China Hacks Australian Festival
Website Over Uighur Documentary

Chinese hackers are being blamed on replacing the website for the Melbourne International Film Festival with a Chinese flag and some anti-Uighur slogans. This is being blamed on a small group of independent nationalist hackers inside the country, but it is more probable that the Chinese government themselves are behind it. The site was attacked because one of the documentaries which is being pushed in the festival is about the overseas-based Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer. It is quite supportive of her and her people's cause, and China decided that it could not allow this viewpoint to be shown. But it has backfired, with the film garnering even more international publicity due to this incident.

July.29.2009 - George Valentine Corr, Blatant News Editor
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THE DISPUTED FILM SUPPORTS THE UIGHURS
The 10 Conditions of Love is a film which charts the life of Rebiya Kadeer, the defacto rebel leader of the Muslim Uighur population of China-controlled Turkistan, also known as the Xinjiang province of China. They have been fighting for independence from China since 1933, since when they have been trying to set up a new country called Uyghurstan or East Turkistan. The Uighur's make up 45% of Xinjiang's 20 million population, and the Han Chinese make up 41%. Most of these Han Chinese are settlers brought in by the Chinese government to swamp the land with it's own people, in the hope of diluting any independence fight. And similar to the arrival of Israel's settlers in Palestine, this can be done by force, with people removed at will from their historical family homes and farms. The Uighur's have no international support but in recent years there has been a surge of interest from the media, so we are beginning to understand what has been going on in this secretive part of China for many decades.

THE HACKING ATTACK
During last weekend the website for the Melbourne International Film Festival was attacked by "hundreds if not thousands" of people from outside of Australia, according to Richard Moore, the head of the festival. He said that they could see from their back-end of the website what was happening. The site would completely disappear from the net and would be replaced with the Chinese flag or some anti-Uighur or anti-Kadeer slogans. This was clearly a highly concentrated and highly organised attack, with possibly a lot of people involved. This suggests that it could only be either a government operation or an online community attack, but no information suggesting the latter has emerged so far. The Chinese government also withdrew their country's films from the festival, in protest at the showing of The 10 Conditions of Love, and this has also been followed by the the withdrawal of Looking For Eric, by Ken Loach, in protest at the festival's acceptance of sponsorship from Israel, so this festival has made some waves in 2009 for sure!

IRONIC TWIST
Before the Chinese withdrew their films, their cultural attaché to Australia had tried to pressure the festival head into dropping The 10 Conditions of Love, but he reused to give ground. It seems the Chinese are much more focussed on this subject than the rest of the world is, but that will be the irony of this. They have awoken some more people to the plight of the Uighur's, and to the personality of Kadeer, who is now based in exile in Washington. Her presence has unsettled the Chinese - who had locked her up for six years, until her release in 2005 - because the people of Chinese Turkistan now have an iconic figure. To many she is their Dalai Lama, but she is also much more. Before leading the independence fight she rose to become Xinjiang's richest person. She is an industrialist, and therefore understands the international politicians in this respect, so she has been able to get this into the international arena in a relatively short space of time. The other irony of this hacking episode for the Chinese is that the festival have replaced some of the dropped screenings of Chinese films with extra screenings of The 10 Conditions of Love.

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