Uighur Film to Show In Taiwan, Angering China

By REUTERS | The New York Times
September 20, 2009

Taiwan's second-largest city said Sunday it would show a film about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer further angering China which is still fuming about the Dalai Lama's recent visit to the island.

The documentary, The 10 Conditions of Love, will screen four times Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of an annual film festival in Kaohsiung, a southern Taiwan port city whose mayor Chen Chu is backed by Taiwan's anti-China opposition party.

"To draw the curtains over this controversy as soon as possible, the film will be screened ahead of schedule," the city said in a statement.

Chinese officials say that Kadeer, a former businesswoman who now leads exile group the World Uyghur Congress, orchestrated ethnic violence in July in Xinjiang, a largely ethnic Uighur region of northwest China, killing about 200 people.

She denies the allegation.

China's state-run television said the government agency in charge of Taiwan affairs denounced the decision to show the film, which it said distorted the truth and sent the wrong message on terrorism.

"We urge Kaohsiung not to cling to this reckless decision and disrupt cross strait relations," the television said in a report quoting the Taiwan Affairs Office.

China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong's forces won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to the island. But the two sides have worked since mid-2008 to improve relations.

A furore erupted in Australia earlier this year when Chinese embassy staff pressed unsuccessfully for the same documentary to be removed from the country's biggest film festival in Melbourne, prompting an angry public backlash and higher audience numbers.

Kaohsiung and several opposition-led Taiwan counties irked Beijing this month when they invited the Dalai Lama to pray for victims of typhoon Morakot, which killed up to 770 people, mostly in mudslides.

Beijing sees the Tibetan spiritual leader as a separatist.

(Reporting by Ralph Jennings in Taipei and Kirby Chien in Beijing; Editing by Ron Popeski)

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