Chinese authorities detained the Central University for Nationalities professor on Jan. 15 but have refused to say where he is being held, accusing him of leading a separatist group that advocates violence to overthrow Chinese rule in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) — charges which Guzelnur totally refuted.
IN AN ominous sign of the fate awaiting one of China’s best-known Uighur intellectuals, security officials in the far western region of Xinjiang issued a statement on January 25, accusing him of separatism and inciting ethnic hatred. The statement provides the first concrete indication that the scholar, Ilham Tohti, an economics professor in Beijing, could face a long prison term for his advocacy on behalf of Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority whose uneasy coexistence with the Chinese authorities has grown increasingly violent.
Chinese authorities defined multiple explosions on Friday in Xinjiang Aksu as a so-called "violence and horror" case. Six people were shot and five people arrested including two ladies; another six people died in the explosion. Commentators said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a new method to suppress the rebels. They shoot Uyghurs continuously and frame them as terrorists.
Twelve people died in clashes with police in the troubled Xinjiang autonomous region in western China on Friday, after causing explosions at a hair salon and a vegetable market, says state-controlled news agency Xinhua in an unverified report. The news agency said six assailants were gunned down by police, while six others died after setting off explosives. Five people were also arrested in what the police described as a “premeditated terrorist attack.”
Last October, a sport-utility vehicle sped onto a crowded Beijing sidewalk and exploded at the foot of Tiananmen gate, killing five people and injuring nearly 40 others. In the aftermath of the attack, the Chinese government declared the explosion an act of terrorism committed by Islamic jihadists from western China. Meanwhile, the foreign media turned the spotlight on the home province of the attackers -- China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region -- where some nine million Turkic-speaking Muslims, known as Uighurs, have lived under the control of the Chinese Communist Party since 1950. This arrangement has not been altogether peaceful; just this week, for example, local police gunned down six people in the city of Xinhe.
The bleak outlook for Uyghurs hoping to succeed in this Han dominated system has led to increased tension drawn upon ethnic lines. Protests against the Han influx became increasingly violent during the 1990s in response to the CCP’s tightening grip on Xinjiang’s administration. Although protests decreased in the early 2000s, the riots of 2009 were a bloody wake-up call to the worsening state of Uyghur-Han relations. The Chinese government, however, blamed these acts of violence not on state policy but on the encouragement of international agitators such as Rabiya Qadir, the leader of the World Uyghur Congress. The government labels all Uyghur violence as “terrorist acts” as a way to associate Uyghur separatism with global Islamic extremism and point the blame to causes external to Xinjiang’s domestic situation.
The Uyghur people's modern relationship with China is often sketched by analysts in terms of historic milestones. For example, the onset of the reform period in China in the late 1970s ushered in a period of détente; a signal that this was eroding came with unrest in 1990 in Baren. The definitive turning-point was, however, reached when Chinese forces killed Uyghur protesters in Ghulja in 1997. If this led Uyghurs in general to lose whatever belief they had had in the Chinese state, the deadly inter-ethnic violence in Urumchi in 2009 is cited as the moment when relations between Han and Uyghur communities became irretrievable.
Today, China's boom has seen those tensions with the country's 10 million Uighurs resurface. The Government says the movement contains Islamic extremists, citing last October's suicide attack in front of the iconic Chairman Mao portrait in Beijing.
