MCLC: devotion to Uighur language risky

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter (dujuan99 at gmail.com)
Subject: devotion to Uighur language risky
***********************************************************

Source: NY Times (5/12/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/world/asia/a-devotion-to-language-proves-
risky.html

A Devotion to Language Proves Risky
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — A poet, linguist and globe-trotting polyglot, Abduweli Ayup
had a passion for the spoken word, notably Uighur, the Turkic language
spoken in his homeland in China’s far northwest. In 2011, soon after
finishing his graduate studies in the United States, Mr. Ayup returned
home to open a chain of “mother tongue” schools in Xinjiang, the vast
Central Asian region whose forced marriage to the Han Chinese heartland
has become increasingly tumultuous.

But in a country where language is politically fraught, Mr. Ayup’s
devotion to Uighur may have proved his undoing.

Last August, Mr. Ayup and two business partners were arrested and
accused of “illegal fund-raising,” charges that stemmed from their
effort to finance a new school by, among other means, selling honey and
T-shirts emblazoned with the school’s insignia.

Mr. Ayup, 39, and his two associates, Dilyar Obul and Muhemmet Sidik,
have not been heard from since.

In fear-addled Xinjiang, where ethnic violence has been mounting and
where Chinese security forces can detain Uighurs with impunity, Mr.
Ayup’s fate would have probably gone unnoticed beyond his immediate circle.
But in recent weeks, his plight has begun drawing attention outside
Xinjiang through a small group of supporters in the United States, some
of whom came to know him during the two years he spent at the University
of Kansas on a Ford Foundation fellowship. They have created a Facebook
page and a petition on MoveOn.org to publicize his case. Human rights
advocates have also begun raising his name in Washington.

To outside analysts, Mr. Ayup and his business partners are victims of a
government crackdown aimed at quelling ethnic bloodletting that has
spilled beyond Xinjiang. In recent months, there has been a spate of
attacks across China, including one in the heart of Beijing last October
involving a Uighur driver who plowed through a crowded sidewalk, killing
two pedestrians, and a massacre in March at a train station in southwest
China during which at least 29 people were killed.

On Tuesday, six people were wounded in a knife attack at a train station
in Guangzhou. Separatists were blamed for these and other attacks.
In the six decades since Chinese troops ended a fleeting experiment with
Uighur independence, Beijing has tried with mixed success to subdue a
mostly Muslim people who have far more affinity for their Central Asian
brethren in neighboring Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan than for
the Han majority to the east.

Alarmed by increasingly violent resistance to its policies, the Chinese
government has embraced an even more heavy-handed approach: ramped-up
Han migration to the region, restrictions on Islamic religious practice,
a Stalinist-style police state and educational policies that seek to
make Mandarin the lingua franca.

During a highly publicized tour of the region two weeks ago, President
Xi Jinping underscored the message of integration and stability, urging
Uighur students to devote themselves to Mandarin and praising
truncheon-bearing troops.

“The battle to combat violence and terrorism will not allow even a
moment of slackness, and decisive actions must be taken to resolutely
suppress the terrorists’ rampant momentum,” the state-run Xinhua news
agency quoted Mr. Xi as saying.

After Mr. Xi’s appearance, a train station in Urumqi, the regional
capital, was attacked, perhaps in response. Exile groups and rights
advocates said they feared the recent bloodshed would lead to even
tighter security measures in Xinjiang and shrink the already narrow
space for discourse about Beijing’s policies in the region. Uighur
intellectuals have long bemoaned the Communist Party’s stranglehold on
free expression, especially that which strays from the official
narrative portraying Uighurs as an exotic people, fond of dancing and
singing, who are deeply appreciative of the party’s benevolent embrace.

In January, the authorities silenced one of China’s most prominent
Uighur academics, Ilham Tohti, who was arrested on charges of
subversion. The apparent crime of Mr. Tohti, an economics professor in
Beijing and moderate voice for Uighur aspirations, was to document
abuses by Chinese security forces and to call on the government to
deliver the autonomy initially promised by Mao Zedong.

Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong
Kong, said the Chinese leadership has come to view the promotion of
Uighur culture and identity as a covert effort to foment disloyalty to
Beijing and subvert the drive for assimilation.

“The Chinese state appears to place no value on the Uighur way of life
and traditions beyond the Disneyfied version it offers to tourists,” he
said. “Every other aspect of Uighur life must be either destroyed,
remodeled or neutered so as to prevent it from becoming a potential
vehicle for Uighur ethno-national aspirations.”

The story of how Mr. Ayup traded the freedoms of life in America for the
quixotic dream of opening Uighur-language schools in Xinjiang is a
cautionary tale about the perils of challenging the Chinese state on
matters of ethnic identity.

At a time when the authorities are determined to tamp down even the
faintest expression of Uighur self-determination, few hold much hope
that he will be freed anytime soon. “The government can make sure he
rots in jail for years,” said Mamatjan Juma, a childhood friend who now
lives in suburban Virginia. “They don’t want a brave, influential
intellectual like him on the streets.”

Despite the evident risks, friends say Mr. Ayup thought he might succeed
by steering clear of politics and carefully following the regulations
that govern the establishment of private schools. Soon after returning
from the United States, he opened a kindergarten in the Silk Road city
of Kashgar. Having quickly achieved full enrollment, he set his sights
on Urumqi, where Mandarin-language public schools are producing a
generation with limited Uighur proficiency.

Anwar Mamat, 38, a childhood friend who teaches at the University of
Nebraska, said Mr. Ayup turned down a three-year scholarship at the
University of Kansas to pursue his dream. “A lot of parents are willing
to send their kids to a Uighur school, but none are available,” he said.
“Abduweli knew the risks, but he was committed to achieving his goals.”

It was not long before Mr. Ayup had become a local celebrity. He
appeared on state-run television to offer advice about studying abroad,
and his blog posts on Uighur language drew hundreds of thousands of
hits. Robert Wilson, an English teacher in New York who was a former
student of Mr. Ayup’s, said he was far from a radical. “It wasn’t that
he thought Uighurs shouldn’t learn Chinese, it’s just that he thought
they should also know their own language,” Mr. Wilson said.

But Mr. Ayup soon met official resistance. Last year the authorities
forced the cancellation of an event he had organized to mark Nowruz, an
ancient pre-Islamic celebration of spring, and in March of 2013, they
shut the kindergarten in Kashgar, saying it lacked the proper license.

Faced with bureaucratic intransigence to his proposed school in Urumqi,
Mr. Ayup began documenting his odyssey online last spring, a move that
most likely angered the authorities. “It was a kind of symbolic
activism, to let people know how China was treating the status of the
Uighur language,” said Mr. Juma, the childhood friend, who is a senior
editor at Radio Free Asia, an American-financed news service.

According to Omerjan Bore, a brother of Mr. Sidik, one of the detained
associates, the three men had been trying to raise $260,000 to open a
kindergarten in Tianshan, a largely Uighur neighborhood in Urumqi. The
owner of two accounting companies and an employee at the regional
taxation bureau, Mr. Sidik was apolitical and steadfastly law-abiding,
his brother said. He said the other partner, Mr. Obul, was a
well-regarded lawyer. “What they were doing was completely legitimate
and legal,” said Mr. Bore, who lives in Canada. “Everyone in the world
wants to keep their own language.”

The police have not allowed lawyers or family members to see the
detained men, but a relative who made contact with the authorities late
last year told Radio Free Asia that Mr. Ayup had become seriously ill in
jail. Reached by phone, employees at the Public Security Bureau and the
prosecutors’ offices in Kashgar and Urumqi declined to comment or to
acknowledge that the men were in police custody.

“We have been waiting nine months without word,” Mr. Bore said. “We are
very, very worried.”