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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver