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Crackdown brings
criticism
Posted on Mon, Oct. 04, 2004
Some calm has returned to the Xinjiang region. Rights
groups allege repression.
By Tim Johnson
Inquirer Foreign Staff
KASHGAR, China - Under the guise of a "war on
terrorism," China has launched a campaign of
repression on its Muslim Uighur minority that has
stopped cold nearly all violent attacks.
Not so long ago, far western China was roiled by
numerous bombings and assassinations.
More recently, a brutal crackdown reported by
human-rights groups has restored a measure of calm to
the remote, oil-rich Xinjiang region. China has
shrugged off criticism and pledged anew to obliterate
any glimmer of separatist sentiment among the eight
million ethnic Uighurs.
Today, the Uighurs (pronounced Weeghers), who live in
arid, dun-colored towns and cities on the edge of the
forbidding Taklimakan Desert, dwell in resentful
coexistence with migrant Han Chinese flooding their
homeland. The Uighurs bristle at how China has
restricted their religious freedom, yet fear to speak
out amid the pervasive presence of security agents.
Communist Party leaders sound triumphant in describing
their efforts to quash Uighur separatists.
"Xinjiang has dealt a heavy blow to nationalist,
splittist and terrorist forces since the 1990s," Wang
Lequan, the top Communist Party official, told a group
of visiting foreign reporters in Urumqi, the capital
of Xinjiang, a huge area officially called the
Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
So far this year, Wang said, police have broken up 22
cells of Uighur rebels and handed out sentences to
more than 50 of them, including the death penalty.
The last known violent attack in Xinjiang was in 2001.
But Uighur activists in exile say they have not given
up on a dream of an independent homeland, which they
call East Turkistan, and they do not believe that
China's arrest of thousands of Uighur activists and
Muslim clerics will bring long-term stability.
"I do not know when the pressure-cooker situation will
explode, but I am sure it will happen," said Dilxat
Raxit, a spokesman for the East Turkistan Information
Center, an exile group based in Sweden and Germany.
Chinese officials portray Xinjiang as pacified and the
Uighurs as a contented part of a national tapestry
that includes 55 other ethnic minority groups.
In organizing a tour for foreign journalists around
Xinjiang, the Foreign Ministry set up meetings with a
"typical Uighur family" and officials, many of whom
said Uighurs should integrate more fully into China.
"We try to encourage the Uighurs to speak Chinese.
That would be convenient for them to do," said
Mohammed Sayed of the Islamic Scripture School in
Urumqi.
Even as they speak of pacification, officials wield an
iron fist in Xinjiang. Most Uighurs spoke only warily.
Secret police often tailed a journalist breaking from
a group.
At a new housing compound in the eastern part of
Kashgar, a city near the border with Kyrgyzstan, a
crowd of Uighurs grew agitated at a visitor's
questions. A weeping woman held her wrists together as
if she were handcuffed. Others exhorted a translator:
"Tell him the truth!"
The translator began to interpret their grievances,
only to abruptly stop. "We are not alone," he said,
signaling agents lurking nearby.
Uighurs have numerous complaints, ranging from
education and health care to lack of religious freedom.
Authorities limit the religious practice of Uighurs
more than of other Muslim minorities, such as the Hui.
Officials bar those under 18 from entering mosques,
ban foreign Muslims from meeting local imams, and
prohibit the use of the word jihad, or holy war.
Mosques routinely are blocked from using loudspeakers.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States,
China saw an opening to crack down further on Uighur
separatists, human-rights groups said.
"Over the last three years, tens of thousands of
people are reported to have been detained for
investigation in the region," the London-based
human-rights group Amnesty International said in a
report in July. Thousands are believed to be in labor
camps. Others have been executed, though how many is
unclear.
"The government basically sees Islam as a threat to
China's stability," said Alim Seytoff, the general
secretary of the Uyghur American Association, an exile
group that represents 1,000 Uighurs who are living in
the United States.
Wang, the party official, said Uighur attacks in the
1990s killed more than 160 people and injured 400,
including religious figures and party cadres.
More than 1,000 Uighurs trained at al-Qaeda or Taliban
bases before U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in late
2001, Wang said, and Uighur extremist groups overseas
are seeking to fuel violence in Xinjiang.
"They have sent foot soldiers repeatedly to Xinjiang
to organize violent activities," Wang said.
Whether China has subdued Uighur separatism
permanently is an open question.
"Last year, Xinjiang's public security situation was
very good," the chair of the provincial government,
Ismael Tiliwaldi, said in April.
Others say Uighur discontent simmers, and will vent
one day.
"If you push a group of people into a corner by
stripping them of their rights, it will radicalize the
people, forcing them to strike back," said Seytoff,
the exile leader.
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