway to get his traveling companions, a relative and a friend, from another room.

The two others had also heard the crash and were already in the hallway. All three dashed to the window in the photographer’s room. The photographer said he had been gone for about a minute. Back at the window, he said, he saw no sign of the truck driver.

The friend said: “The first thing I remember seeing was that truck in the wall in the building across the street. I saw a pile of about 15 people. All their limbs were twisted every which way. There was a gentleman whose head was pressed against the pavement with a big puddle of blood.”

“I remember just thinking, ‘It’s surreal,’ ” he said. “I had this surreal feeling: What is really happening?”

The tourists said the scene turned even more bizarre.

One or two men dressed in green uniforms took out machetes and began hacking away at one or two other men dressed in the same type of uniforms on the ground.

“A lot of confusion came when two gentlemen, it looked like they were military officers — they were wearing military uniforms, too — and it looked like they were hitting other military people on the ground with machetes,” the friend said.

“That instantly confused us,” he said. “All three of us were wondering: ‘Why are they hitting other military people?’ ”

The photographer grabbed a camera for the first time and crouched down by the window. His first photograph has a digital time stamp of 8:04 a.m., and his last is at 8:07 a.m. The first frames are blurry, and the action is mostly obscured by a tree. But it is clear that there are several police officers surrounding one or more figures by the sidewalk.

The photographer said that there had been two men in green uniforms on their knees facing his hotel and their hands seemed to be bound behind their backs. Another uniformed man began hitting one of them with a machete, he said.

“The guy who was receiving the hack was covered in blood,” he said. “A lot of the policemen were covered in blood. Some were walking around on the street pretty aimlessly. Some were sitting on the curb, in shock I guess. Some were running around holding their necks.”

The friend recalled a slightly different version of the event. He said he had seen two uniformed men with machetes hacking away at two men lying on their backs. “I do kind of remember one of them moving,” he said. “He was definitely injured but still kind of trying to squirm around.”

The relative also saw something different. He said a man in a green uniform walked from the direction of the truck. “A policeman who wasn’t injured ran over and started hitting him with a machete,” the relative said. “He hit him a few times, then this guy started fighting him back.”

After being hit several times by the machete, the uniformed man fell down, and at least one other police officer came over to kick him, the relative said.

It became clear to the tourists that the men with machetes were almost certainly paramilitary officers, and not insurgents, because they mingled freely with other officers on the scene.

While all this was happening, the three tourists said, a small bang came from the truck. It sounded like a car backfiring, the friend said. Black smoke billowed from the front of the truck.

The machete attack lasted a minute or two, the tourists said. One uniformed man then handed his machete to another uniformed man who had a machete, the friend said. One of the photographs shows a man walking around clutching two machetes in one hand. Another photograph shows a uniformed man carrying a rifle with a bayonet, a rare weapon in China.

Other officers were trying to disperse civilian onlookers, the tourists said. One of the officers saw the photographer with his camera in his hotel room window, the tourists said.

For about five hours after that, police officers locked down the hotel and went room to room questioning people, the tourists said. They seemed unthreatening, the tourists said, but they kept asking about photographs and checking cameras.

“They asked if we took any pictures; we said no,” the relative said. The tourists had stuffed the camera into a bag. “They asked if we sent any e-mails. I said no.”

The photographer said that while at breakfast, he saw white body bags on gurneys being wheeled to vans. In the afternoon, when people were finally allowed to leave the hotel, workers were spraying down the street with hoses, he said.

The truck was gone. Except for a bent pole across the street, there was no sign that anything had happened.

- New York Times: Doubt Arises in Account of an Attack in China

4th death reported in China milk scandal: govt

AFP, Sep. 18, 2008-

BEIJING (AFP) — One person has died in northwestern China from consuming tainted milk powder, a government website said on Thursday, the fourth death reported so far in the mounting scandal.

A notice on the Xinjiang regional government’s website said the death occurred in the prefecture of Bazhou, but gave no other details such as whether the person was a baby.

The latest reported fatality adds to three deaths confirmed on Wednesday by China’s Health Minister Chen Zhu, who also said more than 6,000 babies had fallen ill.

The three deaths were due to kidney failure after drinking milk powder contaminated with melamine.

Melamine, a chemical normally used in plastics, was illegally mixed into milk products and has made its way into the baby formula of 22 Chinese dairy companies.

Six people have been arrested, five of whom were involved in adding melamine to milk, the official Xinhua’s news agency has said.

The government has announced a massive recall of tainted products and launched comprehensive nationwide tests for melamine throughout the agricultural sector and not just the dairy industry.

- Original: AFP

Uyghur Radio Worker Sacked, Detained for criticizing China policy

Radio Free China, Sep. 8, 2008-

HONG KONG— Authorities at a Chinese government-run radio station in the remote Xinjiang region have fired and detained an ethnic Uyghur woman working there, apparently for criticizing government policy, Uyghur sources have said.

Mehbube Ablesh, 29, was removed from her post at Xinjiang People’s Radio Station several weeks ago, according to two colleagues at the government-run station in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Ablesh, who studied journalism, was employed in the station’s advertising department, although her exact duties there weren’t immediately clear.

“She was fired a month ago. Now we hear she is in prison and we don’t have any information about Mehbube’s prison situation,” one colleague said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We tried to lead her in the right direction but she didn’t listen to us.”

“Management already held a meeting and told all 60 employees that Mehbube committed mistakes. She wrote articles for Web sites. I don’t know which Web sites, and I don’t know what she wrote about or what she discussed, [but] she wrote articles for Web sites and so she has been arrested by the police,” the colleague said.

Another colleague confirmed her removal from the station “about one month ago.”

A third source, based in Europe, said he had been in contact with Ablesh and that in her messages she had sharply criticized top provincial leaders and the government’s policy of requiring Mandarin-language teaching. She may have been detained because of this, he said.

“Our department is a journalism department—people should be very careful because it is a very sensitive place,” the first source said.

“She prayed. But she didn’t wear a headscarf. What she did was wrong. The government provided her everything—a good job, everything. It is the same everywhere, in America too. If the government provides you a good job, everything, and you speak out against the government, you will be punished. Isn’t it so?”

Multi-lingual radio
A radio station employee, contacted by telephone, declined to discuss the matter.

“It is too sensitive to talk about issues like this. You can verify the issue through other channels. It may be a normal thing to talk about it somewhere else, but this is Xinjiang. It’s too sensitive,” the employee said.

Radio employees declined to comment further and referred questions to the police and Public Security Bureau. Officials at both offices declined to comment.

Xinjiang People’s Radio currently broadcasts a total of 111 hours daily in Uyghur, Mandarin, Kazak, Mongolian, and Kyrgyz, according to its official Web site.

Following a string of violent attacks in remote, northwestern Xinjiang, Chinese authorities are stepping up restrictions on Muslim Uyghurs during the fasting month of Ramadan. Police say women are being forced to uncover their faces in public, while restrictions on teaching Islam to Uyghur children are being intensified……. (more details from Radio Free China)