MIT Event (for all interested)

MIT Event: Rhetoric and Repression of Uyghur Muslims in Western China

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The Muslim Uyghur people are victims to what Human Rights Watch has identified as a "wholesale assault" on their faith and cultural identity by the Chinese state.

Fearful of separatist tendencies in the majority Muslim population in its westernmost province, China has instituted a systematic repression that has failed to discriminate between legitimate threats to state security and peaceful religious practice and tradition. After September 11, China has used blanket accusations of terrorism to justify repressive policies that suppress any Islamic ideology that does not, according to a PRC internal document, "uphold the Marxist point of view of religion and use the yardstick of the Party's."

Rebiya Kadeer has been called the spiritual mother of the Uyghur people. A brilliant businesswoman, she rose from poverty to become China's millionaire poster child. However, she quickly fell out of the government's favor when she began to demand a change in its policies. She was arrested in 1999 for sending newspaper articles to her husband in the United States, and spent her next two years in solitary confinement, witnessing the brutal torture of her fellow prisoners. Ms. Kadeer was released to America in 2005 and currently resides in Washington, D.C., where she serves as president of the Uyghur American Association and the World Uyghur Congress. Ms. Kadeer was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Open to: the general public
Cost: Free
Sponsor(s): MIT Model United Nations, Forum on American Progress , Program on Human Rights & Justice, Muslim students' Association, MIT Public Service Center, Amnesty International
For more information, contact:
uyghur@mit.edu

http://uyghuramerican.org/articles/920/1/MIT-Event-Rhetoric-and-Repression-of-Uyghur-Muslims-in-Western-China/index.html