Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 17 2005 (IPS) — International human rights groups praised the unexpected release after nearly six years of imprisonment of a prominent Uighur businesswoman but complained that the timing of her freedom suggested it was more of a public-relations manoeuvre than a major advance in Beijing’s human-rights performance.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) pointed to the decision by the Bush administration, announced shortly after the release, not to table a resolution criticising China’s human-rights record at the current session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that got underway this week, as evidence of a quid pro quo.

Rebiya Kadeer, whose plight had become a cause celebre for lawmakers in the U.S. Congress since she was arrested while meeting with a member of U.S. Congressional delegation in 1999, immediately flew to the United States to be re-united with her husband and five of her 11 children who have lived here for most of the past decade. It is not clear whether permanent exile was a condition of her release.

”We’re very happy to see Rebiya freed, but China shouldn’t get any political credit for letting her go when they kept her behind bars for so many years,” said Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director.

”Letting her go now is yet another instance of China’s ‘revolving door’ policy of releasing a few prominent political prisoners before important international events to head off criticism,” he added, noting that Beijing last year released a Tibetan nun a year before her 17-year sentence was due to end. Kadeer was given a medical release.

Kadeer, who received HRW’s highest honour in 2000 for her promotion of the rights of the Uighurs, particularly Uighur women, hails from China’s westernmost province and the Uighur homeland, Xinjiang.

A Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim people who only came under China’s rule in the mid-19th century, Uiguhrs still refer to their territory as East Turkestan. Fifty years ago, they made up more than 80 percent of the population, but steady ethnic-Han Chinese immigration, encouraged by Beijing and spurred by oil production and growing links with Central Asia, has brought their percentage down to less than half.

Tension between the two groups, fuelled by racial discrimination against the Uighurs in both education and employment, has risen steadily since the late 1980s.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent creation of Central Asian states ethnically related to the Uighurs sparked a wave of nationalism among the Uighurs that has become more powerful over the past decade. In 1997, a Uighur demonstration in Yining erupted into a riot in which nine people were killed.

In addition to detaining tens of thousands of Uighurs – the vast majority of whom, according to rights groups, are believed never to have used or advocated violence – the government has shut down a number of mosques and banned some religious schools and practices.

Islamic clergy, for example, have been subjected to "political education" designed to give them "a clearer understanding of the party’s ethnic and religious policies," while some clerics have been detained for teaching the Koran.

In addition to the restrictions on religious schools and mosques, tens of thousands of Uighur books have reportedly been banned and burned, while Uighur has been banned as a language in which courses can be taught for most subjects at Xinjiang University.

Kadeer, whose development work and business acumen made her one of China’s most prominent and wealthiest women, was extolled by the government through much of the 1990s as a model for the country as a whole. In 1995, she was made an official representative to the U.N.’s ground-breaking Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and later became a member of an official advisory body to the National People’s Congress.

But the government became increasingly concerned with the activities of her husband, who had moved to the U.S. after serving a brief sentence for political activity. When several of her sons fled the country to join their father, the regional government confiscated her passport and subsequently announced in September 1997 that she could not leave the country because ”her husband was engaged in subverting the government and in separatist activities outside the country.”

After her arrest, she was tried secretly on charges of ”providing secret information to a foreigner” and sentenced to eight years in prison. In fact, the information she was charged with providing were newspaper articles sent by her to her husband. Last March, her sentence was reduced by one year.

”The release of prisoner of conscience Rebiya Kadeer is a joyful victory, and our joy is only tempered by thoughts of the many others who remain unjustly jailed in China, including those jailed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests," said Amnesty International. ”Her release demonstrates that no government is immune to the persistent pressure applied by dedicated human rights activists worldwide…”

At the same time, however, the London-based group said it noted the timing of the release ”with skepticism,” particularly in light of Washington’s decision not to sponsor a resolution on China at the UNHRC and the imminent visit of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Beijing. The timing, according to Amnesty, creat[ed] the impression that once again the Chinese government is using political prisoners to play ‘hostage politics.”’

The group noted that other Uighur political prisoners remain behind bars, including Abdulghani Memtemin, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2002, also on charges of ”leaking state secrets” after sending information abroad about rights abuses against Uighurs in Xinjiang, and Tohti Tunyaz, sentenced to 11 years in 1999 for ”inciting separatism” by writing a book on Uighur history.

The group also expressed concern that the release ”will be cited as evidence of improvements in human rights as the European Union debates lifting its arms embargo on China,” a step that is opposed by Amnesty, HRW, and the Bush administration.

At the State Department Thursday spokesman Adam Ereli denied that a deal had been struck between Beijing and Washington, while declining to speculate on the motives for Kadeer’s release. ”The release, for whatever reason, is important, is welcome and I think gives us reason to press for further releases in the future,” he said, adding that that 20 political prisoners have been released as a result of reforming the rules on parole and 33 more have received reductions in their sentences since December 2003.

He claimed that Washington had decided against sponsoring a resolution in Geneva because ”we have seen some significant steps, some important steps that China has taken and agreed to take” to improve its human-rights performance in the last couple of months.

Among them, he cited changes in regulations that give prisoners convicted of political crimes the same rights to sentence reductions and parole as other prisoners.

The State Department spokesman also said Beijing had agreed to host visits by the U.N. special rapporteurs on torture and on religious intolerance and also the UN High Commission for Human Rights.