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China orders
end to instruction in Uighur at top Xinjiang
university
BEIJING, May 28 (AFP) - China has ordered Xinjiang's
most prestigious university to stop instruction in
Uighur and teach all classes in Chinese, halting
education in the language of the local Muslim
population, officials and groups said Tuesday.
A German-based organisation advocating
Uighur rights said officials told Xinjiang University
faculty and students earlier this month that the
school must stop offering bilingual instruction from
September 1.
For more than 50 years, the university
in the Muslim-majority region in China's far west
offered a variety of classes in Uighur, which is
similar to Turkish, said the spokesman for the East
Turkestan Information Center, Dilixat Raxit.
"It's an open attack by the Chinese
government on an ethnic group's culture," he said.
A majority of the students at the
university are Uighurs, many of whom prefer to study
in Uighur, Raxit said.
The new decision could have a
significant impact on Uighur students, forcing school
pupils to study Chinese in order to advance to
university, he told AFP.
Half of the classes in the university
are currently conducted in Uighur, and many of the
university's Uighur faculty face redundancy, he added.
A Xinjiang University official confirmed
that courses in Uighur were being phased out, but said
this was a continued policy of emphasizing instruction
in Chinese that began in 1999.
The official added that it was difficult
to teach some advanced courses, such as science, in
Uighur because there are few Uighur texts.
Beijing has faced accusations from
rights groups that it is trying to brutally stamp out
nationalist and religious sentiment among Uighurs in
Xinjiang and discriminates against people from the
group in employment and education.
They have additionally warned that a
security crackdown following attempts by China to link
Uighur separatism to the US-led campaign against
terrorism has seen even peaceful dissent muzzled.
Raxit said he believed the ban on Uighur
instruction may be expanded to other colleges in
Xinjiang.
The announcement at a meeting this month
alarmed Uighur teachers because it was the strongest
such demand so far, Raxit said. Officials warned that
teachers must not try to prevent or delay carrying out
the order.
The reason why there were so few Uighur
language texts was because of government limits, and
there were many highly educated Uighurs qualified to
translate books into Uighur, he added.
"The reason is to pressure Uighurs to
give up their culture, language."
He also reported that in the southern
Xinjiang city of Kashgar, officials on Friday held a
book-burning rally, incinerating nearly 10,000 volumes
which they claimed contained separatist ideology or
threatened stability.
"We think these books are related to
Uighur history and culture.
They are not illegal books.
They most likely came from libraries and bookstores,"
Raxit said.
Police in Kasgar denied the event took
place.
cs/pw/evz
2002-05-28 Tue 05:27
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