EU - save Ukraine from Russia, The European Foreign Policy Council (ECFR) NGO says.

Philippa Runner, from Brussels for the EUobserver, August 25, 2008.

The European Union should formally recognise Ukraine’s right to join the EU and offer it a “solidarity clause” to help prevent Russia from undermining Kiev’s pro-democratic government in the wake of the Georgia conflict, a European foreign affairs think-tank has said.

“The next focal point for security tensions - although not for war - might be Ukraine,” the European Foreign Policy Council (ECFR) warned in a flash report on Monday (25 August), urging Brussels to make a strong show of friendship with Ukraine at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting on 5 September and the EU-Ukraine summit on 9 September.

Russian cruiser - the Black Sea fleet has been stationed in Crimea since 1783.

In the “mid-term,” the ECFR advised the EU to make a political declaration endorsing Ukraine’s EU perspective, draft a road-map for a visa-free travel deal, and help Ukraine to ready itself for NATO membership and the ejection of Russia’s Black Sea fleet from its old home in Crimea.

 www.SustainabiliTank.info thinks this is a very raw idea - not even half backed. We have seen Sevastopol and neighboring towns and waters. They are filled with old and newer Russian warships and the people in the towns are mainly Russian. Talking of the people - also in the Eastern part of Ukraine most people are Russian transplants, they speak Russian and feel they want to be part of Russia. We said this many times - to save Ukraine from Russia, the solution is an amicable divorce - so the best the EU could do is to advise the Ukraine to go for their own good to a marriage/divorce councillor and promise them the EU membership if they agree to severance from some of the heavily Russian territories. Surely, the EU can say to the Russian Prime-Minister that moving in with force will be dealt with in economic terms, but we all know that if ,and when, these statements are put to test, the EU will not go to war because of the Ukraine. Further, in the Ukraine case there is not even an argument like we had for Ossetia, where we said that if one opts for independence - this should lead to an Ossetia State that includes both - South and North Ossetia. There is no similar condition in the case of The Ukraine.}
A new bilateral EU-Ukraine treaty - currently under negotiation - should also legally oblige the EU to “consult and assist Ukraine in case of challenges to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.”

The ECFR study sees Russia’s assault on Georgia as part of a wider plan to rebuild the old Soviet sphere of influence, noting that some pro-Kremlin analysts such as Sergei Markov recently floated the idea of a Russia-led “East European Union,” which would mimic EU integration and include countries such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

“What matters here is Russia’s drive to become the centre (and the sheriff) of a pole of influence in a multi-polar world and a bipolar Europe,” the ECFR said.

***

Tensions flare:

Russia-Ukraine tensions flared in recent weeks after Moscow accused Kiev of supplying arms to Georgia, and Kiev tried to limit Russia’s use of its Crimea-stationed warships against Georgia.

Inside Ukraine, pro-western President Viktor Yushchenko’s senior aide, Andriy Kyslynskiy, last week accused Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of striking a secret deal with the Kremlin in return for Russia’s support when she runs in the next Ukrainian presidential elections in 2010.

Mr Kyslynskiy also said political “interference” by pro-Kremlin elements in the Ukrainian establishment has reached levels unseen since the run-up to the 2004 Orange Revolution, adding that Russian intelligence is funding and steering Crimean separatist groups.

Some 60 percent of the 2 million people who live in Crimea are ethnically Russian, hundreds of thousands of whom secretly hold Russian passports, the ECFR says.

Crimea was historically Russian and has been home to the Black Sea fleet since 1783. It became part of Ukraine when Ukraine won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, with the Russian fleet set to leave by 2017 under a bilateral deal.

In the wider Ukraine, about 25 percent of the 50 million-strong population are Russophone, most of whom live in the east of the country and many of whom oppose Ukraine’s integration with NATO and the EU.

***

Warning shots already fired:

On 22 August, some 2,500 people held an anti-Georgia rally in the eastern Ukrainian town of Donetsk. The same day, 50 people in Simferopol in Crimea called for the peninsula to rejoin Russia, with the crowd nonetheless gaining coverage in Russian state media.

In late July, anti-NATO protestors in Crimea threw stones at Ukrainian police, who fired warning shots in the air. A second group used small boats to try and block NATO warships leave the port of Odessa to take part in a naval drill.

“[Russia] is likely to play on deep rifts within Ukraine on the ‘Russia question’ to try and influence the country’s future,” the ECFR said. “[The EU] must demonstrate that an escalation of tensions in the post-Soviet space will be met with more, not less, engagement in the Eastern neighbourhood.”

——————–

Georgian rebels in Abkhazia seek greater EU recognition.
LEIGH PHILLIPS, 25.08.2008, EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS.

Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, on the Black Sea - is a once a popular holiday spot for Russian elite.

The Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia is keen to get EU recognition as an independent country, after the Russian parliament passed a resolution urging the Russian president to endorse Georgian rebels’ ambitions of statehood.

“We are not interested in only Russia recognising us,” Abkhaz deputy foreign minister, Maxim Gunjia, told EUobserver on Monday (25 August), adding that he expects Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to shortly back the pro-independence vote by Russian MPs.

“We want the European Union and all states to recognise our independence. This is a very positive moment for the EU - it could follow Russia’s example and also recognise Abkhazia. It is the only way to preserve stability and peace in the region.”

“We recognise that full recognition is a very big demand of Abkhazia for the EU at the moment,” Mr Gunja added, indicating that Abkhazia would also be interested in other ways of increasing its presence on the international stage.

“The EU could instead give a voice to Abkhazia in various European forums and institutions,” he said. “Only Georgia is invited to such forums while discussing the Caucasus, which is why the information the EU is receiving is biased, and why the conflict became possible.”

***

The lower house and the upper house of the Russian parliament on Monday both unanimously voted through a resolution urging Mr Medvedev to recognise Abkhazia and a second Georgian rebel territory, South Ossetia, as independent states.

The resolution has a largely symbolic value so far, as the legal decision resides solely with the Russian president, with some western experts doubting the Kremlin will follow through.

“The game is completely open, but it would be much more reasonable for Medvedev not to do so. If he doesn’t, he holds onto a very powerful bargaining chip with regards to the EU and US, and Georgia itself,” conflict prevention think-tank, the International Crisis Group (ICG), analyst, Alain Deletroz, said.

“If he wants to turn a military victory into a diplomatic victory, he will not recognise [the rebel enclaves], because it will then become extremely difficult for the EU to keep an open dialogue with Moscow,” Mr Deletroz explained. “What Russia wanted was a division within NATO. If they go too far, they will only achieve the opposite - a unification within the alliance.”

***

The China angle:

“Even for the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation [the China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan security alliance], recognition would create problems. For the same reasons that China was not happy with the West’s recognition of Kosovo, Beijing would also not be happy with Russian recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” the ICG expert added, pointing to China’s discomfort over its own separatist problems, such as Taiwan.

The European Commission was reluctant to issue any reaction to the Russian parliamentary vote ahead of next week’s extraordinary summit on EU-Russia relations, but the EU has repeatedly said it supports Georgia’s “territorial integrity.”

“The debate is ongoing in Russia, and we will not react as long as the debate is ongoing,” European Commission spokesperson, Ton Van Lierop, told reporters in Brussels.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Tbilisi in civil wars in the 1990s, setting up de facto states with their own mini-parliaments and paramilitary forces within Georgia’s internationally-recognised borders during a tense, 15-year long ceasefire that erupted into open conflict on 7 August.

Tbilisi has accused Russia of giving the rebels financial and political backing, as well as arms, in order to keep NATO and EU-aspirant Georgia divided. It also accuses the separatist and Russian forces of “ethnic cleansing” in pushing out the last remaining ethnic Georgians from the two territories during the recent war.

———————-

UNDP Releases Information on a UN Angle:

Please see - http://www.innercitypress.com/undp1georg…

It seems that Inner City Press came up with information, acknowledged by UNDP, that together with the George Soros Open Society International, and the Swedish Government, there was a very modest supplemental funding of Georgian officials, including the President, to make it possible for them to run a rather non-corrupt government in the National interest of Georgia, and perhaps also in the interest of the oil buyers of the West.

Above link leads to an article that starts:

UN’s Engagement with Saakashvili Included $1500 a Month, Soros and Sweden Also Paid.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, August 25 — Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was paid $1500 a month by the UN Development Program earlier this decade, on top of his official presidential salary, UNDP has told Inner City Press. UNDP says the goals of these payments, in which the Swedish government and financier George Soros joined, were to allow the Georgian “government to recruit the staff it needed and also to help remove incentives for corruption.”

  While receiving these $1500 monthly payment, Saakashvili committed to increase tax collection in Georgia. Deals were signed with , among others, British Petroleum, for the Baku - Tbilisi - Ceyhan oil pipeline. UNDP, and presumably its two co-funders, applauded this development.

——-

This last article mentions also the old UNDP problem with having helped with injecting hard currency to North Korea that, as the claim goes, has helped them finance the acquisition of nuclear know-how. So, UNDP is a tool for covert actions and not just a victim of side effects in what they consider to be development work? In the tape attached to the article, Matthew Russell Lee points out at the unevenness of the way, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe were dealt with, and surfaces the idea that the treatment is in relation to the interest of internal politics in the US. So back to our posting, how will the UN be used in the case of the Ukraine - which is rather more of an EU then a US problem?

From:  media at avaaz.org
Subject: Release: global Olympic handshake to reach Beijing
Date: August 22, 2008

The August 23, 2008 - PRESS RELEASE - Will Appear In the International Herald Tribune and China’s Ming Pao, on the Day of The Beijing Olympics’ Closing. It Willl Say - Love China / Love Tibet / Love Burma / Love Darfur - and Will Promote Human Rights For China - a Hanshake to the World.

175,000 STRONG GLOBAL HANDSHAKE TO LAND IN BEIJING AHEAD OF OLYMPIC CLOSING CEREMONY see avaaz.org

A virtual global handshake will land in Beijing tomorrow ahead of the Olympic Closing Ceremony.

Since the beginning of the Olympics, Avaaz.org has taken actions worldwide to promote a dual message of friendship with China and the need for renewed dialogue and action on human rights post Olympics. Aside from the handshake website, they have launched a sister website in China www.onevoicechina.org, and have run an ad campaign which has made a splash in London, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Sydney using print media, adwalkers, and mobile billboards to carry the message Love China / Love Tibet / Love Burma / Love Darfur. You can see images of these ads at avaaz.org

To culminate the campaign, this weekend, Avaaz.org has taken out an advertisement in Saturday’s International Herald Tribune and China’s Ming Pao to deliver the handshake to the world.

“Some in China have slandered human rights activism as violent and anti-Chinese. Our handshake campaign is an attempt to reach out to Chinese people and show that our call is for peaceful and respectful dialogue”, said Avaaz Executive Director Ricken Patel.

However, Avaaz is concerned that the end of the Olympics may herald an era of further oppression.

“People around the world are concerned that the Olympics are coming to a close without any changes in Chinese policy on Tibet, Burma or Darfur — will things get better or worse?” said Patel.

***

The global handshake petition reads:

“With this handshake, we reach out to one another as citizens round the world in the Olympic spirit of friendship and excellence, committing to hold all our governments to a higher standard of peace, justice and respect for human dignity wherever they fall short – be it in Tibet, Iraq, Burma or beyond. Dialogue is the best way forward, for China, and the world.”
For more information, see www.avaaz.org

***

AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW

Ricken Patel, Executive Director,  ricken at avaaz.org, +1 646 229 5416
Brett Solomon, Campaign Director,  brett at avaaz.org, +61 407 419 320

***
ABOUT AVAAZ:

Avaaz is a global web movement with over 3.3 million members worldwide, working to ensure that the views and values of people everywhere inform global decision-making. Avaaz means “voice” in many languages.

Despite Flaws, Rights in China Have Expanded.

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 2, 2008, The New York Times.

SHANGHAI — For the past two decades, China’s people became richer but not much freer, and the Communist Party has staked its future on their willingness to live with that tradeoff.

Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making.

On The Way To The Olympics - Other NYT Articles:
China’s Leader Meets the Press, but Only on His Country’s Very Narrow Terms (August 2, 2008)
Olympic Organizers to Weigh Unblocking More Web Sites (August 2, 2008)

But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past.

“Some people will tell you, look at the walls, and say they are still pretty high, while others will tell you that there is a lot of space between the walls,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch. “Both things are true.”

New flexibility in rules that dictate where people live has allowed Song Daqing to escape poverty in Sichuan to sell vegetables in Shanghai.

Chinese who try to challenge the one-party state directly say authorities are no more tolerant of dissent than they were in the 1980s, and in some cases they are tougher on citizen-led campaigns to enforce legal rights or stop environmental abuses.

On the other hand, the definition of what constitutes a political challenge has changed. Individuals are far less likely to run afoul of a system that no longer demands conformity in political views or personal lifestyles.

The shift toward a more diverse society helps explain some anomalies in perceptions of life inside China. Amnesty International, the human rights group, reported this week that the rights situation had deteriorated significantly in the months before the Olympics despite China’s pledges to improve its record as a condition for hosting the games.

But a survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project this spring and issued last month found that an astounding 86 percent of Chinese said they were content with their country’s direction, double the percentage who said the same thing in 2002. Only 23 percent of Americans polled in the survey said they were satisfied with their country’s direction.

The speeches of China’s leaders, with their gray imagery and paternalistic phrasings, have changed relatively little, emphasizing unity, harmony and economic growth under party rule. The reality on the ground, though, has been transformed, partly because a more dynamic economy necessitates a more dynamic society, partly because money gives people options they did not have when they were poor.

Arguably the most dramatic change in the freedoms enjoyed by most Chinese has been the gradual erosion of a population registration system that tied people to their places of birth, preventing internal migration or, at its height, even tourism.

China has not formally abandoned the system, known as hukou, and it can still prove a nuisance. But as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the inland provinces to wealthier coastal cities in search of economic opportunity, authorities in one place after another have found themselves making concessions to this new reality.

Song Daqing, who lives in a single-room home here with his wife and three children, counts himself as a beneficiary of these changes. Born into poverty in Sichuan Province, he worked as a cattle herder, bricklayer and coal miner, earning as little as 60 cents a day before coming to Shanghai in 1998. His early years in this city were marked by frequent mass roundups of migrants by the police, and he was twice held in crowded detention centers before being expelled from the city.

“Now we all have residence permits,” said Mr. Song, who supports his family by selling vegetables. “The police don’t check our paperwork anymore, and even if they found you without a permit, they won’t arrest you, but rather would suggest you get one as soon as possible.”

Reality Trumps Ideology:

The relative flexibility the government has shown in allowing this to happen is more a matter of pragmatism than any overt ideological shift, a grudging concession to economic reality.

But China’s bureaucracy is more contentious than it was under Mao. Policy advocates within the government — including officials representing weak bureaucracies, like those charged with fighting pollution, improving education and broadening women’s rights — often seek popular support to increase their clout.

A recent example involved a revision of a law covering rights for the handicapped, which the government undertook after several organizations banded together in 2004 to advocate change on the issue. The activists also contacted Chinese legislators and provided a report to the official Chinese Disabled Person’s Federation.

The government never publicly acknowledged the citizens’ action, but a revised law incorporating some of their recommendations was enacted earlier this year. “The pressure came from both inside and outside,” said Wu Runling, director of the Beijing Huitianyu Information Consulting Center, one of the groups involved. “You can’t tell me that our appeal and calls for revision of the law had no meaning at all.”

Although a powerful system of censorship remains a fact of life, and journalists are frequently jailed and detained, feisty publications with mass audiences in print and on the Internet report forthrightly about ills in society.

“After 30 years, everybody knows about democracy and freedom,” said Wang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Youth Research Center, a wing of the Communist Youth League. “They know that as taxpayers, we support the government, not the opposite.”

Before the Olympics, Beijing demolished a favorite pilgrimage spot for petitioners who flow to the capital from all over the country to seek redress from perceived injustice. According to a recent report in a Hong Kong magazine, Phoenix Weekly, the government has also hired thugs to intimidate or kidnap petitioners to prevent them from making their cases. Critics of such abuses say that in an indirect way, the state is acknowledging the power of such protest.

“What they are asking for now is a change in the system, and this reflects a widespread change in attitude,” he said.

Even in the best of times, China’s human rights improvements have been so gradual as to be almost impossible to discern in any month-to-month sense. And in the tense environment before the Olympics, which China fears could invite uncontrollable protests or blemish its international image, the climate has become noticeably more restrictive.

Lawyers have been sternly warned not to represent clients involved in delicate political cases. Tibetans and Uighur Muslims have been subjected to arrests and “re-education” campaigns.

Hu Jia, a Beijing-based political activist who campaigned for years on behalf of AIDS patients and for greater political openness, was arrested late last year and sentenced to three and a half years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.” Many other dissidents have been warned to stay away from Beijing, or have seen state surveillance and harassment extended to their family members.

The government relies on unwritten laws: political confrontation with the ruling party remains a no-go area, and state stability trumps nascent notions of human rights.
Blogs Subvert Propaganda:

Yet even as the police tightened security before the Games, the power of new information technologies to chip away at the official line was still on display. In a poor county in Guizhou Province in the south, a teenage girl died under mysterious circumstances, and rumors of police malfeasance and a cover-up spread widely on the Internet, prompting public protests to demand a new investigation.

Local authorities initially tried to suppress news of the protests, which turned violent, and impose an official account of events there. But people wielding video cameras uploaded material to YouTube, and some Chinese journalists disputed official accounts that the riots had been put down peacefully.

One of them was Wu Hanpin, a radio reporter who took pictures of the riot. They showed that the police had fired rubber bullets and teenagers in detention whose bruised foreheads suggested beatings.

“I saw a gap between the official story and the reality, which was mind-blowing, like the presence of the armed police,” Mr. Wu said. “So I put some of these things on the Internet, on my personal blog.” Four days later, after registering hundreds of thousands of visitors, his blog was closed by censors.

“The media has made a huge step forward from the ’80s,” said Sun Jinping, a veteran senior editor at a Beijing newspaper. The riot in Guizhou Province, he said, “would have been impossible for the public to know about in the past.”

A View of the Outside:

For others, the impact of information about other countries has been just as great. He Weifang, a professor of law at Peking University, said that before the economic reform era began in 1979, the country was much like North Korea, where people were indoctrinated to believe that Chinese were the better off than people anywhere else.

“Today, even the farmers in remote areas have satellite TVs,” Mr. He said. “So whenever they see an election, such as the one held in Pakistan recently, they may wonder why, even though we have approximately the same economic conditions, they can elect their top leaders, and we can’t even vote for the leader of a small county. I think a consciousness of political rights has increased more than anything.”

In criminal law, progress is more grudging. Yan Ruyu, a former Beijing police officer who quit the force and became a lawyer after the violent crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square, said such cases remained unpopular with most lawyers because the likelihood of prevailing over the state remains so slim.

“There has been progress, but it’s so slow that sometimes one becomes pessimistic,” he said. “It’s empty talk to speak of having an independent judiciary if the party leads everything.”

On the other hand, Mr. Yan says, party control turns every criminal case into a human rights case. That gives every criminal defense lawyer the chance — and for some of them, the incentive — to inch the system forward.

Li Zhen contributed research from Beijing, and Fan Wenxin and Zhong Zijuan from Shanghai.

July 9, 2008, 5:07 pm - The EU agreement on the Olympics opening ceremony can be a starting point for a more effective stance on human rights in China.

Following today’s announcement by French and incumbent EU President Nicolas Sarkozy that, in agreement with all the EU Heads of Government, he is to participate to the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on behalf of the European Union, Graham Watson, Leader of the Alliance of the Liberals and Democrats at the European Parliament commented:

“A common line on the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony is a welcome departure from Europe’s trademark divisions on foreign policy. The Alliance of the Liberals and Democrats for Europe has been repeatedly calling on the EU leaders to agree on a common position. Unlike the EPP and Socialists, we have reiterated this request also in the parliamentary resolution tabled by our Group and which the Parliament will have to vote tomorrow.

However, a bull-in-a-china-shop Europe is not what we need. Representing the EU’s 500 million citizens, Nicolas Sarkozy should tread carefully between embracing cooperation with Beijing and making clear our disapproval of China’s human rights violations.

The East European communist regimes were brought down through dialogue and engagement set out in the Helsinki Accords. A similar approach is our best hope for achieving political reform in China”.

For more information, please contact:
Yannick Laude: +33-3-88 17 27 76 or +32-495-22 78 37
Paolo Alberti: +33-3-88 16 40 82 or +32-476-95 51 44
Web: http://www.alde.e

We assume that above agreement will now preclude the presence of heads of state from Germany and the UK - so the front line of guest seats will be taken up by Bush, Fukuda, and Sarkozy. We hope that the Chinese people will realize that there is a system in these decisions and that it was taken in order to help them - not in order to snub them. Also we hope there will be made available plenty of oxygen.

——————-

STRASBOURG: Parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering has said he will boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games next month in protest at the continued repressions in Tibet.

China to meet Dalai Lama aide - writes Associated Press as per the official Xinhua News Agency from Beijing.
April 25, 2008.
The Chinese government plans to meet with a private representative of the Dalai Lama in the coming days, state-run media reported, after weeks of pressure from world leaders.

The official Xinhua News Agency said it had learned of the development “from official sources.” It quoted an unnamed official as saying there had been requests repeatedly made by “the Dalai side for resuming talks.”

China has faced repeated international calls, including from U.S. President George W. Bush and the European Union, to open a dialogue with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader since anti-government riots rocked the Tibetan capital of Lhasa in mid-March.

The official said “the relevant department of the central government will have contact and consultation with Dalai’s private representative in the coming days.” No date was given, and it was unclear exactly which representative was expected to take part in the meeting.

In the meantime - Tibetan monks attend birthday celebrations for Gedhun Choekyi Nyima in New Delhi on Friday. Thousands of Tibetans exiles in India marched on Friday, demanding the release of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who is recognized by Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama as the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and who according to the exiles has been a prisoner in China since 1995.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Communist leadership’s international affairs office said they did not know about the Xinhua report.

“The policy of the central government toward Dalai has been consistent and the door of dialogue has remained open,” the official was quoted as saying.

China says 22 people died in the Lhasa violence, while overseas Tibet supporters say many times that number have been killed in protests and the ensuing security crackdown across Tibetan regions of western China. The riots and government reaction have cast a shadow over preparations for the Beijing Olympics.

Between 2002 and 2006, China held six rounds of contacts with representatives of the Dalai Lama, who is also head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, with no apparent result. China has demanded he meet numerous preconditions before it will talk to him directly.

One of the preconditions is that he not seek independence for Tibet. The Nobel winner has repeatedly said he wants autonomy, not independence, but Beijing has expressed suspicion.

“It is hoped that through contact and consultation, the Dalai side will take credible moves to stop activities aimed at splitting China, stop plotting and inciting violence and stop disrupting and sabotaging the Beijing Olympic Games so as to create conditions for talks,” Xinhua quoted the official as saying.

Many Tibetans insist they were an independent nation before communist troops invaded in 1950, while China says Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries.

Postcard from Khotan, The Other ‘Tibet’
Time Magazine, Wednesday, Apr. 16, 2008 By SIMON ELEGANT

A Photo shows an Uighur man rideing a bicycle past Chinese security forces who patrol a street in Xinjiang.

“Silk Road Gem and Jade Shop” the sign proudly reads. Centrally located just down the street from the main mosque in Khotan, a dusty oasis town in the vast Taklamakan desert in China’s far southwest, the shop is a focal point for the Muslim Uighurs who make up the majority of the local population. But though it is mid-morning, its gates are secured with heavy steel padlocks. Pedestrians kept their distance, and warning notices from the Public Security Bureau pasted across the doors declare that the business has been closed indefinitely.

The store’s owner, Mutallip Hajim, a successful Uighur jade trader well known for sponsoring religious education classes was arrested in January for unspecified crimes. On March 3, police announced that the 38-year old had died of a heart attack in prison. Mutallip was killed “because he was too powerful, too influential,” claims a Uighur man in his 30s. “Any Uighur who gets to that kind of position will always be arrested.” The man, who like many residents of Khotan is clearly anxious to avoid being seen talking with foreign journalists.
Police and other local authorities declined to talk about Mutallip, but his death marked the beginning of troubled times for a town that has become a locus of the problems plaguing the Chinese administration of the Uighur-dominated western region of Xinjiang. While repression in neighboring Tibet has generated global headlines recently, activist groups and rights advocates have long accused Beijing of similar discrimination and abuses in Xinjiang. And Beijing’s fears of an angry backlash of the sort that has left scores dead in Tibet in recent weeks has prompted a tight clampdown on the restive Uighurs. Last week, Chinese authorities announced they had foiled a separatist plot to kidnap athletes at the Olympics, and made scores of other arrests. But the clampdown may be provoking the very backlash it aimed to preempt. Since Mutallip’s death, say locals, Khotan and surrounding areas have been roiled by protests that are continuing despite hundreds of arrests.
Local farmers, jade hunters, shopkeepers, students and professionals interviewed by TIME complained of job discrimination and the curtailing of their language rights. Some expressed fears that the culture and way of life of the Uighurs — a central Asian people ethnically much closer to Turkey than China — is threatened by a steady influx into the region of Han Chinese, whose share of the population, according to official estimates, has grown from around 6% in 1949 to 40% today, although millions of undocumented immigrant workers make it far higher. Northern Xinjiang today has a Han majority, sparking similar ethnic tensions to those seen in Tibet.

Analysts fear that the combination of Han immigration and government repression fosters a potentially violent despair among the Uighurs, whose adherence to Islam has been used by Beijing to demonize them at home and abroad sijnce 9/11.

“It’s a systematic Chinese policy to portray Uighurs as splittists and terrorists,” says Rebiya Kadeer, a businesswoman who now heads the American Uighur Association and is the leader of an exile movement seeking greater rights for her roughly nine million compatriots who live in Xinjiang. Like Mutallip, Kadeer was once a rich businesswoman in Xinjiang but fell afoul of the authorities and served a six year jail sentence for revealing state secrets to foreigners. Two of her sons are still in prison in China. “It’s a Chinese tool to have the Han feel a sense of animosity toward Uighurs,” Kadeer says. “Look at it now! They have extracted all the natural resources and the oil. We’re left in the darkness.”

Beijing’s security chiefs see a more sinister trend at work. On three occasions — most recently on April 10 — officials in the Chinese capital have announced that security forces foiled planned attacks by what they called Muslim separatists groups from the province. Details were scant, but the most recent announcement alleged that some 45 Uighurs in the provincial capital Urumqi had been arrested in raids that uncovered plans to kidnap athletes and others attending the 2008 Beijing Olympics. An earlier report alleged that a young Uighur woman had tried to smuggle a bomb aboard a commercial aircraft in an attempt to bring it down.

Xinjiang separatists in the past have carried out small bombings in the region and in Beijing in the 1990s, and a handful of Uighurs were detained by the U.S. at Guantanamo after being captured in Afghanistan. But while China likes to emphasize an al-Qaeda connection to militant separatism in Xinjiang, analysts are less sure of what to make of such claims. Whatever the truth about the alleged terror plots, resentment is growing in areas like Khotan. As violence erupted in Tibet, authorities here arrested large numbers of Uighur men, hoping to preempt similar protests. Instead, the detentions themselves became the focus of protests, according to locals, who claim that hundreds of veiled women demonstrated for independence during a weekly bazaar on March 23. Khotan residents say there have been smaller demonstrations since then, mostly in the countryside.

Despite the undercurrent of resentment, there’s little sign of trouble on Khotan’s streets, where commerce is brisk in everything from roast lamb and athletic shoes to hand-woven local carpets and the famous local white jade. But the almost exclusively Chinese traders in its business center are evasive when asked about ethnic tensions or the events of March 23, after which many of these shops stayed closed for days. One young woman from Sichuan province says it is getting dark outside and she must close her store because “we don’t go out on the streets at night.” In the the karaoke lounge of the nearby Wenzhou Hotel, businessman Wang Jianliang is giving a lengthy denunciation of the “spilitists,” whom he dismisses as “just a small minority.” Wang, who says he had been in Khotan five years, says residents should be grateful for the economic development of recent years. “When I came out here it was nothing. Now it’s a big city.” He turns to belt out a ballad in his native Fujian dialect. A fellow reveler, a 21-year-old who says he has only been in town a year, asks a visitor if he frightened by the rising racial tension. “No,” comes the reply, “what’s to be scared of?”
“They hate us,” the 21-year-old says. “The Uighurs hate us Han.” The one thing equally shared, today in Khotan, between Uighur and Han Chinese, is fear.

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Will the Olympic Torch Burn China?
Sunday, Apr. 06, 2008 By SIMON ELEGANT/BEIJING, Time Magazine.

China is dealing with visible and invisible opposition in the months before the Beijing Olympics begin. The visible was front-and-center in the world media as the OIympic torch made its way through various countries on a circuitous route to the Games. Everywhere Chinese security is on guard against activists prepared to disrupt the flame’s progress to protest China’s human rights record in Tibet and in the enormous province of Xinjiang. In London, a protester tried to grab the flame away from its official bearer; at one point, the torch had to make its way through the city within the protective confines of a bus. Earlier, when the flame traveled through Istanbul, Turkish police arrested a man who made a move toward the torchbearer. And in Paris on Monday, officials actually took the step of extinguishing the torch amid protests.

But it is the invisible opposition, what Beijing prevents the rest of the world from seeing, that elicits the most concern. Recent reports indicate that sporadic violence in Tibet continues despite a massive Chinese military crackdown that has now lasted almost three weeks. According to Tibetan exiles and activist groups, Chinese police on April 3 fired on monks from the Tongkor monastery in Ganzi, Sichuan Province, killing an unknown number. China’s official Xinhua News Agency confirmed that disturbances had taken place but did not report any deaths. Meanwhile, in what is certainly a deeply worrying development for Beijing, the unrest has spread to other ethnic minority areas, the Chinese authorities confirmed, this time in the far western Muslim-dominated province of Xinjiang. As usual, accounts of what happened by overseas activists and the Chinese authorities were poles apart. But there is no doubt that significant unrest over Chinese rule has occurred in Xinjiang, involving hundreds and possibly thousands of protesters. There have also been roun