Meeting Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer was a personal ambition for Hugh Pope ever since he visited Xinjiang in 1999, he writes in News from Tartary. He made the connection following a recent discussion at the National Endowment of Democracy which, he notes, “bravely and rightly gives Mrs Kadeer a helping hand, despite great pressure from China.”
Kadeer stresses the non-violent nature of the Uyghur cause. Her goal is to win the same status enjoyed by the Dalai Lama,” he observes. “as a one-woman human force field, working the world” from her base in Washington.
The Uyghurs, he notes:
….can only be included in the broadest of all possible definitions of the Middle East, since they are a distant Turkic-speaking Muslim people in Central Asia. Their claim to importance is that they are half the population of Xinjiang, itself one-sixth of China’s territory. The problem is that their 8 million population is a drop in the ocean of 1.3 billion Chinese. They are being crushed by fate, history, overwhelming immigration by ethnic Han Chinese and an extraordinarily strict and illiberal approach by Beijing, about which I wrote at length in Sons of the Conquerors.
[...] clout, and its ability to resist international pressure over its human rights abuses, writes Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur American [...]