Uyghur minority group: September 2009 Archives

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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By Dikki Sinn - Associated Press writer | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News Philippines
September 13, 2009

Hundreds of Hong Kong journalists, lawmakers and residents marched Sunday to protest the alleged police beatings of three reporters covering recent unrest in western China and demanded a government investigation.

Demonstrators wearing black rallied outside a police station before marching to local offices of China's central government.

"This time the authorities are over the line," Mak Yin-ting, chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalist Association, told the gathering. "They did not only beat reporters, but blamed them for inciting the public disorder."

Organizers put the crowd at about 700 people. Police did not immediately provide estimates.

The TV journalists were covering the aftermath of a mass protest by Han Chinese in the troubled city of Urumqi earlier this month after a series of attacks with syringe needles that China's government blames on Muslim separatists.

The three, who worked for TVB and Now TV news outlets in Hong Kong, said they were kicked, punched, and shoved to the ground by police before being detained for about three hours.

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