Beijing - China sentenced two members of its Uighur minority
to long prison terms after convicting them of staging protests in the
far western city of Khotan, a US-based Uighur support group reported
on Tuesday.
A court in Khotan sentenced Mamatali Ahat to eight years in prison
on March 6 after he raised the flag of East Turkestan near a
politically sensitive statue of former Chinese Communist Party leader
Mao Zedong, the Uighur American Association said.
In a separate case, Abdukadir Mahsum was sentenced to 15 years in
prison on February 26 for organizing large protests in Khotan last
March following the death in police custody of a well-known Uighur
philanthropist, the group said.
Both protests were peaceful but Chinese state media linked the
protests over the death in custody to religious extremists, it said.
'These two cases show the world how Chinese government authorities
deal with peaceful Uighur dissent: through lengthy imprisonment and
accusations of extremism or violent intent,' US-based Uighur rights
activist Rebiya Kadeer said in a statement.
'Even an action as simple as raising a flag is punished by years
in a Chinese prison, something which I know from experience is
extremely brutal and dehumanizing,' said Kadeer, who left China for
exile in the United States following a prison term for 'providing
state secrets abroad.'
East Turkestan is the name still given to China's ethnically
divided central Asian region of Xinjiang by Uighurs seeking an
independent state there.
The huge Moslem-majority region borders Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.
More than 60 per cent of its 20 million people are from the
Uighur, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Hui, Mongol and other ethnic minorities,
according to government statistics.
Some members of its largest minority, the Uighurs, favour
independence from China and have staged some small-scale terrorist
attacks over the past 20 years.
China alleged that Uighur terrorist groups had planned to disrupt
last year's Olympic Games in Beijing.
Uighur exile groups have accused China of using terrorism claims
as an excuse for a broad crackdown on dissent in Xinjiang in the
run-up to the Olympics.
Rights group Amnesty International has previously accused China of
using the fight against global terrorism to justify its
'long-standing repression' of the rights of Uighurs.
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