Draconian repression in East Turkestan

In far western China, the Uighur (a Turkic people) have been waging a decades-long struggle to establish the republic of East Turkestan. Just in the past few years there have been more than 130 uprisings, according to Uighur sources. The Chinese have responded with a draconian campaign of terror to wipe out Uighur nationalism. Daily arrests and public executions are part of normal' life in the bazaars of the Silk Route today. Mass executions of over fifty prisoners at a time have been reported.

Besides the invariable human rights abuses, the "one-child policy", large-scale population transfer of Chinese people to East Turkestan, and Chinese racism, the Uighurs protest China's nuclear tests in the region, which they claim has been the cause of serious and unexplained health problems in Uighur society. China has conducted 46 nuclear tests so far, and all of them in Xinjiang (the Chinese name for East Turkestan). One secret nuclear base located in the area of Malan, is only six miles away from a residential area where ethnic Uighur and Mongols live. The director of the local hospital told journalists from Taiwan that many local residents suffered from hair loss and various skin diseases. The number of patients found having pathological changes in their blood was five or six times that of the other areas. The number of children and women with leukaemia and throat cancer was also unusually high. The number of premature births and deformed babies had also increased dramatically since the construction of the nuclear base.

China's bacteriological weapons laboratories and testing sites are also located in Xinjiang. Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bacteriological weapons expert has reported the discovery of two rare strains of Ebola and Marburg in Xinjiang, which doctors had never even seen in Africa. China began experimenting with bacteriological weapons as early as the 1980s. During the first years of the 80s, epidemics occurred continuously in South Xinjiang and caused many deaths. Nobody knew the names of the epidemics, so they were identified as "No.1 disease, "No.2 disease" and so on, according to the year the disease struck. In the end, people simply dubbed the epidemics "unknown illnesses."

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