Uighur Groups Rally Across Cities Over Crackdown

Members of the Uighur Muslim ethnic group held demonstrations in cities around the world to protest a sweeping Chinese surveillance and security campaign that has sent thousands of their people into detention and political indoctrination centres.

Overseas Uighur activists said they organised demonstrations in 14 countries in total, including the US, Australia and Turkey.

More than a hundred Uighur protesters gathered at a plaza near the United Nations in New York to call on the body to protect their culture against Chinese government efforts to assimilate the Turkic-speaking people.

Elsewhere, hundreds of Uighur women on Istanbul's Istiklal Street and in front of Sydney Town Hall chanted and waved blue flags, the separatist symbol for a proposed independent state called East Turkistan.

China has rolled out one of the world's most aggressive policing programs in the Uighurs' homeland of Xinjiang, a vast region in the country's northwest. Mainland officials say the crackdown is necessary to stamp out a decades-long separatist movement and, more recently, Islamic extremism seeping into the region.

"The Chinese government is using the war against terrorism very effectively, using that to portray the Uighur as a terrorist," said Rushan Abbas, the organiser of the New York protest who showed up with her children. "In actuality, the Chinese government is the one who's acting the terrorist against the Uighur."

Many overseas Uighurs say that their relatives in China have been sent to an extrajudicial network of political indoctrination centres for months at a time without formal charges or for reasons unrelated to separatist activity – such as communicating with relatives abroad. (AFP)