【The Australian】Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side

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Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25863570-25837,00.html

Peter Alford, Rowan Callick and Michael Sainsbury| August 01, 2009               

Article from: The Australian                                                

UIGHUR leader Rebiya Kadeer has replaced the Dalai Lama as China's enemy No 1.

THE new No1 hate figure targeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party arrives in Australia in a few days: Rebiya Kadeer.

Althoughthe Dalai Lama is also due to come to Australia later in the year,Kadeer -- the charismatic 63-year-old president of the WorldUighurAssociation -- has in the past month seized the Tibetan spiritualleader's place as China's Public Enemy No 1.

This has sent her global profile soaring, and attracted unprecedented interest in the Uighur cause.  

Her hot-to-handle visit next week -- against which Beijing hasprotested in vain -- is further battering Australia's already rockyrelationship with China.

And it points the way to future tensions between Beijing anddemocratic liberal countries more generally, as the Chinese governmentseeks to press its soft power globally, extending ever wider the circleof exiled leaders to whom it intends to provide no respite. Kadeer, whocomes from Xinjiang, the Queensland-sized region of northwest Chinathat is the home of the nine million Uighurs, lives in exile inWashington.

Last year it was the unrest and riots in Tibet, another huge regionof western China, that saw the Dalai Lama blamed as a "splittist"manipulator of violent protests. This year the same mantle has beencast on Kadeer.

She has become a non-person in China, with articles that include hername being blocked by the "net police" even from the Google searchengine.

What Kadeer describes as mere phone calls to her family in Xinjianghave been portrayed by Beijing as messages masterminding theinter-ethnic violence that caused about 200 deaths there a month ago.

Pan Zhiping, a researcher at Xinjiang Academy of Social Science,provides a sense of the outrage from Han Chinese, who suffered theinitial casualties from the violence.

She told The Weekend Australian that Kadeer, who was one of China'swealthiest businesswomen before being jailed in 1999 for five years forpolitical offences, "was not a good businesswoman, she just had astart-up and accumulated her money from tax evasion".

She says: "Ordinary Uighurs are not calling for independence, onlyso-called elite Uighur intellectuals. Rebiya was influenced by herhusband, who was a third-class professor. These people agitated thestreet violence and manipulated extreme racism.

"She is rotten meat, the kind that only attracts flies. But she willhave her verdict when the official investigation (on the riots) isfinished -- lies can't be covered up. The human right she advocates areevil rights, murderers' rights." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon saidon Thursday that while being "deeply saddened by the loss of life andviolence" in Xinjiang: "I will have to look at the case for exactinformation ... (which) I do not have."

The only inquiry so far announced is being conducted by the Chinesecentral government. On a visit to Japan this week, Kadeer urged theestablishment of an international commission to examine what sheclaimed to be the disappearance of 10,000 Uighurs in Xinjiang lastmonth.

China's ambassador to Japan said during Kadeer's stay in Tokyo: "Sheis a criminal," and compared her to Aum Shinrikyo, the cult leader whounleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995.

Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Uighur Association ofAustralia, the main hosts for Kadeer's week-long visit, said: "Chinahas blamed her for the troubles in Xinjiang in order to externalisewhat is an internal problem -- a classic Chinese tactic, as it alsodoes with the Dalai Lama, to whip up nationalistic fervour,brainwashing its own citizens.

"This also transforms perceptions among ordinary Chinese of theUighurs into an evil people, an enemy within. As a result,reconciliation now seems almost impossible," she says.

After Kadeer this week gave the foreign correspondents' club inTokyo a lengthy, graphic and doubtless highly partisan account of theviolent riots on July 5, a reporter from China's People's Daily posedwhat he perhaps thought was a "gotcha" question.

"It sounds like you were there," he noted. "How could you have suchdetailed knowledge when at the time you were tens of thousands ofkilometres away in Washington?" Kadeer allowed herself a hard littlesmile before answering.

The element of the case against her most quoted by China's statemedia is a telephone tap allegedly of her saying: "Something willhappen in Urumqi."
Kadeer says she learnt of the gathering Uighur unrest, provoked bya security crackdown in Xinjiang and local anger over the June mobkillings of Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, and called to warn herfamily.

She has four sons -- two imprisoned since July 5 -- a daughter,numerous grandchildren and a brother still in Xinjiang, and says familymembers are the usual suspects to be rounded up when trouble flares.

She does not deny being closely plugged into contemporary affairs inXinjiang, which, like other dissident Uighurs, she prefers to call EastTurkestan, even after five years in Chinese prisons and four years inUS exile.

It's one of the reasons, she says, the Chinese authorities hate her so.  

That, and the fact she was once a poster-woman for ethnicintegration in post-Maoist China, a self-made multi-millionaire andinfluential figure on policy towards the 55 minority nationalities --who comprise 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population -- untilradicalised by a violent suppression of Uighur unrest in 1997.

Beijing has sought to reposition her World Uighur Congress (WUC)rather than the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as themain driver of Uighur violence, linking both to al-Qa'ida andinternational Islamic terrorism.

There is no reason to doubt the genuine repugnance among Chineseofficials and representatives abroad that so soon after the killings ofat least 192 people, mostly Han Chinese according to the officialaccount, countries such as Japan and Australia are hosting visits bythe strongest voice in the world for Uighur separatism.

It was notable this week in Tokyo how carefully Japanese officialsand the ruling Liberal Democratic Party handled her visit -- a likelyindicator of the sort of damage they feared to China relations.

But Kadeer got her visa and she got her LDP meeting, which suggeststhe governments of Japan -- and Australia, the US and other countries-- do not believe the Beijing narrative about her associations withIslamic terrorism.

ETIM is a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- originally onChina's post-9/11 advice to George W. Bush's White House. Yet Kadeerhas been given refuge in Washington since 2005 and granted visas bycountries, including Australia, that are members in good standing ofthe coalition against Islamic terror.

In the post-Guantanamo world, the cloak of international legitimacycannot be earned by simply designating separatist movements asassociates of international terrorists.

In fact, many Americans find it harder to tolerate evidence recentlyproduced that the Bush defence department allowed Chinese interrogatorsinside Guantanamo to question 22 Uighur terror suspects in 2002 --though the same department flatly refused American congressmen andwomen access to camp inmates.

The US has refused Chinese demands to return them, and the last ofthem are now being relocated to third countries -- five at first toAlbania, and now four to Bermuda and 13 to Palau, which recognisesTaiwan rather than China diplomatically.

Kadeer told The Weekend Australian in Tokyo: "While I was in China Ifollowed the Communist Party (line) and was obedient to the government.
"I know well when the Chinese government says something which islies and which is truth. It knows if it stops the voice of Rebiya, itstops the voice of the Uighurs in the world."

Small, intense and unusually charismatic, Kadeer talks as if sheembodies the Uighur spirit of independence, and particularly since July5 that seems close to the truth.

The WUC, a confederation of Uighur exile groups, is passionate butthinly spread and seems not very well organised. When Kadeer came toTokyo two years ago, soon after taking over the leadership, sheattracted only scant media attention, and certainly not three officialprotests from Beijing.

But in the past 25 days, she and her cause have attracted moreheadlines and sympathetic interest than in the four years since shearrived in the US, after Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice'spersonal intervention with the Chinese led to her release.

Kadeer's name and cause are increasingly linked in international commentary with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet.  

And she is exploiting that association for all it's worth.  

"Of course, I have chosen the way of the Dalai Lama, so I willtravel all over the world, I will give true information about EastTurkestan -- I want to become (like) the Dalai Lama, to bring myhomeland to freedom and liberation," she says.

While disavowing violence, Kadeer now refuses to rule out shiftingfrom her established position of seeking proper political and religiousautonomy for Xinjiang within the People's Republic, to a campaign forfull independence.

That decision, she says, will be taken by the WUC once its campaignfor an independent UN investigation of the July 5 uprising and thesubsequent Chinese crackdown is settled.

Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, has put a large dent in what onepro-Beijing Uighur official recently called "the Great Wall of ethnicunity" allegedly bounding both the Han Chinese and the minoritynations.

She is an opponent who came from inside the wall, who says policiesshe once supported and thrived under are now being turned to crushingthe Uighurs.

She seems less inclined than the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet 50 yearsago, to moderate her criticisms of Beijing in order to foster adialogue on autonomy. "I cannot wait 50 years," she says.

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