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In Xinjiang province,
an uneasy coexistence
Posted 9/22/2004 7:48 PM
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A Muslim Uighur vendor fills bags for Chinese
tourists buying nuts and dried fruit at a market
in Kashgar.
By Frederic J. Brown, AFP |
By David J. Lynch, USA TODAY
KASHGAR, China — The Chinese government says this
remote city of mud brick and mosques lies on the front
lines of its own war on terror.
Yet here in Xinjiang province, there are no overt
signs of conflict, no military checkpoints, no
tangible tension. The fabled Sunday open-air market
that embodies the city's 2,000-year-old heritage as
the Silk Road's commercial crossroads continues its
brisk trade in donkeys, hand-woven rugs and
elaborately jeweled daggers.
Amid a crackdown on alleged terrorist groups that
accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, Beijing
appears firmly in command of its sometimes restive
Muslim northwest. "Chinese authorities have the
situation pretty much in hand. The degree of control
in Xinjiang is at its highest point ever," says
Nicolas Becquelin, a Hong Kong-based analyst with
Human Rights in China.
In the 1990s, the Chinese government blamed a series
of bombings and shootings in Xinjiang on groups
promoting an independent Uighur (WEE-ger) homeland.
But Beijing has remorselessly repressed advocates of
independence or even greater autonomy, using
widespread arrests to drive resistance groups deep
underground. China also hopes to swamp ethnic
discontent in a rising tide of economic activity,
abetted by a massive influx of Chinese migrants. To
China's rulers, intent on avoiding the national
fragmentation that befell the former Soviet Union,
maintaining command of mineral-rich Xinjiang is
non-negotiable. Among some Uighurs, however, the
thirst for greater control over their own lives is
equally compelling.
Centuries of strife
Becquelin says that China is using the pretext of
fighting terror to quash all dissent by Uighurs,
leaving a simmering resentment below Kashgar's surface
calm. The government's heavy-handed approach, in this
view, risks eventually provoking the very upheaval it
is designed to prevent.
Kashgar today is a peaceful place, but it is also an
oddly neutered one where the majority ethnic Uighur
residents are mere bystanders to their hometown's
development. Surging Chinese investment is remaking
this exotic frontier town in the white-tiled image of
countless cities across the mainland, and scores of
ethnic Han Chinese workers and businessmen continue to
stream into the province. But many Uighurs say the two
peoples coexist only uneasily.
Indeed, the two peoples lead such separate lives that
the Chinese set their clocks to Beijing's time, 2,100
miles away, while the Uighurs follow the sun, which
keeps them two hours behind the resident Han community.
There is a long history of friction in Xinjiang
between the native Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people,
and the Han. For brief periods in the 1930s and 1940s,
this province, which accounts for one-sixth of China's
territory, was an independent republic called East
Turkestan. Chinese authorities insist the area was
settled by the Han 2,000 years ago and have been
willing to use as much force as necessary to prove the
point. Xinjiang is the only place in China where the
death penalty is routinely handed out for political
crimes, according to Amnesty International.
In the 1990s, anti-Chinese sentiment here flared into
violence. Turkic peoples in nearby former Soviet
republics — Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazahkstan —
provided inspiration by forming their own independent
states. In February 1997, when Chinese security
officials forcibly suppressed a peaceful
pro-independence demonstration in Yining, 30 miles
from the Kazakh border, two days of riots resulted.
Nine people were killed and hundreds injured,
according to New York-based Human Rights Watch. One
month later, separatists triggered bombs on two public
buses in Urumqi, the capital.
Chinese officials responded harshly, imprisoning
thousands of people "after grossly unfair and often
summary judicial processes," Human Rights Watch
reported. By 1999, a reported 200 people had been
executed, according to Amnesty International.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, China linked Uighur
activists to al-Qaeda and its Afghanistan allies, the
Taliban. Chinese military units moved to this border
region and the government in Beijing pressed
Washington to label Uighur groups as terrorists. In
August 2002, the State Department froze the financial
assets of an obscure outfit called the East Turkestan
Islamic Movement, saying it was responsible for
politically motivated killings of civilians. The
United States then persuaded the United Nations to add
the group to a global list of terrorist organizations,
which gave the Chinese campaign against Uighur
separatism an enormous boost.
International human rights groups said there was
little evidence that ETIM, one of many Uighur groups,
was involved in terrorism. Since then, the United
States has resisted Chinese demands to add other
Uighur organizations to the list and to repatriate 22
Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay after being captured in
Afghanistan more than two years ago. The latter
decision came after human rights groups warned that
the Uighurs could be summarily executed or imprisoned
if returned to China. The United States now says it is
seeking a third country to accept them once they are
freed.
In the past decade, Uighur terrorists and separatists
killed 160 people and injured more than 400, Wang
Lequan, Communist party secretary in Xinjiang, told
visiting foreign reporters last week. Chinese
authorities uncovered more than 6,000 hand grenades in
one anti-terror operation, he said.
But the last separatist bombing reported in Xinjiang
occurred in 1998. And the number of deaths Wang cited
is the same as the figure published in a Chinese
government report in January 2002, more than
two-and-a-half years ago.
Wang conceded that "terrorists and separatists" had
been less active in recent years than during the early
1990s. But he said Chinese authorities in the first
eight months of this year cracked down on 22 Uighur
groups that were "making preparations" for possible
terror attacks, including buying arms. A total of 50
Uighurs this year have been sentenced to death. Wang
denied reports that some already had been executed. He
said none had yet been put to death.
Same city, different way of life
One expert likens Xinjiang to a "pressure cooker"
because of the absence of legitimate channels for
discontent. "They've been very effective in
suppressing any violence. Sentiment is more difficult
to judge. Many of the issues that led to uprisings in
the 1990s are still unresolved," says Dru Gladney of
the University of Hawaii.
Chief among them is a pervasive feeling on the part of
Uighurs that the continued migration of Han Chinese
here is overrunning their customs, religion and
culture. In 1949, when the Communists seized control
of China, only 6% of Xinjiang's population was Han
Chinese. Today, officially 40% of the province's 19
million residents are Han, slightly less than the 44%
Uighur. (The actual number of Han likely is higher,
since official government statistics are believed to
underestimate the politically sensitive migration.)
Under Chinese law, Xinjiang is governed as an
autonomous Uighur region. But the top Communist Party
officials, who wield the real power here, are all Han
Chinese. And in a place where the two people often
lead separate lives, Uighurs complain that the best
jobs, schools and residences are monopolized by the
Han.
"In a fight between a Han and a Uighur, definitely the
Han will get the benefit of the doubt. ... Deep down
in our hearts, it's hard to accept. There is a great
deal of inequality," says Mai Maijiang, 19, a patron
in an Urumqi barber shop.
The practical impact of the government's Han-first
policies is on display inside a primary school in
Kashgar, 900 miles southwest of Urumqi. The classrooms
here are filled with cheerful boys and girls,
enthusiastically practicing their English, but in
numbers that make learning a challenge. An average
class has almost 50 students.
Many of these children resist learning the Chinese
language, since so few of the Han who emigrate here
learned theirs.
The differences between the two peoples can be
glimpsed simply by strolling around Kashgar. The
streets of the Uighur old town neighborhood are a
charming amalgam of low-slung, mud-brick buildings and
wooden framed structures bearing painted floral
decoration. The men wear beaded square caps and some,
but not a majority, of the women are veiled in the
Muslim tradition.
Horse-drawn wagons, bells jingling, pass through the
narrow lanes in this neighborhood near the
15th-century Id Kah Mosque. Arabic music coming from a
nearby building audibly demonstrates that Kashgar is
closer to Baghdad than Beijing. Vendors hawk tomatoes,
lettuce, red peppers, squash, eggs and dozens of fresh
spices. Nearby, open-air barbecues offer grilled
chicken and lamb kebabs and round, flat nan bread.
This doesn't look remotely like the rest of China. But
less than a mile away, restaurants offering Chinese
specialties from every major region sit alongside
shops selling China Mobile cell phone service. A
massive statue of Mao Zedong, founder of Communist
China, dominates central People's Square. Karaoke bars
are filled with Chinese men swilling the alcoholic
drinks eschewed by devout Muslims.
The Chinese government permits Xinjiang's 23,000
mosques to conduct Islamic services. But unlike cities
elsewhere in the Muslim world, Kashgar at prayer time
does not echo with the amplified sound of the
muzzein's call to prayer. Abdul Ghani, a local
municipal official, insists no law prohibits the
practice.
Further cementing their hold on this land, officials
keep a close eye on the political reliability of the
mosque's imams, or religious leaders. At the Islamic
scripture school in Urumqi, where future imams are
molded, 30% of the curriculum consists of political
and cultural lessons. Notable among them: intense
study of "Deng Xiaoping theory," the cardinal
principles of the former Chinese leader.
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