EDITOR’S NOTE: If Chinese authorities are to be believed, then a 62-year-old Uyghur grandmother with a waist-length graying, braided hair has masterminded one of the most serious security threats in China in years that has left at least 156 people dead in an orgy of destruction that started on July 5 in the country’s northwestern fringes. If Beijing is to be believed, then Rebiya Kadeer is as notorious and cunning as Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, other governments are not convinced, and Kadeer has increasingly emerged as a symbol of peace and democratic struggle to rival even the Dalai Lama himself. In a way, the bloody riots between the majority ethnic Han Chinese and the Muslim Turkic-speaking Uyghur minority in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, was a tragedy waiting to happen – and bound to happen again. And now, with Kadeer’s largely successful efforts to bring global opinion behind her in her fight for her fellow Uyghurs’ human rights and cultural heritage, a new heroine is born. Here, she tells ReviewAsia her story. obody knows China like Rebiya Kadeer. The 62-year-old Uyghur mother of 11 survived five years in the country’s notoriously harsh prison system. She knows the People’s Republic from inside its parliament. And she even remembers how it feels to bask in the glory of being the seventh-richest person in the country. These days, Kadeer is fighting from abroad the Chinese government’s right to rule her people and Beijing’s lack of commitment to human rights. Kadeer is accusing Beijing of nothing less than committing “cultural genocide” against her people, the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, the former East Turkestan, which was annexed by China in 1949. “The Chinese government is forcefully transferring young Uyghur women into the eastern parts of China in order to dilute the Uyghur culture,” she tells ReviewAsia in an exclusive interview. One of the many reports she wrote since being released from jail on March 17, 2005, reveals that she perceives herself to be engaged in a titanic power struggle. In the piece, titled Beijing & I, she says that being thrown into Chinese prisons was not the only horror she confronted. “I have lived with a sense of terror for the fate of Uyghurs for the past few decades, and I have watched in horror as my worst fears have come true,” she says. Kadeer is China’s most prominent female dissident, even more so since she went into US exile right after her release from five years in prison, where she said she witnessed constant torture of fellow Uyghur inmates. She was released three days before a scheduled state visit by Condoleezza Rice, who was then the US secretary of state. PREVIOUSMORE