Washington, August 25: Rebiya Kadeer, the leader of China’s Uighur minority in exile, said Monday she received a report that nearly 200 inmates were “tortured” to death in prison.
The allegations come as a war of words intensifies between Beijing and the 62-year-old former businesswoman. China has accused her of instigating recent unrest in northwestern Xinjiang province, charges she adamantly denies.
Kadeer, who lives in the Washington area, said she received a fax from a Uighur policeman who fled to nearby Kyrgyzstan and gave a grim account of a prison south of the city of Urumqi called Urumbay.
The policeman said that 196 Uighurs detained in a clampdown in the region “were tortured and killed” in the prison, Kadeer said.
“One of the Uighurs, named Erkin, couldn’t stand the torture and killed himself,” she said.
Kadeer, leader of the World Uighur Congress, said it was impossible to verify the account as phone lines had been cut.
“I’m sure that as soon as this is made public, China will say that it’s not true,” she said. “We cannot prove it because everything is down.”
China’s worst ethnic violence in decades broke out on July 5 in Urumqi pitting Han Chinese against Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim people. At least 197 people died, according to official count.
China said Monday it would put more than 200 people on trial over the unrest — news that Kadeer scoffed at.
“I believe it’s another sham to deceive the world about what’s actually going on behind closed doors,” said Kadeer, who spent some six years in a Chinese prison before her release under US pressure in 2005.
“The Chinese government already decides the lawyers who are going to ‘defend’ the Uighurs,” she said. “If these lawyers do not act the way that the Chinese government expects them to, they will suffer the same fate as those being tried.”
The mother of 11 was speaking at the recording of a segment on the current affairs cable network C-Span about her memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” which was published in May.
—Agencies