Chinastan

Sep 4th 2008 | KASHGAR AND KUQA
From The Economist print edition

A crackdown in China’s wild West, its Muslim-majority chunk of Central Asia

ON THE roads crossing the dusty fields of cotton and maize around the oasis city of Kashgar, China’s police are on alert. Terrorists, as they call them, have been stepping up their attacks. Officers at checkpoints turn back foreigners venturing towards troublespots. Citizens entering Kashgar line up by the roadside to have their identity cards scanned.

Kashgar’s recent troubles began on August 4th when the police said a lorry was driven into a group of border guards jogging in the heart of the city. Home-made explosives were detonated and the police were attacked with knives. Sixteen policemen were killed, bang in front of a posh hotel. Just ahead of the opening of the Beijing Olympics, the incident unnerved the government. It blamed two “terrorists”, arrested on the spot. That is its usual term for Muslim militants pushing for the independence of Xinjiang, a vast Central Asian expanse of mountain and desert.

Despite an intensified campaign against potential troublemakers, violence has continued. On August 10th, with the games under way in Beijing, 2,800km (1,750 miles) to the east, assailants threw home-made bombs at a police station in the town of Kuqa during the night, killing a guard. Again, they were Uighurs, members of the mostly Muslim, Turkic ethnic group estimated to make up nearly half Xinjiang’s 20m population. They let off several more bombs in Kuqa’s broad, deserted shopping streets, killing a Uighur civilian.

A dangerous neighbourhood

There have since been at least two more attacks in the countryside around Kashgar. On August 12th three guards were killed at a checkpoint in Yamanya township. Two policemen were killed on August 27th in nearby Jiashi county. The official media called the attacks “terrorism”. It is the bloodiest series of such incidents in Xinjiang since the 1990s.

China likes to link Xinjiang’s troubles to the militant Islamism roiling other countries in the region. On August 28th, at a summit in Tajikistan, President Hu Jintao told fellow leaders of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, which groups China, Russia and four Central Asian countries, that members should “deepen co-operation” in their fight against the “three evil forces” of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.

The police in Xinjiang have not pinned the blame for the recent violence on any terrorist group, nor has any claimed responsibility. But the official press has been less restrained. Nanfeng Chuang, a weekly magazine, said unspecified pro-independence groups outside China were “imitating al-Qaeda” and sending members into Xinjiang to organise terrorist attacks.

The group most commonly accused of waging a terror campaign in Xinjiang is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which in 2001 China described as a “major component” of Osama bin Laden’s network. Earlier this year officials said ETIM had been plotting attacks against the Olympics. A group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic Party (possibly another name for ETIM) released videos claiming responsibility for bus explosions in Shanghai in May and the south-western city of Kunming in July. But the authorities, partly perhaps to prevent fears of a spread of violence into the rest of China, denied the blasts had any terrorist connection.

In fact scant evidence has been made public of any organised terror campaign in Xinjiang or anywhere else in China. The recent attacks involved only the crudest weapons—no machine-guns or other military arms in a part of the world awash with them. In Kuqa a Chinese man shows how an explosive device had fallen to the bottom of the flight of stairs down to his shoe shop. He says the confined space concentrated the blast and enabled it to smash metal and glass shutters.

None of the attacks seems to have been aimed primarily at civilians. One did die in Kuqa, but the decision to attack at 2am does not suggest an intention to cause widespread loss of life among ordinary citizens. The killing of the border guards in central Kashgar occurred at around 8am, also a quiet time, since most people follow an unofficial local time two hours behind the Beijing hour on the clocks.

There is not much evidence either of religious extremism. There have been no reliable reports in Xinjiang of suicide-bombings, a hallmark of Islamist fanaticism. In Kuqa two attackers are said to have blown themselves up, but whether by accident or design is not clear. Eight others were shot dead by police. Li Wei of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing says he believes that Xinjiang’s militants are motivated more by separatism than jihad. In the 1930s and 1940s, a Republic of East Turkestan twice enjoyed a brief independence in parts of Xinjiang. In Kashgar a few older women go out with their heads completely veiled and most women, even many schoolgirls, wear headscarves. But many young people drink alcohol and dress as fashionably as do their Han Chinese counterparts.

So China may be overstating the menace a bit, to rally international support for its crackdown. Travellers in southern Xinjiang say they often see slogans on walls warning people to shun Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an extremist group banned in much of Central Asia that wants to unite Muslims around the world under one caliphate. Others remind citizens that making one’s own way to Mecca is “illegal”. China only allows government-run trips, partly to stop pilgrims mixing with extremists.

To discourage the others

China’s heavy-handed repression angers many Uighurs. In the build-up to the games and particularly since these latest incidents, residents of Kashgar and Kuqa say many suspected of militancy have been arrested. Helmeted police cruise the streets of Kuqa at night in open-topped jeeps. A driver in Kashgar erupts with a tirade against China’s leaders—as “fascists” who do nothing but “bully” Uighurs. Security is likely to remain tight at least until after October 1st, when officials are fearful of attacks over the National Day holiday.

On July 9th near Kashgar, apparently to cow anyone plotting to disrupt the Olympics, the authorities summoned residents to a rally. Officials read out death sentences imposed on three Uighurs for terrorist offences. Notices posted around Kashgar showed the three men’s faces covered by red crosses (indicating they had been executed) and gave details of 57 others sentenced for separatist or terrorist crimes.

The Economist found a relative of one of the 57 near Kashgar. The police soon stopped the interview and detained those involved for over three hours. One officer said he had not been home for more than two weeks because of the alert in the area. A Han Chinese, unusually for a rural policeman, he carries a pistol on his hip.

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