Beijing  - Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer has led an extraordinary life in her 62 years spent between three cultures.

The mother of 11 children emerged from relative poverty in a highly male-dominated culture to become one of China's most successful businesswomen before she was imprisoned by the government on subversion charges in 1999.

China's ruling Communist Party released her in 2005 to join her husband, the writer and fellow Uighur activist Sidik Rouzi, in exile in the United States.

Despite threats against her and claims that the Chinese government has a vendetta against her family, Kadeer has become more and more outspoken since leaving China.

She has stepped up her rights advocacy on behalf of the eight million Uighurs she left behind in China, being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, becoming president of the World Uighur Congress and meeting international politicians, including former US president George W Bush last year.

In April, Kadeer published a book in English, "Dragon fighter: One woman's epic struggle for peace with China".

She called the book a "tale of personal tragedy, triumph over adversity (and) persistence in the face of repression".

In the 1980s and 1990s, the former laundry worker developed a successful trade business and ran a department store in Urumqi, the capital of the far western region of Xinjiang, which is home to most of China's Uighurs.

She joined the Communist Party, was a member of a regional political congress, and attended national and international women's conferences.

But Kadeer's life seems to have changed after the brutal military crackdown on Uighur protesters in Xinjiang's Gulja (Yining) city in 1997.

Amnesty International said "hundreds, possibly thousands, lost their lives or were seriously injured" in Gulja, with many more Uighurs detained and some executed.

As with other military crackdowns in China, the government has never given a full account or held a public inquiry into the Gulja crackdown.

Kadeer tried to use her position as a prominent businesswoman and local politician to investigate what happened in the city.

"I began hearing about terrible events occurring in Gulja in early February 1997, and decided - as a Uighur and a member of the Chinese National People's Congress, that I had to go to see for myself what was happening," Kadeer said in a 2007 testimony to Amnesty.

As she was interviewing people at one of the first Uighur houses she visited in Gulja, police and soldiers "burst into the house."

"The top military officer ordered me to put my hands on my head and to face the wall and said, 'if you resist or shout and scream, we will shoot you,'" Kadeer said.

The officers strip-searched her before taking her to a local police station, where she was told to "leave the city immediately," she said.

Kadeer said she was threatened but "resolved to stay in the city to gather more information."

The following month, she spoke out at a politcal meeting in Beijing, criticizing China's "harsh crackdown" on the student-led Uighur protests in Gulja.

The Communist Party sacked her from her political posts and banned her from travelling abroad, but she was not arrested until 1999, while she was on her way to meet a US congressional rights delegation.

Kadeer was convicted of "providing state secrets abroad", though rights groups said the charges related only to sending newspaper clippings from Xinjiang to her husband in the United States.

In her book, she said government prosecutors at her trial played the "secret videotape they had made of me while I was unconscious.

"In the video, my hair was disheveled and my mouth half-open. The documents that the government officials themselves had stuffed into my blouse beforehand were clearly visible," Kadeer said.

In her own defence, without a lawyer, Kadeer said she told the court she had "led a just life" and "helped safeguard the stability of China".

"The human rights abuses that the Uyghur population suffers, I myself suffer from too," she said.

"I've been placed before this court today as an important event in the history of our Uighur homeland."

When China sentenced two more Uighurs to long prison terms in March after convicting them of staging protests in Xinjiang's Khotan city, Kadeer said the sentences show how the government handles with "peaceful Uighur dissent: through lengthy imprisonment and accusations of extremism or violent intent".

"Even an action as simple as raising a flag is punished by years in a Chinese prison, something which I know from experience is extremely brutal and dehumanizing," she said.(dpa)