China will next week try a Uighur journalist and Web site manager on charges of “endangering state security” after he spoke to foreign journalists about riots in western China, an overseas activist group said yesterday.
Gheyret Niyaz, whose trial is to take place on Wednesday, was one of a number of Uighur journalists, Web masters and bloggers detained after ethnic unrest in energy-rich Xinjiang region in July last year, the Uyghur American Association (UAA) said.
Nearly 200 people died in violence that exploded across the regional capital, Urumqi, after a protest by the minority Turkic Uighurs, who have called the region home for centuries but fear they are being marginalized by Han Chinese.
Most of the dead from the first night of violence were Han Chinese killed by Uighur mobs, but Han gangs seeking vengeance turned on Uighurs in the following days, causing fresh deaths.
“Police reportedly informed the 51-year-old Niyaz when he was initially detained in October 2009 that he was being detained because he had talked with foreign journalists about the unrest that took place in Urumqi,” the UAA said in a statement.
“The Uyghur American Association is extremely concerned about the upcoming trial of Uyghur journalist and webmaster Gheyret Niyaz on charges of ‘endangering state security,’” it said.
The Xinjiang government declined immediate comment when contacted by reporters.
However, in an online transcript of at least one of those interviews, with Hong Kong magazine Yazhou Zhoukan, he expressed views broadly in line with the government stance on the rioting, blaming outside instigators.
Niyaz was also regarded as broadly supportive of Chinese government policy by overseas Uighurs, who were surprised by his detention, the UAA report said. But he criticized economic inequalities and parts of a campaign against “separatism.”
Niyaz was an administrator for the Web site “Uighurbiz” and a journalist with the Xinjiang Economic Daily.
Uighurs say bloggers and Web site managers were a particular target during a wider crackdown. A string of detentions decimated the small but previously thriving Uighur online community.
China blocked off the Internet, text messaging and most international calls as it tried to reassert control after the violence and only restored full online access in May.
The Dui Hua Foundation, a US-based group that campaigns for the rights of Chinese prisoners, said in March that the unrest in Xinjiang likely contributed to a high number of charges of endangering state security last year. That came on top of a wider increase in use of the charge against Uighur defendants over the last decade.
“Although national criminal justice statistics in China are rarely broken down by offense or region, Dui Hua research has established that since the early 2000s, trials of Uighur defendants have accounted for as much as two-thirds of all the country’s endangering state security trials,” the group said.
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