In China, an Irrational Indictment

On July 30, Chinese communist authorities indicted Ilham Tohti, a Uighur intellectual, on charges of separatism, a charge that could carry the death penalty. Tohti was detained in mid-January, and the timing of the indictment seems related to an attack the Chinese authorities claim was carried out by knife-wielding militants in the Uighur homeland, which China calls Xinjiang, near Kashgar. An overseas Uighur group says the violence took place around a protest against Chinese restrictions on the observance of Ramadan.

It is impossible to know what really happened. China allows no independent monitoring and little access to Xinjiang, a large but remote area that is home to China’s Turkic Muslim Uighurs.