We Are No Chinese!

China regards militants from its Uighur minority as a major threat to security at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

The militants are blamed for a bloody attack on a border post in western China in the run-up to the Games. Human rights groups have long accused China of persecuting the Uighurs.

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are Muslims based in north-western China's Xinjiang region. Their language is related to Turkish and they regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to other Central Asian nations.

The region's economy has for centuries revolved around agriculture and trade, with towns such as Kashgar thriving as hubs along the Silk Road.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the Uighurs briefly declared independence. The region was brought under the complete control of communist China in 1949.

Officially, Xinjiang is now described by China as an autonomous region, like Tibet to its south.

What are China's concerns about the Uighurs?

Beijing says Uighur militants have been waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest.

Since the 9/11 attacks in the US, China has increasingly portrayed its Uighur separatists as auxiliaries of al-Qaeda.

It has accused them of receiving training and indoctrination from Islamist militants in neighbouring Afghanistan.

However, little public evidence has been produced in support of these claims.

More than 20 Uighurs were captured by the US military after its invasion of Afghanistan. Though imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for six years, they have yet to be charged with any offence.

What complaints have been made against the Chinese in Xinjiang?

Activists say the Uighurs' religious, commercial and cultural activities have been gradually curtailed by the Chinese state.

China is accused of intensifying its crackdown on the Uighurs after street protests in the 1990s - and again, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

Over the past decade, many prominent Uighurs have been imprisoned or have sought asylum abroad after being accused of terrorism.

China is said to have exaggerated the threat from Uighur separatists in order to justify repression in the region.

Beijing has also been accused of seeking to dilute Uighur influence by arranging the mass immigration of Han Chinese, the country's majority ethnic group, to Xinjiang.

Han Chinese currently account for roughly 40% of Xinjiang's population.

What is the current situation in Xinjiang?

Over the last decade, major development projects have brought prosperity to Xinjiang's big cities.

The activities of local and foreign journalists in the region are closely monitored by the Chinese state and there are few independent sources of news from the region.

China has been keen to highlight improvements made to the region's economy while Uighurs interviewed by the press have avoided criticising Beijing.

However, occasional attacks on Chinese targets suggest Uighur separatism remains a potent - and potentially violent - force.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I knew I had it somewhere... and I found it, there it is: The Gulag Archipielago... 660 pages... I bought it in a charity, just for 3.99... and I am sure it's worth more, much more. Here you have the Obituary I found in the BBC, is not impressive but is something.

A look at the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Born into a family of Cossack intellectuals, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated in mathematics and physics, but within weeks the Soviet Union was fighting Hitler for its survival.

Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer and was decorated for his courage, but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.

He spent the next eight years as one of the countless men enduring the gulags. He was one of the lucky ones to survive.

There followed a period of internal exile in Kazakhstan during which Solzhenitsyn was successfully treated for stomach cancer.

Instant celebrity

On his return to European Russia, he was allowed, following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, to publish his largely autobiographical One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in 1962.

This made him an instant celebrity. But with the subsequent fall from power of the reformist Khrushchev, the KGB stepped up its harassment of Solzhenitsyn, forcing him to publish his work abroad.

His novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward were further damning allegories of the Soviet system.

In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But he refused to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm for fear of not being allowed back home.

In 1973, the first of the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West. He had been hiding the work from the authorities, fearful that people mentioned in it would suffer reprisals.

Branded a traitor

But his former assistant, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, revealed its location after being interrogated by the KGB after which she hanged herself.

So Solzhenitsyn decided to publish it. The Gulag Archipelago offered a detailed account of the systematic Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 in the vast network of prison and labour camps.

Its publication led to a violent campaign against Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet press which denounced him as a traitor.

In early 1974, even Solzhenitsyn's world reputation could not prevent his arrest. But rather than put him on trial, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country.

In exile, he continued to be a source of controversy, notably when he issued a series of documents which cast serious doubt on Mikhail Sholokhov's authorship of the novel And Quiet Flows the Don.

Many of his utterances were discursive and even baffling, and the admiration for him was not entirely uncritical.

Eventually, he settled in Vermont in the USA with his second wife and their three sons. Here, he completed the other two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago.

Return to Russia

Prussian Nights, a long narrative poem about the Red Army's vengeful advance into East Prussia in 1945, was published in 1977. He was said to have composed the poem and committed it to memory 25 years before, during his years in prison.

But Solzhenitsyn also rejected liberalism, dismissing the notion of democracy introduced by Gorbachev and Yeltsin as a myth. He was equally scathing of Western liberalism.

He returned to Russia in 1994 and told the Russian parliament, the Duma, that post-communist Russians were not living in a democracy.

He denounced politicians as being corrupt, and appeared regularly on television to voice his disapproval of the country which had first reviled and then embraced him.

In 2000, his book, Two Hundred Years Together, again covered sensitive ground in exploring the position of Jews in Soviet society.

He denied some charges of anti-Semitism. Gradually, his own people no longer had quite the desire to listen so carefully to his criticisms.

But former President Vladimir Putin courted his approval towards the end of the author's life, personally visiting his home in 2007 to award him the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work.

In 2006, the first Russian film based on one of his novels - The First Circle (V Krugu Pervom) - was shown on Russian state television, four decades after it was published.

The 10-part TV film depicted the terror of Stalin's regime, describing the Soviet Union as a huge prison camp.

Also in 2006, Solzhenitsyn, then 87, castigated Nato, accusing it of trying to bring Russia under its control.

He accused the organisation of "preparing to completely encircle Russia and deprive if of its sovereignty".

By then, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had already secured his place in history as one of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th Century.

Jaweed al-Ghussein

Palestinian leader persecuted after exposing Arafat deceit

Jaweed al-Ghussein, who has died aged 77, was a Palestinian philanthropist, educationist and former chairman of the Palestinian National Fund. In that role, he drew attention to the extensive corruption of his colleague Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). His whistleblowing was met with a sustained campaign of persecution by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Ghussein was born in Gaza, the son of a prominent land-owning family. He attended the Friends school in Ramallah, but with the creation of Israel in 1948, the family, like many fellow Palestinians, became refugees. However, unlike many others, the Ghusseins could afford to send their son to complete his education at the American University in Cairo, where he studied economics and first met Arafat. The two became friends: while the young Arafat pursued a political career, Ghussein went into business, with huge success.

In 1964, having moved his family to Britain, he set up, with an American consortium, an engineering and construction company, Cordoba, in Abu Dhabi. The company became a major player in establishing the infrastructure of the oil-rich desert sheikdom. Cordoba built the first water pipeline from the oasis of Al Ain to Abu Dhabi city as well as roads, hospitals and many of the most important buildings in the emirate, including the iconic Sheik Zayed cultural centre.

During this time of plenty, Ghussein clung on to his Palestinian roots and traditions. He personally funded the education of many young Palestinians and then made sure they got the jobs to match their qualifications, either at Cordoba or elsewhere. He was a passionate believer in peaceful co-existence with Israel and determined to ensure the rights of all Palestinians. Inevitably, he entered politics.

In 1984 Ghussein was reunited with Arafat, and became chairman of the Palestinian National Fund, the financial arm of the PLO. He soon began to suspect that money intended to help families and fighters in the resistance was being siphoned off by the PLO leader into secret bank accounts. "None of us ever knew how much Arafat got from the Arab states," he said recently. "It could have been billions." Known payments included two from Saddam Hussein, each for $50m, which were neither acknowledged nor audited.

Ghussein kept his suspicions to himself, out of loyalty to the PLO and a fear of what he called "washing dirty linen in public". But when he criticised Arafat's backing of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, instigating the first Gulf war in 1990, their relationship collapsed. Six years later Ghussein, sickened by the deceit and hypocrisy that surrounded him, resigned very publicly on Abu Dhabi television when he called for accountability and transparency in the PLO.

From that moment on, he was a marked man. An extraordinary campaign of innuendo and accusation was orchestrated by the PA, alleging misappropriation of funds. Despite all accusations against him being quashed, in 2000 Ghussein, while attending a wedding reception in Abu Dhabi, was abducted and bundled into a private jet, taken to Gaza and held captive by the PA. He was eventually allowed to travel to Cairo for cancer treatment, but a group of armed men burst into his hospital room, kidnapped him and took him back to Gaza. Only international pressure led by Amnesty International secured his release, and he was finally brought to London for urgent medical treatment.

This period of persecution left Ghussein's health permanently damaged, and saw the huge wealth he had built up virtually disappear. Cordoba, with a one-time annual turnover of around $1bn, had ground to a halt, mostly because clients had allowed huge debts to accumulate. They remain unpaid.

Ghussein insisted on maintaining the Palestinian tradition of warmth and boundless hospitality at his London home in Mayfair. Every evening, guests, not necessarily invited but always welcome, would turn up for good conversation, followed by the inevitable itfaddalou - sit, eat, join us at our table. He had, according to his daughter Mona Bauwens, an "open house, open heart".

He never stopped trying to ease the Palestinian people's suffering and was co-founder, with the industrialist Arnold Weinstock among others, of the New Century Foundation, a non-governmental organisation created specifically to encourage dialogue between adversaries.

Recently he was honoured by the American University in Cairo in recognition of his services to education in Palestine. In his acceptance speech at the ceremony in London, all he uttered was a cry for help for Palestine. He is survived by his wife Khalida, Mona and son Tawfiq.

· Jaweed al-Ghussein, businessman and political activist, born July 18 1930; died July 1 2008

Thu Wed

Rebelious July

(The) Iron Maiden

El Salvador, literally

He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.

Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.

"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda Garcia, one of the diplomat's daughters, told a news conference at El Salvador's embassy in Washington this week, amid calls for Castellanos to be honoured posthumously by Israel.

Castellanos, an army colonel, served as a diplomat in Liverpool and Hamburg before being posted to Geneva in 1942 where he befriended a Romanian Jew, Gyorgy Mandl.

To protect Mandl he appointed him to the fictitious post of first secretary and amended his name to the more Latino-sounding George Mandel-Mantello.

The two men set about issuing blank nationality certificates for Jews in German-occupied central Europe, especially Hungary.

To make them seem more authentic the documents, signed by Mantello, were stamped by other consulates in Geneva before being spirited over the border to grateful recipients who filled in their details.

The so-called "freedom papers" afforded protection against deportation to Nazi extermination camps and gave meaning to the name El Salvador, which means The Saviour.

Many of the documents were sent to Budapest where Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, provided sanctuary to thousands of Jews at an abandoned glass factory known as his "Glass House".

Neither Castellanos nor Mandl had the authority to issue the documents, and El Salvador had sided with the allies against Germany, but the papers offered some protection from Nazi round-ups.

It did not matter that few recipients would ever travel to their supposed homeland, a tiny country of rainforest and Pacific coast 6,000 miles away, wedged between Guatemala and Honduras, and that possibly few had even heard of it before.

Castellanos and Mandl persuaded suspicious Swiss and Hungarian officials that the documents were genuine and that there was indeed a sizeable Salvadorean diaspora in this corner of Europe.

The initiative evoked the efforts of Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, and Schindler, a German industrialist, who separately risked their lives and fortunes to save thousands of Jews.

After the war Castellanos lived a quiet life and played down his role, said Garcia. "He said whoever was in his place would have done the same. For him it was not heroic nor spectacular."

The writer Leon Uris tracked down the retired diplomat in 1972 and Castellanos gave a brief radio interview in 1976 but otherwise he remained anonymous and his contribution went unrecognised. He died in 1977, three years after Schindler's equally low-key passing.

Until now Latin America's best known role in the Nazi genocide was the "rat lines" which spirited wanted war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann to Argentina and Klaus Barbie to Bolivia.

Castellanos's story has been brought to light by a new documentary film called The Glass House, directed and produced by Brad and Leonor Marlowe, and a campaign in El Salvador by the foreign ministry and the country's small Jewish community.

"This is the story of a man with great courage who stood up against a system," Ricardo Moran Ferracuti, a Salvadorian official, told the Cox News Service. The campaign has urged Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum to confer the title Righteous Gentile on Castellanos.

F.F. (to F)

How To...

... use instructions

by Guy Browning

If you really wanted to hide the meaning of life, the best place would be in an instruction manual, tucked away under "Read this before you start". This would guarantee it would remain undiscovered for centuries.

The law is a set of instructions for living in our society. Lawyers are living proof that these instructions are seldom clear and rarely followed. The government continually issues instructions for everything on the basis that we are too stupid to work things out for ourselves. As we voted for them in the first place, they may be on to something.

People leave instructions in their wills. For many, this is the only time anybody will take any notice of their instructions on anything, and by then it's too late. Of course, you have to leave a certain sum of money for your instructions to be taken seriously.

Giving instructions is one of the most futile of all human endeavours. Telling someone, "Here's what you have to do" releases a chemical in their brain that automatically shuts down their capacity to hear, understand or remember anything you say afterwards. When you ask if they've understood your instructions, the answer "Yes" simply acknowledges you've stopped talking and they're ready to try it their own way.

Instructions are tiny pieces of cultural DNA. If you had to leave instructions for somebody else to lead your life instead of you, it would be interesting to see how few points you would need. Before trying, remember that feeding the cat is a six-part instruction.

Work emails are often instructions. Research shows that the likelihood of something happening as instructed recedes with every line of an email. People rarely read beyond 10 lines in an email and adding a PS is the communication equivalent of telling the west wind.

You learn driving from a driving instructor, not a driving teacher and certainly not a driving counsellor. Really important things are commanded, important things are instructed, quite important things are taught and inconsequential things are shared in an involving relevant dialogue. It would be really useful if there were a set of further instructions for each of the Ten Commandments, say, to show you how to follow them. Then again, no one would read them.

Insectophobia?

It seems that the president of Turkmenistan fired 30 TV staff after a cockroach crawled across the newsdesk in the middle of a live bulletin...

Essay on the (real) Moon

I know that lately I have been talking about the other side of the Moon – the side that is difficult to recognize is there. But there is this side of the Moon too – the one we usually see: light, shiny and optimistic. The very same full Moon I like so much and I always say is the silver mirror that reflects your genuine soul. The Moon that links us even when we are physically distant. And the one that helps me to keep my particular inner calendar.

And looking to a bright full moon I see…

I see you in hippy clothing, hanging around and catching my eye. I see your old car and the trips we did on it, visiting this and that, careless of the stress others were feeling, laughing at it… remember? “Man, you can’t talk to some of them this time of the year!”

I see you staying for first time and putting your eyes on water. I see a night of love and little pain – everything was new. And I see trees talking to us.

I see you going to the roof of the world and enjoying what you do - and I see myself in a happy summer, floating and smiling and not knowing why or, maybe, knowing exactly why.

I see you turning up at that cool café with worry in your eyes, and being by my side all the time when suddenly the future was uncertain and we didn’t know how my body would talk. And you cried when the man in white left the room, and you hugged me. You were crying out of joy. And then we all went for a coffee down the road, in celebration.

I see you in a warm windy evening, waiting for a chat, with emotion in your eyes. And later on, often in rainy but happy days, joking about “road to diversion” signs. And getting too worry when I was late from work.

I see you lying down in a towel, sunny summer beach day, with earphones and listening one of our favorite ballads. I see your face not knowing I’d see it again and then, I see your face again, half smiling half crying with emotion, closing the door behind you.

I see you in an amazingly blue sky and sunny days, with very cold nights but enjoying a lot under a thick duvet, starting again. And I see you by my side throwing flowers into the sea in that important day.

I see myself asking that there must be something strange, something strong and something good that keeps us together. Despite breaks, despite mistakes, despite painful decisions and despite depressions in both sides.

Although I know you are not perfect, no-one is, I see all this and much, much more of love and positive things. That’s why I am writing this – because I am in love with you as the first night we talked to the trees.

Because I like the Moon as it is – with all it’s faces, knowing that the perfect relationship is accepting our imperfections.

The Vikings Are Coming!

It seems that the richest person in Europe is the owner of Ikea.

(Don't) Go And See It!

The worst film I have seen this year, so far. French, boring, slow, long, bad acting, wooden camera work... it has all the ingredients!!

Not Bad for a Weekend

Sat: an anti-Bush singer and good folk Irish music.

Sun: lovely Brazilian food!

Mon: surprinsingly good Lebanese film.

Thank You!

Funny Guy of the Day (No 2,341)

"Go and steal as long as you don't take too much."
J.D. Mobutu

Victor Jara

Funny Guys of the Day (IX)

"The Party must not become the servant of the masses, but their master."
Adolf Hitler (an Austrian)

"The defence of internal peace and order constitutes the sacred mission of a nation's armed forces and that's what we have carried out."
Francisco Franco (a Galician)

Donna di Porto Pim

Antonio Tabucchi (Pisa, 1943)

Funny Guy of the Day (VIII)

"This is genuine democracy, but
reallistically the strong always rule."
Muammar Al-Qadaffi