Protests that have taken place around the
world during the first anniversary of the arrest of the businesswoman and social activist
Rebiya Kadeer, suggest that the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang may at last have found a
figure of sufficient stature to give their cause the international recognition it
deserves. Rebiya Kadeer was arrested in August 1999 when she was travelling to meet
visiting United States Congressional staff members in Urumchi, the regional capital of
Xinjiang. At her trial on March 9, 2000 in Urumchi, she was sentenced to eight years
imprisonment for passing on classified information to foreigners. Rebiya Kadeer was found
guilty of mailing local newspapers, freely available but which give detailed information
on local problems, to her husband Sidik Rouzi, an academic who supported Uyghur
independence from China, and left Xinjiang in 1996 for the United States where he began a
career as a journalist.

Rebiya Kadeer became an iconic figure in the Xinjiang of the "reform and opening
era" beginning in 1978-85. Xinjiang, in northwestern China, was granted limited
autonomy by the government of the People’s Republic of China in 1955 and named the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. As an ethnic Uyghur, a mother and grandmother, as well
as a successful business women, Rebiya Kadeer was adopted as a model by the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). She served from 1993 until 1998 on the Xinjiang branch of the
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee. She had progressed from laundress
to millionaire businesswoman and had interests in the retail trade, including a
seven-story popular department store in Urumchi, cross-border trade with Kazakhstan and a
hotel. In 1997, she started a movement to encourage Uyghur women to develop small
businesses as a way out of poverty. 

Rebiya Kadeer is the ideal type of Uyghur leader that the communist Chinese government
has sought to foster in Xinjiang. But the region is also known to the local Turkic
speaking population as Eastern Turkistan and many Uyghurs look back with nostalgia to the
independent republic that existed in the northwest of Xinjiang from 1944-49. This is
particularly, recently as a series of disturbances occurred in Xinjiang culminating in an
insurrection during February 1997 in Yining. Many local Uyghurs were killed and injured
and a campaign of mass arrests ensued. The police and military sought out underground
separatist organizations, unregistered mosques and madrasas (Quranic schools),
which were suspected of giving support to the separatists, were closed down.

The imprisonment of Rebiya Kadeer has focused world opinion on Xinjiang for the first
time in decades. It will no longer be possible for the Xinjiang question to be hidden
away. Questions have been asked about the Uyghurs in the United States Congress and in the
Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom and this will finally give them the high
international profile that their cause deserves. The Chinese authorities complain
that separatists within Xinjiang are being supported by a variety of foreign forces,
including the United States of America and what were described as reactionary Islamic
organizations, often loosely and inaccurately referred to as Wahabbis, in the
Middle East and Central Asia. This has resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic approach, as
not only was Beijing trying to build bridges with the major states in the Middle East and
Central Asia, it was also encouraging Xinjiang to trade across the border with Kazakhstan
and Kyrgyzstan.

Dr. Michael Dillon is Director of the Centre for Contemporary
Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Durham, Elvet
Hill in Durham, United Kingdom.