Posts Tagged ‘Recep Tayyip Erdogan’

Barack ObamaWASHINGTON President Barack Obama and presidents, prime ministers and other top officials from 47 countries start work Monday on a battle plan to keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.Confronting what he calls the “single biggest threat to U.S. security,” Obama is looking for global help in his goal of ensuring all nuclear materials worldwide are secured from theft or diversion within four years.

On the eve of what would be the largest assembly of world leaders hosted by an American president since 1945 – the San Francisco conference to found the United Nations – Obama said nuclear materials in the hands of al-Qaida or another terrorist group “could change the security landscape in this country and around the world for years to come.”

While sweeping or even bold new strategies were unlikely to emerge from the two-day gathering, Obama declared himself pleased with what he heard in warm-up meetings Sunday with the leaders of Kazakhstan, South Africa, India and Pakistan.”I feel very good at this stage in the degree of commitment and a sense of urgency that I have seen from the world leaders so far on this issue,” Obama said. “We think we can make enormous progress on this, and this then becomes part and parcel of the broader focus that we’ve had over the last several weeks.”

He was referring to what had gone before this, the fourth leg of his campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The United States is the only country to use the weapons, two bombs dropped on Japan to force its surrender in World War II.The high-flown ambition, which the president admits will probably not be reality in his lifetime, began a year ago in Prague when he laid out plans for significant nuclear reductions and a nuclear-weapons-free world.

In the meantime, he has approved a new nuclear policy for the United States, promising last week to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal, refrain from nuclear tests and not use nuclear weapons against countries that do not have them. North Korea and Iran were not included in that pledge because they do not cooperate with other countries on nonproliferation standards.

That was Tuesday, and two days later, on the anniversary of the Prague speech, Obama flew back to the Czech Republic capital where he and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed a new treaty that reduces each side’s deployed nuclear arsenal to 1,550 weapons. Medvedev also arrives Monday to sign a long-delayed agreement to dispose of tons of weapons-grade plutonium from Cold War-era nuclear weapons – the type of preventive action Obama wants the summit to inspire.Obama welcomes the assembled world leaders at a Washington convention center late Monday afternoon, but begins the day with a morning meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, whose intelligence apparatus is deeply involved in the Afghan war.

He then will sit down one-on-one with the leaders of Malaysia, Ukraine, Armenia and China.National Security Council spokesman Ben Rhodes said Obama would squeeze in a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is a key NATO ally, and relations have been difficult recently, particularly over Iran. Rhodes said there were additional “pressing issues,” including normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.

Throughout the two-day gathering, Iran will be a subtext as Obama works to gain support for a fourth round of U.N. sanctions against Tehran for its refusal to shut down what the United States and many key allies assert is a nuclear weapons program. Iran says it only wants to build reactors to generate electricity.Support from Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao, who sees Obama privately Monday, is critical, but neither is firmly committed to a new sanctions regime. (AP)

Beijing – China expressed anger and strong opposition Thursday after the U.S. sent two brothers Uighurs detained at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Switzerland. The announcement about the transfer of two Uighur men were delivered by the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday.

Beijing in the past demanded that the Uighurs held at Guantanamo were sent back to China. The U.S. government says can not do that because those people will face torture, and for several months to find countries willing to accept them. “We strongly reject U.S. measures to protect the suspects in a third country, and oppose any country that receives them,” said the spokesperson of China Foreign Ministry Qin Gang told a news conference.

“We have sent our strong protest to the countries concerned,” Qin added. The two people who moved to Switzerland it is Bahtiyar Arkin Mahmud and Mahmud, their lawyer said. The men were arrested by the U.S. government during the Afghanistan war, launched after the attacks, 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States.

Muslim Uighur people and a native of Xinjiang, far western China.

In the ethnic violence in July 2009, the Uighur people of China attacked the majority Han people in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s provincial capital, after falling to the streets to protest the attack on Uyghur workers at a factory in southern China in June that killed two Uighur men.

Beijing says, at least 197 people were killed in riots on July 5 in Urumqi between people and the Uighur minority group Enik dominant Han China. More than 1,600 people were also injured in the riot. Violence experienced by the Uighur people has led to a wave of protest marches in various cities of the world such as Ankara, Berlin, Canberra and Istanbul after the riots.

Uyghur people speak Turkish and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the most harsh criticism and calls asking what is happening in Xinjiang as “a kind of massacre”.

Uyghur people in exile claimed that China’s security forces to react too much for peaceful protest and to use deadly force. Eight million Uighur people, who have more contact with their neighbors in central Asia than with the Han people of China, amounted to less than half the population of Xinjiang. Together Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most vulnerable areas of politics and the two regions, the government of China tried to control religious life and culture growing promising economy and prosperity.

Beijing does not want to lose control of the region, which borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and has large oil reserves and is the largest natural gas producer in China. However, the minority population has long complained that China’s Han majority rake profits from government subsidies, while making local residents feel like outsiders in their own country.

Beijing says that the riots, the worst in the region in recent years, the work of separatist groups abroad, who want to create an independent region for the Muslim Uighur minority. The groups deny these violent and manage to say, the riots are the result of accumulated anger against the government policies and economic domination of Han China.(Reuters)