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China Said to
Step Up Religious Persecution of Minority in Its West
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: April 12, 2005
BEIJING, April 11 - China
has stepped up a campaign of religious persecution
against its minority Uighur population in the western
region of Xinjiang even though the government has
already eliminated any organized resistance to
Beijing's rule there, two leading human rights groups
said in a joint report to be released Tuesday.
The groups, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in
China, quoted secret Communist Party and government
documents as detailing a range of new policies that
tighten controls on religious worship, assembly and
artistic expression among Xinjiang's eight million
Turkic-speaking Muslims, including strict rules on
teaching religion to minors.
China adopted some of the measures, the groups said,
after it persuaded the Bush administration that a
little known Uighur exile group, the East Turkistan
Islamic Movement, was responsible for terrorist acts
and belonged on America's list of leading terrorist
threats. The groups said China has used isolated
terrorist acts to justify a wholesale crackdown on its
Uighur Muslim population.
"China is using the suppression of religion as a whip
over Uighurs who challenge or even chafe at Chinese
rule of Xinjiang," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human
Rights Watch, said in a statement. "In other parts of
China, individuals have a little more space to worship
as they choose. But Uighur Muslims are facing
state-ordered discrimination and crackdowns."
China has waged a long-term battle against what it
describes as "splittist" forces in its two sprawling
but lightly populated border regions of Xinjiang and
Tibet. The Beijing government has promoted rapid
economic development in both areas, while encouraging
migration of Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group,
to offset the influence of Tibetans and Uighurs in
their home communities.
The Chinese government has long maintained that it
allows religious freedom in both areas, opposing only
those people who use religion to advocate independence.
But the human rights groups said that in practice the
authorities in Xinjiang have adopted
ever-more-intrusive controls, including intensive
political vetting of imams, surveillance inside
mosques and screening of literature and poetry for
even vague hints of dissent.
Even prosaic complaints about the government or the
quality of life that might no longer be taken as
threatening in other parts of China are often viewed
as veiled support for separatism in Xinjiang, the
report said.
Although these and other human rights groups welcomed
the release of Rebiya Kadeer, Xinjiang's best known
political prisoner, before the United Nations Human
Rights Commission's annual meeting last month, the
report's authors said they detected no signs of a
general easing of conditions in the region.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/international/asia/12china.html
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