Rebiya Kadeer
21 February 2008, 04:05PM
www.uyghuramerican.org
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Rebiya Kadeer - who spent six years in a Chinese prison for allegedly revealing state secrets – makes her first visit to Australia this month.
The 61-year-old ex-laundress turned millionaire and former prisoner of conscience, now lives in exile in the United States. She campaigns for the rights of the Uighur people, who mostly live in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, which borders Tibet.
Rebiya Kadeer was arrested by the Chinese authorities in 1999, while on her way to a meeting with a US congressional delegation investigating the situation in Xinjiang.
Chinese authorities alleged she had a list of 10 people "suspected of having a connection with national separatist activities". She was sentenced to eight years prison for "revealing state secrets" after sending newspaper clippings to her husband, former political prisoner Sidik Rouzi, who had earlier fled to the US.
Six years later, in March 2005, she was finally released, into U.S. custody, on medical grounds.
Family harassed
Before she was freed, Rebiya Kadeer says she was warned if she became involved with the Uighur community or spoke publicity about "sensitive issues" her businesses and children would suffer.
After her initial detention in 1999, her family in China was harassed by authorities, and since her release they have experienced intensified persecution. Chinese authorities have also launched an investigation into alleged financial irregularities by her family company based in Urumchi.
At least two of her sons - Alim and Ablikim Abdiriyim, who are both in their early 30s - are currently in prison in China, and they are also considered to be prisoners of conscience.
Ablikim was reportedly tried in secret last year on the charges of "subversion of state power", "ethnic separatism" and sending information over the internet to his mother. While in detention he has reportedly endured regular long interrogations, beatings and other ill-treatment, and has been denied medical treatment.
Chinese authorities have formed the "Kadeer Working Group", presumably to handle the state's actions against the family and its businesses.
Empowering her people
Before her arrest Rebiya Kadeer was among the top ten wealthiest people in China. Despite being born into poverty, she built up and ran a multi-million dollar company and department store in Urumchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region - which was once known as East Turkistan.
Rebiya Kadeer, who has 11 children, set up free classes, in her department store, to educate poor Uighur children and started a group called the Thousand Mothers Movement, to empower Uighur women to start businesses.
Since her release she has campaigned for the rights of the Turkish-speaking Uighurs and is considered the leader and mother of the Uighur nation. She is the ambassador for the World Uighur Congress - which was set up to promote democracy, human rights and religious freedom for the Uighur people.
In 2004, while still in jail, she was honoured with Norway’s human rights award the Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize - laureates of the award include Myanmar's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and former South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung. And in 2006, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Uighur people
The Uighurs are a mainly Muslim ethnic minority. Since the 1980s, they have been the target of systematic and extensive human rights violations - including arbitrary detention and imprisonment, incommunicado detention - and have faced severe restrictions on their religious freedom and their social and cultural rights.
In recent years, China has exploited the international "war on terror" to suppress the Uighurs, labeling them terrorists, separatists and religious extremists.
In an account of a massacre in the Uighur city of Gulja in 1997, Rebiya Kadeer described how the police tried to terrify and intimidate her by showing her footage of what had happened.
"I have never seen such viciousness in my life ...In one part dozens of military dogs were attacking - lunging and biting at, peaceful demonstrators, including women and children. Chinese PLA soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators ... those on the ground - some alive, others dead - were then dragged and dumped all together into dozens of army trucks."
In February 1997, Chinese security forces brutally broke up a peaceful demonstration in Gulja. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed or seriously injured that day and in the aftermath the following day.
Campaigning for freedom
Activists worldwide, including Amnesty International members, wrote to Chinese authorities for years calling for Rebiya Kadeer - who has also been awarded Human Rights Watch's highest honour - to be set free. They continue to do so on behalf of her sons.
Her eventual release shows no government is immune to persistent pressure from human rights activists worldwide.
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