Untitled - the ultimate blog

Speaking out for the Uighurs
Breathing fire
Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Dragon Fighter: One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace with
China. By Rebiya Kadeer with Alexandra Cavelius. Kales Press; 426
pages; $28.95 and £22.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
AP
TENSE days followed last month’s ethnic violence in Urumqi, the
capital of China’s western region of Xinjiang. Your reviewer had to
dodge blockades and angry crowds of Han Chinese protesters to
reach the neighbourhood in the south of the city where the Turkicspeaking
Muslim Uighurs live. There he found the modest,
dilapidated building that is still named for Rebiya Kadeer. Given all
the scorn that has been heaped on the exiled Uighur activist in
recent years—she has been branded a conspirator and a terrorist—it
is amazing that the Chinese government has yet to find another
name for the building.
As she recounts in her memoir “Dragon Fighter”, Ms Kadeer, now
aged 62, was at the height of her wealth and influence in 1992 when
she threw open the doors of her new seven-storey trade centre and
offered cut-rate stall rentals to 1,000 local merchants. Her own
Mother of all Uighurs
ethnic group knew her as the “Mother of all Uighurs”. She was celebrated as the most astute and
successful businesswoman in the nation, and was accorded high political office by China’s Communist
Party rulers who distrusted her but hoped to co-opt her.
But then she fell from official grace. In the late 1990s she was stripped of all her titles and much of her
wealth, and spent almost six wretched years in prison until she was released in 2005 on medical parole
and went to the United States. China has continued to denounce her and three of her 11 children are in
prison or under house arrest. The campaign against her rose to fever pitch last month after nearly 200
people were killed in the fighting between the Uighurs, the Han Chinese and the police.
The Beijing regime was quick to blame Ms Kadeer for orchestrating the entire chain of events. She has
denied this, proclaiming her commitment to non-violence. Though the government claims to have proof of
its charges, it has yet to reveal anything very convincing.
But there is plenty in her book to bolster some of the regime’s more general complaints about Ms Kadeer’s
motives and methods. Unlike the Dalai Lama, who campaigns for greater autonomy for Tibet but stops
short of urging independence, Ms Kadeer lambasts the Chinese as the illegitimate occupiers of her land,
and openly longs to see them gone. She also acknowledges that she sought her fortune only in order to
use it in the service of that goal. In one confession that is bound to cheer her Chinese accusers, she
admits that in 1978, outraged when policemen beat a Uighur teenager to death, she arranged to turn his
funeral into a protest march, all the while taking care to hide her involvement.
Not much else in the book will endear it to Chinese officials—or to Chinese nationalists, for that matter.
There is, for instance, a brief introduction by the Dalai Lama himself, plus sharp criticism of Mao Zedong
as “one of the most despicable mass murderers of the twentieth century”. But the heart of the book is its
relentless litany of Chinese abuses and a direct rebuttal of China’s official narrative about its troubled
history with the Uighur people.
The Beijing regime claims an ancient stake in the land and insists the Uighurs have gained from its
benevolent rule since the Communists took over in 1949, integrating the East Turkestan Republic into
China. But this line is hard to square with Ms Kadeer’s descriptions of Chinese brutality, mendacity and
pettiness.
“Dragon Fighter” was originally published in German in 2007. Its publication in English is timely. The
-128-