China executes Muslim ‘extremist’

Jane Macartney in Beijing

China has executed a Muslim activist for attempting “to split the motherland” and possessing firearms and explosives.

The death by firing squad of Ismail Semed was criticised by human rights groups, who claimed that there was insufficient evidence to justify the sentence.

Semed, an ethnic Uighur, was deported from Pakistan in 2003 and convicted two years later. During his trial he said that he had been forced to sign a confession. He was executed on Thursday in Urumqi, capital of the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang, northwest China.

Semed’s wife, Buhejer, told Radio Free Asia that she had been informed only on Monday that her husband was to be executed and she was allowed to see him briefly that day.

She said: “It was only for ten minutes, we didn’t have too much time to talk . . . Previously, he had said his leg hurt, and his stomach hurt, and other parts of his body hurt, and that he needed medicine.” He told her to take care of their son and daughter and to make sure they received a good education.

She said: “When the body was transferred to us at the cemetery I saw only one bullet hole, in his heart.”

The charge of attempting to split China stemmed from the allegation that Semed was a founding member of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, outlawed by Beijing as a terrorist group. Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs account for 8 million of the 19 million people in Xinjiang and have taken part in several uprisings against Chinese rule.

Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: “The death penalty was widely disproportionate to the alleged crimes . . . his trial did not meet minimum requirements of fairness and due process. We don’t think there was sufficient evidence to condemn him.”

The exile group, the World Uighur Congress, also said the prosecution had presented no credible evidence for a conviction. It said: “His trial, like most Uighur political prisoners’ trials, was not fair.”

China has waged a campaign in recent years against what it says are violent separatists and Islamic extremists attempting to set up an independent “East Turkestan” in Xinjiang, which shares a border with Afghan-istan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia.

Semed had previously served two prison sentences for taking part in an uprising in 1990 in the town of Baren in which 22 people were killed. Uighurs said the clash was instigated by the Government’s closing of a mosque, while Chinese police said locals were trying to establish an Eastern Turkistan republic. He fled to Pakistan after a Chinese government crack-down in 1997 that was prompted by violent protests in Yining, near the Kazakhstan border.

Two other Uighurs who testified against Semed were also executed.

The courts in Urumqi are currently considering the case of another Uighur activist accused of terrorism. Hussayin Celil fled China in the 1990s and travelled last year to Uzbekistan, where he was detained and then extradited to China on terrorism charges.

Divided past

Xinjiang — or East Turkestan — has been part of China periodically, with the latest “occupation”, as many of the Uighurs see it, beginning in the 18th century. The Uighurs claim that thousands of years of history separate them from China

Much of their culture is shared with the nearby Turkic nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan — whom they refer to as West Turkestan

They developed their own script, before adopting Arabic after conversion to Islam in the 10th century

For a brief period in the early 20th century parts of the region reportedly declared independence

In 1949 Uighars comprised 96 per cent of the Xinjiang population. They are now outnumbered by the Chinese Source