Word: uighurs
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Political tension over the deadly riots that struck northwest China has spilled into an unlikely venue: the Melbourne International Film Festival. Three Chinese directors announced they were pulling their works from the event to protest the inclusion of a documentary about a Uighur activist. (Read "A Brief History of the Uighurs...
...Uighurs are a Turkic speaking, largely Islamic minority group concentrated in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. On July 5 several hundred Uighurs went on a rampage in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi. The violence left 197 people dead, most of them members of China's majority Han ethnic group. The Chinese government has placed the blame on Reibya Kadeer, an outspoken Uighur businesswoman and human rights activist who spent nearly six years in a Chinese jail and now lives in exile in the U.S. (See pictures of the race riots in China's far west...
...Many Uighurs complain that they have become second-class citizens in their own homeland. Government authorities limit the number allowed to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Teaching of the Uighur language, written in the Arabic script, has been curbed, and Uighurs face restrictions on their travel. "The Uighurs are the very bottom of the heap economically in China," says Dru Gladney, an expert on Xinjiang at Pomona College in California...
...blamed the exiled Dalai Lama for masterminding protests in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, last year (a charge he has strongly denied), China's official media said the violence in Urumqi was fomented by members of the World Uyghur Congress, a group based in Washington. Its head, Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur entrepreneur who moved to the U.S. in 2005 after being jailed for five years by the Chinese, tells TIME, "I have nothing to do with the demonstrations...
...Chinese government seems determined to exert even tighter control over the lives of Uighurs. Yet this strategy has left them feeling trapped and desperate. If China doesn't rethink its policies, regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet might prove inhospitable for all--Uighur, Tibetan and Han Chinese alike...