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Door slam of the Foreign Affairs Ministry to a Nobel Peace Prize candidate

Originally published by  El País

By ÓSCAR GUTIÉRREZ

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Portazo/Exteriores/candidata/Nobel/Paz/elpepuint/20100507elpepuint_15/Tes

 The Office of Human Rights rejects at the doors of its headquarters to meet with the exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer .- The appointment had been agreed on 26 April 2010.

The Foreign Ministry yesterday [6 May 2010] denied the entry to the Human Rights Office to exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer minutes before the start of a meeting, agreed on April 26. According to the NGO Amnesty International, who had accompanied Kadeer on her visit to Spain, an official informed a delegation from the organisation that according to the received “instructions” he could not allow the access to hold the meeting with the director of the department Juan Duarte. Kadeer has made this week a brief tour through Spanish cities after having concluded a meeting with European parliamentarians in Brussels. Following the failed appointment yesterday [6 May 2010], the leader of the Uyghur community, which populates the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, has flown back to Virginia (USA) where she lives since leaving Beijing in 2005 after more than five years in prison.

The slam of Foreign Affairs Ministry, which so far has not reported the incident, coincides with the statements made yesterday [6 May 2010] by the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jiang Yu, who urged the international community to not facilitate “anti-Chinese and separatist activities,” as recorded by the agency EFE. Yu, referring to Kadeer’s visit to Spain, insisted that [the visit]

“harms China’s interests” and warned that maintaining contact with her could hinder “bilateral relations with China”. Rebiya Kadeer has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in several occasions, although it was in 2006 when her nomination reached the final stretch, but at the end the Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus was elected winner.

Kadeer, 63 years old, president of the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur American Association, entered in a Chinese prison in August 1999 just before receiving a U.S. congressional delegation to discuss human rights. Two years earlier, Kadeer had founded the Thousand Mothers Movement to redirect his fortune (seventh in China and first in Xinjiang) to the aid of what she denounces as “brutal” repression of Beijing to the minority to which she belongs. In July 2009, clashes in Urumqi (Xinjiang’s capital) among Uyghurs, 45% of the population in that region, and Han Chinese in Xinjiang -40%, but mayority in China, killed two hundred people. Beijing authorities blamed Kadeer to stir up the community to violence.

The article was also published on the page of Amnesty International Andalucía: http://www.es.amnesty.org/es/donde-estamos/grupos/andalucia/grupos/universidad-de-sevilla/paginas/noticia/articulo/noticias-4/