Uighur community leaders in Central Asia have reacted with fury to the deadly riots in their ancestral Xinjiang region of China, even as governments in the former Soviet states refuse to interfere.
Many in the half-million-strong Uighur community in Central Asia allege that the unrest is a consequence of decades of repression by Beijing of Uighurs in Xinjiang, a Chinese region that borders both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Their anger is predictable given that the Uighur population living in Central Asia is descended from refugees who fled China in the 1930s and 1940s after two failed attempts in those decades to form an independent Uighur state.
“The Uighurs wanted to protest peacefully against the authorities’ policies towards them. But because of the police it ended in tragedy,” said Torgan Tozakhunov, deputy director of the Uighur cultural center in Kazakhstan.
“These events are a violation of human rights. A true genocide of the Uighur people is in progress and the Chinese authorities will have to answer for these crimes in front of the international community,” he said.
Kazakhstan is home to 220,000 Uighurs, the biggest such community in Central Asia, with the rest of the population spread amongst the other mostly Turkic ex-Soviet republics of the region.
“The Chinese authorities provoked the troubles in Xinjiang because the World Uighur Congress is growing in influence and China wants to present it as a terrorist group,” said Rakhimdzhan Khapisov of the Ittipak group in Kyrgyzstan, home to 50,000 Uighurs.
China accuses the World Uighur Congress — led by US-based exile Rebiya Kadeer — of fomenting the riots from abroad although diaspora leaders claim that the unrest broke out when police fired on demonstrators.
In one of the worst spikes in ethnic tensions to have hit China in decades, 156 people died in the unrest on Sunday in Urumqi, the Xinjiang regional capital, China’s official Xinhua news agency said.
Now, even with Beijing pouring troops into Urumqi in an attempt to stabilize the situation, fresh violence has still flared as Han Chinese and Muslim Uighurs arm themselves with makeshift weapons.
Despite the anger amongst the Uighur diaspora, governments in Central Asia have kept a guarded silence over the events, with the growing importance of trade ties with Beijing foremost in their minds.
This is despite the fact that Uighurs are well integrated into society, especially in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan Prime Minister Karim Massimov is himself an ethnic Uighur.
The countries’ former Soviet-era master Moscow issued its first reaction on Wednesday, three days after the rioting began, in a statement demonstrating a reluctance to interfere.
“The events there are an exclusively internal matter for the People’s Republic of China,” the Russian foreign ministry said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS