This is why Rebiya Kadeer will be waiting a long time

Recently, Uighur spokeswoman Rebiya Kadeer asked the Obama administration (1) to condemn the violence, killings and arrests in Xin Jiang/East Turkestan, and the broader campaign to reduce the Uighurs to a minority in their own homeland, while keeping them economically and politically powerless. That is, without the numbers, the money or the political means to assert themselves, or even prevent their culture and history being eroded as part of a systematic campaign by the Beijing government to crush the Uighur national liberation movement.

But she'll have to wait a long time for Obama, or any American government, to mouth any concern over the plight of her people, or any of the human rights abuses of the Communists.

Here's why:

The Chinese, who have the largest foreign holdings of US Treasury debt at $801.5 billion, have expressed worries that soaring deficits could spark inflation or a sudden drop in the value of the dollar, thus jeopardizing their investments. (2)

It's the economy, stupid. Who cares about a bunch of peasants and camel herders in a desert somewhere beyond Outer Mongolia, when the people who hold the largest slice of US foreign debt need to be appeased?

Never mind that torture, the imprisonment, the lack of free press, the show trials, the executions, the corruption, the anti-union brutality, the crushing of the indigenous populations (hey, what country are we talking about here? This all sounds very familiar ...) - the Uighurs are very far away from the White House, don't make cheap DVD players for US consumers and don't own very much ot the US economy.

So screw 'em, eh, Barak?

1 - As described previously on lefthandpalm: http://lefthandpalm.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-wouldnt-hold-my-breath.html
2 - "Obama declares new era of co-operation with China," by Martin Crutsinger, published by Associated Press, reproduced in The Independent, 28th of July, 2009. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/obama-declares-new-era-of-cooperation-with-china-1763489.html)