China sentences four for explosives, bid for 'jihad': report
BEIJING Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:08am EDT
Policemen in riot gear guard a checkpoint on a road near a courthouse where ethnic Uighur academic Ilham Tohti's trial is taking place in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region September 17, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Stringer
(Reuters) - China has sentenced four people to up to 20 years in jail for "plotting terror attacks", state media said, the latest in a wave of rulings as the government accelerates a crackdown on what it says is violence fueled by Islamist militants.
The sentences came as the separate trial of a prominent Muslim academic began in the western region of Xinjiang. Economics professor Ilham Tohti, who has championed the rights of the region's Muslim Uighur people, has been charged with separatism.
The four sentenced to between 10 and 20 years were found guilty of "participating in terrorist organizations, illegally making explosives, offering funds or harboring suspects", the Xinhua news agency said late on Wednesday, in a report on their trial in the southwestern province of Yunnan.
"The court said the gang was influenced by religious extremism and made explosives in Beijing and Yunnan, attempting to launch a 'jihad'," Xinhua said.
Two members of the group were captured trying to cross China's border "to join overseas terrorist groups", the news agency said. It did not say where they were trying to go.
All four defendants, who are Uighur judging by their names, appealed against the rulings, it said.
The decision follows last week's sentencing of three people to death and one to life in prison for a March attack at the Kunming train station in Yunnan in which 31 people died and 141 were injured.
China's leaders have vowed to strike hard at religious militants and separatist groups, which they blame for a series of attacks around China and in Xinjiang, the traditional home of Uighurs.
Shen Deyong, the executive vice president of China's Supreme People's Court urged judges to "speed up trials of terror cases and deliver exemplary penalties", Xinhua reported last week.
Xinjiang, resource-rich and strategically located on the borders of central Asia, is crucial to China's growing energy needs. Analysts say much of the economic development there has benefited majority Han Chinese, stoking resentment among Uighurs.
Exiled Uighur groups and human rights activists say the government's repressive policies in Xinjiang, including controls on Islam, have provoked unrest. Beijing denies that.
Hundreds of people have died in violence in Xinjiang in the past 18 months or so, the government says.
Tohti has rejected charges of separatism he faces at his trial that opened on Wednesday in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi. The trial has drawn international concern over alleged judicial and human rights abuses.
(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Robert Birsel)
China Muslim scholar rejects 'separatism' evidence as widely criticized trial opens
By Michael Martina
BEIJING Wed Sep 17, 2014 7:50am EDT
Police with riot gear guard a checkpoint on a road near a courthouse where ethnic Uighur academic Ilham Tohti's trial is taking place in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region September 17, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Stringer
(Reuters) - A prominent Uighur academic charged with separatism rejected evidence presented by Chinese prosecutors on Wednesday on the first day of a trial that has drawn criticism from international judicial and human rights activists.
Authorities in China's western Xinjiang region say Ilham Tohti, an economics professor who championed the rights of the region's Muslim Uighur people, had promoted its independence, serious allegations which carry the maximum penalty of death.
Tohti's case, which has attracted high-level concern in the United States and the European Union, is seen as an extension of a government crackdown on dissent in Xinjiang, where tension between Uighurs and majority Han Chinese has led to violence.
Prosecutors "essentially finished" presenting evidence against Tohti, including testimony from his former students, his lawyer, Li Fangping said, rejecting it as made under duress.
"Most of the students said Professor Tohti had separatist goals or intentions," Li told Reuters by telephone after the first day in court in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi.
"We believe they weren't trustworthy statements, that they were made under pressure," Li said, adding that Tohti refused to accept the testimony.
Seven of Tohti's students, who had worked on a Uighur-language website he managed, were also detained after his Jan. 15 detention in Beijing. Tohti and his student were sent to Urumqi, despite his lawyers' petitions to have the trial transferred to Beijing where he lived and worked.
Beijing blames a series of violent attack in Xinjiang and around the country on Islamist militants, who it says want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan.
Tohti, who taught at Beijing's Minzu University, which specializes in ethnic minority studies, has said he never associated with any terrorist organization or foreign-based group and has "relied only on pen and paper to diplomatically request" human rights and legal rights for Uighurs.
INTERNATIONAL OUTCRY
Police set-up a two-block cordon around the court in Urumqi and blocked access to reporters and a group of at least nine Western diplomats who sought to observe the trial, one diplomat told Reuters by telephone.
One said authorities had told the diplomats, from countries including the United States, Britain, France and Germany, that they had not applied for access in time, though the trial date was only confirmed by Tohti's lawyers on Friday.
A photo obtained by Reuters of the scene near the courthouse showed police with riot shields and batons setting up six-foot tall poster-like barricades with phrases invoking "openness" and "unity".
"Let the world understand Xinjiang, let Xinjiang go out to the world," one of the posters read.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, reiterated at a regular press briefing that "China's judicial organs will try the relevant case on the basis of facts in accordance with the law".
But Tohti's prosecution prompted an international outcry.
The United States and the European Union have called for Tohti's release, and his lawyers have decried judicial abuses and mistreatment, from his being incommunicado in detention to the withholding of food for more than a week at a time.
"We reiterate our calls for Chinese authorities to release Professor Tohti and the students who were detained with him," a U.S. Embassy spokesperson told Reuters.
"...His arrest silenced an important Uighur voice that peacefully promoted harmony and understanding among China's ethnic groups, particularly Uighurs," the spokesperson said, adding that China needed to differentiate between "peaceful dissent and violent extremism".
China says extremist groups in bordering south and central Asian countries are spurring the violence in Xinjiang and around China, though the government has produced little evidence and experts question the extent of the links.
Activists counter that the government's repressive policies, including controls on Islam, have provoked unrest pitting Uighurs against China's ethnic Han majority.
Tohti has repeatedly denied the charges he faces, which provide for a sentence of 10 years to life in prison, or a maximum punishment of death in extreme cases. The ruling Communist Party tightly controls courts and guilty verdicts in such cases are typically a foregone conclusion.
Human Rights Watch has called the trial a "travesty of justice" and the exiled World Uyghur Congress said his prosecution would only intensify ethnic conflict.
"China hopes that by charging Ilham Tohti it can threaten Uighur intellectuals of conscience to accept and spread China's policies of enslavement," Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the group, said in an emailed statement.
The acid test: Australian journalists must ask what agenda they serve
.. for sure, and without being picky or presumptuous or impertinent, i'm sure most all here would agree 'and American' could be inserted into the heading above ..
At the end of a week of much media hysteria about terrorism, the Senate passed arguably the most significant restraints on press freedom in this country outside of wartime
Katharine Murphy, deputy political editor theguardian.com, Friday 26 September 2014 19.36 AEST Jump to comments (492)
Police and forensic officers investigate the scene of a fatal shooting of a teenager at Endeavour Hills police station in Melbourne. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP
It’s been a big week for the Australian media. We’ve published a picture supposedly of a terrorism suspect that was actually, not. We’ve presented front page stories full of unsourced and misleading or just plain wrong information about a horrific confrontation between a messed up, radicalised, dangerous Melbourne teenager and counter-terrorism police.
At the same time, as the ABC broadcaster Mark Colvin noted on Friday, the Australian Senate passed arguably the most significant restraints on press freedom in this country outside of wartime. Those measures are on their way to becoming law.
Given that parliament seems to be on a path to deliver a bigger surveillance state and less means for whistleblowers to expose its abuses or for journalists to scrutinise it, a bit of push back from the community might have been expected. This is, after all, a pretty important principle: public interest disclosure and press freedom.
Yet nobody, apart from the industry, the Greens and a couple of crossbench parliamentarians stood up for press freedom. The freedom warriors of the Coalition, and the accountability merchants of the ALP, waved the restrictions through without a backward glance. The community as a whole declined to be outraged.
The absence of cavil is a significant rebuke, given it would be obvious to most that the current environment invites more truth telling, not more secrecy.
So let’s stand still for a moment and put these two events together – our appalling collective performance this week, and the profound lack of public support for our institutional role.
I don’t think we can avoid the reality that these two eventualities are connected. There’s a harsh truth sitting before journalists and their employers this weekend, and it’s this: people don’t support us when we very much need our community mandate because, too often, we fail our readers and viewers and listeners. We often hurl some very hard truths at others, in fact we pride ourselves on it. It’s about time we joined a couple of dots in order to hurl a few back at ourselves.
This week we produced headlines, like the Courier Mail did on Wednesday with “Police Kill Abbott Jihadi” complete with front page illustrations suggesting to the reader that the prime minister had survived some sort of direct attack. (Police have been saying for days they have no evidence of a specific threat to Abbott, who was, of course, in a different city, in a building surrounded by armed police, before leaving for New York.) Reckless, and misleading.
In multi-ethnic Sydney, at a time of heightened security risks, huge stakes and community tensions, the Daily Telegraph screamed “Jihad Joey” at its readers on Thursday. A front page story reported that the “death cult disciple” Abdul Numan Haider had been “tracking” the prime minister before his “frenzied knife attack”.
It’s still not entirely clear if that actually happened, or what “tracking the prime minister” might actually mean in a connected age where we are all invited to #askTony on Twitter or like Tony on Facebook; where any of us can Google “where is Tony Abbott” and pull up a string of references. Noting this fact is not a bleeding heart exoneration of a radicalised kid troubling enough to be the subject of police interest, and out of control enough to stab two police officers – it’s just a simple statement of the obvious.
A number of reports this week had more in common with a graphic novel or a Marvel comic than anything that actually rang true in the real world. Compounding the beat-ups and the breathlessness, we’ve seen the return of “men of Middle Eastern appearance” doing nefarious things. It should be pointed out that some of the things they were claimed to be “doing” have later been retracted.
“It is understood” was also ubiquitous. We all periodically have to use anonymous sources, and sometimes that process brings us closer to enlightenment than to obfuscation. But we all know that something being “understood” is quite different from it being “known.” And so it came to pass. Some things that were “understood” on front pages were later more complex than they seemed. But the myths, once stated, are difficult to retract.
So the sum of the week was mistakes, sensationalism, stereotyping and the amplification of various “understandings” supplied by Lord knows who. Most reporting came from inside the tent of officialdom, projecting thunderously out. Right now, the times require prompt evacuation. We need to step outside the tent in order to have a good hard look in.
Any objective look at the week would present a report card that said: running too fast, filing too much, revealing too little. I’m certainly not putting myself above it. I’m not positioning myself as better and possessed by more clarity and steadiness and insight and truth-telling powers than anyone else. Truth is I’m flat out keeping my feet and my wits most days too. All of us are a heartbeat away from a career ending stuff-up – that’s the business.
But what I am saying is: wake the hell up. I have never been more resolved, in 18 years of practising journalism, of the absolute importance of our function in a democracy. I have never been more sure that the opportunity cost associated with doing this job is, actually, worth it.
I believe we matter. I know I’m not alone in that belief. Yet we act as though we don’t matter, and facts don’t matter, and truth doesn’t matter. Call this Dispatch this particular weekend a love letter to my profession, and an outpouring of grief at its failings.
In Australia right now, there is a complex story to be told. It’s a story with a geopolitical dimension and a local one. This story involves real people. How we choose to frame and tell the story has real consequences for real people – for neighbours living alongside neighbours, for the police and intelligence agencies working around the clock to keep communities safe, and for the politicians who must lead at this moment and make critical decisions about community interest and national interest.
The story we are telling right now is not just a bunch of disconnected fragments to feed the beast and flog a few newspapers. The real story here is whether or not Australia can come through a specific challenge to the fundamental notion of ourselves as a united, vibrant diverse community which has largely avoided ethnic and religious violence: whether we will affirm these characteristics or fall into disputation and rancour.
So as well as playing cops and robbers, we might have to start interrogating other valid lines of inquiry. A couple of thoughts. Have we done enough as a society to invest in our cohesion and mutual understanding? Is our ridiculously paranoid and hostile disposition to unauthorised boat arrivals sending a broader negative message to non-Anglo communities about our true feelings about ethnic diversity?
Are police doing their job out in the suburbs in our cities in an even-handed way? Is national politics helping or harming the current conditions? Are the legal changes being proposed in Canberra justified given the threats – or is this just cynical over-reach? Will going to war in Iraq make us safer, or make the domestic climate more dangerous?
We are, actually, capable of telling this story. It’s a story which demands the best Australian journalism can provide. But we need to take a moment to be clear about what the responsibility of telling it actually requires.
It requires us to seek truth, whether the truth is ugly and discomfiting or whether it is reassuring and soothing. It requires us to ask questions – a lot of questions – of very powerful people, without fear or favour.
It requires us to take the time to get things right rather than assuming in cavalier fashion that an error in the internet age is never wrong for long. And it involves taking steps to ensure we don’t inflame the tinderbox: truth is not inflammatory, but dog whistling and ethnic stereotyping certainly are.
To put it simply, this story requires what great journalism always requires: that no agenda is served other than the interests of the readers. If we are asking the state to be accountable and not abuse its power and position, then best we hold ourselves to the same standard.
If we meet this basic test, then perhaps we’ll be worth defending.
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