Rights monitors say the crackdown has led to curbs on religious freedom, uptick in Uyghur executions<\/p>\n
November 25, 2014<\/p>\n
Chinese authorities have busted 115 terrorist cells in restive Xinjiang during the past six months, state media reported on Tuesday, part of a crackdown on Islamic separatist violence that has led to unprecedented restrictions on minority Muslim Uyghurs.<\/p>\n
Halfway through a one-year \u201cstrike hard\u201d campaign in Xinjiang that the state-run China Daily<\/em> said was \u201cstopping most terrorist attacks\u201d, authorities have shut down 171 \u201creligious training sites\u201d and arrested 238 people.<\/p>\n Xinjiang authorities have opened 44 cases of people training in the use of explosives over the internet and 294 cases in which violent footage was distributed, it added, without giving further details.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, more than 18,000 documents, 2,600 DVDs and 777 computer memory sticks \u201crelated to religious extremism\u201d have been seized in Xinjiang over the past six months.<\/p>\n President Xi Jinping announced the campaign using \u201cextremely tough measures and extraordinary methods\u201d on May 23, the day after Uyghur separatists ploughed into the main market in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, leaving 44 people dead as they lobbed explosives. It was the third deadly attack by suspected Uyghur separatists in a two month period.<\/p>\n In response, Beijing poured extra police and security personnel into Xinjiang, China\u2019s largest region where an estimated 12 million minority Muslim Uyghurs live, many of them in remote areas near China\u2019s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.<\/p>\n The government\u2019s campaign has seen the return of mass trials in China for the first time since the 1990s and has coincided with a surge in death sentences and executions of Uyghurs \u2014 nearly 40 people have been sentenced to death and at least 20 executed since May.<\/p>\n William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty International, said that Chinese legal reforms had led to improvements in recent years but this year\u2019s campaign in Xinjiang was bucking the trend.<\/p>\n \u201cYou do have people who are committing acts of violence against innocent civilians. That\u2019s not to dismiss the government\u2019s need to care about security,\u201d he said. \u201cBut from a human rights point of view it has been a very troubling campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n Rights groups including Amnesty say it remains unclear whether Uyghurs charged on terrorism and separatism related charges are permitted basic legal rights including defense counsel. Chinese lawyers say they have been denied the right to defend Uyghurs in such cases.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, a mass trial in the mainly Uyghur city of Kashgar resulted in 22 people convicted on charges including disturbing public order and \u201cillegal preaching\u201d with prison sentences of up to 16 years.<\/p>\n During the past six months, China\u2019s state-run media has reported that religious teaching to under-18s has effectively been banned as Islamic schools have been closed.<\/p>\n Around Kashgar, principals at more than 2,000 kindergartens signed a pledge last month to \u201cdefend schools against the infiltration of religion\u201d while discouraging Islamic teachings at home, according to the Global Times,<\/em> which is close to the Communist Party.<\/p>\n Children under 18 have also been banned from entering mosques, and there were reportedly increased restrictions on people trying to observe Ramadan this year.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are going after unlawful religious practices but what they define as lawful is very tightly controlled by the state,\u201d said Nee.<\/p>\n State media this week pointed to the success of the government\u2019s pre-emptive campaign against the related \u201cevils\u201d of separatism, religious extremism and terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n Although China saw a slowdown in terrorist attacks directly after the campaign started, in the past four months at least 168 people \u2014 including alleged terrorists, police and civilians \u2014 have died in violent attacks blamed on Uyghur separatists.<\/p>\n China suffered its most deadly terrorist incident in years when violence in remote Shache County in late July left 96 people dead, according to state media, with overseas Uyghur groups claiming the toll was much higher.<\/p>\n The government has paired its harsh anti-terrorism campaign with plans for major economic development in a bid to quell discontent in one of China\u2019s poorest regions by spending billions of dollars creating a new \u2018Silk Road\u2019 of cross-border trade and investment in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n Jiang Zhaoyang, an ethnic affairs expert in Beijing, said that the government needed to find a better balance between economic development and harsh punishment if it hoped to reverse the cycle of violence.<\/p>\n \u201cActions should be taken delicately,\u201d he said. \u201cExtremist thought and general discontent should be carefully distinguished, and this \u2018strike-hard\u2019 campaign should be more precisely targeted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rights monitors say the crackdown has led to curbs on religious freedom, uptick in Uyghur executions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-1435","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\/1435","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=1435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1435"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=1435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}