Divine Intervention: Xinjiang Officials Punished for Playing Favorites With Pilgrims

China Real Time

5:32 pm HKT Jan 15, 2015

Prospective Muslim pilgrims in China’s western Xinjiang region typically endure long waits to get on state-organized trips to Mecca. Helping them jump the line, though, could mean landing in hot water.

Some 32 Xinjiang officials are being punished for wrongdoing related to their handling of government-organized pilgrimages, the Chinese Communist Party’s official news portal said Thursday, after investigators uncovered “serious violations of political discipline, abuse of power, dereliction of duty, use of power for personal gain and power-for-money deals.”

The Party news portal didn’t give details on the alleged wrongdoing, but a Thursday report by the state-run China Daily said the officials, mostly from Kizilsu prefecture, were investigated for “arranging pilgrimages for unqualified people.”

The newspaper didn’t define what it meant by “unqualified,” though it said some of the 32 officials “abused their power by changing the [pilgrimage waiting] list to cut waiting time for relatives.” Others were “found to have asked for and received bribes or neglected the inspection and management of pilgrimage work,” it added.

Xinjiang is home to a large population of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and mainly Muslim ethnic group. The border region, which abuts Central Asia, has also been the site of simmering ethnic tensions between Uighurs and China’s majority Han Chinese, laced with religious, political and economic overtones.

Regional authorities organize pilgrimages each year for Muslim Uighurs, though the waiting list for such trips are long, China Daily said. More than 14,000 Chinese pilgrims visited Mecca on a government-organized trip last year, the newspaper added.

Six of the officials were removed from their posts, expelled from the Communist Party and face further punishment via the criminal justice system, the party’s news portal said.

They include Aniwar Turdi, former director of the pilgrimage affairs office under the Xinjiang Ethnic Affairs Committee, as well as the head of Kizilsu’s public-security bureau and the mayor of Artux, the prefectural capital.

The case against these six officials first surfaced last year, when Xinjiang’s Communist Party committee said in a Oct. 11 notice that authorities were investigating them over “serious” disciplinary violations, such as abusing their power to interfere in the pilgrimage-application process and taking bribes, as well as dereliction of duty related to pilgrimage-management work.

The remaining 26 officials were slapped with punishments ranging from removal from their administrative and party positions, as well as censures and warnings, it added.

None of the 32 officials could be reached to comment. It wasn’t clear if the six officials facing criminal punishment had legal representation.

– Chun Han Wong. Follow him on Twitter @ByChunHan