But isn't Xinjiang a islamist leaning separatism? Soviets were brutally against any religion as a whole.
This is new info for me. Thanks.
USSR was facing US, Taliban, entire NATO brigade, Pakistan and you combined. One on one with each of these, the cold war would have ended in a different way.
Let's face it; it was an uneven fight. Afghanistan and Pakistan combined won't have lasted 2 days without NATO + CCP support against the Soviet juggernaut.
Stalin and the Soviet Union did not give a crap about anyone's religion if it fulfilled their goals.
The entire "Uyghur" ethnicity was created by Soviet ethnologists. The Uyghurs didn't call themselves Uyghurs 100 years ago. They called their language Turki and called themselves by the Oasis city they came from, Khotan, Kashar, Turfan. The Soviets then appropiated the name Uyghur from a historical empire in Siberia and gave it to the Turkic people in the Tarim, through their puppet client Governor of Xinjiang, Sheng Shicai.
The Turkic sedentary Muslims of the Tarim basin were ruled by the Chagatai Khanate, with the Chagatai Khan as the secular leader and the Naqshbandi Sufi Khoja as the religious leader. I will refer to them as Turki because they didn't call themselves Uyghur.
The Buddhist Dzhunghar Mongol Zunghar Khanate attacked the Chagatai Khanate and forced them into submission and paying tribute. The Khojas split into two factions, the Aqtaghliks and Qarataghliks. The Aqtaghliks were expelled by the Chagatai Khan and allied with the Zunghars.
Then China came, and allied with a Chagatai Prince and the Qarataghliks to defeat the Zunghars and Aqtaghliks. There was a massive, brutal slaughter of the Buddhist Zunghars by Chinese and Turkis and nearly all of them were "cleansed" from Dzungharia.
China then settled Han Chinese and Turki Muslims in Dzungharia, when all the Buddhist Zunghars were cleared out. The Turkis later became the Uyghurs. The Chagatai prince and Uyghur begs, Khans and Qarataghliks then submitted to China's rule.
To this day, China has sent almost all immigration in xinjiang into Dzungharia and avoids settling them in the Tarim Basin, which remains majority Uyghur. Anyone claiming China is swamping Uyghur's native land is lying, because the reason Uyghurs are in Dzungharia, in northern Xinjiang today, is because China settled them there. The Uyghurs land is in the Tarim Basin and its not being flooded by migrants. The massive percentage of non Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in Dzungharia.
And back to the topic of separatism. The Aqtaghliks were the ones who formented the first separatist rebellions because they were angry that they were defeated. It was hypocritical of them to complain about the Qarataghliks and Chagatais siding and submitting to China, because the Aqtaghliks collaborated with the very much non Muslim Buddhist Dzunghars.
The other time violence came to Xinjiang was when Kokandis invaded Kashgar under Yaqub Beg. He was not a Uyghur but a foreigner from Kokand.
The 1933 revolt happened because of Pan Turkic influence from Turkey, before that, there was no nationalist separatist sentiment among Uyghurs, the only sources of violence were disgrunlted Aqtaghliks and Kokandi invaders.
And it was because it was Pan Turkic in nature that it was brutally crushed, because the non Turkic Hui Muslims got really pissed off at the Uyghurs declaring the First East Turkestan Republic so they crushed the rebellion.
The second revolt, the 1944 Ili Rebellion was Soviet supported as I explained in my previous post. The Uyghur leader in the revolt, Ahmad Jan Qasim was a member of the Soviet Communist party and took orders from Moscow. Now, Uyghur separatist propaganda sites delete all mention of him being a communist party member and a Soviet stooge, and pretend that they were never supported by the Soviet Union.
Hurrah!
