Roberts, who has carried out 25 years of field research in Uighur communities in Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Turkey, deconstructs how the “terrorism” label was appropriated after 9/11 to explain violent acts of resistance in Xinjiang
. The claims had little evidence to support them but, in 2002, as part of diplomatic horse-trading to secure China’s acceptance of the “global war on terror”, the US publicly endorsed Beijing’s claims that an essentially unheard-of militant group known as the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement had a role in violence in Xinjiang. Although the primary driver for the campaign is Beijing’s longstanding desire to assimilate the Uighurs, the justification and inspiration for its most recent drastic escalation can be found in the US-led war on terror, Roberts writes. In 2014, Xinjiang’s Communist party boss Zhang Chunxian launched a “people’s war on terror” that was escalated in 2016 by the arrival of Chen Quanguo, a hardliner. The use of the terrorist label in Xinjiang is especially fraught. While a handful of apparently premeditated attacks have been documented, the vast majority of incidents fit more easily as spontaneous violence sparked by locally motivated grievances.
A carefully researched study of Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang
www.ft.com
full article: (above excerpt in blue)
A carefully researched study of Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang
www.ft.com
China’s crackdown on the Uighurs
A newly renovated hall in the largest museum in Urumqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang region in China, hosts an installation that makes little sense for a family outing: “The exhibition on major violent terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.” Opened in February, the well-lit room is filled with grisly details blamed on murky “terrorist” organisations. Ancient firearms, rusting gas canisters and “home-made grenades” fill glass display cases.
The exhibit is part of the ruling Chinese Communist party’s propaganda campaign to justify
a mass internment programme of more than 1m Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim-majority peoples in the region. Diplomats and journalists on closely managed government tours to Xinjiang inevitably visit.
For nearly two decades, China has sought to cast harsh security measures in the region as part of a battle against “terrorist” aggressors driven by extremist ideology. In the face of growing western condemnation of its
“re-education” camps, Beijing has doubled down on this narrative. But the assertion that violence in Xinjiang is the work of international terror groups has little factual basis, according to the careful tracing of China’s claims by Sean Roberts, an anthropologist at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
One of the first books to concisely explain how and why the Communist party under President Xi Jinping has embarked on an all-out war on Uighur culture, its publication comes as many western nations are waking up to the abuses. Hopes of a global response, let alone a change of course, must contend with China’s assertions that the campaign is a necessary response to an imminent threat, a claim that diplomatic partners of Beijing have so far been willing to support at the UN.
Roberts, who has carried out 25 years of field research in Uighur communities in Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Turkey, deconstructs how the “terrorism” label was appropriated after 9/11 to explain violent acts of resistance in Xinjiang. The claims had little evidence to support them but, in 2002, as part of diplomatic horse-trading to secure China’s acceptance of the “global war on terror”, the US publicly endorsed Beijing’s claims that an essentially unheard-of militant group known as the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement had a role in violence in Xinjiang.
Although the primary driver for the campaign is Beijing’s longstanding desire to assimilate the Uighurs, the justification and inspiration for its most recent drastic escalation can be found in the US-led war on terror, Roberts writes.
In 2014, Xinjiang’s Communist party boss Zhang Chunxian launched a “people’s war on terror” that was escalated in 2016 by the arrival of Chen Quanguo, a hardliner. The use of the terrorist label in Xinjiang is especially fraught. While a handful of apparently premeditated attacks have been documented, the vast majority of incidents fit more easily as spontaneous violence sparked by locally motivated grievances.
Roberts describes “self-perpetuating” cycles of repression and violence between disenfranchised Uighurs and security forces that spiralled into the events that spurred Mr Xi to launch the most recent crackdown: an attack in central Beijing in 2013, and another shortly afterwards at Kunming railway station in south-west China.
Perhaps Roberts’s greatest contribution to the debate over Xinjiang is his attempt to dismantle China’s assertions about a “terrorist threat” by sketching a picture of the isolated groups it deems international terrorist organisations. Through interviews in Uighur communities, he concludes that the groups have for the past two decades mostly hovered on the edge of extinction as a poorly resourced, loosely organised bunch with aspirations, but no capacity, to launch militant operations.
Ironically, the “people’s war on terror” may be planting the seeds of a real militant threat among Uighur exiles. When Roberts, in a recent interview, asked one former Uighur fighter whether he was afraid of dying in a fight against China, he replied that his entire family had already disappeared into camps or prisons, and “he had nothing left to live for anyway”.
