Definitely Not Gitmo

Chinese authorities in the far-west city of Urumqi today executed an ethnic Uyghur man for allegedly attempting to “split the [Chinese] motherland.

“The execution was carried out at 9 a.m.,” Ismail Semed’s widow, Buhejer, told RFA’s Uyghur service. “They gave his body to us at the cemetery. Some of his relatives and friends joined us. When the body was transferred to us at the cemetery I saw only one bullet hole in his heart.

Semed, a Uyghur political activist deported to China from Pakistan in 2003, was sentenced to death Oct. 31, 2005, by the Urumqi City Intermediate People’s Court for “attempting to split the motherland” and “possessing firearms and explosives,” according to Uyghur sources.  [Radio Free Asia]

I’m not about to launch into a condemnation of China, because I lack sufficient information to judge the most relevant fact — whether this man was in fact a terrorist.  I believe that any government has a right to carry out any sentence, including the death sentence, against a person a competent tribunal convicts of targeting noncombatants.  I also believe that people denied any democratic, nonviolent means of dissent have a right to resist the state, provided they do not target noncombatants and take all reasonable precautions to avoid harming them.  Those principles may be in some tension here.  Maybe some occasional tension of that kind is a fact of modern life.

In this particular case, color me dubious.  I don’t accept the veracity of ChiCom government accusations as fact.  It sounds like the ChiCom police  beat the confessions out of the witnesses against Semed, and then shot them, too.  I’m especially doubtful that the  East Turkestan Information Center, among the groups listed as “terrorist” by China, is a really a terrorist organization.  The organization  operates openly in Washington, D.C. and  eschews violence.   The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is a different matter.  Some of its members  were captured in Afghanistan  shortly after 9/11, where they were training in AQ camps.  I presume that the gentle  jaws of the  Taliban weren’t cradling many aspiring pro-democracy activists.

Instead, I just wanted to note that this execution attracted little or no  attention from the Human Rights Industry, the Soft Reich (a/k/a the European Union), the media, or the U.N.  What attention it does  receive will be solely over China’s use of the death penalty, meaning that these parties have abandoned all moral distinctions between political dissidents, rest stop serial killers, and school bus bombers.

Parting irony:   The U.S. Army captured a number of those Chinese Uygurs who were either  fighting on the side of al-Qaeda, or who just “happened” to be in AQ camps when the Northern Alliance rolled them up.  Eventually, the Army sorted out the terrorists from the strap-hangers.  It wanted to release the latter.  We realized, however, that if we sent them back to China, they would meet the same fate as Ismail Semed.   After many months of  head-scratching,  they were all sent to Albania.  As a direct result of our compliance with the Convention Against Torture, we were stuck feeding these people and fending off legal challenges to their detention.  Some of those challenges  were based on intentionally spurious accusations  of torture, including a few that sound a lot like things I actually paid money for in my misspent youth (but not the blood thing — that would be icky).  They also delayed the very day in court that so many have (rightly) said these detainees ought to have.  Yet The Cause will be those who are still held in Gitmo, not those who  died in front of  ChiCom firing squads.