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The World Uighur Network News 2001

The New York Times   December 16, 2001

China, in Harsh Crackdown, Executes Muslim Separatists

By CRAIG S. SMITH

HOTAN, China — A crowd gathered in a sports stadium beneath a blue morning sky here in October to watch court officials sentence a man to death, a scene that has been played out hundreds of times across China this year as part of the Communist Party's latest drive against crime.
But this rally was different. The man, Metrozi Mettohti, 34, was given the death penalty for trying to "split the country" and for storing weapons as part of a persistent and occasionally violent separatist movement among China's Uighurs, the Turkic- speaking ethnic group of nine million people, most of them Muslims, concentrated along the country's far western border.
Six other men were given jail terms of up to 12 years that day for separatist activities, said local residents and activists abroad. According to one account, Mr. Mettohti shouted "Long live Eastern Turkestan!" — the name of the country separatists would like to create — before being gagged.
After the rally, local people say, he was put in the back of a truck, driven to a village outside of town and shot in the back of the head. The execution could not be officially verified.
The fragile, fertile strip between China's rugged western mountains and its vast western desert is the only place in the country where people are regularly put to death for political offenses. The country's current anticrime drive, coupled with a renewed focus on Islamic militancy in the wake of the American-led war on terrorism, has only increased the pace of the executions, Uighurs say.
"The government gives very little information about the people who are executed, and news of executions isn't published outside the places where they occur," said a young Uighur man in Hotan, speaking in the privacy of a car in a region where most everyone is jittery when talking to outsiders.
"Have you heard of `hazat?' " he said, using the Uighur word for jihad, or Islamic holy war. But he was startled when he saw the word written in a reporter's notebook and insisted that his cellphone number be torn from the same page.
Then he thought better of discussing politics at all, and with good reason. His brother had been released just days earlier after nearly a decade in jail for publishing separatist tracts. "The secret police are everywhere," the young man said. "You never know who they are."
Most of the Uighurs condemned to death here are charged with murder or with otherwise causing deaths, but some, like Mr. Mettohti, are being executed for lesser transgressions.
The Chinese government says the executions are meant to keep the separatist threat in check, arguing that Beijing is battling Islamic terrorists not unlike those the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, just a few hundred miles away.
But Uighurs say that the number of executions is incommensurate with the threat posed by separatists and that many innocent people have been swept up in the crackdown. Some of those charged with separatism are simply frustrated young men demanding their rights, they say, adding that the war against terrorism war has given Beijing the political cover to pursue policies that are meant to erode their cultural identity.
At least 25 Uighurs have been executed this year and scores more are waiting on death row, say people who track these executions in the local news media. They say the number is probably much higher because the government in August stopped publicizing most of the executions, which Uighurs say are part of a larger effort to suppress legitimate dissent and accelerate the ethnic group's assimilation into the country's larger Han Chinese population.
This sparsely populated area's oases once watered camels and fortified travelers with raisins, mutton and bread while they paused between mountains and desert on the fabled Silk Road. The Uighurs' local economy is still made up of such stuff.
Though called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region today, its autonomy is largely symbolic because all major policy decisions are made by the Communist Party and almost all of the region's senior party posts are held by ethnic Chinese. Though Uighurs accounted for more than 90 percent of the region's population when the party came to power in 1949, they account for less than half now.
Hopes for an independent homeland increased after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when a cluster of new, independent Turkic countries appeared on China's western border. But a quick Chinese crackdown dashed those hopes. By the late 1990's, the separatist movement had turned increasingly violent, culminating in a series of bombings and clashes with the police in 1996 and 1997.
The Uighurs are at the eastern end of a swath of Turkic-speaking Central Asia that stretches from the Bosporus to the western edge of the Mongolian steppes and includes 120 million people.
For centuries, the area was ruled by various khans until the Qing dynasty took control here in the mid- 18th century. The Qing court consolidated its hold on the region in the mid-19th century with the help of China's legendary General Zuo Zongtang (better known in the West as General Tso, for whom a popular chicken dish is named). He renamed the area Xinjiang, or New Territory.
Today, Xinjiang is China's largest province, accounting for one-sixth of the country's land and much of its valuable natural resources, most notably oil.
Despite centuries of Chinese rule, though, the Uighurs have maintained a vibrant culture, with writers and musicians continuing to produce popular works — some now banned by the government — in the Turkic language.
They re-established contact with the Muslim world in the 1980's as the country opened up again. Some Uighurs were allowed to travel to Mecca for the hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage, and many young Uighurs who made the trip brought back a renewed sense of their religious and cultural identity.
How many Uighur separatists are operating in Xinjiang today is impossible to estimate. China says several hundred Uighurs have received training from the Afghan Taliban, and several Uighurs are among the Taliban fighters who have been captured in Afghanistan in the last few weeks. But the number of serious separatists inside China is still believed to be small.

 


© Uygur.Org  18/11/2001 04:10  A.Karakas