Monday, December 21, 2009

The Uighurs Try To Flee China Despotism and Fail


The Uighurs are a minority group in China who left to seek refuge in Cambodia. Cambodia betrayed these 20 people and returned them to China because they feared losing Chinese aid and investments. But doing the right thing is always right isn't it...The Uighurs have nowhere to go. America should accept them as we have accepted other people from around the world. This would show that we are still the home of oppressed and downtrodden and that we stand for FREEDOM!

On Saturday night under cover of darkness, a special Chinese plane departed from the military section of the Phnom Penh airport carrying 20 Uighur asylum seekers. For this group of men, women and children, this was the end of their failed effort to seek freedom from the Chinese regime.

Cambodia's decision to deport the asylum seekers, who were in the process of applying for refugee status at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is a reminder that Beijing's oppression of the Uighurs does not stop at China's borders. The Uighurs are a predominantly Turkic, Muslim people who live in East Turkestan (also knows as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region). For decades they have been the victims of systemic human-rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese government...

...Beijing leaned hard on Phnom Penh to secure the deportation of these Uighurs, because once free they would no doubt contradict the official version of the events of July 5, when security forces cracked down violently on Uighur protestors and unrest spread through the city of Urumqi...

...The Cambodian government must be held accountable for its act of complicity with the Chinese government. Cambodia is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, but turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the U.S. and other democratic countries on behalf of these Uighur asylum seekers. Phnom Penh's decision was no doubt influenced by enormous Chinese pressure, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and a reported $1 billion in foreign direct investment... Read "The Long Arm of China".

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