Rebiya Kadeer visits Sydney to raise awareness for the Uyghurs of East Turkestan and trying to use this year's Beijing Olympics to turn attention to China's human rights record.

Below is an article written by Hamish McDonald published by The Sydney Morning Herald:

As a career woman, Rebiya Kadeer once seemed to have it all: a successful trading store that made her the 11-richest business person in China, and no less than 11 children.

Now she is in exile after six years' solitary imprisonment, her assets are confiscated, and two of her sons are serving long jail terms in what appear to be reprisals against her.

Since being released in 2005 and allowed to travel to the United States, Mrs Kadeer, 60, has become the best-known voice of the Uighurs, the racially and culturally Turkic people of China's Xinjiang region, a remote land of high mountains and deserts abutting Central Asia.

In Sydney this week [21 February 2008] on a visit to raise awareness, Mrs Kadeer joins the Dalai Lama, the filmmaker Steven Spielberg and others in trying to use this year's Beijing Olympics to turn attention to China's human rights record.

Briefly independent as East Turkestan during China's civil war period, the Uighurs were brought back into Beijing's fold by the People's Liberation Army in 1949, their lands flooded with Han Chinese soldier-settlers, and their deserts used as a nuclear testing ground. Despite formal autonomy, Xinjiang remains under the tight control of a Communist Party secretary from Beijing, and the 8 million Uighurs are thought to be outnumbered by Han settlers among the region's 20 million people.

Mrs Kadeer paints a picture of a people demoralised by Chinese pressure on their culture and religion, resulting in soaring crime rates, drug use and HIV infections.

Community leaders, academic figures and Muslim imams have been jailed and removed from their positions - including her husband, Sidike Rouzi, 65, a professor of Uighur literature, who spent 11 years in jail before preceding her into exile.

Children are forbidden to enter mosques, and parents risk jail for "illegal religious activity" if they try to teach their children about Islam. Sweeps of villages carry out forced abortions on Uighur women, despite such ethnic minorities being officially excluded from the one-child policy, she said.

"The Chinese Government's intention is that by attacking our ethnic identity - our religious beliefs, our culture, our language and script - by removing these, we would no longer exist as a people," she said yesterday. "It's a form of cultural genocide."

Mrs Kadeer, left behind to run her department store in Urumqi, was arrested in 1999 and jailed for sending "state secrets" to foreigners - the only evidence being she had mailed newspaper clippings to her husband. She was released ostensibly on medical grounds just before a visit by the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in March 2005, and allowed to leave China.

"The war on terror has been a golden opportunity for the Chinese Government to crack down on all kinds of Uighur activity," she says. Raids on alleged "terrorists" continue, including one on January 27 in which police acknowledge they killed two men.

China is aided by friendly governments that hand over Uighur suspects blamed for attacks on Chinese diplomats. One Uighur with Australian citizenship, Noorpolat Abdullah, is serving a 15-year jail term for alleged terrorism in Kazakhstan. But Mrs Kadeer says East Turkestan terrorism is a creation of Chinese security.

In Australia she hopes to raise awareness of the Uighur situation in meetings with MPs, officials and community groups.

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, will not meet Mrs Kadeer, but officials of his department will. The Government has rejected Chinese objections to her visit.

Now she heads the World Uighur Congress, an exile body pressing for self-determination, and she is used to facing down threats that included police beatings of three of her children while she listened on a mobile telephone. One son has been jailed for seven years for alleged tax evasion, another for nine years for subversion.

"The war on terror has been a golden opportunity for the Chinese Government to crack down on all kinds of Uighur activity," she says. Raids on alleged "terrorists" continue, including one on January 27 in which police acknowledge they killed two men.

China is aided by friendly governments that hand over Uighur suspects blamed for attacks on Chinese diplomats. One Uighur with Australian citizenship, Noorpolat Abdullah, is serving a 15-year jail term for alleged terrorism in Kazakhstan. But Mrs Kadeer says East Turkestan terrorism is a creation of Chinese security.

In Australia she hopes to raise awareness of the Uighur situation in meetings with MPs, officials and community groups.

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, will not meet Mrs Kadeer, but officials of his department will. The Government has rejected Chinese objections to her visit.