tagged w/ Uighurs
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The communist authorities who built the so-called Great Firewall of China raced to stamp out video, images and words posted by internet users about the unrest in Xinjiang, which left at least 140 people dead.
Twitter and YouTube appeared to be blocked in China late on Monday afternoon, while leading Chinese search engines would not give results for 'Urumqi', the city in Xinjiang where the riots occurred.
Traditional press carried only the official version of events, which blamed the unrest on ethnic Muslim Uighurs.
However, similar to the phenomenon seen last month during Iran's political turmoil, pictures, videos and updates from Urumqi poured onto social networking and image sharing websites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
In many cases, items were reposted by other internet users on sites outside China to preserve the content, while Twitter helped link people around the globe to images Chinese authorities did not want seen.
A US academic in Urumqi broke news about the unrest via Twitter, saying hours before the mainstream news organisations on Sunday night that security forces were blocking off streets in the city.
State-run China Central Television (CCTV) showed its first images of the violence just before midday Monday - more than 12 hours after footage began circulating on the internet.
CCTV broadcast images of a woman apparently being kicked as she lay on the ground, protesters throwing stones at police, vehicles on fire, and two young girls with bloodied hands comforting each other.
However, its footage gave a different impression to some of the clips on YouTube that Uighur exile groups said backed their case the protesters were largely peaceful.
Footage posted on YouTube showed what appeared to be, at least initially, a peaceful protest, with men and women marching, chatting on mobile phones, sipping bottled water and raising their arms as they cheered.
Another video on the site apparently taken by low-grade video technology in Urumqi showed police in black helmets leading away handcuffed protesters.
Meanwhile some Chinese internet users were able to express frustration at having their postings on the violence deleted. In one case, Chinese blogger Wen Ni'er reposted an entry on a Google site.
"Chinese mainland websites repeatedly deleted my post, which seriously violated China's law and violated my freedom and rights. I hereby want to express my strong disgust and condemnation," she wrote.
She had help from other anonymous sites based outside of China that were aggregating and saving both official and non-official materials about the incident, such as drop.io/urumuqi.
"I saved them primarily because once the Chinese censors order a take-down, they might not be seen again. Indeed, since I saved them, many of these pictures were 'harmonised' and can no longer be accessed," the site's operator wrote.The communist authorities who built the so-called Great Firewall of China raced to... more
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At least 129 people were killed in in rioting by a Muslim ethnic group in China's far west, state media said Monday.
The brief report from Xinhua news agency gave no more details.
Protesters, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, set dozens of cars on fire and attacked buses in several hours of violence in the Xinjiang province city of Urumqi on Sunday. The violence appeared to subside as the police and military presence intensified into the night, according to participants and witnesses.
Tensions between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese are never far from the surface in Xinjiang, China's vast Central Asian buffer province, where militant Uighurs have waged sporadic, violent separatist campaign. The overwhelming majority of Urumqi's 2.3 million people are Han Chinese.
State television aired footage that appeared to show protesters attacking and kicking people on the ground. Other people sat dazed with blood pouring down their faces.
Mobile phone service provided by at least one company was cut Monday to stop people from organizing further action in Xinjiang.
The protest started Sunday with demonstrators demanding an investigation into a fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese workers at a southern China factory last month. Accounts differed over what happened next in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi, but the violence seemed to have started when a crowd of protesters — who started out peaceful — refused to disperse.
State media said at least 37 people — both Uighur and Han Chinese — were hospitalized with injuries.At least 129 people were killed in in rioting by a Muslim ethnic group in China's... more
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Again, we see this administration that thinks it is above the law..even the Supreme Court. Why? They have much to hide..here is the article, and the rest at the link
This week could see a remarkable moment in American legal history, as 17 Guantanamo detainees are on the verge of being let out of prison. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the men released into the U.S. and told the Bush administration to produce the men in his courtroom Friday morning.
The detainees are 17 Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, who have been held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for nearly seven years. In past decades, the U.S. government has treated the group as Chinese nationalists. But in 2003, in an effort to accommodate the Communist Chinese government, the Bush administration listed one of the Uighur groups as a terrorist organization, using the designation as a rationale for the Uighurs' continued detention at Guantanamo.
However, a largely conservative panel of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled in June that the group is not hostile to the U.S. and that the administration had produced no reliable information to justify holding the Uighurs. The case was then sent back to a lower court for further action, including the possibility of release.
Federal Judge Ricardo Urbina said Tuesday that, in essence, enough is enough. Whatever authority the government may have had for detaining the Uighurs has ceased, he said.
The government now concedes these men are not enemy combatants, Urbina noted, and has provided no other justification for detention.
Uighurs living in the United States have arranged for 17 families to take the men until more permanent arrangements can be made. Urbina said he would hear from the Department of Homeland Security as to any conditions it would like imposed on the men after release — conditions that could include a ban on travel and requirements that the men report to authorities on a regular basis. The judge reacted angrily, however, when Bush administration lawyers suggested they could imprison the men in the U.S. once the Uighurs are transferred here. It is expected he will forbid that.
As luck would have it, one of the lawyers for the Uighurs was in Guantanamo on Tuesday and told the men of their court victory. The lawyer is not permitted to talk about the men's reaction by phone under classification rules.
The Chinese government on Tuesday again demanded that the men be returned, but the U.S. has refused because it concedes they would be tortured and possibly killed. The Chinese government sees the Uighurs as a threat because many of them want greater autonomy from Beijing.Again, we see this administration that thinks it is above the law..even the Supreme... more
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Unlike their Hollywood friendly brethren, the Tibetans, the Uighurs of northwestern China, claim to be an oppressed minority group that no one has ever heard of. That is, unless the Chinese government publicizes an attack by Uighur insurgents, such as the one that killed 16 Chinese police officers on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. In this Vanguard report, Laura Ling travels to the wild-west frontier in China's Gobi Desert, an area the Chinese named Xinjiang, or New Land, but a place many Uighurs believe should be an independent Uighur nation.Unlike their Hollywood friendly brethren, the Tibetans, the Uighurs of northwestern... more
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