Nearly 1,300 Arrested In Muslim Region Of China

January 5, 2009

Author: Edward Wong

Source: International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/05/asia/china.php

The authorities in the western desert region of Xinjiang in China approved the arrests of nearly 1,300 people in the first 11 months of last year on suspicion of "endangering state security," according to a report published Sunday in an official newspaper.

The number of arrests on that particular charge represents an extraordinary leap over the number in 2007 and is drawing scrutiny from human rights groups.

The newspaper, The Procuratorial Daily, which is published by the Chinese equivalent of the attorney general's office, said that prosecutors' departments in Xinjiang approved 1,295 arrests of individuals and indicted 1,154 of those people. The newspaper article was also posted on a Xinjiang government Web site, lending legitimacy to the statistics.

In 2007, the number of people arrested across all of China on suspicion of endangering state security was 742, according to government statistics. Prosecutors indicted 619 of them.

Of those 2007 numbers, about half were from Xinjiang, said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, citing statistics from the Xinjiang Yearbook, a government publication of regional statistics. That makes the numbers reported on Sunday vastly higher than their 2007 equivalents.

"If this is confirmed, this is very alarming, because it reflects that the threshold of what constitutes a state security crime was considerably lowered last year, in line with the campaign," Bequelin said, referring to a campaign against political crimes and terrorism that the authorities in Xinjiang announced last year before the Beijing Olympic Games.

Chinese officials have said that elements in Xinjiang, a large region that is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, are a special threat to the regional and national governments, which are controlled by ethnic Han Chinese. Many Uighurs chafe at what they call discriminatory policies in Xinjiang, and some advocate independence.