China’s ambassador to Japan yesterday slammed a planned Tokyo visit by Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.
China says Kadeer, a once successful businesswoman in China but now leader of exile group the World Uyghur Congress, planned an outbreak of violence in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region earlier this month in which nearly 200 people died.
She denies the claim.
“How would the people of Japan feel if a violent crime occurs in Japan and its mastermind is invited by a third country?” Japan’s Kyodo news agency quoted ambassador Cui Tiankai (崔天凱) as saying in a group interview.
“The matter can be considered easily when you think from the other person’s viewpoint ... she is a criminal,” he said.
International trips by exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama are routinely criticized by Beijing, particularly when he has been received by prominent figures.
But China has rarely commented on Kadeer’s travels before.
She is scheduled to give a news conference tomorrow and speak at a symposium.
Cui also warned that the visit should not be allowed to damage a working relationship with China which has improved recently, after years of diplomatic spats over wartime history.
“We must prevent important matters that should be worked on together from being disturbed by a criminal or attention to our common interests from being diverted,” Kyodo quoted him as saying.
Meanwhile, the premiere of a documentary about Kadeer that Chinese officials tried to have pulled from Australia’s biggest film festival was a sell-out success, organizers said yesterday.
The Melbourne International Film Festival called in security guards for Sunday night’s premiere of Ten Conditions of Love fearing trouble amid Chinese anger over the film.
Festival director Richard Moore has accused Chinese officials of trying to bully him into pulling the documentary, while Chinese directors have withdrawn their films in protest and hackers have attacked the festival Web site.
Event spokeswoman Louise Heseltine said the Web site remained partially disabled yesterday because of the cyber-attacks, in which hackers replaced information with the Chinese flag and left anti-Kadeer slogans.
But she said the screening at a city center cinema was peaceful and the audience response was positive.
The Australian film-maker behind the documentary, Jeff Daniels, said he was surprised at the strength of the campaign against his film.
“I understood that the Chinese government certainly didn’t want the film to be screened but I never thought people would put that much pressure on the festival,” he told Sky News.
Daniels, who will host Kadeer when the film next screens in Melbourne on Aug. 8, said he was pleased Sunday’s premiere was peaceful.
“I know emotions are running high at the moment. It’s a very dark time for the Uighurs in China and there are a lot of angry people from China on both sides,” he said. “So I’m very happy that it went peacefully, as a documentary should, and people were able to see different sides of the story.”
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