Jamal Doumani
ARAB NEWS - Friday 26 September 2014
Like their fellow-ideologues in the former Soviet Union, communist
officials in Beijing have kept their promise: They will answer dissent
with repression. In China today, if you’re the member of an ethnic
minority with a complaint, that you are rash enough to air in public,
expect to be dragged into “court” to face a life sentence.
That’s
what happened to prominent Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti last Tuesday.
Tohti is widely respected abroad as a moderate voice within China’s
eight million-strong Muslim Uighur community, who inhabit Xinjiang
Province in the country’s far northwestern corner. The charges were
advocating separatism, criticizing the government and “voicing support
for terrorists.”
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