60 Years of Democracy in China
(seen by Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, Human Rights Defenders)
Wednesday, 30 September 2009, 13.00-15.00
European Parliament (Brussels)
Dolkun Isa
Secretary General of WUC
Lades and Gentleman,
It is my honor to be here and to speak about Uyghurs issue today.

As most of you know, the Uyghurs are the indigenous people of East Turkestan, also known as Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. East Turkistan has been under military controlled by Communist China since 1949. The territorial size is 1,818,000 square kilometers, The territorial size is 1,818,000 square kilometers, According to the 2005 census of China, Uyghur population of 9.5 million. However, the Uyghur sources put the population of Uyghurs around 20 million.
October 1, 2009 will mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

China is preparing for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and 54th anniversary of the founding of the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. But the Uyghur people living at home and abroad commemorate this date as a date of national mourning. The main reason is that the decision to set up the autonomous region rather than fulfilling the promises of self-determination made by Mao Zedong was against the wishes of the Uyghurs people.

At the Sixth Congress of The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1945, Mao Zedong announced that after CCP takeover of China, the people of East Turkestan would have the right to self-determination and the choice between full independence and establishment of a federated republic within the framework of federalism. However, as soon as CCP took over China, Mao Zedong denied the people of East Turkestan the right to self-determination, and established this so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Faced with this situation, the Uyghur people asked to form a federated republic within the People’s Republic of China. Mao also rejected this request calling it a “ demand hostile to the history,” and claimed “that East Turkestan has always been an inalienable part of an indivisible China, even before it was liberated; therefore there would be no sense in dividing China into federated republics.”

In Februrary 1955 a special committee was created by CCP to prepare for regional autonomy in East Turkestan, and in August the provincial government adopted a resolution calling for such regional autonomy. The First East Turkestan Provincial People’s Congress approved the resolution in September 1955 and dispatched it to Beijing, where the State Council and the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress approved it on September 13, 1955. As a result, the so-called Xinjiang Wei Wu Er Zi Zi Chu, or the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, came into being on October 1, 1955.

With the creation of the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Chinese political oppression, cultural assimilation, economic exploitation, ecological destruction, racial discrimination, arbitrary arrests, torture, execution and the forced sterilization on Uyghur women. The Uyghurs are faced with the danger of becoming a small minority in their own country and thereby losing their cultural identity.
Since 60 years, the fundamental human rights and the freedoms of the Uyghurs including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights have been violated.
We are extremely worried about the further escalation of the current situation.
The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and Uyghur communities around the world are deeply concerned about the unprecedented bloodshed on July 5th 2009 in Urumqi, the capital city of East Turkistan.

Urumqi, July 5th 2009

On July 10, nearly a week after the violence in Urumqi, the Chinese Government publicly announced the death toll of the violence. They said that out of the 192 that were killed, 46 were Uyghur and the rest was Han Chinese. The WUC refutes these figures based on reports of several Uyghur witnesses who have contacted WUC representatives in the USA, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Germany and Turkey. These eye-witnesses have reported that on July 5th, the Chinese police were present on the People’s Square in Urumqi before the Uyghur protesters arrived and that they started kicking, beating and arresting the protesters at their arrival. A well-prepared and initially peaceful protest turned violent within a few hours.

The fact that the Uyghur demonstrators carried the flags of the People’s Republic of China shows that they did not intend for the protest to turn violent. Chinese authorities knew about the upcoming protest by its announcement on the Internet. They had an opportunity to make arrangements on how to deal with it. The protest started as reported around 5:00pm local time (7:00pm Beijing time). The police’s beating, chasing and arrests started immediately and lasted for many hours. By 8:30pm local time, the police chased Uyghur protesters into three alleyways (Old Malbazar alleyway near Sanshihangzi, Haba alleyway near No.28 Elementary School, and the one near the Border Hotel) and cut off the electricity of the city of Urumqi for 90 minutes. In these 90 minutes, the police, fully armed with armored vehicles and machine guns, surrounded the crowds and fired with full military power. The sound of gunshots can be heard in many YouTube videos made that night. Adam Grode[1] an English teacher living in the neighborhood where the crackdown took place, said that by midnight, when some of the armored vehicles had already left, the gunfire could still be heard. According to witness reports, an estimated 1000 people, most of them ethnic Uyghurs, were shot dead during that one and a half hour period of time. The Turkish Prime Minister has compared this violence to genocide.

After electricity in Urumqi was returned at 10:00pm local time, the police searched the homes in the three alleyways where the killings took place and arrested all the males of 14 years and older. The police forced Uyghurs to undress completely except their underwear and loaded them into trucks. With China’s history of brutal crackdown and mass arrest of Uyghurs in past demonstrations in mind, we strongly believe that Chinese authorities have arrested an estimated 5000 or more Uyghur males that night. For this reason, the Uyghur protesters on July 7th and later were mostly women and children.

An eye-witness recalls a 20-year old Uyghur being shot twice and crawling into a nearby trench before he died. His body was found the next morning. Being distressed by the news of what happened to this young Uyghur man, more than 10 Uyghur residents, most of them women and children, gathered where it had happened. At that moment, a truck of police arrived and took that dead body as well as the people that had gathered around it. The fates of those people as well as of other detained Uyghurs are still uncertain.

The background of the riots

One of the reasons for the July 5th Uyghur peaceful protest in Urumqi was the government’s inaction after a number of Uyghur workers had been killed and several hundreds more injured in a Guangdong toy factory on June 25th. In addition, the Chinese government announced that only 2 Uyghur workers had been killed and 118 injured in that ethnic clash and that the violence had started with an Internet posting in which a former Han employee of the toy factory wrote that a number of Uyghur workers had raped two Han Chinese girls. The WUC believes that this is an incorrect representation of what happened. It is unlikely that one accusation posted on the Internet can mobilize several thousands of Han workers to take up iron pipes and other weapons, to come to the factory campus, and to start beating any Uyghur worker, in most cases until they died.

The author of an article published on guardian.co.uk on July 10 wrote the following: “A local man said he took part in the assault because he was furious that the rapes had gone unpunished. ‘I just wanted to beat them. I hate Xinjiang people,’ he said. ‘Seven or eight of us beat a person together. Some Xinjiang people hid under their beds. We used iron bars to batter them to death and then dragged them out and put the bodies together.’ Squatting on his haunches in the shadows of a half-constructed apartment block, the Han man – who gave no name – said the government was lying about the death toll. He claims he helped to kill seven or eight Uyghurs, battering them until they stopped screaming. He thinks the death toll is more than 30, including a few Han.” [2]:

According to witness reports received by WUC representatives in several countries, at least 30 Uyghurs were killed and more than 300 were injured in this clash. It took police authorities about two days to clean up blood stains in streets and dormitories in factory campus. Many of the families of victims that live in villages in the Kashgar District, East Turkestan, have received the bodies of their loved ones with a threat from the police saying that they were not allowed to talk to anyone about this incident. If they would, they would lose their homes and their farming lands and they would go to jail.

After the riots in Urumqi

On July 6th, several thousand Han Chinese mobs, carrying meat cleavers, machetes, axes, clubs and shovels, went onto Urumqi’s streets to injure and kill every Uyghur they could find. They destroyed shops and restaurants owned by Uyghurs and demolished two mosques. One Han Chinese with the pen name of “TD” wrote the following[3]:

“I just made a phone call to Xinjiang. The situation has spread into a large scale. Immigrant Han Chinese have already started actions. They are beating and killing every Uyghur they can find. The number of the Uyghur shops destroyed far exceeds that of those destroyed on July 6 and owned by Han Chinese. The number of the Uyghurs killed and injured is also many times more than what was reported. I was told that the people walking on the streets are only Han Chinese. Almost all of the Han Chinese walking on the streets are carrying long knives. It is unimaginable that some Han Chinese killed Uyghurs first, and then hang their dead bodies on trees. Some Han Chinese are standing on crossing bridges and throwing Uyghurs off the bridges. There were so many dead bodies, and trash-collecting trucks started to move them away. The policemen standing nearby are pretending they didn’t see anything, and sometimes saying ‘hit (the Uyghurs) at the life-threatening places.’ This has greatly encouraged those Han Chinese.”

Some Uyghur witnesses reported that those Han Chinese mobs are likely to have been military personnel in civilian clothes, because they acted like well-trained professionals when they were beating and killing Uyghurs.

Unlike in the case of the empty-handed, peaceful Uyghur protesters, the police made no attempts to stop the armed Han Chinese mobs on 6 July 2009. There are no reports on arrests of members of Han Chinese mobs who injured and killed Uyghur victims and who rioted on Uyghur properties. To our knowledge, all the arrested are Uyghurs.

Urumqi’s CCP chief, Li Zhi, said that those who had used “cruel means” during the rioting would be executed. In saying this, he referred to the several thousand Uyghurs who have been detained, since the Han mobs who used “cruel means” to injure and kill Uyghurs and damage Uyghur properties were not arrested.

In reports obtained by WUC representatives from people within East Turkestan, it is stated that the Chinese authorities conduct secret executions of Uyghur victims and then cover up the evidence. Whereas Uyghurs do not have any place to hide the dead bodies of tens of Han people or the means to get rid of them because the roads are guarded by police, the Chinese authorities do. They dig two meters deep ditches at night in deserted locations and bury a number of dead bodies. In fact, several people have speculated that Uyghurs returning from Nepal and Pakistan “disappeared” this way in the past.

Media report that an unknown number of Han Chinese residents in Urumqi are looking for missing family members. Possibly, some of the 1000 people that were shot dead in the night of July 5th were Han Chinese and have already been buried by the Chinese authorities along with other bodies.

The Black Hand Behind the Scenes

In an article titled: “Who is the ‘Black Hand’ Behind the Scenes in the Urumqi Riots?”, Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese democracy activist, writes the following [4]:

“During this whole play, the ‘black hand’ was hiding behind the scene for the first half of the show, where it is difficult to be discovered. However, near the crucial end, the Chinese government must come forward to coordinate in an effort to produce the needed effect. Thus in both Shao Guan and Urumqi, as the riots started and reached life threatening levels, both the government and the police were unusually absent from the scene. In particular in Urumqi this absence lasted for about 4 to 5 hours. … Thus, the minorities become the easiest diversion targets, to replace the target of the bureaucratic CCP. Stirring up ethnic groups' hatred against each other as Hitler did before, became a big subject that is related to the life and death of the CCP itself. They chose the Uyghurs instead of the Tibetans or Mongolians, because in Tibet, the Han Chinese is still a minority that would only escape rather than sustain a lasting big battle. In Inner Mongolia, there are already too few Mongolians. Only in Xin jiang, are there reasonably comparable forces of Uyghurs and Han Chinese. That is why they are the chosen targets.”

That is, as a victim of the Chinese regime and propaganda, Wei Jingsheng points out that both incidents took place through the Chinese government’s well-planned encouragement and lack of action to prevent mob beating and killing of the Uyghurs. An article published on July 12 in boxun.com website and several other Internet postings written by Han Chinese readers suggest that the two incidents involving Uyghurs, one in Guang dong and the other in Urumqi, are the products of power struggles between the current Chinese president Hu Jintao and the former president Jiang Zemin; Wang Lequan, a close friend of Jiang Zemin and the current CCP General Secretary of East Turkestan (XUAR), is the one who executed the well-planned conspiracy by Jiang Zemin. [5]

The Chinese Government’s practices in dealing with social unrest prove to the world that they do not honor either international law or the Chinese Constitution. Another example is the Tiananmen Square Massacre that took place June 4, 1989. The Chinese Government said that only three soldiers had been killed. However, the Red Cross reported that 2,500 people died and 7,000 - 10,000 were injured.

The tensions remain high in East Turkestan. China has responded to a peaceful Uyghur protest with a military crackdown that resulted in about 1000 Uyghur civilian deaths and about 5000 arrests. This has increased fear and intimidation faced by the Uyghurs. Those who have been detained are at great risk of torture and other forms of ill-treatment.

The Chinese government should first of allow an independent and international investigation into the Shaoguan killings and into the Urumchi unrest. Let the world understand the real events.. If the truth were to emerge, this would surely contribute to a path of dialogue between Han Chinese and Uyghur based on equality and trust.
we also urge the Chinese government to allow journalists access to East Turkestan and Uyghurs without any conditions. It is well known that Uyghurs who speak to western journalists often disappear.
This access to East Turkestan will be critical in the coming days as looming executions of Uyghurs on political charges come ever nearer (see CECC’s Authorities Pledge Crackdown Following Xinjiang Demonstration and Clashes) [6]. We fear that a number of Uyghurs are going to be executed unnoticed by the world. In order to prevent such state-sanctioned killing we require the eyes of the world’s media and the world’s governments to remain on East Turkestan and to speak out against a further abuse of the Uyghur people’s human rights.
The Chinese government should respect its own constitution [7] and Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law [8] and grant Uyghurs genuine religious freedom, economic opportunity, cultural rights, freedom of speech and the rule of law.
We believe the Chinese government should end its aggressive policy of monolingual education, and give students and their parents a choice about their language of instruction. Chinese government policies ensuring equal employment opportunities for Uyghurs should be implemented, in which employment inside of East Turkestan is available to Uyghurs, instead of just sending them outside of East Turkestan to work. All Uyghurs should be allowed to attend the mosque without fear of suspicion and imams should be allowed to speak freely. The Chinese government should stop imprisoning peaceful dissenters and make them partners in a robust dialogue on the development of the region. Uyghurs will welcome these policies, and they will help to reduce tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese.
The government must end policies diluting Uyghur culture and must stop distorting our history. These are policies aimed to assimilate Uyghurs and show no regard for our distinct identity as a people. The government should stop its cultural genocide of the Uyghur people.
The time has come for the Chinese government to reform its failed policies, not only in East Turkestan and Tibet, but also in all of China.
The time has come for China to embrace human rights, freedom and democracy, and become a respected member of the international community. Uyghurs, Tibetan, Chinese and all ethnic groups in China have suffered too long under the Chinese Communist Party administration’s repressive policies.

The international community should encourage China to start dialogue with the representatives of WUC to peacefully resolve the current issues, respect of international law, and taking actions in the international framework and the future status of East Turkestan.

Thank you.