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November 28, 2006
The Associated Press
The son of a U.S.-based Muslim activist has been sentenced to seven years in a Chinese prison on tax evasion charges, while his brother was fined for the same charges, a rights group said Tuesday.
Alim Abdureyim was sentenced on Monday in the western city of Urumqi, the capital of China's predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region, said a statement from the Uyghur American Association.
He was also fined 500,000 yuan (US$62,500, €50,000), the Washington-based group said.
His older brother Kahar Abdureyim was not sentenced to prison, but was fined 100,000 (US$12,500, €10,000).
Their mother, Rebiya Kadeer, is the association's president and has been an outspoken critic of China's treatment of Uighurs — Turkic-speaking Muslims whose language and culture are distinct from the rest of the country.
Kadeer, once a prominent businesswoman, was arrested in 1999 in Xinjiang on her way to meet U.S. government researchers. She was sentenced to eight years in prison, but was granted early release in March 2005 and allowed to leave for the United States.
A third son, Ablikim Abdureyim, was still in detention after being charged with subversion, the rights group said.
The group said that he had been carried out of the Tianshan Detention Center in Urumqi on a stretcher, and that it feared he may have been "beaten or tortured as a consequence of his mother ... being elected to the position of president of the World Uyghur Congress" on Sunday.
A woman who answered the telephone at center said, "We will not talk about anyone or anything in our center over the phone."
The Germany-based World Uyghur Congress, which represents China's Uighurs, has accused Beijing of turning Xinjiang into a Chinese colony by stripping the region of its natural resources and encouraging ethnic Chinese to move in to take jobs from the 8 million Uighurs and dilute the culture.
"My sons are completely innocent of all charges against them," Kadeer said in the statement. "The announcement of the sentence — and the treatment of Ablikim in detention — is obviously linked to my election as president of the WUC."
"The timing is more than cynical and less than human, and it shows the world yet again what the Chinese government and Communist Party does to its opponents and how little it cares for international opinion," she said.
China claims it is fighting an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang, where Uighurs are the dominant ethnic group and refer to the territory as "East Turkestan."
Beijing blames Uighur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence. The government says the separatists are linked to al-Qaida, but diplomats and foreign experts have expressed doubts about that.
