A day after Rep. Dana Rohrabacher sent a blistering letter urging President Barack Obama “to unambiguously condemn the Communist Chinese
government's violent crackdown on peaceful Uyghur protests in the
Xinjiang province of China,” Radio Free Asia reports that an outspoken Uyghur economist has gone silent and his whereabouts are unknown after police summoned him from his Beijing home.
“Police
have been watching my home for two days now,” Ilham Tohti, an economics
professor at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing, said Tuesday in a
telephone interview, two days after deadly clashes in the northwestern city of
Urumqi killed at least 156 people. “They are calling me now, and I have to go. I may be out of touch for some
time.”
The 40-year-old also told RFA's Uyghur service, “I wasn't involved in anything, but I am not safe. The police are
calling me.” He then hung up. Subsequent phone calls rang
unanswered.
Tohti's blog, Uyghur Online, had specifically been targeted in a speech
Sunday by the governor of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), Nur Bekri, as
an instigator of the clashes. Tohti's last blog entry, published through a U.S. server at 10:52 a.m.
Beijing time on Tuesday and now blocked inside China, reads: “As the editor of Uyghur Online, I want only to tell Nur Bekri, 'You
are right, everything you say is right, because you will decide everything. I
have already offended too many powerful people, including yourself and others
whom I don't want to and don't dare to offend. But right or wrong,
there will be justice.”
That same day, Rohrabacher posted on his congressional website a press release detailing the contest of his letter to Obama.
Passages follow . . .
]
During our holiday season as we
celebrated the Fourth of July, there have been alarming reports of
violence against, and killings of, hundreds of Uighurs. If indeed there
has been a massacre of Uyghurs, I would hope that you demand to know
who is responsible…
This is a case that calls out
for unambiguous condemnation on the part of the United States. Your
words will make a difference one way or the other and will be
remembered.
Rohrabacher says he also sent a joint letter
with Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA) to Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton asking for “strong condemnation” of the Chinese government's violent actions and investigation into who is
responsible for ordering the attacks.
Delahunt is the chairman and Rohrabacher the vice chairman of the House International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight
Subcommittee, which recently held a series of hearings on the persecution of
Uyghurs in China and the wrongful detention of 22 Uyghurs at
Guantanamo Bay. During testimony, the subcommittee learned that Chinese
intelligence officers were granted permission by the Bush administration to
interrogate Uyghur detainees during a week-long visit to Guantanamo
Bay, despite the fact that China has been engaged in systematic
oppression and violence against the Uyghurs in their native Xinjiang
province.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.