http://time-blog.com/china_blog/2008/09/only_in_china_department_ii_sh.html

I’m holding her accountable for being the president of the WUC which has repeated failed to clearly distant itself from violence (”clearly” means persistently, as in not just in its “Mission Statement” but whenever the topic comes up). The quote you’ve shown above was unknown to me (where is it from, BTW?), and now I’ve seen it, I give her credit for that. Bus still, she should have either urged the WUC to be more forceful in its stance against violence, or if that’s not possible, she should have resigned. Just like Dalai Lama should resign as the head of the exile Tibetan government as long as complete independence is still its official goal. Not doing it puts serious doubt about the sincerity of DL’s “no longer independence” stance.

Condemning violence on occasion is certainly better than nothing at all, but the negative side of refraining from doing so at times when it’s required outweighs the positive side.

WASHINGTON - THE exiled leader of China’s Uighur Muslims condemned on Monday the reported killing of 16 policemen in a suspected terrorist attack in the country’s Xinjiang region, but urged Beijing not to wage a crackdown on ‘peaceful Uighurs’.
‘We condemn all acts of violence’, Ms Rebiya Kadeer said in Washington, where she has been living in exile since 2005 after spending six years in a Beijing prison.

‘The Uighur people do not support acts that engender bloodshed’.

The Uyghur people and their situation both as portrayed by the Chinese and as portrayed by angry Uyghur exile organizations are not very well known at all on the global public stage. That you did not hear in whatever information networks you browse through that Rebiya Kadeer condemned the pre-Olympic violence doesn’t mean she didn’t. Most sites and news organizations will have deemed that not newsworthy (in contrast to the celebrity of the Dalai Lama). That’s why we sort of started this blog, we sensed an information gap. The WUC condemned the violence. It’s mission statement on its website is “to promote the right of the Uyghur people to use peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic means to determine the political future of East Turkestan.” Granted that mission statement may be a lie but I say for the third time the onus is on you to prove that the WUC is lying about its opposition to violence and is somehow more deeply involved, but so far all you’ve come up with are completely incorrect guesses about what the leaders of these movements said or didn’t said - which anyways is based on the assumption that these leaders by virtue of being leaders can exert some form of control over people using violence within PRC borders. It seems your opinions about the WUC and minority diasporas in general are based on some sort of pre-fabricated assumptions about their agendas and abilities… rather than actual research into what they are.

Many exile Uyghur organizations dispute that there is a high level organization and coordination between the hard realities of violence committed by Uyghurs in Xinjiang simply because the government hasn’t been public about the evidence they supposedly hold. This lacks credibility. The US presented its evidence to the world and invaded Afghanistan with international approval. The US presented crappy evidence or no evidence at all and invaded Iraq to the world’s scathing criticism. The US has created an atmosphere where making claims about terrorist capabilities without providing convincing evidence immediately draws skepticism. If it’s so “laughable” then PRC has nothing to lose by providing a “9/11 Commission” style document to the world, transparently detailing the results of its investigations and the personalities, networks, and timelines to create overarching, integrated, and complex proof that there is “ET terrorism.” In fact, I’m sure if it did this it would win praise as it did with its transparency in response to the Sichuan earthquake and even actual support. It hasn’t done this. It makes claims in vacuums about how many grenades they found in houses they raid. The story even changes over time, as was detailed in analysis of one violent event that happened a few months ago. You don’t seem to be grasping the concept of burden of proof. In legal terms, the “complainer” has to provide the evidence. Making a positive claim about something - claiming that something is there - requires evidence. The violent events that happened in Xinjiang are a cold, hard facts. The level or coordination, sophistication, and organization behind them are not. These require evidence, as do your claims about the level of involvement and approval on behalf of Tibetan and Uyghur exile groups with violence inside China’s borders, but everything you’ve come up with has been spurious or just plain incorrect.

As for the one quote you made (you seem to be fond of pulling single sentences out of things), I disagree with the WUC’s reasoning there and agree that if someone said the same thing about the US government I would think it was a dumb statement - though I wouldn’t call him a terrorist sympathizer, I would call that “expressing one’s opinion” which is a cornerstone ideology in my country and is something which in many instances distinguishes a Western worldview from a Chinese one (wantonly accusing people of being sympathizers with the enemy actually constitutes one of the most embarassing and shameful episodes in American history, this is actually discussed in American classrooms, wiki McCarthyism). Furthermore, the cases aren’t analogous, the ability and capacity to produce oppression in Xinjiang by the Chinese government is a lot more clearer and better recorded than the American government’s ability to produce oppression in Taliban-era Afghanistan. If you want a better analogy, then you can say “The US government carries the main responsibility for increasing violence in modern Afghanistan” which wouldn’t be completely incorrect, since our vaunted over reliance on air strikes and our completely incompetent nation-building efforts has pissed off a lot of people. Both situations would be cases where a particular government is exercising control over an ethnically, culturally, and historically distinct population. And finally, who cares if the WUC places a logically questionable sentence on their website? This is a far cry from the evidence needed to prove that Rebiya Kadeer and the WUC are actively implementing and controlling violence in Xinjiang, which would in turn validate Nur Bekri’s otherwise sloppy speech.

Which brings me back to the original topic - I love how you came in protesting rather enthusiastically about me being haphazard with Nur Bekri’s words, but now that the discussion has flowed to the “other side,” that is, exile organizations, you have been demonstrably and repeatedly sloppy with the words of the Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer. And I’m still scratching my head about your tangent post on not being a CCP lap dog - who accused you of that? Why so defensive? Strikes one as insecure - to preemptively defend against accusations no one made or intended to make…

I’m not considering the WUC a sympathizer of terrorism because it tries to explain to the world the reason why violence exists in XJ, but because that explanation is their sole response to those attacks. It completely failed to publicly condemn the violence (like the Dalai Lama did — I do give him credit for that) and distance itself from the terrorist — it even refuses to recognize there is organized ET terrorism at all. That is simply laughable.

And again, “the Chinese government carries the main responsibility for those attacks”? Really? If someone says: “The US government carries the main responsibility for the 9/11 attack”, would you also consider it unfair to call him a terrorist excuser and sympathizer? (To be clear, if the statement were “the Chinese/US/whatever government *shares* the responsibilities for the attacks”, I would have no objection.)

Furthermore, if in your eyes believing that Uyghur discontent is the source of Uyghur violent action, as Kadeer and the WUC do, is “sympathizing and excusing terrorism,” then what do you think are the causes of the events that occurred before and during the Olympics? You said in a different post that the Ramadan crackdown is ridiculous - are actions like these driving religious Uyghurs into religious extremism? Is believing that “sympathizing and approving” their actions? Or, are Uyghurs just nasty, violent people? A lot of well-intentioned Han friends of mine warn me about this when I tell them I’m going to Xinjiang.

Also, I’d like to know on what ground you disagree with my characterization of Kadeer as a terrorist sympathizer. Do you disagree with my assessment that the WUC is publicly excusing and sympathizing with ET terrorism, or do you think Kadeer as its president shouldn’t bear responsibility for the official position of the WUC (or maybe both)?

“The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people according to Tibetan Buddhism.”

Interesting. But wikipedia is wikipedia, after all - you can go and edit this sentence if you perceive it to be incorrect.

And there you have it. You consider the Dalai Lama to be privy to planned violence in Tibet and believe that Rebiya Kadeer is a terrorist sympathizer. I respectfully but completely disagree with you on both accounts. If your stance is the presence of sympathy and support for violence on behalf of these two individuals and my stance is the absence, then the burden of proof is on your side. Frankly speaking, I think making spurious links among completely different and fragmented sections of the Tibetan and Uyghur diaspora, and by proxy erroneously weaving them into a single and single-minded movement, isn’t solid reasoning, and doesn’t compare to asking what kind of ideological links exist between members of the Communist Party which, unlike an ethnicity group such as the Uyghurs or Tibetans is a social institution based on membership instead of accident of birth which is specifically designed, more so than even other created social institutions, to create and strive on ideological consistency across the Party. Which is why I wrote the post that started this all.