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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.
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