Rebiya Kadeer – Dragon Fighter

by Ernie Diaz

Of her childhood in the Heavenly Mountains, she has nothing but a story her father told her, a fable she would remember and come to embody.

“One day, an ant met a bird.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the bird.

‘I’m going to the West,’ replied the ant, and kept moving.

‘How can you do that? There are high mountains and turbulent rivers along the way.’

‘I can climb over the mountains and swim through the rivers.’

‘But you’ll certainly be killed.’

‘Even if a large wave should come along, I can find a piece of wood and cling to it,’ replied the ant, and kept walking.

Many years later, the same bird was building a nest in a tree, far away to the West. Suddenly, an army of ants climbed into the tree and began to dismantle the nest. The poor bird was about to fly off in defeat when one of the ants spoke to him.

‘Hello, my friend. You don’t need to fly away. I’ll tell my people to leave your nest alone.’

The bird was astonished. ‘Who are you? How do you know me?’

‘Don’t you remember me from long ago, far away in the East, when we spoke to each other?’

Filled with admiration for the ant, the bird replied, ‘Yes , I do remember. And now you’ve taught me that we each have the power to unlock the secrets of the world, as long as we have courage and self-confidence.’” Her father would add, “No hurdle is insurmountable. No goal is too lofty.”

Rebiya Kadeer’s life resembles a fable, one which has already fulfilled her father’s, but whose own moral is still to be revealed. A refugee child, then an abused housewife, she built a business empire, becoming one of China’s wealthiest people. After joining the National People’s Congress, she openly criticized the government’s policies in Xinjiang, leading to her imprisonment and exile in America where she lives today.

Kadeer was five years old, but can still recall leaving her home soon after the arrival of the Chinese First Field Army in 1951. Fleeing from new authorities was old hat to her family and other Uyghurs, an ancient branch of Turkish people who have always been pushed about their long-contested homeland between Central Asia and Western China.

Kadeer’s early life mirrored the tragedies that befell many Chinese, and other women, worldwide. Married off young to another youngster, the relationship soon grew abusive. For sustenance, she washed clothes by hand, a tiny enterprise that eaked into a clothes-selling operation. But trying to get rich was still taboo in those days, and both she and her husband were purged as anti-revolutionary speculators during the Cultural Revolution. A divorce proved the sole silver lining to those dark and cloudy days.

Officially rehabilitated, Kadeer opened a Laundromat in 1976. Most of us view earning a living as our life’s work, but Kadeer had her mind set on a mythical place, with many rivers and mountains to cross in between. She sought out, wooed, and finally married a Uyghur professor, by avocation a poet and dissident. Before the nuptials in 1981 she solemnly told him, “After our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”

Apparently her plan for liberation involved first creating enough wealth to buy a land, and enough children to populate it. Her Laundromat eventually made her enough to lease a market, which she converted into a department store selling Uyghur costumes and specialty items. Her window at the big time came with the collapse of the USSR, after which Kadeer found herself ideally situated for trade, smack between two massive countries in the throes of free-market reform.

Over the next several years, she amassed the proverbial fortune, not in Oprah-esque, house frau-friendly media, but in big boy industries: lumber, scrap iron, factories, and real estate. You can hold up Carnegie for comparison, but he never pushed out eleven children during his capitalist odyssey; Kadeer did. By the 1990s she was the seventh-richest person in China, a feat far more astounding by virtue of the fact that she was a she, not a Han, and held no office.

The latter distinction disappeared in 1993, when she joined the National People’s Congress. When not governing her empire, or catching up on her sleep with fellow cadres at National Assemblies, she kept busy by founding and administrating the Thousand Mothers’ Movement, to promote job training and other economic empowerment initiatives for Uyghur Women. Little wonder that during the mid-90s she was the Chinese government’s favorite token, a flesh-and-blood symbol for the country’s ethnic harmony and economic potential.

Thus the Sino sense of double betrayal when Kadeer put her private agenda above that of her ostensible nation. The Gulja (or Yining) incident touched off her messy break-up with Zhongnanhai, a break-up that seems inevitable in retrospect. The meshrap is a treasured Uyghur cultural institution, an autumn harvest festival old-fashioned in that rather than feast and blearily stare at TV, the Uyghurs feast, sing and dance, recite epic poetry, and formally accept adolescents into society. Kadeer and the Uyghurs cite a ‘ 97 crackdown on their holy meshrap as the flame that touched off an explosion of violence that ended in several deaths and subsequent “peace-keeping measures”. At risk of loot and liberty, Kadeer openly criticized the government’s handling of the incident.

You don’t dump volatile boyfriends; you let them down easy, and you don’t spurn powerful governments without consequences. In 1999, on her way to meet a US delegation sent to investigate the situation in Xinjiang, Kadeer was arrested for leaking state secrets and locked up. She did two years in solitary, then had her sentence reduced in 2004 for good behavior. But dissident idols make great chess pieces. In 2005, China released her in advance of a visit from then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. In return, the US dropped a resolution against China in the UN Commission on Human Rights. She flew straight to Washington DC to join her husband and family, but announced she would remain a citizen of the PRC and devote her life to “the integrity of China”. Even clue-challenged George W. Bush was able to conceive of her worth, when after a tete-a-tete he deemed her “far more valuable than weapons or armies or oil under the ground.”

Yes, the fable that would have ended happily long ago for most, after marrying happily, reproducing abundantly, and getting rich gloriously, only keeps adding new plot points for Kadeer the Dragon Fighter. After the 2009 Xinjiang … troubles, the Chinese government claimed that Kadeer and her Uyghur World Congress had set off the fireworks. Her few remaining sons in China are either in jail or issuing oddly Xinhau-sounding letters to the media denouncing their mother.

She prays for her sons’ safety, and staunchly avows that the UWC, and indeed every effort she spearheads, reject violence and Islamic extremism. Such protests haven’t squelched accusations that she is linked to the East Turkestan Islamic movement, a terrorist organization, as defined by the UN and USA. She has lost her fortune, and even Taiwan won’t issue her a visa. Indeed, the only tangible gains when an ant butts heads with a dragon come when more creatures know of the struggle.

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