China accused of using Ilham Tohti case to halt criticism of ethnic policies

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/18/china-ilham-toti-uighur-criticism-ethnic-policies

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The two-day trial of Uighur academic Ilham Tohti on charges of fomenting separatism concluded without a verdict on Thursday evening, amid accusations by lawyers, human rights groups and diplomats that Chinese authorities were using the case as a cudgel to silence criticism of their ethnic policies.

Tohti, a 44-year-old former economics professor at Minzu University of China in Beijing, is widely considered a rare moderate commentator on the country's ethnic issues. Authorities tried him in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region in China's far north-west, where tensions between Han Chinese and minority Uighurs – a Turkic speaking, Muslim ethnic group of 8 million – frequently boil over into violence.

Although the court has not yet announced a verdict, Tohti's lawyers said he would likely be found guilty and sentenced to 10 years to life in prison.

"I am innocent," Tohti said, according to a tweet by Liu Xiaoyuan, one of his two defence attorneys. "I have never organised a separatist criminal group, and I have never engaged in criminal activities intended to split the country." Tohti has claimed that he spent his career attempting to foster an honest dialogue between Han and Uighurs, rather than advocate Uighur independence.

Police, both uniformed and plain-clothed, sealed off the streets around the courthouse, barring journalists and diplomats from attending the trial, according to accounts posted online.

Prosecutors presented more than 100 articles by Tohti, as well as footage of his classroom lectures, to build an argument that he fomented ethnic hatred in an attempt to split the state, his lawyers said.

Over the past year and a half, hundreds of people have been killed in Xinjiang-related violence, from assaults on police stations in dusty, far-western towns, to bombings and knife attacks against civilians in major cities. Authorities have responded by implementing advanced surveillance networks and flooding the region with armed police. Although many Uighurs complain about religious and cultural restrictions, Communist authorities maintain that their ethnic policies are just, and blame the clashes on independence-seeking terrorist groups, radical Islamists, and "hostile forces" from abroad.

"Currently in Xinjiang, a developing tendency is that the authorities are over-extending anti-terrorism measures to conceal other problems in their name, including the incompetence of both the local governments and the security maintenance apparatus," Tohti wrote before his detention, according to a translation by the website China Change. "In fact, the biggest problem in Xinjiang is not anti-terrorism, nor is it terrorism, but rather, the problem is that political power is unrestrained, unequal, controlled and monopolized by the very groups that profit from it."

Chinese authorities have stifled the public conversation on Xinjiang, only allowing domestic media to carry pro-government views and banning an array of relevant terms, including Tohti's name, on social media websites.

Tohti's former defence attorney, Wang Yu, said the authorities' handling of his case has violated the country's own criminal procedure laws. "It's clearly illegal what they're doing," she said in a phone interview. Police did not allow Tohti's lawyers to visit him during his first few months in detention, she said, and barred them from making copies of the prosecution's evidence. Urumqi police claimed via their official microblog that Tohti was guilty before the trial began. "Nobody is 'guilty' before a verdict is given," she said. "This clearly sends a misleading signal to the public."

Wang dropped Tohti's case in June, after judicial and public security authorities began putting pressure on her law firm.

Liu, Tohti's current attorney, tweeted on Thursday night that while he applied to have more than 10 defence witnesses testify, judiciary officials did not invite any of them to appear in court.

Seven of Tohti's former students have also been detained, though their current status remains unclear. The parents of one student told the Associated Press outside the courthouse that they had not heard from their son since he was detained.

Tohti's "arrest silenced an important Uighur voice that peacefully promoted harmony and understanding among China's ethnic groups, particularly Uighurs," a US embassy spokesperson told Voice of America. Human Rights Watch called the case a "travesty of justice" that "only serves to deepen perceptions of discrimination against Uighurs".