Central Eurasian Studies at Harvard University
LECTURE- Rebiya Kadeer, Repression of Uyghurs in Western China, May 15, MIT
Posted by: Shaheer Rizvi <rizvi@fas.harvard.edu>
"I am a Terrorist": Rhetoric and Repression of Uyghur Muslims in Western China
Featuring Rebiya Kadeer
May 15th, 2007
7:30pm to 9:00pm
MIT Landau Building, Room 66-110
The Muslim Uyghur people are victims to what Human Rights Watch has
identified as a "wholesale assault" on their faith and cultural
identity by the Chinese state. Fearful of separatist tendencies in the
majority Muslim population in its western most province, China has
instituted a systematic repression that has failed to discriminate
between legitimate threats to state security and peaceful religious
practice and tradition. After September 11 th, China has used blanket
accusations of terrorism to justify repressive policies that suppress
any Islamic ideology that does not, according to a PRC internal
document, "uphold the Marxist point of view of religion and use the
yardstick of the Party's."
Rebiya Kadeer has been called the spiritual mother of the Uyghur
people. A brilliant business woman, she rose from poverty to become
China's millionaire poster-child. However, she quickly fell out of the
government's favor when she began to demand a change in its policies.
She was arrested in 1999 for sending newspaper articles to her husband
in the United States, and spent her next two years in solitary
confinement, witnessing the brutal torture of her fellow prisoners.
Ms. Kadeer was released to America in 2005 and currently resides in
Washington, D.C., where she serves as president of the Uyghur American
Association and the World Uyghur Congress.
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