Rebiya Kadeer is a regular liar and a bald-faced one at that.

Addressing the National Press Club in Australia's capital Canberra on Tuesday, the chairwoman of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) lied again, right to the reporters' faces.

Kadeer accused Chinese authorities of removing Uyghur-language lessons from schools and forcing the Uighurs to learn Chinese.

"I think the Chinese government should stop its invasive policy of single-language (Chinese) education and allow students and their parents to choose whatever language they aspire to learn," she said through an interpreter.

Interestingly though, Kadeer made her remarks in Uyghur, the language she would not have been able to speak should the Chinese government have deprived her of her right to learn it.

China, Kadeer said, has adopted "biased policies towards ethnic minorities" in the past 60 years, exploited the Uyghurs and pushed all of them into a "state of extreme poverty."

But she herself was once a "millionairess" in Xinjiang and stood as a strong testament to China's preferential policies toward ethnic minorities there.

Starting from a small business in the 1980s, Kadeer worked her way up to become the richest woman in Xinjiang before she broke Chinese law and was sentenced to jail.

Still, during her appearance at the press club, Kadeer continued to tell lies in a vain attempt to cover the bare facts and her separatist intentions.

Throughout her "speech," Kadeer called China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region "East Turkistan," and publicly proclaimed that Xinjiang was an "independent country" before 1949 and that Chinese troops "invaded" and "annexed" the region.

Books compiled by Western historians never said Xinjiang was an independent country before 1949, not to mention that there was no such ridiculous record of it in Chinese history.

Isn't it a pack of lies, then, for Kadeer to say she does not seek secession and independence?

Lies, even repeated a thousand times, remain lies. A clumsy liar draws the derision of those with discerning eyes, and each lie Kadeer tells will be a display of her true separatist nature.

(Xinhua News Agency August 12, 2009)