India stops Chinese dissident from visiting country
April 25, 2016, 6:05 am

New Delhi has cancelled a visa for Isa Dolkun, who was invited by by Initiatives for China, a US-based organisation led by a former dissident, Yang Jianli. Dolkun is branded as a “terrorist” by China [Xinhua]

Earlier last week China said Isa is a “terrorist” on Interpol’s Red Corner and it is the obligation of all countries to bring him to justice.

Indian Ministry of Home Affairs officials were quoted by local media reports confirming the visa for Isa, wanted by Chinese police, has been cancelled.

Isa, currently in Germany, had been invited to a conference being organised by the US-based ‘Initiatives for China’ led by a former Chinese dissident, Yang Jianli.

“What I want to point out is that Dolkun is a terrorist in red notice of the Interpol and Chinese police. Bringing him to justice is due obligation of relevant countries,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on Thursday in Beijing.

The Chinese government says it faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists in energy-rich Xinjiang, which sits strategically on the borders of Central Asia and where hundreds have died in violence in recent years.

China’s violence-prone western region of Xinjiang needs to make more efforts at development in its ethnic Uyghur heartland to ensure young people there have “something to do and money to earn”, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told top officials last month.

Beijing has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction over the international community’s sluggish response in treating Xinjiang violence as “terrorism”.

In May 2014, five suicide bombers carried out a deadly attack which killed 31 people in Urumqi, the capital of China’s restive Xinjiang region.

The US had, up until this attack, refrained from branding the Uyghur separatists in Xinjiang as “terrorists”.

China’s fourth-ranked leader, Yu Zhengsheng, called southern Xinjiang the “main battle ground in the anti-separatist struggle” during a visit last September.

At least 50 people died in September at a coalmine in Xinjiang at the hands of knife-wielding Uyghur separatists, US-based Radio Free Asia had reported.

Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Li has said companies which “suit actual local conditions and are good for the environment” needed to be “guided” to set up in the Uyghur-dominated parts of Xinjiang so that the youth could be a part of China’s economic prowess.

“Let the people, especially the young, have something to do and money to earn,” he said.

Isa Dolkun, who has now been denied an Indian visa, is a leader of the World Uyghur Congress.

The main Uyghur groups abroad are the separatist East Turkestan Liberation Movement, founded in Turkey in the late 1990s, and the World Uyghur Congress, which was set up in Germany in 2004.

TBP