A Conference on Uyghur crisis and professor Ilham Tohti
Archive for October, 2020
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Happy Birthday to you, Ilham !
Today is the 51st Birthday of Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur Professor, winner of the Sakharov Prize, and twice Noble Peace Prize nominee. Through his writing, academic research and activities, he has campaigned for the rights of Uyghur people and challenged the Chinese authorities oppressive and apartheid policies which have developed nowadays to “China’s Uyghur Genocide”, The Chinese regime arrested him 6 years ago and and jailed him for life. Ilham, you are the Ilham (the inspiration) of Uyghur people and for everyone in the world who stands for freedom, free speech and dignity! We will never forget you. In every breath we feel your suffering inside the dark Chinese prison. We are fighting for your release and we pray for you, you will see the sun shine soon. You were born free, you don’t deserve to be imprisoned! The free world will stand with you always! Ilham Tohti Institute25th October 2020. www.ilhamtohtiinstitute.org
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China ‘Responsible’ for Riots [Archive]
RFA News 2009-08-06 With trials planned in connection with deadly riots in Urumqi, exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer calls for leniency. HONG KONG—Exiled Uyghur dissident Rebiya Kadeer has called on the Chinese government to take responsibility for last month’s deadly race riots in the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), as the authorities released an ethnic breakdown of the official death toll. Of the 197 people who died in the riots, 156 were “innocent civilians,” the official Xinhua news agency reported. Of those, 134 were majority Han Chinese, 10 were Uyghurs, and 10 Kazakhs, it said. “If we take the numbers announced by Chinese government as true, the Chinese government is still responsible for the incident,” said U.S.-based Kadeer, a former businesswoman who served six years in jail for alleged subversion. Authorities have formally arrested 83 people in connection with the two-way ethnic violence, sparked July 5 after a student demonstration clashed with police, sending armed mobs from both ethnic groups out onto the city’s streets. They will be charged with murder, intentional injury, arson, and robbery, according to city prosecutor Utiku’er Abudrehman. A lawyer based in Urumqi who asked to be identified by his surname, Zhang, meanwhile said several thousand prosecutions were planned in connection with the July 5 clashes. “The trials will be conducted in the Uyghur language by Uyghur prosecutors, and lawyers for the defendants are supposed to be Uyghur too,” Zhang said in an interview Thursday. “There are several thousand suspects to be tried.” “I think the government is too rushed at this point in processing these cases. You need time to get a clear understanding of each case, such as who are the culprits and manipulators and who are the followers,” he said. Kadeer, 62, called on Beijing to treat those found responsible for the […]
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Thousands of Articles Restored From Downed Website of Jailed Uyghur Scholar Ilham Tohti
RFA 2020-10-08 The former website of jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti containing thousands of articles has been restored seven years after it was shut down by authorities in China ahead of his 2014 arrest and sentencing to life in prison for “separatism,” according to a group that advocates for his release. The Uyghur Online website, formerly at uyghurbiz.net, was established by Tohti in in 2006 as an advisory platform for him and other Uyghur intellectuals to promote voices from within their community to the people of China and the wider world. The website was used to draw attention to the discrimination facing Uyghurs in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) under Beijing’s rule—restrictions on practice of religion and use of native language, and other curbs on cultural practices—as authorities sought to assimilate the ethnic group. China’s policies toward Uyghurs’ in the XUAR have gotten progressively more harsh in the six years since Tohti’s jailing, with a re-education program launched in 2017 putting as many as 1.8 million people through a vast network of internment camps, and many inmates now pressed into forced labor. Uyghur Online was closely monitored by the government, which shut it down several times prior to Tohti’s arrest on Jan. 15, 2014, citing the politically sensitive nature of the content posted there. The former professor of economics at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing was sentenced to life in prison for “separatism” by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court in the XUAR on Sept. 23, 2014, despite having worked for more than two decades to foster dialogue and understanding between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. In a statement posted to Facebook on Monday, the Germany-based Ilham Tohti Institute (ITI) said that after a year and a half of work by a group of young volunteers, it had […]
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The restoration of the “Uyghur Online” Website of Ilham Tohti
The Uyghur Online website, which was created by Professor Ilham Tohti in Beijing 2006, was an important advisory platform for Ilham Tohti and other Uyghur intellectuals’ struggle to make heard the voices of the Uyghurs to Chinese people, as well as the world. He campaigned for the rights of Uyghur people despite limited resources. He was at the forefront of this struggle conducting research and writing for the website about the injustices that his people were facing in China. This website soon became a focus point of learning about Uyghur’s situation at home and internationally. This website was closely watched by the authorities and subsequently was closed down and reopened several times before Mr. Ilham Tohti was arrested in January 2014 where he was given life imprisonment. His website was a beacon of truth for Uyghur people under Chinese strict Internet censorship. Published were many controversial topics that were written fearlessly, predominantly by a group of intellectuals who were headed by Ilham Tohti. There were many valuable articles about the Uyghur people, including research on political, socio-economic and cultural aspects of Uyghur lives. To share this valuable legacy of Mr. Ilham Tohti, to provide this for the Uyghur people and researchers, the Ilham Tohti Institute decided to work on the restoration of his website. The institute organised a group of young volunteers led by a computer expert Mr.Abliz Mehsud who lives in the United States. After a year and a half of our efforts, we successfully completed restoration work on valuable articles from an old website that existed on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. We restore a total of 3553 articles which were published on the old website between the year 2006 and 2013. The restoration is based on the materials of the Internet Archive, as well as preserved articles found on […]
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