The Farm: Rabiya Kadeer

Rabiya Kadeer's story is an extremely interesting one. A Uyghur, the 61-year-old Kadeer is the foremost human rights advocate and leader of the Uyghur cause. She is the “Mother of the Uyghur nation”, in addition to being the mother of eleven children of her own. A former laundress turned millionaire, Kadeer established a joint multi-million dollar trading company and department store empire, and was at one time ranked as the seventh wealthiest person in China. Mrs. Kadeer was, in fact, the richest and most powerful woman in all of the PRC, and things were exceptionally fine for her until she pissed off the Chinese. Put in perspective, imagine if Oprah Winfrey were given an 8-year sentence by the U.S. government for criticizing it.

Such was her success that following a story about her business excellence that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1994, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet personally flew to meet her from out of respect for her enormous achievement as a woman and as a Uyghur in China. Kadeer utilized her wealth to aid downtrodden Uyghurs, especially women and children, and opened free classes in her department store to educate Uyghur children from poor families. She also developed a foundation in 1997, called the “Thousand Mothers Movement”, to empower Uyghur women to start their own businesses.

Ms. Kadeer’s philanthropic efforts were at first praised by the Chinese government. She was subsequently appointed to the National People’s Congress, as well as the Political Consultative Congress in 1992. In 1995, she attended the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women as a member of the Chinese delegation.

During this time she strove to improve the situation of the Uyghur people by working within the Chinese system. Her efforts to persuade high-ranking Chinese officials to change their hard-line, repressive policies against the Uyghurs, including direct talks with Jiang Zhemin, had little effect though. In a speech given during a National People’s Congress session in March 1997, she criticized China’s treatment of her people and demanded that the Chinese government honor the autonomy conferred on the Uyghur people and respect their human rights. She strongly criticized China’s harsh crackdown of a Uyghur student demonstration, which had taken place a month earlier in Ghulja City, Xinjiang, on February 5, 1997. (Less a "crackdown" than a massacre. See 4th web link at bottom). In doing so, Beijing’s attitude toward Ms. Kadeer vehemently curdled.

To punish her for her disloyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, she was stripped of her membership in both the National People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference, and forbidden to travel abroad. Beijing also pressured her to divorce her dissident husband, Sidik Rouzi, who had fled to the US in 1996.

In 1999 while on her way to meet a U.S. congressional delegation in Urumqi, the capital, Xinjiang, in the far northwest of China, she was arrested. Newspaper clippings she had sent to her husband containing accounts of recent events in Xinjiang were interpreted as “state secrets” and used to convict her. Kadeer was sentenced to eight years in prison for having stolen the above “secrets.”

Ms. Kadeer’s case became an international embarrassment for the Chinese government after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch publicized her case and aggressively pursued her freedom. While in prison she received Human Rights Watch highest human rights award and was honored by Norway’s Rafto Foundation with its Rafto Award in 2004. On March 17, 2005, three days before an official visit to Beijing by US Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice, she was released from prison on medical grounds after having completed six years of her punishment by the state. China would now exile her and the U.S. would adopt her. In 2006 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, further fueling China's embarrassment.

Since her release Rabiya Kadeer has been actively campaigning for the human rights of the Uyghur people, despite Chinese government efforts to discredit and harass her. In the meantime, Uyghur women continue to be sterilized or forced to have abortions because the Chinese government says they are too poor to afford to have families. Uighur mosques are closed, their imams jailed, and parents are forbidden to teach religion to their children. It is estimated that there are thousands of Uighur political prisoners, and Xinjiang has the dubious distinction of being the only place in China where executions still take place for political crimes. Beijing calls this “harmonizing the state”.

As regards the efforts of Beijing to harass her, in 2006 The Washington post reported that Chinese government agents had secretly videotaped Kadeer at her home outside of Washington D.C. It has been verified by the F.B.I. that the suspects were indeed Chinese government agents. Also in 2006, a U.S. congressional delegation had requested to meet her family during their visit to Urumqi. On May 29, Chinese authorities responded by warning her three adult children living in the city to decline any such invitation. Three days later, police took more drastic steps to prevent a meeting.

The three children were driven out of the city, where two of her sons were badly beaten by police along a back road. In a further effort to intimidate the family, one of the officers conducting the beatings handed a cell phone to her daughter, Rushangul, and demanded that she call her mother so that she could hear them screaming. Mrs. Kadeer was subjected to sounds of her sons being beaten and tortured over the phone. One of the two sons, Ablikim, was so badly beaten that he lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized before being taken to a detention center. Five of her eleven children are still in China, held by the government in indemnity against any political damage she might do abroad while in exile.

On June 13, Ablikim, together with Alim, the other son who was beaten, were charged with "plotting to split the state", a death penalty crime. Together with a third son, Kahar, aged 42, they were charged with tax evasion, this in keeping with Beijing's usual strategy of using ostensibly nonpolitical offences as an additional way of targeting their political opponents. As part of their "investigation" into these charges, Chinese authorities confiscated all of the financial records of her family companies, making it nearly impossible for her sons to prepare a defense against these charges. It was reported that Alim Abdureyim, the youngest son, ‘confessed’ on or around July 1 to criminal and political charges against him as a direct consequence of being tortured. With these actions, the government had definitely made good on threats to her before she left Beijing in 2005, warning that if she spoke out about the plight of the Uighurs, that her children and her businesses would be "finished."

During the meeting at the White House 5 days ago, Bush specifically expressed concern about the situation of Ms. Kadeer’s sons, Alim and Ablikim Abdureyim, who are currently serving lengthy prison sentences in the PRC. He indicated that he would raise their cases with Chinese leaders during his visit to Beijing. Ms. Kadeer expressed her concerns over the Beijing regime’s recent harsh campaign of repression on peaceful Uyghur dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.

Because Beijing fears that Xinjiang province might go renegade, strict measures are inflicted upon it, ones even greater than those inflicted upon Tibet. Yet, little is known of East Turkistan, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in this world. My guess is hardly anyone on the streets of the West could tell you where it is at, if they had even heard of it before. "From its conquest by the Qing Empire in the mid-eighteenth century until its incorporation in the PRC in 1949, there have been several efforts to wrest all or part of Xinjiang from Beijing's control. Though this restiveness is often portrayed as an enduring "clash of civilizations" between Chinese and Muslim realms, both the participants and the causes of these episodes have been more diverse than this simplistic formula allows. Indeed, Turkic or Uyghur nationalism has been a far more salient ideological feature than religious zeal. After 1949, despite some Islamic-colored unrest in southern Xinjiang, disturbances in the region corresponded with the political and economic disruptions of the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) and Cultural Revolution (1966-76)". (James Millward, Policy Studies, No. 6. East-West Center Washington, D.C. Publication Date: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/search-for-publications/browse-alphabetic-list-of-titles/?class_call=view&pub_ID=1479).

Most of the CCP's interest in the region stems from the fact that there are large resources of oil and natural gas in the province. Also, the Chinese are fond of testing their nuclear weapons there. The Chinese have very good reasons to maintain a grip on Xinjiang. Yet, the Uyghurs remain as they have for centuries upon centuries; completely different from mainstream Chinese in religion, language and culture.

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