Rural East Turkistan to be “focus” of
family planning policies
Posted on February 15, 2006
Concerns have again been raised
that Uyghurs in East Turkistan are
being made to bear the brunt of
China’s “one-child” policies in order
to accommodate the growing
number of migrants from mainland
China.
For Immediate Release
February 15, 2006, 4:30 p.m. EST
Contact: Uyghur Human Rights Project, 1 (202) 349 1496
(Washington, D.C., February 15, 2006.) Concerns have again been raised that Uyghurs in East Turkistan are being made to bear the brunt of China’s “one-child” policies in order to accommodate the growing number of migrants from mainland China.
A senior communist official stated on Monday, February 13 that even though the region’s natural population growth rate has been kept within targets, and even though East Turkistan has the fastest population growth in the entire PRC – due to large-scale in-migration from mainland China – the regional government still plans to “focus population and family planning work in the agricultural and pastoral areas”.
Nur Bakri [Ch: Nu’er Baikeli], Deputy Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – as East Turkistan is referred to in the PRC – claimed in a speech to a population and family planning forum in the regional capital Urumchi that there was a “relatively high” number of births in agricultural and pastoral areas. He added that births in East Turkistan are “imbalanced”, meaning there are proportionally more births in rural areas than in urban areas.
“This is extremely bad news for the Uyghur people – Uyghur women in particular – living in rural East Turkistan,” said Rebiya Kadeer, a former prisoner of conscience now based in Washington, DC and the founder of her own organization, the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation (IUHRDF). “In my experience, the rural areas have already been ‘targeted’ by the policy. To claim that the policy is ‘imbalanced’, that it hasn’t been systematic in the rural areas, just is not true. And now an entire second generation of women are going to be targeted more than their mothers – this is very bad news for the Uyghur people.”
Family planning regulations have been the cause of massive human rights violations throughout all of the PRC since their introduction in 1980. A constant feature of their implementation has been persistent and ongoing reports of coerced and forced abortions and sterilizations.
The regulations were introduced into East Turkistan in late 1988, with a dispensation that Uyghurs and other ethnic groups could generally have more than one child. According to official estimates, family planning regulations in the region prevented 3 million births between 1996 and 2000 – an alarmingly high figure when officially, the Uyghur population of East Turkistan was less than 8 million people.
During the same period – 1996-2000 – it was also reported that 58% of Uyghur women of childbearing age were no longer able to give birth. This is thought to be mainly due to the prevalence of sterilizations, the use – voluntary or otherwise – of intra-uterine devices (IUDs), as well as the result of botched operative procedures, including IUD insertions and abortions.
“These controls – these denials of reproductive rights – are being imposed at a time when the Chinese government is planning rapid urbanization in East Turkistan, which is going to ratchet up the overall population of East Turkistan,” said Nury Turkel, Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in Washington, DC.
Currently, 34% of East Turkistan’s population is registered as urban; government development strategies foresee this rising to 42% by 2010, and 50% by 2020, when it is expected the total registered population of East Turkistan will be over 25 million people.
The Uyghur people, currently the ethnic majority although not an absolute majority in East Turkistan, will by then account for possibly less than a quarter of East Turkistan’s population.
“The Uyghur people have been steadily excluded and marginalized in most of East Turkistan’s towns and cities,” continued Mr Turkel. “Whether the thinking now is about preserving rural resources, such as water, or whether it’s just the same old official discrimination against the Uyghur people, the result is the same: the Uyghur people are being brushed aside, and made to pay the price for Chinese development in East Turkistan with our lives and with our future.”
Nur Bakri is himself an ethnic Uyghur who is known to be a strong advocate of universalizing the Chinese language in Uyghurs’ education at all levels. A former mayor of Urumchi City, he is regarded with considerable disdain by Uyghurs both in East Turkistan and in exile. As with the majority of Uyghurs to have attained senior positions in the regional administration, Bakri is referred to by many Uyghurs and other non-Han peoples in East Turkistan as a ‘collaborator’ and is disparagingly known as ‘Wang Bakri’ – he has been given a Chinese family name.
Only a select few Uyghurs attain senior political or administrative positions in East Turkistan – official statistics showing apparently high proportions of ethnic cadres do not reflect the degrees of actual authority held by the indigenous ethnic populations in East Turkistan. For those Uyghurs who do attain senior posts, they are often tasked with seeing through policies and practices deeply unpopular with the Uyghur people – family planning regulations being a prime example – making it extremely unlikely that an ethnic Uyghur government official could build a base of popular Uyghur support.