22 Imprisoned in Crackdown on Extremism in Xinjiang
New York Times, 12 November 2014
By Andrew Jacobs – BEIJING – The authorities in Xinjiang, an ethnically divided region in northwest China, have imprisoned 22 people in a mass sentencing that included charges of rape, disturbing public order and “illegal preaching,” a state news media outlet reported on Tuesday.
The sentences ranged from five to 16 years, according to the state-owned China News Service, which published a short article about the crimes of “violent terrorism” in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar.
The article did not indicate the ethnicity of the defendants, but a vast majority of previous terrorism convictions have involved Uighurs, the largely Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who make up more than 90 percent of the city’s population.
A storied outpost on the ancient Silk Road, Kashgar has been at the center of violence in the region that has claimed hundreds of lives in the past year. Uighurs have protested discrimination, restrictive religious policies and the suppression of Uighur-language education as people from the Han majority have settled in Xinjiang by the millions.
Those whose sentences were announced on Tuesday included people who were convicted of continuing to work after being dismissed from religious positions, “inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination,” “exploiting superstition to undermine implementation of the law” or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” the news report said.
Another category of defendants included so-called wild imams, who illegally deliver sermons.
The report featured a photograph of the accused wearing signs around their necks listing their crimes, but it did not say how they had been involved in acts of terrorism.
The public sentencing, which reportedly took place on Monday, was part of an aggressive, high-profile campaign against religious extremism that began in May. It has included a crackdown on young men who download jihadist speeches from the Internet, but also limitations on the practice of Islam outside state-approved mosques. In recent months, the authorities in some cities in Xinjiang have tried to ban women from wearing veils, or men from growing long beards.
According to the China News Service, Mayor Enwaer Tursun of Kashgar praised the sentences, saying religious extremism had “seriously affected people’s thoughts and hindered normal life.”
It was not immediately clear when the defendants had been tried. A spokeswoman for the People’s Court of Kashgar said that all 22 suspects had been represented by defense lawyers, but that she was not authorized to discuss the cases.
In written comments he provided to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua on Monday, President Obama, who is in Beijing for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, spoke against the threat of terrorism around the world and voiced support for Beijing’s cooperation in fighting that threat.
He also offered condolences to the families of those who died in a recent attack in Yunnan Province and to victims of violence in Xinjiang. “As a husband and a father, I cannot even begin to imagine the grief of these families who lost a loved one,” Xinhua quoted Mr. Obama as saying. “Terrorist groups like ETIM should not be allowed to establish a safe haven in ungoverned areas along China’s periphery,” he said, referring to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.
Beijing blames the group for most of the violent attacks involving Uighurs. Many experts say, however, that Chinese officials overstate the group’s presence and influence in China.
Critics say that by focusing a “strike hard” campaign in Xinjiang on religion, the government is overlooking the broader roots of Uighur discontent and inadvertently feeding anger toward Beijing.
Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman in Germany for the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group, said the crackdown on religious practices was arbitrary and incendiary. “The so-called differences between legal and illegal religions are defined according to China’s political needs,” he wrote in an email on Tuesday. “Uighurs have absolutely no religious rights.”
William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong, said the recent series of mass trials, some of which have resulted in death sentences, raised questions about due process and the quality of judicial proceedings. Foreign journalists are rarely allowed in Chinese courtrooms and are heavily restricted in their reporting from Xinjiang, making it difficult to gather more information about events there.
“The more they try to control people’s thinking and attack religious beliefs,” Mr. Nee said, “the more it increases resentment.”