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CHINA BATTLES TO CONVINCE TERROR
SCEPTICS
A giant statue of China's late chairman Mao Zedong
watches over the People's Square in Kashgar.
Photo: Reuters
By Hamish McDonald, Yining
November 12, 2005
Page 1 of 3
IN A freezing late-autumn drizzle a week ago, a local
man showed visitors around the mosques of this small
city that is hard up against the spectacular Tienshan
range, literally the Mountains of Heaven, that forms
China's border with Central Asia.
They ranged from a timber mosque in the Chinese pagoda
style, built by troops of a Manchu emperor in the
mid-18th century, to a gleaming Arabian-style edifice
built a few years ago by a rich trader returned from
the Middle East.
The buildings are impressive, but silent. What is
missing is the buzz of classes, normal during the day
between prayers, when mosques are usually full of
classes in the Koran for children, and the discussions
of young people.
Memet, not his real name, attends the new mosque once
a week, but is unable to take his son there. Under an
interpretation of China's laws on religion, the
communist government of this far-flung region of China
bans anyone under 18 from entering mosques, or from
taking any religious instruction.
Memet is the internal enemy of China's vast security
apparatus, which is trying to convince a sceptical
world that China is also a victim of terrorism, like
the other countries hit by al-Qaeda-linked bombings.
Once seen mostly as a desert buffer zone, useful as a
place for nuclear tests, Xinjiang recently became a
vital repository of oil and other resources for the
booming coastal economy centred far to the east. It is
also China's frontier to the wild and frightening
Islamic fanaticism seen just to its west and south in
the former Soviet republics, and Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
Memet and the rest of Xinjiang's Uighurs, a Turkic
people who have flourished for centuries in the narrow
band of land between the mountains and the salty
Taklimakan desert, are squeezed between these Chinese
hopes and fears. Since 1990, when some Uighurs mounted
an Islamic-inspired revolt near the fabled Silk Road
city of Kashgar, they have faced tightening repression.
Beijing gave financial incentives for more settlers of
the Han race, who form 92 per cent of China's
population, to "go west". Now the Uighurs are a
minority in their own land, about 8 million out of
Xinjiang's 19 million people.
The settlers live in tackily modern new cities and
drive along freeways in bank-financed cars and trucks,
beneficiaries of the $US55 billion ($A75 billion) that
Beijing has poured into development of its western
provinces in the past five or six years.
Uighurs live in shabby neighbourhoods beside the new
towns, or in quiet villages that are picturesque, with
their mud-brick courtyard homes, avenues of poplars,
pony carts, and tiny fields of cotton. The Han
settlers regard them with suspicion. "We call them
Taliban and al-Qaeda," a taxi-driver in the provincial
capital Urumqi said.
The Uighur have not been free of the ferment in the
Islamic world. Some purists, inspired by Afghanistan's
Taliban, were active in Yining, Memet says. A few
others went off to join the jihad across the border.
But when this upsurge resulted in arrests and a
protest here in February 1997, the result was a
mini-Tiananmen, with at least nine killed and hundreds
arrested.
There was a spate of bus bombings in Urumqi, killing
nine people, but since then, little violence from the
Uighurs inside Xinjiang, although two years ago there
were attacks on Chinese in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan.
What has happened since 1997, say human rights
monitors, has been a tightening of controls on the
Uighurs, with the September 11, 2001, attacks by
al-Qaeda in the United States providing Beijing with
an opening to put a terrorist label on even the most
peaceful types of Uighur dissent and separatist
expression.
Nicolas Becquelin, Hong Kong-based research director
for the respected Human Rights in China group, said
that soon after 9/11, Beijing abruptly switched from
playing down the extent of Uighur unrest to
exaggerating it.
"The Government has now made pretty explicit what was
previously covert: that the separate identity and
culture of indigenous people, particularly Uighurs, is
the basis, they fear, of ethno-national aspirations,"
Dr Becquelin said. "What is targeted through Islam is
really the basic tenets of Uighur identity."
The repression of Islam is pervasive, with anyone in
state or Communist Party employment or studying at
colleges banned from overt displays of religious
identity, such as beards, head scarves, fasting during
Ramadan, or prayer during working hours. Possession of
Islamic texts not printed by Government-approved
presses is grounds for arrest and detention.
Religious instruction of children has disappeared.
Even parents are scared to teach their own children.
"As young as six or seven, they have drills at school
where they have to give responses to ideological
questions and tell teachers if members of family are
practising Islam," Dr Becquelin said.
Police and militias recruited from Han military
settlements sweep Uighur suburbs and villages, picking
up people with identity card discrepancies and taking
them off for questioning. The province's "re-education-through-labour"
camps are full beyond capacity, prison officials
recently complained. Regular prisons have an
extraordinarily high proportion of their Uighur
convicts, about one in 11, serving time for crimes
against state security.
About 200 Uighurs have been executed since 1997 for
political crimes.
Because of concerns about execution and torture,
Washington refuses to return 22 Uighurs it has in the
Guantanamo Bay prison on Cuba, whom it has cleared of
major involvement with the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
In February, a court in Kashgar gave Uighur author
Nurmemet Yasin 10 years' jail for publishing a story
called The Blue Pigeon last year, about a blue pigeon
captured by different-coloured pigeons and kept in a
cage. As some Uighur separatists use a blue flag,
China's Ministry of State Security saw the point.
There has been widespread scepticism outside China
that Uighurs are a major terrorist threat.
"It's very hard to know — we can't take the Chinese
authorities at their word on the situation," Dr
Becquelin said.
"They have undermined their credibility by construing
non-violent acts and people as terrorists."
Since the Chinese gave in to US pressure and released
Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer in March, Beijing
is facing renewed scrutiny.
But Dr Becquelin says Beijing's preoccupation with
ethnic separatism in Xinjiang (as well as Tibet and
Taiwan) may blind it to a threat of Islamist extremism
in its heartland areas, such as Henan and Shanxi.
"They have the most incredibly extremist Islamic
groups in China among some of the Hui congregations,
and they are totally legal," he says. "They are in the
mosques. They have all the jihadist, the Salafist
material, and doctrines, schools with children
attending, very anti-American. It's really puzzling."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/
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