Some of China’s most well-known activists are circulating an open letter protesting the 15-year prison term for a Uighur journalist snared in tensions that followed the country’s worst ethnic rioting in decades.
The letter, e-mailed within China and published on Friday by the Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders, is the latest in a chorus of international protest to last week’s sentencing of 51-year-old Halaite Niyaze.
Niyaze wrote critical articles and made critical comments to foreign media after ethnic rioting in July last year in the capital of the western region of Xinjiang that left nearly 200 dead and 1,700 injured.
The government has tried to block dissent following the violence between the minority Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group, and majority Han Chinese, who have been moving into the region under a government campaign to develop the west.
Niyaze’s 15-year sentence was among the harshest handed down for someone who committed no violence in the riots.
“This kind of intellectual is extremely important in advancing communication and reconciliation between ethnic groups. The groundless charges brought against Niyaze, and the severe sentence he has received, are bound to foment extremist thoughts and actions and deepen ethnic tensions,” the activists’ letter says.
The letter says Niyaze even warned Xinjiang officials of possible violence after tracking Uighur reactions online to a fight between Uighur and Han Chinese workers in southern China, in which Han workers killed two Uighurs.
“However, officials did not act on his recommendations,” the letter says.
The letter’s two dozen signers include well-known rights lawyer Teng Biao (滕彪) and Fan Yafeng (范亞峰), a legal scholar and former researcher at the official Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Only one apparent Uighur name is among them.
Both Teng and Fan confirmed yesterday that they signed the letter.
On Friday, another three Uighurs were jailed for running popular Uighur-language sites with content considered politically sensitive.
Amnesty International on Friday condemned their closed trial and convictions.
All four Uighurs were convicted under the same vaguely worded charge of “endangering state security” that China’s authoritarian government often uses to silence political critics.
Hundreds of people have been arrested after the riots and about two dozen were sentenced to death. Many Uighurs remain unaccounted for and are believed to be in custody.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS