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China's Uighurs fight for rights
Uighur men in Old Town Kashgar, Xinjiang. (Nice LogoFlickr)
Image: Nice Logo, Flickr
China's eight million Muslim Turkic Uighurs hit the global stage with the fight for their rights after Beijing uses the war on terror to legitimize a crackdown on the minority and stave off its worst nightmare.
By John C K Daly for ISN Security Watch (21/11/07)
While the outside world may be slowly coming to an awareness of the concerns of China's little known Uighur minority, according to human rights activists, Beijing's policies in the last few years have put the minority under increasing pressure.
Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on 1 August 1949, its communist government has persistently pursued the policy of Communist Party supremacy in a single-party multi-ethnic state, which reunites all the areas of traditional Chinese influence.
Among China's minorities, the Tibetans have persistently enjoyed the highest visibility, largely due to its charismatic leader, the Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, much to Beijing's fury.
A much less known second minority, the China's eight million Muslim Turkic Uighurs, is seeking similar visibility for its ethnic concerns from the global community.
In fact, in June, US President George W Bush received at the White House one of the Uighur's leading advocates, Rebiya Kadeer, thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and head of the Uighur-American Association.
China's policy toward the province of Xinjiang and the Uighurs has been heavily impacted by three major events: the collapse of Communism in the USSR, 9/11 and the growing importance of the region as a source of raw materials and a transit route for Central Asian energy supplies.
A potential future flashpoint is China's hosting of the 2008 Olympics, which will bring an unprecedented flood of journalists into the country - a situation that has Beijing worried that "separatist" groups will use the event as a publicity platform.
On 16 November Beijing's Olympic Security Command Center Deputy Director Liu Shaowu told journalists that "protesters" violating China's "sovereignty" would not be tolerated.
The Uighurs' most recent international visibility occurred on 10 November, when the Intermediate People's Court in Kashgar sentenced three Muslim Uighur defendants to death, two to death with a two-year suspension and one to life in prison, after convicting them of terrorist activity.
"If anyone dares to conduct sabotage activities or tries to split the country, we will without a doubt clamp down," Xinjiang party chief Wang Lequan recently warned, according to local media reports.
A high stakes game
Whether Uighur nationalism with its slowly emerging international image succeeds in overcoming the cumulative effect of these pressures remains to be seen. Given the territory's sheer size and resources, the stakes are immense.
The province of Xinjiang comprises one-sixth of China's territory, and its security is a major concern for the Chinese leadership, as its borders abut the Central Asian nations of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Tajikistan, along with Russia and southern Asian powers Pakistan and India.
A major way station on the fabled Silk Road, the Uighurs converted to Sunni Islam in the 10th century. Their oasis and tribal-based culture precluded the development of a strong centralized state, which was instead defined on cultural and linguistic affinities, with a strong overlay of Islamic Sufism. During the 19th century, as the easternmost subset of the "Great Game" between the Russian and British empires vying for control of Central Asia, the Sufi brotherhoods strongly resisted Chinese and Russian encroachment into Xinjiang.
In the early 20th century, Uighur nationalism was heavily influenced by the Turkish jadist movement along with post-World War I concepts of Pan-Turkism, as opposed to the ideas of the Turkish republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.
It was only in 1933 and 1944 that the Uighurs succeeded in establishing an independent political state, the Islamic Eastern Turkestan Republic. Uighur political evolution was quashed by Red Army forces aiding Chinese Nationalist forces and the province was later subsumed by Communist Peoples Liberation Army troops.
The collapse of communism in the USSR in December 1991 set alarm bells ringing in Beijing. Earlier in the year, in June, visiting Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev witnessed peaceful student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing before they were repressed by the PLA. The Chinese leadership drew the conclusion that the Soviet leadership's mistake was to liberalize the political system while avoiding reforming the economy, which also encouraged nationalism among the USSR's restive population. The Chinese government subsequently took the opposite tack, loosening state control of the economy while retaining political control. Rising economic prosperity combined with a bankrupt Marxist ideology devoid of legitimacy led to a resurgence of nationalism within China.
During this period, Xinjiang increasingly represented one of China's most lucrative potential economic prizes.
Xinjiang is rich in minerals. To give but one example, the province has coal reserves of 2.19 trillion tons, or 40 percent of China's total. Geological surveys have discovered 138 different minerals. Perhaps most importantly, Xinjiang also contains an estimated 25 percent of China's oil and natural gas reserves, with current proven natural gas reserves at 840 billion cubic meters.
The economy of Xinjiang is being interwoven ever more tightly into China's economy, with one of the leading reasons being both the region's energy resources and the growing skein of pipelines from Central Asia increasingly crisscrossing the province.
The desire for economic exploitation of the region combined with a need for political control has resulted in a gradual decades-long migration of ethnic Han Chinese into the province.
During the early 1980s, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a Beijing nervous about virulently anti-communist Islamic radicalism emanating from Kabul increased its military presence in Xinjiang's urban centers and intensified Maoist indoctrination there, which in turn produced a steady rise in Uighur nationalism.
Even prior to 9/11, Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji epitomized Beijing's attitude toward Xinjiang in his 13 September 2000 statement by saying that an "iron fist" was necessary there to combat threats to China's unity and stability.
Since then, Uighurs have shared with their Chinese compatriots many of Beijing's repressive policies, enforcing single child birth control as it encouraged massive Han migration into the Xinjiang, either through economic incentives or force.
Ethnic Han make up 94 percent of China's population, but the majority of the world's Uighur population lives in Xinjiang. China's 2000 census showed the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang was growing twice as quickly as the indigenous Uighur population.
Statistics say it all; more than 1.2 million Chinese immigrants have arrived in Xinjiang since 1970. In 1949, Xinjiang's capital Urumqi was 80 per cent Uighur in its makeup. In 2007, it is 80 percent Han Chinese. The Uighurs feel that they are slowly being drowned in a rising tide of Chinese immigration, with the Han Chinese allocated the best jobs and housing as well.
A heaven-sent opportunity
The tragic events of 9/11 presented China's communist rulers with a heaven-sent opportunity to portray Uighur nationalists as Muslim terrorists in a quid pro quo for supporting Washington's war on terror.
Two months after the 11 September attacks, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that "several hundred Uighur separatists" had been trained in al-Qaida Afghani facilities.
Chinese President Hu Jintao said in a 28 May 2005 speech, "We will firmly take control of the initiative in the struggle and resolutely oppose hostile forces inside and outside China who use ethnic issues to infiltrate and sabotage."
Human rights groups assert that hundreds of Uighurs have been imprisoned and dozens executed in the ensuing crackdown, with little visibility in the western media. Of the 18 Uighurs arrested in Afghanistan by the US and subsequently incarcerated in Guantanamo, all have been formally declared "no longer an enemy combatant" and slated for release.
Like the Tibetans, a Uighur diaspora exists in the Muslim nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan, along with communities in Canada, Germany and the US. The internet has allowed diaspora members to keep their cause alive, none more so than the Washington-based Uighur-American Association, headed by Kadeer.
In describing Chinese policy in Xinjiang during an interview with ISN Security Watch, Kadeer minces no words: "We have become a minority in our homeland. Our writing and language is being destroyed."
Uighur-American Association General Secretary Alim Seytoff is even more forceful. "Chinese policies in East Turkestan [Xinjiang] are inherently colonial in nature, aimed at marginalizing the majority Uighur people and culturally assimilating them into the Chinese culture by depriving their right to exercise any meaningful autonomy or to develop their culture, language, education, ec+onomy or identity according to their own wishes," he told ISN Security Watch.
"Furthermore, Chinese policies attempt to eliminate any kind of legitimate Uighur opposition to their rule as three evils of 'terrorism, separatism and extremism'…The Chinese government's ultimate goal is for Uighurs to adopt Chinese culture and accept communism or atheism as their new beliefs. Then, there will not be any Uighur problem because there will not be any real Uighurs left," he said.
The 1989 photo of a single Beijing resident confronting a row of four tanks trundling toward Tiananmen Square is memorable; a similarly vivid image of disaffected PRC minorities is undoubtedbly giving Liu Shaowu sleepless nights lest it spoil Beijing's Olympic festivities.
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ISN Security Watch - China's Uighurs fight for rights
China has attempted to assimilate all different minorities into her fold through the instruments of the Communist party and the philosophy that religion is only an opium of the masses. And it has been successful to a great degree and more so with the Hanisation of the minority areas.
China has a total of 56 Official ethnic groups and 94% of the Chinese population is Han.
While it maybe true that Xinjiang is a economic golden goose for China, the Han influx is possibly because the skilled labour and management cannot be found amongst the local Moslem Uighurs!
Of course there would be some discrimination and it is not surprising, but since the Communists do not believe in religion (and surely the Uighurs would also have been converted to Communism), one wonders if Islam has overruled the Communist dogma! If so, it does not auger well for Communist China, given that Taliban is very active in the neighbouring countries!
One wonders if the Uighur Moslems would be able to demonstrate during the Olympic Games. If so, it will be a serious disruption to an otherwise excellent sporting event.
Though there is no doubt the Moslems in Xinjiang have good reason to be alarmed at the galloping rise of the mainland Han population in Xinjiang, which will reduce the Moslems to a minority and wipe out their religion forever!
