Iran opposition urge clerics to act over detainees

The news from Iran is still not positive as you will find in this story posted on Reuters news site.  The opposition to the government of Iran continues to rally against the results of the election and the turmoil continues in Iran.

“Iran’s opposition urged senior clerics on Saturday to help secure the release of people arrested following June’s disputed presidential election, after a protester died in prison.
A reformist website said the son of an adviser to defeated conservative candidate Mohsen Rezaie had been killed in a Tehran prison after being detained in post-election unrest.
The authorities were not immediately available to confirm the death or the circumstances surrounding it.

Rights groups say hundreds of people, including senior pro-reform activists, journalists, academics and lawyers, have been arrested since Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential vote.

In a flurry of announcements on websites, critics of the election condemned the tactics employed since the vote by the authorities, who have banned street protests by those who say the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was rigged.

Iran’s top authority Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei endorsed the president’s election victory soon after the vote.
But the opposition continues to contest the result of the election, which has plunged the country into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution and exposed deepening divisions in Iran’s ruling elite.

“The only way out of this situation is … to immediately release detainees,” Ghalamnews quoted a joint statement issued by moderate defeated candidates and former President Mohammad Khatami as saying.

“We are very worried about their physical and mental health … this imposed state security should end … It is wrong to link pro-reform detainees to foreign countries,” it said.
Tehran has accused western powers of fuelling post-election unrest, charges they deny, adding to tensions over Iran’s nuclear program which the West suspects is a cover for building atomic weapons. Iran says its program is peaceful.

Israel, believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear power, has repeatedly described Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to its existence and the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Iran would strike Israel’s nuclear sites if targeted…”

“If the Zionist Regime (Israel) attacks Iran, we will surely strike its nuclear facilities with our missile capabilities,” Mohammad Ali Jafari, Guards commander-in-chief, told Iran’s Arabic language al-Alam television.

The security establishment has thrown its support behind Ahmadinejad over the election and has been criticized by the opposition for its role in quelling the mass protests.
Moderate defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi said in a letter to Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei that those detained since the election had been subjected to “mental torture” and…”

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Turkey attacks China ‘genocide’

In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”  This definition comes from Wikipedia online.  I have presented this definition in light of the news events happening in China’s Xinjian region.  This news story comes from the BBC news. Genocide of any distinct group whether it be Kurds, Armenians, Rwanda’s Tutsis, Jews to name a few, is  indeed, a crime against humanity and democracy.

“Turkey’s prime minister has described ethnic violence in China’s Xinjiang region as “a kind of genocide”.
“There is no other way of commenting on this event,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

The death toll from the violence there has now risen from 156 to 184, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports. More than 1,000 people were injured.  Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, shares linguistic and religious links with the Uighurs in China’s western-most region.

“The event taking place in China is a kind of genocide,” Mr Erdogan told reporters in Turkey’s capital, Ankara.
“There are atrocities there, hundreds of people have been killed and 1,000 hurt. We have difficulty understanding how China’s leadership can remain a spectator in the face of these events.”

The Turkish premier also urged Beijing to “address the question of human rights and do what is necessary to prosecute the guilty”.

Mr Erdogan’s comments came a day after Turkish Trade and Industry Minister Nihat Ergun urged Turks to boycott Chinese goods. But it said that of the 184 people who died, 137 were Han Chinese.

Earlier on Friday, the Chinese authorities reimposed a night-time curfew in Urumqi. The curfew had been suspended for two days after officials said they had the city under control. Mosques in the city were ordered to remain closed on Friday and notices were posted instructing people to stay at home to worship.

But at least two opened after crowds of Uighurs gathered outside and demanded to be allowed in to pray on the holiest day of the week in Islam.

“We decided to open the mosque because so many people had gathered. We did not want an incident,” a policeman outside the White Mosque in a Uighur neighbourhood told the AP news agency.

After the prayers, riot police punched and kicked a small group of Uighurs protesters, who demanded the release of men detained after last Sunday’s violence, the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville says.

Meanwhile, the city’s main bus station was reported to be crowded with people trying to escape the unrest.

The violence began on Sunday when a Uighur rally to protest against a deadly brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese several weeks ago in a toy factory in southern Guangdong province turned violent.

Tensions have been growing in Xinjiang for many years, as Han migrants have poured into the region, where the Uighur minority is concentrated.

Many Uighurs feel economic growth has bypassed them and complain of discrimination and diminished opportunities.”

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