China, Uighur Groups Present Conflicting Accounts of Unrest

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 25, 2009

BEIJING -- Three weeks after the riots that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured in the capital of the far western Xinjiang region, the Chinese government and Uighur exile groups have been circulating dueling versions of what happened, in an emotional global propaganda war with geopolitical implications.

According to the version of events offered by China's Foreign Ministry and state media, the ethnic unrest that erupted in Urumqi on July 5 was a terrorist attack by Uighur separatists. Women in black Islamic robes stood at street corners giving orders, and at least one handed out clubs, officials said, before Muslim Uighur gangs in 50 locations throughout the city simultaneously began beating Han Chinese.

In the account being circulated by Rebiya Kadeer, a U.S.-based Uighur leader who has emerged as the community's main spokesman, Chinese security forces were responsible for the violence that night. According to Kadeer, police and paramilitary and other troops chased peaceful demonstrators, mostly young people protesting a deadly factory brawl elsewhere, into closed-off areas. Then they turned off streetlights and began shooting indiscriminately.

Clear Details Absent

Chinese authorities have allowed foreign reporters access to the area where the clashes occurred and unusual freedom to conduct interviews, and they have provided evidence verifying the brutal attacks on Han Chinese. But few details are clear, and many witnesses who might be able to answer other questions -- Who set off the initial violence? Why were the police unable to stop the attacks? -- are either in jail or dead.

"The narratives of both the Chinese government and outside observers about what happened are hobbled by the lack of independent, verifiable accounts," said Phelim Kine, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, which is calling for a U.N. investigation into the incident.

Both sides face huge obstacles in trying to convince the world of their stories.

The Chinese government, after decades of covering up and denying such incidents, has a major trust problem, many analysts say. Chinese officials have said they will release video footage of the attacks, phone records and other evidence to support their view of the events in Urumqi, but have not yet done so.

For Kadeer, a 63-year-old former business mogul from Xinjiang who was exiled in 2005 and now lives in the Washington area, observers say the main challenge is convincing people that she can give an authoritative account of events that happened in a country she has not visited in years. Uighur exile groups have declined to provide information about their sources in China, saying they fear that those people will be arrested or worse if they speak out.

Resentment has been building for years between Han Chinese, who make up 92 percent of China's population and dominate its politics and economy, and Uighurs, who once were the majority in the far west, but whose presence there has shrunk in recent decades because of migration by Han Chinese.

Although the Chinese government says its policies have improved Uighurs' educational and job opportunities, some Uighurs say its goal is to assimilate them at the expense of their language, religion and culture.

In the past, the government has linked Uighur separatism to a group known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which it characterizes as a terrorist organization and blames for some recent attacks. Some analysts say that China exaggerates the influence of this group.

When it comes to the events of July 5, Dong Guanpeng, director of the Global Journalism Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said he thinks China is being honest this time, but that doubts have been cast on the information it is releasing because Kadeer is "doing a better job than the Chinese government in public relations."

"Of course, Rebiya's statements have won sympathy in foreign countries," Dong said. "They contain beautiful lies."

Kadeer's version of events appears to have gained traction abroad. In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed solidarity with China's Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group, and described the riots as "a kind of genocide." Protesters in Tokyo, Washington, Munich and Amsterdam have descended on Chinese embassies and consulates demanding a full account of what happened to Uighurs. A top Iranian cleric condemned China for "horribly" suppressing the community, and al-Qaeda's North African arm vowed to avenge Uighurs' deaths.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism and mass communications at the China Youth University for Political Sciences, contends that the Chinese government inadvertently elevated Kadeer's status and gave her an audience that she does not deserve. Beijing has accused Kadeer of being the "mastermind" behind the clashes in Urumqi, accusations she denies.

"The government should haven't portrayed her as a hero by condemning her. She was unknown at first, and she is a well-known person in the world right now," Zhan said.

Gaps in Both Stories

Meanwhile, China has hit back by assigning some blame to third parties. The Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper said that the United States backed the "separatists" who launched the attacks. It also said that Kadeer's organization received funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is funded by the U.S. Congress. Separately, the official China Daily has played up the terrorism angle, saying that the riots were meant to "help" al-Qaeda and were related to the continuing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Some analysts say there are holes in both sides' narratives.

For instance, according to Kadeer's timeline of events, the violence was triggered by police who "under the cover of darkness . . . began to fire" on the protesters. But witnesses have said the rioting began about 8 p.m. Beijing time, when the sun was still up in Urumqi, 1,500 miles west of Beijing.

Chang Chungfu, a specialist in Muslim and Uighur studies at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said "the two parties -- the government and Kadeer -- are choosing the parts of the stories that favor their own agendas," in efforts to win foreign sympathy.

He said he considers it "unlikely that a peaceful protest turned into violence against innocent people just because of policemen cracking down," suggesting at least a measure of organization to the Uighurs' attacks on Han Chinese that night.

On the other hand, Chang said, he is skeptical of the government's assertions that Kadeer instigated the attacks because she lacks that kind of power. Furthermore, he said, "the government hasn't released detailed information of those who were killed, such as their ages and identities, so even the number of dead is in doubt."

Li Wei, a terrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which is affiliated with China's national security bureau, dismissed allegations by state media of involvement by outside terrorist groups. "I have not found any proof that points at linkage between the riot and other terrorism groups, including al-Qaeda," he said.

Li did say, however, that he believes Kadeer is in contact with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert, blamed some of the tension on Beijing's failure to differentiate "between terrorists who attack and the political activities of separatists."

"If China is too hard on the Uighur people, then support of terrorism will grow," Gunaratna said. "The Chinese government must be hard on terrorists but soft on the Uighur people."

Researchers Liu Liu, Wang Juan and Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

Drug Cartels Target Mormon Clans in Mexico

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 23, 2009

COLONIA LEBARON, Mexico -- Mormon pioneer Alma Dayer LeBaron had a vision when he moved his breakaway sect of polygamists to this valley 60 years ago: His many children would live in peace and prosperity among the pretty pecan orchards they would plant in the desert.

Prosperity has come, but the peace has been shattered.

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government's war with the drug cartels.

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teenage brother from a family ranch in May.

Amid the blood and mesquite at the site of his last breath, Benjamin LeBaron's killers posted a sign that read: "This is for the leaders of LeBaron who didn't believe and who still don't believe."

"We're living in a war zone, but it's a war zone with little kids running all around in the yard," said Julian LeBaron, a brother of the slain leader. Like most members of the Mormon enclave, he has dual Mexican-American citizenship and speaks Spanish and English fluently.

These Mormons, some who swear and drink beer, are the latest collateral damage in the Mexican government's U.S.-backed war against criminal organizations.

Here in Chihuahua, the border state south of Texas and New Mexico, conditions are rapidly deteriorating. The violence has left more than 1,000 dead in Ciudad Juarez this year, even though the government has sent 10,000 troops and police officers into the city.

Increasingly the violence is moving from the big cities into the small, usually placid farm towns of the rugged desert mountains. Criminal bands have ambushed the governor's convoy along the highway, and they have assassinated local police at stop lights and political leaders at will. Gunmen executed the mayor of Namiquipa last week.

"The northeast of Chihuahua is now a zone of devastation," said Victor Quintana, a state lawmaker, who reports an exodus of business people fleeing kidnappers and farmers refusing to plant their crops because of extortion.

The columnist Alberto Aziz Nassif wrote in El Universal newspaper, "Chihuahua today is the emblem of a failed state, run by incompetent authorities who have little ability to protect the citizens."

Many of the Mormons have fled north to the United States, and Julian LeBaron said he fears for his life. He has reason. In Ciudad Juarez, a three-hour drive to the north, hand-painted banners were hung from overpasses last week threatening the extended clan.

"All we want to do is live in peace. We want nothing to do with the drug cartels. They can't be stopped. What we want is just to protect ourselves from being kidnapped and killed," said Marco LeBaron, a college student who came home for the funeral of his brother, the slain anti-crime activist. Marco LeBaron is one of 70 Mormons who have volunteered to join a rural police force to protect the town. The Mexican government has given them permission to arm themselves.

Dragged Into Drug Fight

For all the violence swirling around them, the Mormons have mostly stayed out of the fight. Their ancestors first settled in Mexico in the 1880s, during the reign of dictator Porfirio Díaz, who offered the religious outcasts refuge from the harassment and prosecution they faced in the United States for their polygamist lifestyles. Some men in Colonia LeBaron and surrounding towns continue to follow what early Mormon prophets called "the Principle," marrying multiple wives and having dozens of children, though the custom here is fading. Polygamy was banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the official Mormon Church, in 1890.

The Mormon community based in Colonia LeBaron, numbering about 1,000, has one motel, two grocery stores and lots of schools. There are no ATMs and no liquor sales. Many Mormons are conspicuous not only for their straw-colored hair and pale skin, but also for their new pickup trucks, large suburban-style homes with green front lawns, and big tracts of land for their pecans and cattle. They are wealthy, by the standards of their poor Mexican neighbors. Most of the Mormon men make their money working construction jobs in the United States; a young Mormon might work 10 years hanging drywall in Las Vegas before he has enough money to buy a plot of land to start his own pecan orchard here.

The Mormons were dragged into the drug fight on May 2, when 16-year-old Eric LeBaron and a younger brother were hauling a load of fence posts in their truck to their father's ranch in the Sierra Madre. According to the family's account, five armed men seized Eric and told his brother to run home and tell his father to answer the telephone. When the kidnappers called, they told Joel LeBaron that if he ever wanted to see Eric again, he must pay them $1 million.

The next day, 150 men gathered at the church house in Colonia LeBaron to debate what to do. They had no confidence in the local police. One of their members, Ariel Ray, the mayor of nearby Galeana, reminded them that someone had put an empty coffin in the bed of his pickup. Some men argued that they should hire professional bounty hunters from the United States to get Eric back. Others wanted to form a posse.

"But we knew the last thing we could do was give them the money, or we would be invaded by this scum," Julian LeBaron said.

Another brother, Craig LeBaron, told the Deseret News in Salt Lake City: "If you give them a cookie, they'll want a glass of milk. If we don't make a stand here, it's only a matter of time before it's my kid."

A caravan of hundreds of the LeBaron Mormons, along with Mennonites and others, went to the state capital to protest the crime. This kind of public advocacy is almost unheard of among the Mexican Mormons, who keep to themselves. Led by Benjamin LeBaron, the protesters met with the governor and state attorney general, who quickly dispatched helicopters, police and soldiers to the area. The government forces erected roadblocks and searched the countryside.

Eric LeBaron was freed eight days after his abduction. His kidnappers simply told him to go home. But soon after, another member of the community, Meredith Romney, a 72-year-old bishop related to former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was taken captive. The state governor sent Colombian security consultants to LeBaron. The Mormons, led by an increasingly public and outspoken Benjamin LeBaron, formed a group called SOS Chihuahua to organize citizens to defend themselves, report crimes and demand results from authorities. LeBaron was featured prominently in the local media. He gave a speech to a graduating class of police cadets. He staged rallies. He got noticed.

Attack on Family Home

Early on July 7, four trucks loaded with men passed through a highway tollbooth, where they were recorded on videotape outside Galeana, where Benjamin LeBaron lived in a sprawling, new stucco home with his wife and five young children. Two trucks stopped at the cemetery outside town and waited. Two pickup trucks filled with 15 to 20 heavily armed men, wearing helmets, bulletproof vests and blue uniforms, came for LeBaron.

They smashed in his home's windows and shouted for him to open the door, as his terrified children cried inside, according to an account given by his brothers. LeBaron's brother-in-law Luis Widmar, 29, who lived across the street, heard the commotion and ran to his aid. Both men were beaten by the gunmen, who threatened to rape LeBaron's wife in front of her children unless the men revealed where LeBaron kept his arsenal of weapons.

"But he didn't have any, because I promise you, if he did, he would have used them to protect his family," Julian LeBaron said.

LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head outside town. A banner was hung beside their bodies that blamed them for the arrest of 25 gunmen who were seized in June after terrorizing the town of Nicolas Bravo, where they burned down buildings and extorted from business owners. According to Mexican law enforcement officials, the gunmen are members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting the Juarez cartel for billion-dollar cocaine-smuggling routes into El Paso.

After the men killed LeBaron and Widmar, a video camera captured their departure at the highway tollbooth -- the make, model and year of their vehicles and the license numbers, according to family members. There have been no arrests.

Who killed Benji LeBaron -- and why? These questions are difficult to answer in Mexico's drug war, and the unknowns fuel the fear of those left in Colonia LeBaron.

The state attorney general, Patricia González, blamed the group La Línea, the Line, the armed enforcement wing of former police officers and gunmen that works for the Juarez cartel. A few months ago, González said La Línea was an exhausted remnant of dead-enders whose ranks had been decimated by infighting and arrests.

After González said the Juarez cartel was responsible for the killings, banners appeared in Ciudad Juarez that read: "Mrs. Prosecutor, avoid problems for yourself, and don't blame La Línea." The message stated that the LeBaron killings were the work of the Sinaloa cartel. On Wednesday, another banner was hung from an overpass, suggesting that Benji LeBaron was a thief: "Ask yourself where did all his properties come from?"

At the LeBaron funeral, attended by more than 2,000 people, including the Chihuahua state governor and attorney general, Benji's uncle Adrian LeBaron said, "The men who murdered them have no children, no parents, no mother. They are the spawn of evil."

Singapore Dissident: Goh Chock Tong's Fear Is Real

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Yesterday, I had written about Goh Chock Tong's disappointment over the serious brain drain of young educated Singaporeans to Western Countries. In fact the numbers that leave are not just every 2 out of 3 graduates of Singapore high schools going abroad to study. There is ten fold multiplier effect which causes the relatives, families and friends of the overseas Singaporean to join him abroad, thereby swelling the figures that leave ten fold.

This huge brain drain of the talented from Singapore must be quite obvious to Goh Chock Tong and his friend Lee Kuan Yew.

Students born brought up and educated in Singapore would know nothing other than Singapore, a place where they have to cram for their studies, where they fear to speak openly against the government, where their Asian culture of submission to authority makes them incapable of questioning authority and where on the whole they live a cowardly introverted fearful submissive lives.

But when they go to Australia for instance, they suddenly begin breathing a whiff of fresh air. The country is open, the people speak openly without fear of anyone, the newspapers are free to publish the truth, they are free to publicly protest and criticize and where the people are generally happier and more contented. Suddenly, the Singaporean export, falls in love with Australia. If only he had known earlier, he says, he would have left Singapore long ago. But, sadly, he did not know. But better late than never, now he knows. And he begins to hate Singapore for what it is, he begins to hate the tyrant Lee Kuan Yew who made him live like the dummy all these years, and he is glad he is free of that steamy intolerant crowded island.

And he transmits this message to all his relative and friends in Singapore. He tells his parents in Singapore to join him in Australia, he tells this to his brothers and sisters, to his relatives and friends. And then the family, the relatives, their friends tell it to theirs and so on, and the chain cumulative effect gets under way.

From the initial student who had gone abroad to study, you now have scores of others who have similarly left Singapore thanks to him.

This is what we call the multiplier effect. And this is what is happening. And this is draining Singapore of it's talent. And this is something Goh Chock Tong or his master Lee Kuan Yew can do nothing to stop.

Lee Kuan Yew can of course turn Singapore into another Cuba or North Korea sealing it's borders to prevent escape. Unfortunately for him if were to do that, it will only precipitate the calamity even further.

He did appear dejected in the picture in the Straits Times. It is quite clear that he has reason to be. This is what happens to all dictatorships. Their arrogance catches up to them.

Gopalan Nair
39737 Paseo Padre Parkway, Suite A1
Fremont, CA 94538, USA
Tel: 510 657 6107
Fax: 510 657 6914
Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com
Blog: http://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/