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Can you hear us now? Uyghur report details Urumchi unrest and repression

Date: Friday, 02-July-2010

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Demdigest
July 1, 2010

A year on from the unrest in Urumchi that followed the violent suppression of an initially peaceful demonstration, human rights activists are calling on China to accept an independent international investigation into the events.

A new report from the Uyghur Human Rights Project examines the unrest of July and September 2009 in Urumchi, East Turkestan’s regional capital (also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region).

Drawing on eye-witness accounts, Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices From The 2009 Unrest In Urumchi details the security forces’ use of deadly live fire against Uyghur demonstrators on July 5, subsequent beatings and arbitrary detentions, and the communist authorities’ efforts to exacerbate tensions between the Uyghur and Han communities.

Two eye-witnesses gave moving accounts of ferocious and arbitrary violence against innocent Uyghur civilians. One described seeing police handing out steel batons to Han mobs, confirming reports that security forces deliberately fomented violence.

Beijing has still not acknowledged the peaceful nature of the July 5 demonstration organized to protest an attack on Uyghur workers at a Guangdong toy factory or the underlying grievances that prompted the unrest, UHRP project manager Henryk Szadziewski told a launch meeting for the report at the National Endowment for Democracy.

The research for the report revealed details of the regime’s violent response to the unrest, said UHRP researcher Amy Reger. The arbitrary nature and scope of the widespread detentions and the severity of the torture endured by some detainees were especially shocking, she said.

The report calls on China to end its information blackout and its Strike Hard Campaign. Its account presents a radical contrast to the official version of events and should help highlight a cause that NED president Carl Gershman considers insufficiently well-known.

The Uyghurs are a victim of the political faddism that George Orwell decried when he observed that “the most enormous crimes and disasters – purges, deportations, massacres, famines… — not only fail to excite the big public, but can actually escape notice altogether, so long as they do not happen to fit in with the political mood of the moment.”

In a message read to the meeting, exiled leader Rebiya Kadeer highlighted Beijing’s “multifaceted” campaign to erase Uyghur identity based on a migration strategy and policy of cultural assimilation that has been described as “tantamount to cultural annihilation”. The regime had cynically “rebranded” its persecution of the Uyghurs as part of the global war on terrorism just because they happen to be Muslim.

The several dozen enforced disappearances that Human Rights Watch had documented following the unrest are “deeply alarming” and among the most serious of human rights abuses, said Sophie Richardson, the group’s Asia advocacy director.

The regime was trying to “radically rewrite history”, investing considerable resources in creating its own distorted narrative, but its efforts to manipulate foreign media had largely backfired.

Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director at Reporters Without Borders outlined Beijing’s efforts to manage and censor media coverage before it resorted to cutting the region’s access to internet and many telephone communications for nearly 10 months – what her group has called the longest-ever case of government censorship of this kind.