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BBC Monday, 15
December, 2003, 10:30 GMT
China issues 'terrorist' list
China has issued its first "terrorist" wanted list,
blaming four Muslim separatist groups and 11
individuals for a string of bombings and
assassinations and calling for international
assistance to track them down.
The groups are accused of trying to create an
independent Islamic state called "East Turkestan" in
the northwest Xinjiang region, which is populated by
Turkic-speaking Uighur Muslims.
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"East Turkestan forces
inside and outside China have long plotted and
executed a series of bombings, assassinations,
arsons, poisoning attacks and other activities in
Xinjiang and elsewhere in China," said Zhao
Yongshen, an official with the Ministry of Public
Security. |
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But Uighur and human
rights activists abroad have rejected the "terrorist"
tag and accuse Beijing of waging a campaign of
politically motivated repression against ethnic and
religious minority groups.
"China wants to have the Uighur movement silenced by
any means," said Enver Can, president of a
Munich-based group called the East Turkestan National
Congress.
According to Beijing, the named groups carried out
their attacks "to achieve their goal of undermining
national unity".
China appealed to other governments to ban the groups,
prohibit them from receiving support or asylum and
freeze their accounts; and to prosecute and
investigate the wanted individuals and hand them over
to China.
But Enver Can denounced the issuing of the list and
the appeal for foreign support as a "misuse" of the
global war on terror.
He had seen nothing that could be connected with
terrorism in his dealings with two of the four groups
on the list and he doubted if the other two actually
existed at all, he told BBC News Online.
The World Uighur Youth Congress and the East Turkestan
Information Centre were, like his own group, simply
NGOs based in Germany whose main function was to
provide information, he said.
The two other groups on China's list are the Eastern
Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and the Eastern
Turkestan Liberation Organization (ETLO).
Chinese authorities have blamed ETIM for many of the
200 or more attacks reported in Xinjiang since 1990
and have banned the group for more than a decade.
Beijing accuses ETIM of having links to the Taleban in
neighbouring Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda network, but has produced no supporting
evidence.
After Chinese lobbying, the group was also banned last
year by the US and the United Nations, despite
criticism from diplomats who described it as defunct.
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