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Kyrgyzstan’s Worried Uighurs
Local minority fears Kyrgyz government is targeting it
as part of a bigger political game.
By Sultan Jumagulov in Bishkek (RCA No. 221,
04-Aug-03)
Ethnic Uighurs living in Kyrgyzstan say their whole
community has been stigmatised by a government
clampdown on a radical separatist movement.
The Uighurs - originally from the neighbouring
province of Xinjiang in China - fear they are being
victimised because the Kyrgyz authorities want to
curry favour with China, and are exploiting the
international war on terrorism to do so.
“This concept of Uighur terrorism and extremism is
constantly hammered into the Kyrgyz public
consciousness,” IWPR was told by Rozimuhammed
Abdulbakiev, head of the Uighur Unity Society,
Ittipak.
Community leaders voiced their worries about the trend
at a national congress of Uighurs held in Bishkek on
July 28. Many feel that whenever a crime is committed
in Kyrgyzstan and an Uighur is found to be involved,
the government and the state-controlled media
deliberately ascribe it to the Islamic militant and
separatist movement operating across the border in
China.
“Anti-Uighur propaganda has created a negative image
of the whole community,” said Muzaffar Kurbanov,
editor of Vizhdan Avazi (Voice of Conscience), an
Uighur-language newspaper in Bishkek.
“We feel that this has led to a hostile attitude
towards the Uighur population among the wider
population.”
As evidence of changing public attitudes, Kurbanov
said some Uighurs found they were treated with
suspicion when they applied for jobs.
Other community members agree that the unfavourable
media coverage - encouraged by the authorities - has
been damaging. After a major fire at a Bishkek market
in 2001, there were persistent rumours that Uighur
separatists were behind it – despite an official
investigation blaming an electrical fault.
“We Uighurs in Kyrgyzstan feel as though we are
treading on hot coals. You never know what other
crimes we might be accused of next,” said Abdulbakiev.
There are an estimated 50,000 Uighurs living in
Kyrgyzstan. Some have been there since the 1940s,
while others are more recent arrivals. There is a lot
of contact between Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang, with
small-time traders - many of them Uighurs - shuttling
across the border.
China has always treated the Uighur diaspora in
Central Asia with deep suspicion, and has pressured
governments there to curb community support for
separatism in Xinjiang. The province is home to
perhaps eight million Uighurs, who are Muslims and
speak a Turkic language, and are thus culturally
closer to Kyrgyz, Kazaks and Uzbeks than to the rest
of China.
The independence movement has its roots in a brief
spell of independence which the region – termed the
East Turkestan Republic – enjoyed between 1944 and
1949.
Until 2001, Chinese repression of pro-independence
activists in Xinjiang – like that in Tibet – found
little support further afield.
That changed after September 11, when the West, Russia
and China found common cause in combating radical
Islamic groups across the region. In 2002, the US
government imposed sanctions on the East Turkestan
Islamic Movement, ETIM, said to have carried out
terrorist attacks in western China. Islamic groups in
Xinjiang were alleged to have links with the Taleban
and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
In Kyrgyzstan, the campaign against Uighur radicals
began in earnest after the 1998 bombing of a minibus
taxi in the southern city of Osh, which left a number
of people dead. Four men – Uighurs with Chinese,
Turkish and Russian citizenship – were sentenced to
death for the attack. Kyrgyz media described them as
members of a group called “East Turkestan”. This term
is ambiguous since apart from ETIM there is another,
much longer established diaspora group called the East
Turkestan Liberation Organisation.
Since then the government has consistently asserted
that militant Uighurs are operating on Kyrgyz
territory. Interviewed by the Res Publica newspaper in
July, National Security Service spokeswoman Chinara
Asanova said, “We have irrefutable evidence that they
[the 1998 bombers] all belonged to the underground
extremist organisation East Turkestan.”
Other acts of violence are routinely branded “the work
of Uighur terrorists and separatists”, although at
least some are more likely to have been committed by
criminal gangs.
In one recent case, the pro-government newspaper
Vecherny Bishkek was quick to blame “an Uighur
organisation” for an attack on a bus which left 19
Chinese citizens dead earlier this year.
Community leaders say they agree that radicals may
have been involved in some incidents. But what worries
them is that no distinction is drawn between the small
number of militants and the larger Uighur community
who lead law-abiding lives in Kyrgyzstan.
The Kyrgyz president’s security adviser, Bolot
Januzakov, denied that Uighurs have been singled out
as a group, “Kyrgyzstan is home to many ethnic groups
and we treat all of them equally.”
Some say that blaming the Uighurs is a deliberate
policy designed to appease Kyrgyzstan’s giant
neighbour to the east.
“There is no Uighur extremist organisation in
Kyrgyzstan,” said Tursun Islam, who heads Democracy, a
human rights group based in the Uighur community.
“One gets the impression that certain politicians and
law-enforcement bodies are carrying out the will of
the Chinese special services, whom it suits to accuse
Uighurs of terrorism and religious extremism.”
Tursun Islam says the Kyrgyz government has been
cracking down on the Uighurs since it joined the
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional grouping
in which China plays a prominent role. Set up in 1996,
the pact focuses on security matters such as terrorism
and Islamic radicalism.
Aside from the international policy dimensions, Uighur
leaders fear the Kyrgyz authorities’ present behaviour
shows uncomfortable comparisons with Stalin’s policy
of persecuting whole minority groups which he
perceived as disloyal.
“We don’t want a repeat of the times when you were
stigmatised because of your ethnic origin,” said
Abdulbakiev.
Sultan Jumagulov is an IWPR contributor in Bishkek
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