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Beijing Stokes the Fires of Ethnic Tensions
Dexter Roberts
MAY 29, 2002
In a move that makes a bad situation
worse, authorities are using September 11 to justify a
crackdown on Muslim minorities Recently, I went deep into
the interior of China to the Xinjiang region, a vast
expanse of deserts and mountains that borders on Mongolia,
Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. My mission: Gather some
reporting on
one of the mainland's biggest
infrastructure projects, a 4,200 kilometer, $18 billion gas
pipeline that will eventually stretch from the arid desert
reaches of northwestern China to Shanghai on the
eastern coast.
My five-day visit in April yielded a lot
more, however: In a bar frequented by Uighur Muslims in
the regional capital of Urumqi, on an overnight train
groaning its way over the Tianshan mountains where I
talked with a young Hui Muslim woman, and in a sunny
city square surrounded by laughing Chinese school
children, I got a taste of what's on the minds of
Xinjiang's varied
people -- and how life is changing in
this tense, ethnically-charged region, containing
China's largest Muslim populations.
Beijing has long carried out
heavy-handed policies of control in Xinjiang that limit the
religious and cultural practices of the local Uighurs.
That's the Muslim group that still narrowly
outnumbers the region's Han Chinese (although a massive
inflow of
Chinese settlers may soon change that).
Since the early '90s, a small number of Uighur
Muslims have been pushing for an independent homeland -- a
state they want to be called East Turkestan. In
fact, the independent state existed briefly after
World War II, before China brought the country under
its yoke.
KERNEL OF TRUTH. Since September 11,
Beijing has been
loudly claiming that more than 1,000
Uighurs have trained in Muslim Taliban camps, and
that some have already returned to China to join in a
separatist movement whose ultimate aim is the
creation of an independent and fundamentalist Islamic
state.
Beijing's claims have at least a kernel
of truth: Xinjiang is a hotbed of ethnic and
religious tensions that have occasionally exploded into
violence, as Uighurs chafed under Han Chinese
domination. For the last decade, ardent separatists have
carried out a series of bomb blasts on buses, had
shootouts with local police, and
occasionally
assassinated Chinese officials.
The local Chinese population, for their
part, say they have been periodically targeted for
harassment as interlopers. And there's no question
that some Uighurs fought in Afghanistan against the U.S.
Indeed, on May 27, Beijing announced more specific
numbers, saying some 300 Uighurs have been captured and
approximately
20 more killed in fighting with U.S.
forces. Hundreds more, China claims, have fled into
Northern Pakistan. While most captured Uighurs are still
being held in Afghanistan, at least one is believed to
be held in Guatanamo Bay in Cuba.
STAMPING OUT DISSENT. At the same time,
international
groups, including Amnesty International,
say Beijing is using September 11 as the rationale for
an intensified human-rights crackdown in Xinjiang that
also limits economic freedoms, despite what those
groups see as scant justification for China's
allegations of a major terrorist threat. Several thousand
Uighurs are believed to have been arrested on political
charges. Hundreds
remain in jails, and some have been
executed. Mosques have been closed, and residents have
been barred from religious practice.
An already tense situation has now grown
much worse, as China uses the new international
revulsion with terrorism as cover for a significant
tightening of control over this restive region --
labeling Muslims who show any resistance to Beijing's
draconian policies as religious extremists and terrorists.
So far, the Bush Administration has
resisted embracing Beijing's claims that it is engaged in a
deadly fight against terrorism and has refused
China's request to repatriate any captured Uighurs. Indeed,
a recent State Dept. report on human rights in China
continued to single out abuses in Xinjiang as being
of particular
concern.
CODED REPLY. In reality, most Uighurs
follow Sufism -- a more mystical and tolerant version of
Islam. And despite
widespread dissatisfaction with
Chinese rule, there is little evidence of any broad
based or organized resistance to Beijing's
sovereignty. But from what I saw, Uighurs are clearly
suffering new infringements on their rights, as the
government cracks
down even harder.
That was clear when I joined some
friends in a nightclub
frequented by Uighurs, in the
regional capital of Urumqi in
northern Xinjiang.
In a smoky bar with many bottles of vodka and beer in
evidence (this in itself suggested to me that Beijing's
claims of rampant religious fundamentalism in the
region are exaggerated), I asked one Uighur
companion what I thought was a relatively simple question:
How had things changed for Muslims since
September 11? He would only nervously say that he held a
government job.
The clear inference was that his
connection to the government (most good jobs, such as his,
going to ethnic Chinese instead) provided him
some level of protection from the arbitrary and now
increasingly common harassment of Uighurs by local
officials and police.
INCREASE IN PREJUDICE. Less egregious,
but also troubling, is the overt racism that many
Han Chinese show for Muslim minorities -- not just
the Uighurs but also the Hui (the Huis in Xinjiang are a
much smaller minority than either the Uighurs or Han).
A thirtysomething Hui woman whom I met on
an overnight
train unburdened herself when I asked
about Han-Muslim
relations in China. (While I only had
one night on the hard sleeper -- a class of train car
that does without extravagances like
separate compartments
with doors -- she was travelling for several days all
the way to China's eastern Anhui province not far
from Shanghai. Believe me, that's a long time to travel
with these
accommodations.)
"People always ask whether I ride a
horse and whether I carry a knife when I tell them I am from
Xinjiang and am Hui. I am so sick of it," she said as
our car rattled back and forth, making sleep a
near-impossible option. True, her pious mother and
father, she reported, would never have accepted her
marrying a non-
Muslim -- her husband is also Hui. Her
father prays the
required five times per day, and has
saved enough money
so that he will be able to make the
pilgrimmage to Mecca next year, she said.
Prejudices against Muslims in China have
only become worse since September 11, she said. As
for the terrorist attack and the war in
Afghanistan: "It is very sad what happened in New York --
but the U.S. should not be bombing Afghanistan," she
said. "War always hurts the common people, not
their governments."
"HEROIC" BUTCHER. Equally informative
was a conversation I had with a group of
bubbly Chinese school children in Korla, which sits on
the edge of the Taklamaklan Desert in southern Xianjiang,
and is headquarters for China's oil-and-gas
exploration
operations in the region. They were the
children of Chinese entrepreneurs -- restaurateurs,
small shopkeepers, cab drivers -- who had come
there looking for economic opportunity.
Standing near a hulking statue in the
city's center of top revolutionary leader and military
man Wang Zhen, the 10- and 11-year-olds gave me a taste
of what they're taught in the local school
system. Wang, who led the conquest of the Uighurs in
Xinjiang in the early 1950s, was a "hero," they said.
Why, I asked? "Because he killed many Uighurs,"
they replied with sweet smiles on their faces.
Wang, whose mammoth statue looks bravely
heroic with both a plow in his hand and a gun over
his shoulder, gained international notoriety after his
death when new revelations surfaced a few years ago
about his hardline stance during the Tiananmen Square
massacre in June, 1989. In The Tiananmen Papers, he was
reported as having this to say about the student demonstrators: "Those goddamn bastards.
They're really asking for it. We should send the troops
right now to grab those counter-revolutionaries.
Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party
deserves death and no burial."
I left Xinjiang with no ready answers --
but one clear realization. As long as Beijing
continues to hold up the likes of Wang Zhen as national
heroes and continues its generally repressive policies
towards minorities, it's very unlikely that the growing and
increasingly dangerous ethnic resentments in places
like Xinjiang
and Tibet can be resolved. That's bad
news, not only for minorities such as Xinjiang's
Muslims but for all Chinese.
Roberts is BusinessWeek's Beijing Bureau
Chief
Copyright 2000-2002,
by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.
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