Kadeer was born into poverty but enjoyed a successful career as an entrepreneur, starting first with a laundry service and then expanding her activities to eventually own a trading company and department store in Xinjiang. She was also an active philanthropist within the community, most notably through her foundation of the 1,000 Families Mothers Project, a charity intended to help Uyghur women start their own local businesses.[1]
Kadeer's successes as a businesswoman earned her the local nickname "the millionairess" and also a position at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. She became a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, but was barred from re-election in 1998 for failing to condemn her husband's statements in the United States.[1]
Having been a witness to the Gulja Incident in 1997, in 1999 she was detained by PRC authorities on charges of "leaking state secrets", having sent newspaper clippings to her husband Sidik Rouzi, an expatriate living in the United States who is active in protesting Chinese policies towards the Uyghur people. Kadeer was detained in August 1999 while on her way to meet a US Congressional Research Service delegation investigating the situation in Xinjiang at the time, and was alleged to be in possession of a list of 10 people "suspected of having a connection with national separatist activities".
She was convicted on 10 March, 2000 in the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court, of "endangering state security".[1]
In 2004, her sentence was reduced by a year based on citations of good behavior in the women’s prison of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region where she was being held. On 14 March 2005, Kadeer was released early, nominally on medical grounds, to United States custody. The U.S. had pressured for her release, and the action came in advance of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region. In exchange to Kadeer's release, the United States agreed to drop a resolution against China in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, causing human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to moderate their praise somewhat.[citation needed] On 17 March, Kadeer flew to the U.S. and joined her family in Washington, D.C..
In 2004 she won the Rafto Prize for human rights, and in 2006 she was nominated by Swedish parliamentarian Annelie Enochson as one of the candidates (among 191 people who were publicly nominated) for the Nobel Peace Prize. Annelie Enochson stated in her nomination, Rebiya Kadeer champions the rights of western China's Uighur ethnic group and is one of China's most prominent advocates of women's rights... [she] has also used her resources as founder and director of a large trading company in northwestern China to provide fellow Uighurs with training and employment.[2] The Chinese government condemned the nomination.[3]
Kadeer was elected as the president of the World Uyghur Congress by its II. General Assembly meeting held on 24−27 November 2006, in Munich, Germany.
A biography of Kadeer, "Die Himmelsstürmerin" (The Great Idealist), written by German writer Alexandra Cavelius in German, was published in June 2007 by German publisher Heyne-Verlag, a subsidiary of Random House. An English translation, Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China, was published in the United States by Kales Press in May 2009.
She has denied the existence of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and has stated her belief that all Uyghur organizations fight peacefully.[4]
On 5 June 2007, at a conference on democracy and security held in Prague Rebiya Kadeer met privately with President George W. Bush and Mrs. Bush. In his speech, President Bush said about her: "Another dissident I will meet with here is Rebiya Kadeer, whose sons have been jailed in what we believe is an act of retaliation for her human rights activities. The talent of men and women like Rebiya is the greatest resource of their nations- far more valuable than the weapons of their army or oil under the ground. So America calls on every nation that stifles dissent to end its repression, trust its people and grant its citizens the freedom they deserve."[5]
On 17 September 2007, the United States House of Representatives passed by a voice vote House Resolution 497[6], demanding the Chinese Government to release the imprisoned children of Rebiya Kadeer and Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil, and change its suppressive policy towards the Uyghur people. Speaking in support of the bill, Congressman Chris Smith said: "At turning points in history ... one honest and courageous man or woman often comes to represent the entire people in the eyes of the world ... For the Uyghur people, deprived of their religious freedom, robbed of their cultural and linguistic rights and marginalized in their own homeland by the government-organized Han Chinese migration, it is Rebiya Kadeer."[7]
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July 2009 unrest
See main article July 2009 Ürümqi riots.
On 5 July 2009, hundreds of Uighur protesters clashed with Chinese anti-riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang, two days after ethnic unrest left at least 156 dead and more than 800 injured. Chinese officials have blamed the unrest on separatist groups abroad, who it says want to create an independent homeland for the Muslim Uighur minority. Exiled Uighur businesswoman and activist Rebiya Kadeer was accused by the provincial government of "masterminding" the violence, but she has denied having anything to do with it.
