|
Uighur: No
Afghanistan
David Murphy
Issue cover-dated November 19, 2001
Beijing is using the U.S.-led war
on terror to justify a new crackdown on separatists in
the northwest. It's a strategy that might backfire.
"STRIKE HARD, HIGH PRESSURE." With that slogan,
Beijing makes no bones about its crackdown on Muslim
separatists in the northwestern Xinjiang Uighur
Autonomous Region.
The September 11 attacks in the United States prompted
Beijing to justify its campaign by publicly and
repeatedly linking the Uighur ethnic-Turkic opponents
of Chinese rule in Xinjiang with international
terrorism and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda movement. At
the same time as pledging support to the U.S. war on
terrorism, Beijing stressed that it must be fought
against all "terrorists," including Uighurs, and
stepped up its own "Strike Hard" operations in the
northwest.
But human rights organizations say that the separatist
problem in Xinjiang has little to do with
international terrorism and is driven largely by local
ethnic and economic tensions between Han and Uighurs.
Human-rights groups and Uighur activists accuse
Beijing of using the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan as a
pretext to crush separatist sentiment in the region.
It is Beijing's own ham-fisted policies in Xinjiang,
and not foreign terrorism, that is bolstering Uighur
separatism and a growing sense of Islamic identity,
they say.
Following the start of the U.S. assault on
Afghanistan, calls by U.S. President George W. Bush
and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Mary Robinson for Beijing to protect minority rights
apparently fell on deaf ears. "There has been an
overall intensification of human-rights violations [in
Xinjiang] and a crackdown on separatists since
September 11," says a spokeswoman for the human rights
watchdog Amnesty International in London.
The government's gamble is that by tarring
independence-minded Uighurs as Islamic terrorists it
can defuse Western criticism of its human-rights
record in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as
pro-independence groups call it. In Beijing's defence,
some analysts say that it genuinely fears attacks like
those of September 11 in China. "I have spoken to
serious [Chinese] strategic thinkers on this and none
of them see Uighurs as able to destabilize China, but
they did fear that they could carry out attacks like
September 11," says Dru Gladney, professor of Asian
Studies at the University of Hawaii.
But with the consequences of U.S.-led retaliation
still unfolding, there are risks for Beijing. First,
as always, an iron-fisted approach to dissent in
Xinjiang could further alienate Uighurs. In addition,
Beijing's decision to focus international attention on
Xinjiang may backfire in some Islamic countries by
arousing sympathy for the Uighur cause. And should
Afghanistan's role as an exporter of subversion end,
the common security interests that had only just begun
to bind China together with its western neighbours may
unravel.
Beijing has put a lot of work into bolstering its
anti-insurgency arsenal this year by building up the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brings
together China, Russia and four Central Asian
countries. All had guaranteed mutual support and
cooperation against religious and ethnic guerrillas.
If that problem should fade with a U.S. victory,
Beijing may still find itself with a domestic
insurgency that won't go away because it never had a
significant foreign component.
In the most extensive briefing given by a Chinese
official to the foreign media on Uighur separatism,
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao on November 14
listed 10 organizations based in Afghanistan,
elsewhere in Central Asia or in Xinjiang that he said
were fighting to end Chinese rule over the region.
"China is now trying to characterize Uighurs as being
intent on setting up an Islamic state but our goal is
actually a secular democratic government," says a
U.S.-based spokesman for the East Turkestan
Information Centre. Human rights groups agree that the
vast majority of Uighur opponents of Chinese rule who
want independence are in fact secular.
There is a danger in the long term, human-rights
activists say, that by relying on force and whipping
up the spectre of foreign-trained Islamic extremists
bringing terror to China, Beijing could end up with
the very problem that it so desperately wants to avoid.
Copyright ©2001 Review Publishing Company Limited,
Hong Kong.
|
ETIC REPORT 2000 
