|
China set to crack down on
Muslim northwest
(Writes through with police crackdown in Xinjiang)
BEIJING, Sept 24 (Reuters) - China will mount a
100-day security crackdown from October 1 in its tense
Muslim northwest, police said, a day after Beijing
agreed with Russia and Central Asian countries on
plans for a regional anti-terror centre.
A spokesman at the Office of Public Security in
Xinjiang said the anti-crime campaign in the region,
where Muslim Uighurs are agitating for a free state,
was timed to cover the period from National Day on
October 1 to Chinese New Year in late January.
"A campaign against all kinds of criminals will run
from October 1 to January 10 in Xinjiang," he said.
"It includes violent crime, terrorist crimes, crimes
involving explosives and guns and so on."
On Tuesday, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)
-- comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- agreed to move ahead with
long-standing plans for an anti-terror centre in the
Uzbek capital of Tashkent.
On the same day, some 2,000 police from across China,
including the capital Beijing and the southern
boomtown of Shenzhen, took part in another set of
drills in remote northern Inner Mongolia, Xinhua news
agency said.
"The participants performed a series of programmes,
combating terrorists who were trying to sneak into the
Chinese territory, set off bombs, attack a motorcade,
use chemical weapons, hold hostages and hijack an
aircraft," Xinhua said.
The spokesman said the Xinjiang crackdown was routine
and bore no relation to SCO activities. "The crime
rate is often higher in winter than in other seasons,"
he said.
But a Uighur activist overseas charged that Beijing
had timed the crackdown, the latest in a series of
police campaigns in heavily militarised Xinjiang, to
come on the heels of the SCO meeting.
Rexiti Dilixiadi, of the Sweden-based East Turkestan
Information Network, said it exposed China's efforts
to use the SCO to legitimise arbitrary arrests and
other forms of oppression.
"If the international community does not pressure the
Chinese government to cancel the crackdown and pay
attention to the Uighur problem, we have no choice but
to reconsider adopting ways that we believe are legal
to mount resistance," he said.
He refused to specify what steps Uighurs might take,
insisting his group had never participated in acts of
terror.
"I am unable to tell you specifics," he told Reuters
by telephone. "But we will adopt ways to turn the
focus of the international community back to the issue
of East Turkestan."
After the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United
States, China began pressing harder for international
support against Uighur militants, who it says have
plotted a series of uprisings and bombings since the
1980's and trained in camps in Pakistan and
Afghanistan.
The SCO, set up as the Shanghai Five in 1996 to
resolve Soviet-era border disputes, admitted
Uzbekistan in 2001 and shifted focus to combating
Islamic militants after September 11.
|
