CHINESE LECTURER SENTENCED TO LIFE FOR 'SEPARATISM'

PROF. ILHAM TOHTI

A university professor who has become the most visible advocate of peaceful resistance by ethnic Uighurs to Chinese government policies was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday after being found guilty of separatism by a court in the western region of Xinjiang.

Ilham Tohti was convicted after a two-day trialin Urumqi, the regional capital, that ended last Wednesday. He was taken by the police last January from his home in Beijing, where he teaches economics at Minzu University, and brought to Xinjiang, where he was charged.

His punishment is the harshest that Chinese courts have imposed on a political dissident in recent years.

“It’s not just! It’s not just!” he yelled as police officers dragged him from the courtroom Tuesday, his lawyer, Li Fangping, said.

His wife, Guzelnur, who along with their two sons had not seen Mr. Tohti in eight months until the trial started last week, wailed when the verdict was announced.

Mr. Tohti, 44, was charged with organizing and leading a separatist group, Mr. Li said in a telephone interview. As evidence, prosecutors presented material representing Mr. Tohti’s views on Uighur identity and China’s ethnic policies, much of it drawn from his classroom teachings and the website he ran from late 2005 to 2008, Uighur Online.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Tohti had “internationalized” the Uighur issue by giving interviews to foreign reporters and had translated foreign articles and essays about Xinjiang to post on Uighur Online.Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, said in an English-language report Tuesday that the ruling declared that Mr. Tohti had “bewitched and coerced young ethnic students” into working on his website and that he had “built a criminal syndicate. Officials in Xinjiang are grappling with a surge in violence between the mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs and the Han, the dominant ethnic group in China. 

Communist Party leaders have long said that they are in a battle to stamp out a religious terrorist insurgency in Xinjiang.But foreign scholars, diplomats and human rights advocates denounce China’s hard-line policies against the Uighurs, and say the harsh measures that China has taken against moderates like Mr. Tohti will only lead to further radicalization of Uighurs and a rise in violence.“He showed great spirit in court,” Mr. Li said. “He gave an eloquent defense to every accusation. He maintained his innocence from the beginning to the end.”Maya Wang, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said she could not recall any ethnic Han advocates or dissidents receiving a life sentence in recent years. But she said the authorities usually treat dissent by Uighurs much more harshly.

A Uighur radio journalist, Memetjan Abdulla, was sentenced to life in prison in 2010.