An ethnic Uighur activist left South Korea yesterday after immigration officials held him for three days at an airport, reportedly because China has blacklisted him as an alleged terrorist.
The Germany-based Dolkun Isa, general secretary of the World Uyghur Congress, left for Dubai from Incheon International Airport west of Seoul, where he had been held since his arrival Tuesday, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has reported that authorities investigated Isa because he is on a Chinese list of alleged terrorists. The report cited an unidentified German embassy official in Seoul.
Isa, reached Thursday on his mobile phone, said airport immigration officials hadn’t explained why he was being held.
“I don’t know what the reason is,” he said. “Korean immigration officials don’t explain ... and just said I should stay here.”
Isa said he had planned to talk about Uighur issues at the World Forum for Democratization in Asia, which started in Seoul on Wednesday.
Bo Tedards, Taiwan-based organizer of the three-day forum, has said he suspected Chinese pressure prompted the ban on Isa. He also accused immigration authorities of holding Isa despite his wish to return home to Germany.
Isa fled China in 1997 and was granted asylum in Germany. He secured German citizenship in 2006.
Amnesty International activist Roseann Rife said in a statement in Washington that South Korea should not deport Isa to China, calling him “a human rights defender.”
“Under no circumstances should he be deported to China, where he would risk arbitrary detention, unfair trial, torture and other ill-treatment and possibly even the death penalty,” the statement said.
Beijing accuses the Congress of fomenting recent ethnic violence in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, a charge that the group denies.
China has accused the US-based leader of group, Rebiya Kadeer, of fomenting the unrest, but has publicized little evidence to support its claims.
In an e-mail yesterday, congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit said Isa “was believed to be detained upon Beijing’s pressure on Seoul.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu (姜瑜) said she had not heard of Isa’s case.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RSS