The Uyghur pawn

The Uyghur pawn
By Kevin Steel ⋅ May 21, 2007 ⋅ Email this post Email this post ⋅ Print this post Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Beijing’s dictatorship sentences a Canadian to life in prison without evidence to support their charges. The question remains, why?

He calls it a “basket charge.” That’s the term Hamilton-area lawyer Chris MacLeod uses when describing “split-ism,” or seeking “to divide the motherland.” This is the charge his client Huseyin Celil has been convicted of in Communist China. On April 19, Celil–a Canadian citizen and ethnic Uyghur by birth–was sentenced to life in prison. “It’s a basket charge for anyone who is either a Tibetan or a Uyghur,” MacLeod says. In other words, if they want to throw someone in prison, all they have to do is allege split-ism, and since the Communist Chinese are pretty much detested in both regions and just about everybody wants them out, they don’t have to do much to make it stick.

Since 1949, China has occupied both Tibet and East Turkistan, the homeland of the Uyghurs, which the Chinese call Xinjiang province. A vague, broad catch-all charge like “split-ism” might explain why the Chinese felt there was no need to show evidence at Celil’s trial. He was also convicted of “organizing, leading and participating in terrorist groups.” For that he received 10 years. Again, no evidence was presented.

But the Chinese Communist party doesn’t do this type of thing without its reasons. So, in the absence of evidence, perhaps there might be an explanation that fits the facts.

MacLeod is willing to offer one. “I think [Celil’s conviction is] for activities he’s done in Canada. This is the Chinese government sending a message to the Uyghur diaspora that if you speak up and speak out in a foreign country for the Uyghur population, that is a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even death,” MacLeod says. And he says it’s now a matter of “message sent, message received”; Uyghurs abroad are fearful of speaking out.

The problem with this theory is that Celil wasn’t known for being a particularly vocal member of the Uyghur community in Canada, which only numbers in the low hundreds. Mehmet Tohti, president of the Toronto-based Uyghur Association of Canada, says Celil simply wasn’t that visible. “He is not an extraordinary man in our community. He’s a real family man, an ordinary man. We arrange protest rallies sometimes in front of the Chinese Consulate. Sometimes he comes, sometimes not, because he has three kids and his oldest son is handicapped,” Tohti says. However, Tohti does agree with MacLeod that the “Chinese government is simply trying to send a message to all Uyghurs outside of China: ‘Just watch your step.’”

Tohti believes the Chinese kidnapped Celil simply because they could. In March 2006, Celil traveled to Uzbekistan with his family to visit his wife’s relatives. Uzbekistan, friendly with the Beijing government because of business ties and Chinese aid, detained Celil when he tried to renew his visitor visa. They concocted a story that he was in fact a wanted terrorist named Guler Dilaver on Interpol’s watch list. Eventually, the Uzbeks spirited him to China without informing his family or Canadian authorities. He continued to be held incommunicado until February this year, when he made a one-day court appearance in the city of Urumchi.

The Chinese initially maintained that because Celil was on an international terrorist watch list, consular agreements didn’t apply–and so China didn’t have to deal with Canadian diplomats regarding his arrest. When it became apparent that this was too weak a pretext to maintain, the Chinese then said they didn’t recognize Celil’s Canadian citizenship, and on that basis have consistently denied him Canadian consular services. But even this latest explanation shows how rickety the rule of law is in China. Tohti is emphatic on this point: “Chinese nationality law is very clear and cut, without giving any room for other interpretations. Chinese nationality law, Article 3, says China does not accept dual citizenship. And Article 9 says if anyone becomes a foreign national, becomes a citizen of any other country except China, he or she will lose Chinese citizenship automatically,” he says. In other words, Celil cannot legally be a Chinese subject.

According to Tohti, when Celil became a Canadian citizen in 2005, he contacted the Chinese consul general’s office in Toronto to find out if there were any formalities he had to undertake to cut all ties with China. The officials there apparently informed him of Chinese law negating his Chinese citizenship. Tohti thinks this was a mistake on Celil’s part because that may have been the moment he appeared on the Communist party’s radar.

China’s human rights abuses against the Turkistan have been widely publicized and internationally condemned, but the plight of the Uyghurs in East Turkistan has largely gone unnoticed. The Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese. They are a Muslim, mainly Sufi, Turkic-language minority of about 10 million. For years, the Communists treated them as subhuman, denying them basic human rights and treating the region as a buffer-zone wasteland between China and the Soviet Union, a place where they would conduct multiple above-ground nuclear tests without any regard for the population.

Then, as China began to develop and became more energy dependent, it turned out that East Turkistan was oil rich. It also borders with Kazakhstan, which has large oil deposits as well. (Any pipeline from Kazakhstan to China–and the Chinese have been inking oil deals with Kazakhstan–will traverse East Turkistan.) To say that this occupied territory is strategically important to China is an understatement; it is rapidly becoming the heart for the lifeblood of China’s rapidly expanding economy. But Beijing has a problem with this heartland: namely, their long and ongoing conflict with the people who live there.

Throughout their occupation, ethnic Chinese, particularly Han Chinese, have been sent to live in the region to replace and rule over the Uyghurs. In 1997, riots started breaking out in response. These were ruthlessly suppressed by the ruling Communists and were quickly followed by mass executions and a clampdown on religious practice. By 1998, the Chinese began what they called “patriotic education” of the Uyghurs.

Enter, or rather exit, Huseyin Celil. He escaped East Turkistan in 1999. (Canadian newspapers keep repeating that he escaped from prison, but Kamila Telendibayeva, Celil’s wife, says this simply isn’t true; he escaped from East Turkistan without a passport, not from prison.) He managed to get to Turkey, and in May 1999 applied at a United Nations office for refugee status. After two years, in October 2001, he was accepted into Canada as a refugee and eventually settled in Burlington, Ont.

The timeline belies the transparent nonsense of China’s case against Celil. For the first six months of his detention, Beijing said Celil was being detained in relation to two terrorist events: a kidnapping in March 2000, and an assassination of a Chinese diplomat in 2002, both in Kyrgyzstan. But it is well documented that he was living under the protection of the UN in Turkey in 2000, and then in Canada in 2002. Neither event was mentioned at Celil’s trial. Still, he was convicted of a terror charge and sentenced.

Anwar Yusuf Turani is the prime minister of the East Turkistan government-in-exile based in Washington, D.C. He says he isn’t surprised by what China has done. “They’ve been doing it for a long time, arresting people in East Turkistan, labelling them separatists or religious extremists or terrorists. China is very good at labelling people without any proof,” Turani says.

Celil’s plight illustrates how Beijing has used the war on terror to justify continued oppression of the Uyghurs. As lawyer Chris MacLeod points out, the Chinese alleged that Celil gave money to Hizb’allah while he was in East Turkistan. “They didn’t say where he got this money or who he gave it to, but Hizb’allah is a name recognized in the West,” MacLeod says, implying the Chinese are just throwing around disinformation to justify what they’ve done. In 2002, the U.S. government put an organization known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement on its Treasury Department terrorism watch list, as did the UN, despite the fact that not much is really known about the group. It was largely viewed as a concession to China for their support in the international war on terror. This allows them to pretend to be on the right side. At an April 26 press briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said, “We believe the case is China’s internal affair and in essence relates to anti-terrorism. It has no connection with Canada. We hope the Canadian side will not interfere with China’s internal affairs under this pretext.”

Turani believes the Chinese are playing a game with the international community, and Canada in particular, by kidnapping Celil and then imprisoning him for life. “Eventually they are going to exchange Celil for something they want from Canada,” Turani says. China did a similar thing, he says, when in 1999 they imprisoned Rabiya Kadir, a once successful Uyghur businesswoman, after she refused to speak out against her scholar husband, then living in the U.S., who had been critical of China. After six years in jail, she was freed in March 2005 and allowed to go to the U.S., after the American government exerted pressure on Beijing. Many China watchers interpreted her release as a public relations manoeuvre rather than a change of heart by the CCP. “They wanted to show the world, ‘See how generous we are: we treat the people humanely, we don’t have absolute dictatorship,’” Turani says.

If this is what China intends to do with Celil, then the CCP has done it at the expense of exposing yet again their bogus legal system. Also, it’s a safe bet that, before the Celil case, only foreign policy wonks and human rights activists knew anything about the Uyghurs. Celil’s trumped-up conviction has put a spotlight on that obscure ethnic minority, and has created a permanent irritant in Canada-Chinese relations. Just ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, that can’t be good for a CCP desperately trying to whitewash its image.

THE MEDDLERS:

Throughout Huseyin Celil’s ordeal, numerous Chinese officials have repeated the claim that the matter is entirely a domestic affair and Canada shouldn’t be meddling. Anyone who knows anything about Communist China would find this hypocrisy laughable. China is always meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations.

A good example was put before the Canadian public at the beginning of April, when it was revealed that Zhang Jiyan, the wife of a diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, had defected to Canada in early March. She brought with her a document that showed how the embassy had tried to subvert the CRTC application of a New York-based Chinese-language television station, New Tang Dynasty Television, to broadcast in Canada. NTDTV is linked with the Falun Gong and is known to be critical of the Chinese Communist party.

There are numerous other examples. Two years ago, Chen Yonglin, a defector in Australia, identified a network of more than a thousand Chinese operatives in Canada, mostly keeping tabs on ethnic Chinese here. Then there are the connections with Canada’s Power Corp., which has a stake in CITIC, one of the largest Chinese conglomerates, while Power Corp. has had direct links to past Canadian prime ministers going back to Trudeau. And who can forget the infamous Johnny Chung case in the U.S., where China funnelled money to the Democratic party in order to influence the 1996 election?

[This article appeared in the May 21, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

http://kevinsteel.org/2007/05/21/the-uyghur-pawn/