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The Asian Wall Street Journal
When leaders of the East Turkestan National
Congress met last month in the European Parliament
building in Brussels, China's Foreign Ministry accused
the parliament of hosting "a terrorist organization."
Yet in the West, the ETNC, a Munich-based group that
claims to represent 16 Uighur diaspora communities
around the world, isn't considered terrorist. Although
it campaigns for Xinjiang's right to
self-determination, it is pro-democratic, committed to
nonviolence and has expressly condemned the Sept. 11
terror attacks on the U.S. Western intelligence
experts say there is no evidence tying it to violent
separatist groups in China.
China's false indignation shows how it is exploiting
world-wide revulsion at the attacks on America to
justify a nearly 10-year crackdown on ethnic
nationalism and religion in Xinjiang, whose Muslim
Turkic Uighurs comprise half of the region's 18
million people. For backing, or at least not opposing,
the U.S.-led campaign against Osama bin Laden,
President Jiang Zemin hopes to milk greater sympathy
from Western governments critical of China's human
rights record.
The Bush administration must reject China's attempt to
equate the attack on America with its separatist
problem. It should not give support, tacit or
otherwise, to China's abuses of Muslims in Xinjiang as
part of any means to prosecute the war against Arab
terrorism. To do so would not only undermine the
larger political struggle for Muslim support against
radical Islam, but also alienate the Uighurs, the vast
majority of whom practice a moderate form of Islam and
are pro-American.
Xinjiang is the last Muslim region in the world under
the yoke of a communist state. And keeping it that way
has been a top priority for Jiang Zemin since he
became Communist Party general secretary in 1989. When
Mr. Jiang retires in 2002, he leaves the minorities
portfolio in experienced hands. Vice President Hu
Jintao earned his bona fides cracking heads in Tibet,
where as the much-feared governor from 1989-92 he
imposed martial law, brutally suppressed the
monasteries and filled the prison camps with Buddhist
monks and nuns.
Like Tibet, Xinjiang has been dissolving inexorably
into the advancing Chinese state for hundreds of years.
But resistance has at times been fierce. The Uighurs
have rebelled against Chinese rule three times since
1860, each time establishing independent states. The
last, the pro-Soviet Republic of East Turkestan,
existed from 1944 until the Chinese communists seized
power in 1949.
Since then, the central government in Beijing has done
everything in its power to consolidate its hold on
Xinjiang, which it considers a strategic buffer zone.
Government relocation programs, the discovery of oil
and the commercial production of cotton have
underpinned successive waves of the great Han Chinese
migration west. In 1949, the region was 93% Uighur;
today Chinese comprise 40% of the population.
Ethnic "swamping," Han chauvinism and a relentless
assault on basic religious freedom have been the chief
Uighur resentments. During the Cultural Revolution,
Red Guards closed Xinjiang's mosques and ritually
burned the Qu'ran. They also forced religious leaders
to eat pork, publicly tortured them and imprisoned
them in labor camps along with thousands of others. In
a bid to cut the Uighurs off from other Turkic peoples
in Central Asia, the Chinese decreed that Uighur be
written in Roman rather than traditional Arabic script.
The persecution and violence in the 1960s was so
severe that thousands of Uighurs and Kazaks fled to
the Soviet Union.
Deng Xiaoping sought stability and ethnic harmony by
implementing preferential policies in employment,
education, culture and religion while pursuing deeper
ties with the Islamic Middle East. But rather than
fulfill aspirations for self worth, identity, higher
living standards and political inclusion, his policies
instead generated a renewed affinity with Islam among
many Uighurs and helped create an intellectual climate
conducive to demands for greater autonomy and
self-determination. In 1985 and `86, Uighurs staged a
series of large but peaceful demonstrations in the
regional capital Urumqi demanding greater freedoms.
Which brings us to the parlous climate Uighurs have
lived in for more than a decade. It began with the
nationwide crackdown on dissent following the 1989
pro-democracy demonstrations in China, during which
Deng imposed draconian new proscriptions on education
and religious activities in Xinjiang. Many mosques and
religious schools were closed, clergy were forced to
make loyalty oaths or be defrocked, and youths under
the age of 18 were prohibited from displaying any
outward sign of religious belief. Prominent Uighur
intellectuals, academics and artists were accused of
fomenting nationalism and jailed.
Two events fed the cycle of tit-for-tat violence that
erupted in 1992 between Chinese security forces and
separatist groups. The first was a major uprising,
triggered by a mosque closure in the village of Baren
in 1990, which after spreading to eight major towns
and cities was ruthlessly crushed. The second was the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence
of the independent Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tajik
states, in which some Uighurs saw the promise of a new
Uighur homeland.
In their wake, a few separatist groups attacked mainly
army troops and infrastructure. A small number of
extremists resorted to terrorist tactics, including
the attempted assassinations of pro-communist imams
and Uighur officials, and bombings of government
buildings and public facilities.
This was the situation throughout the most of the
turbulent 1990s, though Mr. Jiang used a mailed fist
and cast an ever wider net to reverse it. Since 1996,
when China helped create the Shanghai Five with Russia
and three former Soviet republics in Central Asia to
combat Islamic extremism, Mr. Jiang has sought to
justify his harsh policies by emphasizing the
increased threat to Xinjiang from violent Muslim
fundamentalists.
This is almost certainly an exaggeration. Anywhere
from several hundred to several thousand Uighurs are
now believed to be fighting alongside the Taliban. But
even the most conservative Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang
aren't naming their new-borns Osama.
Uighurs are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, and
their intellectuals, inspired by the Ataturk Jadidists,
have traditionally valued the rule of law, scholarship
and social activism. Unlike fundamentalists, they hope
to safeguard indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it
to the modern state. In the impoverished desert oasis
towns of southern Xinjiang, a mix of pre-Islamic
shamanism, Buddhism and Sufism have made the people
tolerant of different forms of religious statement.
Yet for many Uighurs, Islam became an important new
focus of ethnic identity and anti-Chinese unity. It
was this rising unity informed by religious belief
that Mr. Jiang decided to crush in 1996 by ordering
the largest military crackdown on Chinese citizens
since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. As the
security forces (by some accounts more than 300,000
troops were mobilized) began their sweeps, the Uighurs
were subjected to one mind-numbing, Cultural
Revolution-style propaganda campaign after another: an
"ethnic unity" campaign, a "patriotic education"
campaign, a "college rectification" campaign, and a
campaign to "promote atheism." In May 1997, a "denunciation"
campaign was launched resulting in 1,000 arrests.
The army and police virtually wiped out the few,
poorly equipped bands of separatists. Still, there was
resistance, primarily in reaction to the thousands of
arbitrary arrests, the banning of religious activities
and summary executions. Anti-Chinese riots broke out
in 1997 in the city of Yining, leaving nine dead and
more than 200 injured. Terrorists bombed buses in
Urumqi and Beijing that same year.
The crackdown continues. In April, the police and
military launched yet another sweep in Xinjiang, in
which the authorities acknowledged the arrests of
people for having "illegal religious materials."
The separatist goal of an independent East Turkestan
is little more than an imagined community, dreamt by
Uighurs who long ago fled to Turkey, Europe and
elsewhere in Central Asia, and who offer only moral
support to their compatriots in Xinjiang. Very few
Uighurs have been willing to take up the gun, and
fewer yet the bomb, in the name of Allah. And yet the
violence in Xinjiang is likely to continue as long as
Uighurs desire institutionalized means for identity
and autonomy and China continues to deny them.
The Uighurs therefore face a bleak future of
suppression and containment. Whatever China's
contribution to the fight against Osama bin Laden and
the Taliban, the U.S. must not abet Beijing's abuses
against the Uighurs, a people who know all too well
why America is waging war on terrorism.
Mr. Beal is the deputy editorial page editor of The
Asian Wall Street Journal.
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ETIC REPORT 2000 
