{"id":1383,"date":"2014-11-12T02:12:07","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T02:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iuhrdf.org\/en\/2014\/11\/12\/chinas-uighur-problem-rooted-terrorism-or-racism\/"},"modified":"2014-11-12T02:12:07","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T02:12:07","slug":"chinas-uighur-problem-rooted-terrorism-or-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/chinas-uighur-problem-rooted-terrorism-or-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"China&#8217;s Uighur problem rooted in terrorism or racism?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Chinese government has blamed every major terrorist attack in the country in recent years on extremists from the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority.<\/p>\n<p>November 11, 2014, 3:38 AM<\/p>\n<p><strong>BEIJING <\/strong>&#8212; The Chinese government has blamed every major terrorist attack in the country in recent years on extremists from the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority.<\/p>\n<p>Uighur separatists were <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/china-sentences-3-men-to-death-for-attack-on-tinanmen-gate-beijing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">sentenced to death<\/a> for an October 2013 suicide-attack when an SUV was driven into a crowded Tiananamen Square sidewalk in Beijing. Four alleged Uighur activists were killed by police after waging a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/muslim-separatists-blamed-for-china-knife-rampage\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">knife attack at a train station<\/a> in the southern Chinese city of Kunming in March 2014.<\/p>\n<p>Two months later, Uighurs were blamed when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/radical-separatist-muslims-suspected-in-deadly-blasts-in-street-market-in-china\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bombs tore through a market<\/a> in the Xinjiang province, killing 39 bystanders.<\/p>\n<p><embed allowfullscreen=\"true\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" background=\"#000000\" flashvars=\"pType=embed&amp;si=254&amp;pid=38FZnkisvDdP&amp;url=http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/videos\/collective-punishment-for-chinas-uighurs\/\" salign=\"lt\" scale=\"noscale\" src=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/common\/video\/cbsnews_video.swf\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" height=\"279\" width=\"425\"><\/p>\n<p>The government&#8217;s accusations are swift, and evidence is rarely made public.<\/p>\n<p>Non-violent Uighurs &#8212; most of whom live in Xinjiang, in China&#8217;s far west &#8212; say they&#8217;re often made guilty by association, and have long-argued they live as second-class citizens in a country dominated by ethnic Han Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>CBS News was able to set up an interview with Guzaili Nu&#8217;er, the wife of a prominent Uighur scholar. She had cancelled our interviews in the past and warned us to expect secret police to be waiting outside her house.<\/p>\n<p>Nu&#8217;er&#8217;s husband, Ilham Tohti, was detained in early 2014, accused of &#8220;inciting ethnic hatred&#8221; and &#8220;spreading separatist ideology.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We made it into Nu&#8217;er&#8217;s Beijing apartment building and got up the elevator, to find men waiting outside her door &#8212; who didn&#8217;t want to let us in.<\/p>\n<p>They said they were with &#8220;property management.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Then, Nu&#8217;er came into the hallway, shouting at the government goons that she is allowed to have guests. Such is the nature of trying to do an interview with a Uighur in China.<\/p>\n<p>Inside the apartment, Nu&#8217;er told CBS News that government agents frighten her kids, even sleeping outside her apartment.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ve (been) here since January, when my husband was taken away,&#8221; she said. &#8220;He did not do anything illegal. He loves this country.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Nu&#8217;er insists her husband is not a terrorist, nor a separatist. Rather, he&#8217;s a respected academic &#8212; one of the few who have risked everything to articulate the minority Uighur perspective in public.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s a university professor,&#8221; she told us. &#8220;He only wrote about Xinjiang&#8217;s population, economy, religion, it&#8217;s just research.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>CBS News met Nu&#8217;er in June, months before the September trial of her husband, where he faced charges that he led a group that pushed for the creation of an independent Uighur state.<\/p>\n<p>His lawyer Li Fangping said Tohti had refuted every charge against him, but at the end of his trial, he was sentenced to life in prison.<\/p>\n<p>Even the U.S. government was critical of the sentence. &#8220;Peaceful dissent is not a crime,&#8221; Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p>Now, China&#8217;s government has confiscated all of Tohti&#8217;s assets, and Nu&#8217;er will have to figure out how to raise the kids alone. She says she&#8217;s even been robbed of family memories.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our photos were in our phones and the computer,&#8221; she told CBS News. &#8220;They took away everything.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to crack down on &#8220;terrorist attacks,&#8221; but Tohti&#8217;s family argues that amid the violence and accusations, the moderate, peaceful Uighur voices, calling for nothing more than equality, are seldom heard.<\/p>\n<div>\u00a9 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Chinese government has blamed every major terrorist attack in the country in recent years on extremists from the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}