Protests that have taken place around the world during the first anniversary of the arrest of the businesswoman and social activist Rebiya Kadeer, suggest that the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang may at last have found a figure of sufficient stature to give their cause the international recognition it deserves. Rebiya Kadeer was arrested in August 1999 when she was travelling to meet visiting United States Congressional staff members in Urumchi, the regional capital of Xinjiang. At her trial on March 9, 2000 in Urumchi, she was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for passing on classified information to foreigners. Rebiya Kadeer was found guilty of mailing local newspapers, freely available but which give detailed information on local problems, to her husband Sidik Rouzi, an academic who supported Uyghur independence from China, and left Xinjiang in 1996 for the United States where he began a career as a journalist.

Rebiya Kadeer became an iconic figure in the Xinjiang of the "reform and opening era" beginning in 1978-85. Xinjiang, in northwestern China, was granted limited autonomy by the government of the People’s Republic of China in 1955 and named the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. As an ethnic Uyghur, a mother and grandmother, as well as a successful business women, Rebiya Kadeer was adopted as a model by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She served from 1993 until 1998 on the Xinjiang branch of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee. She had progressed from laundress to millionaire businesswoman and had interests in the retail trade, including a seven-story popular department store in Urumchi, cross-border trade with Kazakhstan and a hotel. In 1997, she started a movement to encourage Uyghur women to develop small businesses as a way out of poverty. 

Rebiya Kadeer is the ideal type of Uyghur leader that the communist Chinese government has sought to foster in Xinjiang. But the region is also known to the local Turkic speaking population as Eastern Turkistan and many Uyghurs look back with nostalgia to the independent republic that existed in the northwest of Xinjiang from 1944-49. This is particularly, recently as a series of disturbances occurred in Xinjiang culminating in an insurrection during February 1997 in Yining. Many local Uyghurs were killed and injured and a campaign of mass arrests ensued. The police and military sought out underground separatist organizations, unregistered mosques and madrasas (Quranic schools), which were suspected of giving support to the separatists, were closed down.

The imprisonment of Rebiya Kadeer has focused world opinion on Xinjiang for the first time in decades. It will no longer be possible for the Xinjiang question to be hidden away. Questions have been asked about the Uyghurs in the United States Congress and in the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom and this will finally give them the high international profile that their cause deserves. The Chinese authorities complain that separatists within Xinjiang are being supported by a variety of foreign forces, including the United States of America and what were described as reactionary Islamic organizations, often loosely and inaccurately referred to as Wahabbis, in the Middle East and Central Asia. This has resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic approach, as not only was Beijing trying to build bridges with the major states in the Middle East and Central Asia, it was also encouraging Xinjiang to trade across the border with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Dr. Michael Dillon is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Durham, Elvet Hill in Durham, United Kingdom.