Tibetan environmentalist Rinchen Samdrup was sentenced to five years in prison by a Chinese court, found guilty of inciting separatism by posting a pro-Dalai Lama article on his website.
Eyewitness accounts confirm that Chinese security forces acted with deliberate brutality in the wave of Tibetan protests that began on March 10, 2008, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.
Amnesty International urged China to launch an independent investigation into last year’s riots in Xinjiang, saying new testimony casts further doubt on the official version of events.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization, an alliance of former Soviet republics led by Russia, held an emergency meeting in Moscow to consider intervention in conflicted Kyrgyzstan.
At least 23 people have been killed and more than 300 injured in clashes in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city, between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents.
At least five protesters were injured as thousands of Tibetan villagers in Markham County marched in protest of planned mining operations on a mountain they consider sacred.
Many see an effort to restore ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev behind the outburst of Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic violence that has led to a state of emergency in southern Kyrgyztsan.
Tibetan nomads who have been forced into shoddy government housing in recent years have been hard hit in the Qinghai earthquake, the Free Tibet Campaign warns.
A former Kyrgyz opposition leader now in the new government said "Russia played its role in ousting Bakiyev"–to halt US access to Manas air base.
With China accused of detaining hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims without trial in its western province of Xinjiang, a BBC investigation analyzed satellite data to determine that the detention camp system in the region is rapidly expanding. Reviewing images from the European Space Agency's Sentinel satellite service, the BBC finds at least 40 such facilities across Xinjiang, half built within last two years—with a big thrust of construction just in the past six months. Among the largest is a "massive, highly secure compound" still being built at Dabancheng, about an hour's drive from the provincial capital, Urumqi. It is enclosed within a two kilometer-long exterior wall punctuated by 16 guard towers. (Photo via UNPO)
The Chinese Embassy in Switzerland warned that the Swiss government would jeopardize relations with China by accepting two Uighur Guantánamo Bay detainees.
Gennady Pavlyuk, who died after being thrown from a window in neighboring Kazakhstan, is the latest in a wave of Kyrgyzstan opposition journalists to face violent attack.
