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Rebiya Kadeer, an elfin grandmother with gray-tinged pigtails who was released from a Chinese prison in March 2005 and immediately whisked into exile. A former millionaire once praised by Beijing as a model businesswoman, Kadeer now lives near Washington, D.C. She is recognized as the leader of the Uighur exile community and heads the Uyghur American Association and the World Uyghur Congress; both groups receive grants from the bipartisan National Endowment for Democracy funded by the U.S. Congress

my family has been a target of Chinese government persecution. Whenever something happens, authorities go after my family. My two sons are in prison. Even my grandchildren have been kicked out of school.

You mentioned your two sons in prison. What were they charged with and what are their prison terms?In 2006 one was sentenced to seven years and the other to nine years, on charges of tax evasion and separatism, respectively.

Violence in China's restive western region of Xinjiang has left at least 140 people dead and more than 800 people injured, state media say.Several hundred people were also arrested after a protest turned violent in the city of Urumqi on Sunday.

The protest was reportedly prompted by a deadly fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese in southern China last month. The BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says that if the numbers of dead are to be believed - and state media say they may rise - this look like the bloodiest violence in China since Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

Uighur exiles said police had fired indiscriminately on a peaceful protest in Urumqi.

Along with Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most politically sensitive regions in China. It is strategically located at the borders of Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.

Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tensions, fostered by an economic gap between many Uighurs and Han Chinese, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants who now are the majority in most key cities, including Urumqi. There were attacks in the region before and during last year's Summer Olympics in Beijing.

But controlling the anger on both sides of the ethnic divide will now make controlling Xinjiang, with its gas reserves and trade and energy ties to central Asia, all the more testing for the ruling Communist Party.

Thousands of security forces have been deployed in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang region to try to end deadly ethnic clashes.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, reporting from Urumqi's Uighur neighbourhood, says there are thousands of paramilitary police in the city in a situation he says is martial law in all but name.

Reporters from the AFP news agency said they had seen fresh violence on Wednesday, including one attack on a Uighur man by about 20 Han Chinese.