China angered at rights award for exiled Xinjiang leader
Reuters, 1 April 2016
By Ben Blanchard – China expressed anger on Friday about an exiled leader from the violence-prone far western Chinese region of Xinjiang receiving a rights award in the United States, saying he was a wanted criminal.
Dolkun Isa, executive chairman of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, the leading ethnic Uighur group which advocates democracy and human rights in Xinjiang, received an award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington on Wednesday.
China put Isa, a former student activist in Xinjiang, on a list of Uighur “terrorists” in 2003. Germany accepted his claim of refugee status and granted him a passport in 2006. Isa says he condemns all terrorism.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Isa was a wanted man in China for crimes including murder.
“The giving of this award by the relevant organisation to a terrorist like Dolkun Isa who has carried out multiple crimes is to profane and sully human rights and the rule of law,” Hong told a daily news briefing.
The foundation said they gave him the award for leading “a movement of principled opposition to the ongoing persecution” of the Uighur people and for continuously seeking a peaceful solution with the Chinese government.
The World Uyghur Congress cited Isa as saying in his acceptance speech that he rejects violence and the Uighurs are a “people of peace and development”.
“These principles make the Uighur issue not a Uighur problem, but a Chinese government problem, a condition generated by systematic denial of fundamental human rights and freedoms,” he said.
Hundreds of people have been killed in unrest in Xinjiang in the past few years. The government blames the violence on Islamist militants wanting to establish an independent state called East Turkestan for ethnic minority Uighurs, a mostly Muslim people who speak a Turkic language and hail from Xinjiang.
Exiles and rights groups though say the unrest is more a reaction to repressive government policies than being organised by any cohesive militant group.
China strongly denies abusing anyone’s rights in Xinjiang.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)