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In own `war on
terrorism' China leans brutally on restive Muslim
Uighur minority
Posted on Thu, Sep. 23, 2004
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RICKY WONG, KRT
An Uighur man reads a newspaper in his language
while a Chinese Han woman talks on a public phone
in a commercial district in Urumqi, Xiangjiang,
China. |
By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
KASHGAR, China - Under the guise of a "war on
terrorism," China has launched such an implacable
campaign of repression on its Muslim Uighur minority
that it's stopped cold nearly all violent attacks.
Not so long ago, far western China was roiled by more
than 200 bombings and assassinations. More recently, a
brutal crackdown reported by human rights groups has
ushered in a measure of calm to remote, oil-rich
Xinjiang.
China has shrugged off criticism and pledged anew to
obliterate any glimmer of separatist sentiment within
the ethnic Uighurs, who number about 8 million.
Today, the Uighurs (pronounced Weegers), 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. They 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, linking
them to a global network of al-Qaida terrorism.
"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 haven't given
up on a dream of an independent homeland, which they
call East Turkestan, and they don't 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 Turkestan 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 newly built 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 stop abruptly.
"We are not alone," he said, signaling some agents
lurking nearby.
Uighurs have numerous complaints, ranging from
education and health care to lack of religious freedom.
Up to 50 children crowd elementary classrooms. HIV
infection per capita in Xinjiang, acute among Uighurs,
is the highest in China, due to widespread use of
heroin imported from Afghanistan and Burma.
Authorities limit the religious practice of Uighurs
more than of other Muslim minorities, such as the Hui.
Under the rubric of the "10 No's," officials bar those
under 18 from entering mosques, ban foreign Muslims
from meeting local imams (religious leaders) and
prohibit the use of the word "jihad," or "holy war."
Mosques routinely are blocked from using loudspeakers.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States,
China saw an opening to crack down further on Uighur
separatists.
"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 toil in forced 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 some 1,000 Uighurs who are
living in the United States.
Wang, the party official, said Uighur terrorism 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 Qaida 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.
China has rallied a regional security alliance, the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to lean on
neighboring Central Asian nations to repatriate wanted
Uighur extremists. Those returned generally have faced
execution.
China also has gotten limited support from the United
States, which after months of pressure from Beijing
agreed in mid-2002 to freeze the assets of the East
Turkestan Islamic Movement, a small Uighur separatist
group, as a terrorist organization.
The Bush administration also reportedly allowed
Chinese agents to observe interrogations of 22 Uighurs
believed to be among the 600 or so detainees at the
U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. So far, the
United States has declined to repatriate the Uighurs.
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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