Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith said his department had received a complaint from the Lord Mayor of Melbourne about the behaviour of Chinese officials and had acted on that complaint.
“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade received a complaint from the Lord Mayor of Melbourne about representations that he had received from Chinese officials about the showing of the Rebiya Kadeer film at the Melbourne Film Festival and as a consequence of that, Chinese officials were spoken to by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade," Mr Smith told the ABC.
Mr Smith said Australia “respected freedom of speech” and diplomats were entitled to air their views, but there were accepted channels for expressing those views. Chinese officials had stepped out of line in this regard he said.
“If they're putting a view, that view needs to be put appropriately and when a view or a representation is not put appropriately and a complaint is made, that is taken up by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as it has on this occasion with respect to Chinese representations to the Lord Mayor of Melbourne,” he said.
Chinese officials tried to pressure Melbourne Film Festival director Richard Moore to remove a documentary about Rebiya Kadeer and to cancel her speaking engagement. They also tired to pressure the Australian Government not to give her a visa and to pressure the National Press Club to cancel her speaking engagement there.
Chinese authorities accuse Ms Kadeer, a mother of nine and the President of the World Uyghur Congress, of being a terrorist and the architect of recent unrest in the Uyghur Autonomous region in Xinjiang Province which has seen the deaths of over 200 people.
Speaking at the National Press Club, Ms Kadeer, who spent six years in a Chinese prison before escaping to the United States, thanked the Australian Government for not kowtowing to Chinese pressure.
She also thanked Chinese authorities for the publicity.
"I could not have spent millions of dollars in getting this sort of publicity, but thanks to the Chinese Government for raising my profile and informing Australians of the plight of the Uyghurs," she said through an interpreter.
