Brutal crackdown in Xinjiang
July 25, 2009
The Rafto Foundation strongly condemns the violent suppression of recent demonstrations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, and expresses its strong concern for the fate of those who have fallen victim to the ensuing mass arrests.
The Rafto Foundation strongly urges Norwegian authorities and the international society to put stronger pressure on Chinese authorities to ensure that those arrested will receive fair treatment. There is a strong reason to fear that the arrested face mass executions, and the international society must demand from Chinese authorities that they abide by international human rights.
Brutal crackdown
On 5 July 2009 in Urumqi a peaceful protest against the authorities’ handling of the recent killings of Uyghur workers in a factory in Shaoguan was met with brute force by Chinese police. While it is impossible to obtain accurate numbers of killed and arrested, the Rafto Foundation have a strong reason to believe that the number of detainees is far higher than the 1 434 people mentioned by Urumqi Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi, on 7 July. International media report of more than 4 000 Uyghurs detained in overfilled makeshift prisons.
Ethnic tension
The Rafto Foundation expresses its concern for the heightened level of ethnic tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, and deplores all injuries and deaths in this conflict, irrespective of ethnicity.
While the unrest has been portrayed by Chinese official media as consisting of Uyghur provocateurs and Han Chinese victims, there is a strong reason for believing that only a fraction of the number of Uyghur victims has been reported. Reports from Xinjiang tell of frightened Uyghurs fleeing their homes in fear of the general lynching sentiment spreading in the cities, fuelled by the nationalistically charged reporting of the unrest in Chinese official media. However, the most urgent issue at this point is the arrested citizens’ imminent risk of express trials with no respect for due process, and the strong likelihood of mass executions.
No fair trial
Urumqi’s Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi’s statement on 8 July that "brutal criminals will be sentenced to death" raises strong concerns for swift executions with no fair trial for the unknown numbers that were arrested in the aftermath of 5 July. In addition, reports of Chinese human rights lawyers receiving intimidations and strong warnings of taking on any cases related to the unrests in Xinjiang highlights the willingness of Chinese authorities to deprive the arrested of their right to free counsel and a due legal process.
The Rafto Foundation urges Norwegian authorities to issue stronger condemnations of the violent crackdowns, and to raise its strong concern by the apparent wish of the Chinese authorities to take swift action, regardless of their human rights commitments guaranteeing the right to fair trial.
Marginalised minorities
The Rafto Foundation has since awarding the 2004 Rafto Prize to the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, at the time still imprisoned in Xinjiang, voiced its strong concern for the increasing oppression and marginalisation of Uyghurs in China.
The recent events come as a grim déjà vu 12 years after similar peaceful Uyghur protests were brutally struck down in the Xinjiang city of Ghulja, a massacre which also was followed by mass arrests, and which still has seen no independent inquiry. Many of the arrested are still imprisoned. The violent 5 July crackdown adds to the list of brutal oppression of Uyghurs, and adds to the hopelessness felt by Uyghurs in Xinjiang as well as in exile.
Norwegian authorities must apply stronger pressure
The Rafto Foundation reiterates its urgent call for the Norwegian authorities to immediately raise their concerns for the rights of those arrested after the 5 July unrest.
The Rafto Foundation also urges the international community to apply more pressure on Chinese authorities with regards to the marginalisation and suppression of their minorities’ rights.
http://www.rafto.no/?page=20&news=131&PHPSESSID=9543901234dd824a81b2120c3a36be6b
Friday, July 31, 2009
China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race
China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009
SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.
The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.
What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.
The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.
Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.
China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.
Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.
At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.
I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.
A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”
Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.
Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.
E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/world/asia/01iht-letter.html
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009
SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.
The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.
What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.
The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.
Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.
China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.
Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.
At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.
I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.
A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”
Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.
Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.
E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/world/asia/01iht-letter.html
Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side
Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side
Peter Alford, Rowan Callick and Michael Sainsbury | August 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian
UIGHUR leader Rebiya Kadeer has replaced the Dalai Lama as China's enemy No 1.
THE new No1 hate figure targeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party arrives in Australia in a few days: Rebiya Kadeer.
Although the Dalai Lama is also due to come to Australia later in the year, Kadeer -- the charismatic 63-year-old president of the World Uighur Association -- has in the past month seized the Tibetan spiritual leader's place as China's Public Enemy No 1.
This has sent her global profile soaring, and attracted unprecedented interest in the Uighur cause.
Her hot-to-handle visit next week -- against which Beijing has protested in vain -- is further battering Australia's already rocky relationship with China.
And it points the way to future tensions between Beijing and democratic liberal countries more generally, as the Chinese government seeks to press its soft power globally, extending ever wider the circle of exiled leaders to whom it intends to provide no respite. Kadeer, who comes from Xinjiang, the Queensland-sized region of northwest China that is the home of the nine million Uighurs, lives in exile in Washington.
Last year it was the unrest and riots in Tibet, another huge region of western China, that saw the Dalai Lama blamed as a "splittist" manipulator of violent protests. This year the same mantle has been cast on Kadeer.
She has become a non-person in China, with articles that include her name being blocked by the "net police" even from the Google search engine.
What Kadeer describes as mere phone calls to her family in Xinjiang have been portrayed by Beijing as messages masterminding the inter-ethnic violence that caused about 200 deaths there a month ago.
Pan Zhiping, a researcher at Xinjiang Academy of Social Science, provides a sense of the outrage from Han Chinese, who suffered the initial casualties from the violence.
She told The Weekend Australian that Kadeer, who was one of China's wealthiest businesswomen before being jailed in 1999 for five years for political offences, "was not a good businesswoman, she just had a start-up and accumulated her money from tax evasion".
She says: "Ordinary Uighurs are not calling for independence, only so-called elite Uighur intellectuals. Rebiya was influenced by her husband, who was a third-class professor. These people agitated the street violence and manipulated extreme racism.
"She is rotten meat, the kind that only attracts flies. But she will have her verdict when the official investigation (on the riots) is finished -- lies can't be covered up. The human right she advocates are evil rights, murderers' rights." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that while being "deeply saddened by the loss of life and violence" in Xinjiang: "I will have to look at the case for exact information ... (which) I do not have."
The only inquiry so far announced is being conducted by the Chinese central government. On a visit to Japan this week, Kadeer urged the establishment of an international commission to examine what she claimed to be the disappearance of 10,000 Uighurs in Xinjiang last month.
China's ambassador to Japan said during Kadeer's stay in Tokyo: "She is a criminal," and compared her to Aum Shinrikyo, the cult leader who unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995.
Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Uighur Association of Australia, the main hosts for Kadeer's week-long visit, said: "China has blamed her for the troubles in Xinjiang in order to externalise what is an internal problem -- a classic Chinese tactic, as it also does with the Dalai Lama, to whip up nationalistic fervour, brainwashing its own citizens.
"This also transforms perceptions among ordinary Chinese of the Uighurs into an evil people, an enemy within. As a result, reconciliation now seems almost impossible," she says.
After Kadeer this week gave the foreign correspondents' club in Tokyo a lengthy, graphic and doubtless highly partisan account of the violent riots on July 5, a reporter from China's People's Daily posed what he perhaps thought was a "gotcha" question.
"It sounds like you were there," he noted. "How could you have such detailed knowledge when at the time you were tens of thousands of kilometres away in Washington?" Kadeer allowed herself a hard little smile before answering.
The element of the case against her most quoted by China's state media is a telephone tap allegedly of her saying: "Something will happen in Urumqi."
Kadeer says she learnt of the gathering Uighur unrest, provoked by a security crackdown in Xinjiang and local anger over the June mob killings of Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, and called to warn her family.
She has four sons -- two imprisoned since July 5 -- a daughter, numerous grandchildren and a brother still in Xinjiang, and says family members are the usual suspects to be rounded up when trouble flares.
She does not deny being closely plugged into contemporary affairs in Xinjiang, which, like other dissident Uighurs, she prefers to call East Turkestan, even after five years in Chinese prisons and four years in US exile.
It's one of the reasons, she says, the Chinese authorities hate her so.
That, and the fact she was once a poster-woman for ethnic integration in post-Maoist China, a self-made multi-millionaire and influential figure on policy towards the 55 minority nationalities -- who comprise 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population -- until radicalised by a violent suppression of Uighur unrest in 1997.
Beijing has sought to reposition her World Uighur Congress (WUC) rather than the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as the main driver of Uighur violence, linking both to al-Qa'ida and international Islamic terrorism.
There is no reason to doubt the genuine repugnance among Chinese officials and representatives abroad that so soon after the killings of at least 192 people, mostly Han Chinese according to the official account, countries such as Japan and Australia are hosting visits by the strongest voice in the world for Uighur separatism.
It was notable this week in Tokyo how carefully Japanese officials and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party handled her visit -- a likely indicator of the sort of damage they feared to China relations.
But Kadeer got her visa and she got her LDP meeting, which suggests the governments of Japan -- and Australia, the US and other countries -- do not believe the Beijing narrative about her associations with Islamic terrorism.
ETIM is a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- originally on China's post-9/11 advice to George W. Bush's White House. Yet Kadeer has been given refuge in Washington since 2005 and granted visas by countries, including Australia, that are members in good standing of the coalition against Islamic terror.
In the post-Guantanamo world, the cloak of international legitimacy cannot be earned by simply designating separatist movements as associates of international terrorists.
In fact, many Americans find it harder to tolerate evidence recently produced that the Bush defence department allowed Chinese interrogators inside Guantanamo to question 22 Uighur terror suspects in 2002 -- though the same department flatly refused American congressmen and women access to camp inmates.
The US has refused Chinese demands to return them, and the last of them are now being relocated to third countries -- five at first to Albania, and now four to Bermuda and 13 to Palau, which recognises Taiwan rather than China diplomatically.
Kadeer told The Weekend Australian in Tokyo: "While I was in China I followed the Communist Party (line) and was obedient to the government.
"I know well when the Chinese government says something which is lies and which is truth. It knows if it stops the voice of Rebiya, it stops the voice of the Uighurs in the world."
Small, intense and unusually charismatic, Kadeer talks as if she embodies the Uighur spirit of independence, and particularly since July 5 that seems close to the truth.
The WUC, a confederation of Uighur exile groups, is passionate but thinly spread and seems not very well organised. When Kadeer came to Tokyo two years ago, soon after taking over the leadership, she attracted only scant media attention, and certainly not three official protests from Beijing.
But in the past 25 days, she and her cause have attracted more headlines and sympathetic interest than in the four years since she arrived in the US, after Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's personal intervention with the Chinese led to her release.
Kadeer's name and cause are increasingly linked in international commentary with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet.
And she is exploiting that association for all it's worth.
"Of course, I have chosen the way of the Dalai Lama, so I will travel all over the world, I will give true information about East Turkestan -- I want to become (like) the Dalai Lama, to bring my homeland to freedom and liberation," she says.
While disavowing violence, Kadeer now refuses to rule out shifting from her established position of seeking proper political and religious autonomy for Xinjiang within the People's Republic, to a campaign for full independence.
That decision, she says, will be taken by the WUC once its campaign for an independent UN investigation of the July 5 uprising and the subsequent Chinese crackdown is settled.
Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, has put a large dent in what one pro-Beijing Uighur official recently called "the Great Wall of ethnic unity" allegedly bounding both the Han Chinese and the minority nations.
She is an opponent who came from inside the wall, who says policies she once supported and thrived under are now being turned to crushing the Uighurs.
She seems less inclined than the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet 50 years ago, to moderate her criticisms of Beijing in order to foster a dialogue on autonomy. "I cannot wait 50 years," she says.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25863570-2703,00.html
Peter Alford, Rowan Callick and Michael Sainsbury | August 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian
UIGHUR leader Rebiya Kadeer has replaced the Dalai Lama as China's enemy No 1.
THE new No1 hate figure targeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party arrives in Australia in a few days: Rebiya Kadeer.
Although the Dalai Lama is also due to come to Australia later in the year, Kadeer -- the charismatic 63-year-old president of the World Uighur Association -- has in the past month seized the Tibetan spiritual leader's place as China's Public Enemy No 1.
This has sent her global profile soaring, and attracted unprecedented interest in the Uighur cause.
Her hot-to-handle visit next week -- against which Beijing has protested in vain -- is further battering Australia's already rocky relationship with China.
And it points the way to future tensions between Beijing and democratic liberal countries more generally, as the Chinese government seeks to press its soft power globally, extending ever wider the circle of exiled leaders to whom it intends to provide no respite. Kadeer, who comes from Xinjiang, the Queensland-sized region of northwest China that is the home of the nine million Uighurs, lives in exile in Washington.
Last year it was the unrest and riots in Tibet, another huge region of western China, that saw the Dalai Lama blamed as a "splittist" manipulator of violent protests. This year the same mantle has been cast on Kadeer.
She has become a non-person in China, with articles that include her name being blocked by the "net police" even from the Google search engine.
What Kadeer describes as mere phone calls to her family in Xinjiang have been portrayed by Beijing as messages masterminding the inter-ethnic violence that caused about 200 deaths there a month ago.
Pan Zhiping, a researcher at Xinjiang Academy of Social Science, provides a sense of the outrage from Han Chinese, who suffered the initial casualties from the violence.
She told The Weekend Australian that Kadeer, who was one of China's wealthiest businesswomen before being jailed in 1999 for five years for political offences, "was not a good businesswoman, she just had a start-up and accumulated her money from tax evasion".
She says: "Ordinary Uighurs are not calling for independence, only so-called elite Uighur intellectuals. Rebiya was influenced by her husband, who was a third-class professor. These people agitated the street violence and manipulated extreme racism.
"She is rotten meat, the kind that only attracts flies. But she will have her verdict when the official investigation (on the riots) is finished -- lies can't be covered up. The human right she advocates are evil rights, murderers' rights." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that while being "deeply saddened by the loss of life and violence" in Xinjiang: "I will have to look at the case for exact information ... (which) I do not have."
The only inquiry so far announced is being conducted by the Chinese central government. On a visit to Japan this week, Kadeer urged the establishment of an international commission to examine what she claimed to be the disappearance of 10,000 Uighurs in Xinjiang last month.
China's ambassador to Japan said during Kadeer's stay in Tokyo: "She is a criminal," and compared her to Aum Shinrikyo, the cult leader who unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995.
Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Uighur Association of Australia, the main hosts for Kadeer's week-long visit, said: "China has blamed her for the troubles in Xinjiang in order to externalise what is an internal problem -- a classic Chinese tactic, as it also does with the Dalai Lama, to whip up nationalistic fervour, brainwashing its own citizens.
"This also transforms perceptions among ordinary Chinese of the Uighurs into an evil people, an enemy within. As a result, reconciliation now seems almost impossible," she says.
After Kadeer this week gave the foreign correspondents' club in Tokyo a lengthy, graphic and doubtless highly partisan account of the violent riots on July 5, a reporter from China's People's Daily posed what he perhaps thought was a "gotcha" question.
"It sounds like you were there," he noted. "How could you have such detailed knowledge when at the time you were tens of thousands of kilometres away in Washington?" Kadeer allowed herself a hard little smile before answering.
The element of the case against her most quoted by China's state media is a telephone tap allegedly of her saying: "Something will happen in Urumqi."
Kadeer says she learnt of the gathering Uighur unrest, provoked by a security crackdown in Xinjiang and local anger over the June mob killings of Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, and called to warn her family.
She has four sons -- two imprisoned since July 5 -- a daughter, numerous grandchildren and a brother still in Xinjiang, and says family members are the usual suspects to be rounded up when trouble flares.
She does not deny being closely plugged into contemporary affairs in Xinjiang, which, like other dissident Uighurs, she prefers to call East Turkestan, even after five years in Chinese prisons and four years in US exile.
It's one of the reasons, she says, the Chinese authorities hate her so.
That, and the fact she was once a poster-woman for ethnic integration in post-Maoist China, a self-made multi-millionaire and influential figure on policy towards the 55 minority nationalities -- who comprise 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population -- until radicalised by a violent suppression of Uighur unrest in 1997.
Beijing has sought to reposition her World Uighur Congress (WUC) rather than the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as the main driver of Uighur violence, linking both to al-Qa'ida and international Islamic terrorism.
There is no reason to doubt the genuine repugnance among Chinese officials and representatives abroad that so soon after the killings of at least 192 people, mostly Han Chinese according to the official account, countries such as Japan and Australia are hosting visits by the strongest voice in the world for Uighur separatism.
It was notable this week in Tokyo how carefully Japanese officials and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party handled her visit -- a likely indicator of the sort of damage they feared to China relations.
But Kadeer got her visa and she got her LDP meeting, which suggests the governments of Japan -- and Australia, the US and other countries -- do not believe the Beijing narrative about her associations with Islamic terrorism.
ETIM is a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- originally on China's post-9/11 advice to George W. Bush's White House. Yet Kadeer has been given refuge in Washington since 2005 and granted visas by countries, including Australia, that are members in good standing of the coalition against Islamic terror.
In the post-Guantanamo world, the cloak of international legitimacy cannot be earned by simply designating separatist movements as associates of international terrorists.
In fact, many Americans find it harder to tolerate evidence recently produced that the Bush defence department allowed Chinese interrogators inside Guantanamo to question 22 Uighur terror suspects in 2002 -- though the same department flatly refused American congressmen and women access to camp inmates.
The US has refused Chinese demands to return them, and the last of them are now being relocated to third countries -- five at first to Albania, and now four to Bermuda and 13 to Palau, which recognises Taiwan rather than China diplomatically.
Kadeer told The Weekend Australian in Tokyo: "While I was in China I followed the Communist Party (line) and was obedient to the government.
"I know well when the Chinese government says something which is lies and which is truth. It knows if it stops the voice of Rebiya, it stops the voice of the Uighurs in the world."
Small, intense and unusually charismatic, Kadeer talks as if she embodies the Uighur spirit of independence, and particularly since July 5 that seems close to the truth.
The WUC, a confederation of Uighur exile groups, is passionate but thinly spread and seems not very well organised. When Kadeer came to Tokyo two years ago, soon after taking over the leadership, she attracted only scant media attention, and certainly not three official protests from Beijing.
But in the past 25 days, she and her cause have attracted more headlines and sympathetic interest than in the four years since she arrived in the US, after Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's personal intervention with the Chinese led to her release.
Kadeer's name and cause are increasingly linked in international commentary with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet.
And she is exploiting that association for all it's worth.
"Of course, I have chosen the way of the Dalai Lama, so I will travel all over the world, I will give true information about East Turkestan -- I want to become (like) the Dalai Lama, to bring my homeland to freedom and liberation," she says.
While disavowing violence, Kadeer now refuses to rule out shifting from her established position of seeking proper political and religious autonomy for Xinjiang within the People's Republic, to a campaign for full independence.
That decision, she says, will be taken by the WUC once its campaign for an independent UN investigation of the July 5 uprising and the subsequent Chinese crackdown is settled.
Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, has put a large dent in what one pro-Beijing Uighur official recently called "the Great Wall of ethnic unity" allegedly bounding both the Han Chinese and the minority nations.
She is an opponent who came from inside the wall, who says policies she once supported and thrived under are now being turned to crushing the Uighurs.
She seems less inclined than the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet 50 years ago, to moderate her criticisms of Beijing in order to foster a dialogue on autonomy. "I cannot wait 50 years," she says.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25863570-2703,00.html
An old problem on China's new frontier
An old problem on China's new frontier
By Konstanty Gebert
WARSAW - Had the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev not failed, the riots and death recently seen in Xinjiang could have been taking place in Russia.
Instead of hearing about a crackdown in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, we might be reading about hundreds killed on the streets of Almaty, and columnists would be making comparisons to the bloody crushing of Ukrainian independence demonstrations in Lvov the previous year.
As with China today, there would have been some feeble international condemnation, and some speculation about possible links between Kazakh militants and exile groups, or Islamic fundamentalists. Experts would remind us that Kazakhstan had never been a country, and that Ukrainian claims to independence are historically dubious. Substitute Xinjiang for Kazakhstan and Tibet for Ukraine and you get the picture.
Armed Chinese soldiers in riot gear walk past ethnic Uighur men and a Han Chinese woman along a main street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region . Pic courtesy Reuters.com
But that putsch, thankfully, ended as a farce. The decaying Soviet regime was unable to crush Russia's growing democratic movement - it would take Vladimir Putin to do that a decade later. By opting for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership set their country on a road starkly different from the one on which Russia subsequently embarked.
Though China's policies have brought about Pinochet-style economic growth, if on the scale of a country that is almost a continent unto itself, they have also ensured that there is in no freedom for anyone, including the Han majority. This, in turn, means that, while Kazakhstan and Ukraine are independent, Tibet and Xinjiang alternate between phases of violent agitation and bloody repression.
Though Russia today is autocratically governed, the introduction of a Chinese-style dictatorship seems hardly plausible, while GDP per capita was $15,800 last year, or almost three times that of China. Yet a majority of the Chinese population seems to support its' government's policies, including its brutal suppression of minorities and denial of democratic freedoms.
In fact, the latter seems to be the price paid for the success of the former. This is not a novel phenomenon. In 1863, the Russian democratic émigré thinker Alexander Herzen, commenting on the brutal crushing of the Polish uprising by the Tsarist army, wrote in his publication Kolokol that acceptance of violence on the streets of Warsaw meant the acceptance of violence on the streets of St. Petersburg. Oppression is a package deal. His comments cost him his Russian readership, and Kolokol had to close down.
When Herzen was writing his words, Moscow was not only busy successfully putting down the Poles, reasserting its rule there for another half-century, but also, together with China, carving up Central Asia, known then as Turkestan. The eastern part of the region fell under Chinese rule, and was renamed Xinjiang, or New Frontier.
Each time Chinese rule weakened, as in the 1930's and 1940's, short-lived East Turkestan Republics were established, with Russian support, only to flounder when Russia and China struck new deals. The leadership of the second East Turkestan Republic was presumably murdered on Stalin's orders, when the plane carrying it to Beijing for talks allegedly crashed in Soviet airspace.
Since then, East Turkestan has existed solely on paper, as a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a would-be competitor of the United Nations set up in 1991. In Xinjiang itself, the current agitation is more social than nationalist in character, and targets cultural oppression (Han Chinese by now make up half of the region's population) rather than expressing aspirations for independence. Yet the recent bloodbath there is almost sure to change that, as violence unavoidably breeds radicalization.
In the short and medium term, China's rule in Xinjiang and Tibet seems secure: the international community will not challenge a Security Council member state. Only its own citizens could do that, but Herzen's package deal seems to prevent that: just like the Tibetans, the Uighurs elicit not Han solidarity, but a braying for their blood - somewhat understandable, given that ordinary Han in Lhasa and Urumqi were made to pay with their own for China's misdeeds. In the longer term, however, the Chinese authorities have every reason to be worried: Xinjiang will grow to be a problem like Tibet.
Indeed, though the UNPO, to which both belong - alongside Assyria and the Buffalo River Dene Nation - has a vaguely Marx Brothers' air to it (one expects Freedonia, the mythical country of which Groucho Marx was prime minister, to be on the roster), six member states already have left it to join the UN, and Kosovo, now independent if lacking UN recognition, will eventually follow. Political maps are never carved in stone.
It is therefore safe to assume that not only obscure academics and correspondents, but officials in Beijing as well, are now busy studying the history of the Ghulja uprising and of Osman Batur's guerillas. Come to think of it: whatever happened to the Poles, whom Russia so successfully put down in 1863?
Konstanty Gebert is an essayist and author of ten books on Polish and European history. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009. Exclusive to the Sunday Times
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/090726/International/sundaytimesinternational-08.html
By Konstanty Gebert
WARSAW - Had the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev not failed, the riots and death recently seen in Xinjiang could have been taking place in Russia.
Instead of hearing about a crackdown in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, we might be reading about hundreds killed on the streets of Almaty, and columnists would be making comparisons to the bloody crushing of Ukrainian independence demonstrations in Lvov the previous year.
As with China today, there would have been some feeble international condemnation, and some speculation about possible links between Kazakh militants and exile groups, or Islamic fundamentalists. Experts would remind us that Kazakhstan had never been a country, and that Ukrainian claims to independence are historically dubious. Substitute Xinjiang for Kazakhstan and Tibet for Ukraine and you get the picture.
Armed Chinese soldiers in riot gear walk past ethnic Uighur men and a Han Chinese woman along a main street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region . Pic courtesy Reuters.com
But that putsch, thankfully, ended as a farce. The decaying Soviet regime was unable to crush Russia's growing democratic movement - it would take Vladimir Putin to do that a decade later. By opting for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership set their country on a road starkly different from the one on which Russia subsequently embarked.
Though China's policies have brought about Pinochet-style economic growth, if on the scale of a country that is almost a continent unto itself, they have also ensured that there is in no freedom for anyone, including the Han majority. This, in turn, means that, while Kazakhstan and Ukraine are independent, Tibet and Xinjiang alternate between phases of violent agitation and bloody repression.
Though Russia today is autocratically governed, the introduction of a Chinese-style dictatorship seems hardly plausible, while GDP per capita was $15,800 last year, or almost three times that of China. Yet a majority of the Chinese population seems to support its' government's policies, including its brutal suppression of minorities and denial of democratic freedoms.
In fact, the latter seems to be the price paid for the success of the former. This is not a novel phenomenon. In 1863, the Russian democratic émigré thinker Alexander Herzen, commenting on the brutal crushing of the Polish uprising by the Tsarist army, wrote in his publication Kolokol that acceptance of violence on the streets of Warsaw meant the acceptance of violence on the streets of St. Petersburg. Oppression is a package deal. His comments cost him his Russian readership, and Kolokol had to close down.
When Herzen was writing his words, Moscow was not only busy successfully putting down the Poles, reasserting its rule there for another half-century, but also, together with China, carving up Central Asia, known then as Turkestan. The eastern part of the region fell under Chinese rule, and was renamed Xinjiang, or New Frontier.
Each time Chinese rule weakened, as in the 1930's and 1940's, short-lived East Turkestan Republics were established, with Russian support, only to flounder when Russia and China struck new deals. The leadership of the second East Turkestan Republic was presumably murdered on Stalin's orders, when the plane carrying it to Beijing for talks allegedly crashed in Soviet airspace.
Since then, East Turkestan has existed solely on paper, as a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a would-be competitor of the United Nations set up in 1991. In Xinjiang itself, the current agitation is more social than nationalist in character, and targets cultural oppression (Han Chinese by now make up half of the region's population) rather than expressing aspirations for independence. Yet the recent bloodbath there is almost sure to change that, as violence unavoidably breeds radicalization.
In the short and medium term, China's rule in Xinjiang and Tibet seems secure: the international community will not challenge a Security Council member state. Only its own citizens could do that, but Herzen's package deal seems to prevent that: just like the Tibetans, the Uighurs elicit not Han solidarity, but a braying for their blood - somewhat understandable, given that ordinary Han in Lhasa and Urumqi were made to pay with their own for China's misdeeds. In the longer term, however, the Chinese authorities have every reason to be worried: Xinjiang will grow to be a problem like Tibet.
Indeed, though the UNPO, to which both belong - alongside Assyria and the Buffalo River Dene Nation - has a vaguely Marx Brothers' air to it (one expects Freedonia, the mythical country of which Groucho Marx was prime minister, to be on the roster), six member states already have left it to join the UN, and Kosovo, now independent if lacking UN recognition, will eventually follow. Political maps are never carved in stone.
It is therefore safe to assume that not only obscure academics and correspondents, but officials in Beijing as well, are now busy studying the history of the Ghulja uprising and of Osman Batur's guerillas. Come to think of it: whatever happened to the Poles, whom Russia so successfully put down in 1863?
Konstanty Gebert is an essayist and author of ten books on Polish and European history. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009. Exclusive to the Sunday Times
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/090726/International/sundaytimesinternational-08.html
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China’s ethnic relations
Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China’s ethnic relations
Temtsel Hao, 23 - 07 - 2009
The interplay between local identity, state policy, and economic change is at the core of the violent events in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009. The Chinese government’s predicament in finding a workable policy in response is severe, says Temtsel Hao.
23 - 07 - 2009
The ethnic protests and clashes in China's westernmost region of Xinjiang on 5-6 July 2009 and the following days have caused around 200 deaths. The deadly violence, mainly between the Uyghur (and Muslim) population and the Han Chinese - but also involving the security forces killing some protesting Uyghurs, in circumstances that are not yet clear - has shocked and polarised public opinion across China. They have also focused renewed attention on the sensitive and complex theme of the relationship between different ethnic groups in the People's Republic of China.
Temtsel Hao is a journalist based in London, working for the BBC World Service
Also by Temtsel Hao in openDemocracy:
"Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009The argument can be heard on either side of the divide in Xinjiang that the political arrangements in the region don't match its socio-economic circumstances. Uyghurs are unhappy with the tokenism of "nationality policies", and demand more participation and more of a share in the Xinjiang economy and its social proceeds; Han Chinese are unhappy with what they see as official favouritism towards the Uyghurs, and seek to remove the guarantees of autonomy and special treatment that Uyghurs (and other ethnic minorities) are supposed to benefit from.
A balance of favour
The events of early July 2009 - which mainly, not not exclusively, occurred in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi - reflect the deeper processes of rapid economic growth and social transformation during in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, the national policies of China's leadership in opening the economy, creating new labour-market mechanisms, and encouraging internal-migration flows have had profound effects in this region (as elsewhere).
These processes have accompanied China's historic shift from a centrally planned to a market economy, which has made it the manufacturing centre of the world. Many have benefited, but there have also been great problems, including new development gaps - between urban and rural areas, coastal regions and inland/frontier areas, and prosperous and poor in the same places. In addition, there are huge insecurities: many people in China have lost the assurance of a lifetime job and the social safety-nets that they enjoyed a generation ago.
Also on Xinjiang in openDemocracy:
James Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)
Henryk Szadziewski, "Kashgar"s old city: the politics of demolition" (3 April 2009)
Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation" (6 July 2009)
Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs" (9 July 2009)
Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert" (14 July 2009)
Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink" (15 July 2009)In Xinjiang, this "uneven development" has in the eyes of many Uyghurs become institutionalised along ethnic lines to their disadvantage; the result has been that they have been increasingly marginalised in the region's economic life (see Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert", 14 July 2009).
The Uyghur intellectual and scholar Ilham Tohti - who was detained in the wake of the Urumqi events - has offered two examples. First, the Xinjiang production and construction corps is an all-embracing institution that brings together the communist party, government, army, farms, and factories; it has taken the best farmland in Xinjiang and diverted rivers from the upper streams to its further advantage. Second, Xinjiang has been supplying oil, coal, gas and cotton to more developed Chinese regions, yet locals have to pay higher prices for some of those products than are charged in inland Chinese areas.
Ilham Tohti argues that China's Xinjiang policy is worse even than "colonialism". When foreign capital comes to china or other less-developed countries, local people at least have the chance to be "exploited" in "sweatshop factories". But when China establishes state farms, businesses, and oil companies on its own territory, it imports large numbers of Chinese workers to the area concerned. Uyghur workers have in the main not been absorbed by state factories in Xinjiang; some though have been sent 4,000 kilometres away to work in factories in Guangdong province, where the deaths of two of them in a conflict with Han Chinese workers on 25-26 June 2009 played a role in the outbreak of the violence in Urumqi (see Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs", 9 July 2009).
An ideological disguise
Chinese communist forces entered Xinjiang in 1949 and disbanded the republic of East Turkestan. Since then, under successive systems of effective local independence and regional autonomy, China has created a facade of equality between the "nationalities". In practice, however, the new China continues to implement some elements of an older "frontier strategy": that is, using large-scale Chinese emigration to consolidate the strategically important regions across its western frontier (see "China and its Continental Borders", China Perspectives [2008/3]).
Human Rights Watch estimates that Han Chinese in Xinjiang composed 6% of the entire regional population in 1949, but had become 40% by 2007. The current figure does not include either members of the Chinese military and their families, or unregistered migrant workers. In addition, the aforementioned Xinjiang production and construction corps is the largest ever of its kind; its control of farms, mines, factories, towns, schools, hospitals, police and courts makes it in effect an independent kingdom transplanted into Xinjiang (and, significantly, it is praised by Chinese media as a "deterrence to guarantee the state's unity").
The establishment of Chinese immigration and dominance in Xinjiang, however, took place under the disguise of an ideology that was at once "supranational" and "socialist". In the communist doctrine of "proletarian internationalism", nations and national sentiments - whether of the Chinese or non-Chinese peoples - are regarded as temporary, destined to disappear into a nation-less communist commonwealth at a higher level of development.
Also in openDemocracy on Tibet:
Tenzin Tzundue, "Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown" (15 August 2006)
Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories" (18 March 2009)
Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq" (27 March 2008)
Donald S Lopez, "How to think about Tibet" (28 March 2008)
George Fitzherbert, "Tibet's history, China's power" (28 March 2008)
Dibyesh Anand, "Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind" (1 April 2008)
Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt" (4 April 2008)
Wenran Jiang, "Tibetan unrest, Chinese lens" (7 April 2008)
Ivy Wang, "China's netizens and Tibet: a Guangzhou report" (8 April 2008)
Wang Lixiong, "China and Tibet: the true path" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Chinese intellectuals and Tibet: a letter" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Tibet scholars and China: a letter" (22 April 2008)
Chang Ping, "Tibet: looking for the truth" (8 May 2008)
Fred Halliday, "Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure" (9 May 2008)
Woeser, "The Fear in Lhasa" (10 March 2009)
Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present" (18 March 2009)
Temtsel Hao, "Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009) The supranational policy and this associated ideology were equally against local ethnic nationalisms and manifestations of Chinese chauvinism, the latter including the oppressive policies toward non-Chinese peoples pursued by (for example) the pre-1949 Chinese warlords, the Manchu dynasty, and the Kuomintang. The legitimacy of Xinjiang's integration into China is based on the claim that the common interests of the toiling masses of Chinese and non-Chinese alike made unnecessary any demands for national self-determination by local non-Chinese peoples.
An ethnic revival
Since the late 1980s the supranational emphasis of Chinese nationality policy and theory has increasingly collided with the effects of China's market-reform policies. The older official ideology has little purchase on the emergent social realities, and the state's response has been to swerve to the right by emphasising statist cohesion and the idea of an all-inclusive Chinese nation. These notions need legitimacy, which is met in part by theories that have emerged to compete for prominence - among them the "Zhong Hua nation", the "descendants of Yan and Huang", the "people of the dragon", and other quintessences of "Chinese culture" and "Chineseness".
The period when China's official ideology has swung rightwards has coincided with the country's acquisition of tremendous economic strength and political influence in the international arena. The perception of a rising China is acutely felt at home. In particular, it acts to reinforce Han Chinese ethnic identity and nationalist sentiment; this in turn influences the internal ethnic relationship, by heightening the sense of insecurity felt by non-Chinese minorities facing economic marginalisation and cultural assimilation (see Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt", 4 April 2008).
Two more positive factors intensify the process of a sharpening of ethnic identity in regions such as Xinjiang. First, many people in Xinjiang share close ethnic affinities with those in the five central Asian and majority-Muslim states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These states, which emerged out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, represent a powerful reminder to the Uyghur in Xinjiang of their distinct identity and potentially different political loyalty in relation to their Han Chinese neighbours.
Second, the past two decades have witnessed the spread of new communication technologies such as the internet and the mobile phone. These have facilitated new forms of discourse, organisation and information flows on the part of the Uyghurs and comparable peoples. The connections between people in Xinjiang and those across the border or in the wider diaspora are an important part of this (see Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation", 6 July 2009).
At the same time, the creation of online networks also creates the possibility that false or malicious rumours can have nefarious effects in the real world; the Guangdong violence and that in Urumqi were characterised by the online fanning of hatred between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.
Much of this online orchestration of prejudice exploits pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. It is important to recognise here that these can work both ways. For example, at the national people's congress in Beijing in 2004, I witnessed the then Xinjiang governor Ismail Tiliwaldi react with visible irritation to a formulaic question from a Hong Kong journalist that invited his comment on the large number of common crimes allegedly committed by Uyghurs in Chinese cities. Tiliwaldi reminded the questioner of the need for balanced reporting, and added that ethnic population-exchange went in both directions.
The huge number of Chinese people who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades include many who have been through China's own prison system; some too are survivors of the many large state prisons scattered across Xinjiang's Gobi desert). Indeed, from the Manchu dynasty to 1949, Xinjiang played a role not unlike colonial-era Australia to Britain, as the enforced destination of many of its convicts. Members of local non-Chinese minorities complain about the high proportion of convicts among the Chinese immigrant population.
The emergence of deep divisions along ethnic lines - even when they fall, as they usually do, very far short of violence - suggests that much more than cosmetic repairs and propaganda spins will be needed if the fundamental problems in areas such as Xinjiang are to be addressed.
A quiet end
Today, many Chinese regard the old system of nationality-based regional autonomy as a proven failure. They criticise what they perceive as the central state's excessively benign policy towards ethnic minorities, claiming that this extends even to treating people as above the law. They blame especially the so-called "two restraints and one leniency" policy announced by the CCP in 1984, which enjoins leniency in restraining and prosecuting crimes committed by members of minorities.
These attitudes fuel nostalgia for the "good old days" of the 1950s, when Xinjiang was under the iron reign of General Wang Zhen - notorious for his merciless handling of ethnic and religious affairs, including the massacre of large numbers of minority people. Even Mao Zedong criticised Wang Zhen for his "ultra-left" zealotry and later removed from his Xinjiang post.
Wang Lixiong recounted his personal experience in Xinjiang in his book Our West Region is Your East Turkistan. He encountered the sharp contrast of views expressed by the different nationalities about General Wang Zhen and to the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai,who had ruled Xinjiang in the 1930-40s. The ethnic minorities in Xinjiang regarded Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as ruthless mass-killers; some even called Wang Lequan, the current Xinjiang party boss, "Wang Shicai". But most Chinese in Xinjiang see Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as national heroes who expanded and consolidated Chinese territory.
These attitudes influence political beliefs. Many influential Chinese figures - including Qian Xuesen, and other leading intellectuals and dissidents - have asked the Chinese authorities to re-examine the "favouritist" nationality policy. Some even have called for the cancellation of the existing nationality-based autonomous regions, and returned Xinjiang to its status as a Chinese province. The American model of "melting-pot" assimilation is widely regarded as the solution to China's ethnic problems.
Wang Lixiong too has more recently argued that China can do without the system of nationality-based regional autonomy, as long as individual rights are guaranteed under a democratic system. He says: "If individual rights are guaranteed, naturally the rights of ethnic groups consisting of individuals can be guaranteed; hence the nationality-based regional autonomy is no longer needed" (see Asia Week interview with Wang Lixiong, in Woeser's blog).
An impossible problem
A wider view, however, suggests that there is little empirical evidence in international history for the view of Chinese dissidents that democracy is something of a miracle solution to ethnic conflicts. Dibyesh Anand wisely comments that a "non-communist democratic China may not necessarily be more accommodative of minority interests" (see Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink", 15 July 2009).
In theory, China historically incorporated non-Chinese regions not via the will of leaders or by naked conquest, but by forging agreements with local ethnic elites - either radical (in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia) or conservative (Tibet). The basis of these agreements is a compromise between Chinese communist goals and non-Chinese nationalist demands for national autonomy or liberation. The pacts include the "seventeen-point agreement" and many other directives promulgated by Chinese communists and local non-Chinese communist and nationalist collaborators around 1949. The legitimacy of the nationality-based regional-autonomy system derives from these agreements (see James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [C Hurst, 2007]).
In another words, the major ethnic minorities of the autonomous regions consider that they joined the People's Republic of China in 1949 as groups - with their elites (revolutionary or conservative as the case may be) as their political representatives in the new system.
But after 1949, the ethnic elites within the system were gradually purged and replaced by more obedient ethnic cadres, who became the only legitimate representatives of their groups left within the system. China's lordly policy toward non-Chinese nationalism means that non-Chinese minority cadres have more worries than their Chinese counterparts about defending local interests (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009).
Now, sixty years on from 1949, the nationality system may serve a legitimation purpose for China as a multi-ethnic state - but in practice it has lost its original meaning. China is at a crossroads: after decades of capitalist reform, state control - including the nationality system - is in deep tension with forces of unrestrained economic change.
In this respect, the call for American-style assimilationism to deal with non-Chinese minorities represents support for a market-forces solution: one that (it is argued) tends to break down regional and ethnic barriers, and replace ethnic relations with individually-based economic relations. The logic is that as a result the state's core character would change from a multi-ethnic one into a homogenous nation-state.
A tough choice
The way Chinese authorities have responded to the Xinjiang riots has been criticised by both the Chinese public and Uighur exile groups. It is Chinese authority's supranational (even ostensibly "neutral") stance - seeing the riots not as an ethnic incident but as a political one - that is scorned come by Chinese (for the "official" position, see Fu Ying, "Unity is Deep in China's Blood", Guardian, 13 July 2009).
For the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other non-Chinese minorities, the great concern is how far Chinese authority can resist increasingly populist opinion and retain this limited neutrality. The answer to this question will affect how far and how much non-Chinese minorities can identify with the state. As China's society becomes more loose and state power recedes, government policy is more and more subject to social influences.
The Chinese authorities face a tough choice over how they maintain the state's legitimacy and deal with ethnic relations (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009). If they seek to respond to growing Han Chinese ethnic nationalism by accelerating assimilation of non-Chinese groups, this would provoke the minority-nationalist causes with which the Chinese state found some accommodation in 1949: national self-determination and national liberation. But if they seek to amend and improve existing multi-ethnic arrangements to improve inter-ethnic relations in autonomous regions, they risk severe problems with Chinese business interests and popular opinions.
China has no easy way out. The fires of Lhasa, and now Urumqi, cannot be extinguished without the most intelligent and sophisticated policy mix. But even that might not be enough. Several genies are out of the bottle, and flying free. Welcome to the 21st century, China.
Temtsel Hao, 23 - 07 - 2009
The interplay between local identity, state policy, and economic change is at the core of the violent events in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009. The Chinese government’s predicament in finding a workable policy in response is severe, says Temtsel Hao.
23 - 07 - 2009
The ethnic protests and clashes in China's westernmost region of Xinjiang on 5-6 July 2009 and the following days have caused around 200 deaths. The deadly violence, mainly between the Uyghur (and Muslim) population and the Han Chinese - but also involving the security forces killing some protesting Uyghurs, in circumstances that are not yet clear - has shocked and polarised public opinion across China. They have also focused renewed attention on the sensitive and complex theme of the relationship between different ethnic groups in the People's Republic of China.
Temtsel Hao is a journalist based in London, working for the BBC World Service
Also by Temtsel Hao in openDemocracy:
"Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009The argument can be heard on either side of the divide in Xinjiang that the political arrangements in the region don't match its socio-economic circumstances. Uyghurs are unhappy with the tokenism of "nationality policies", and demand more participation and more of a share in the Xinjiang economy and its social proceeds; Han Chinese are unhappy with what they see as official favouritism towards the Uyghurs, and seek to remove the guarantees of autonomy and special treatment that Uyghurs (and other ethnic minorities) are supposed to benefit from.
A balance of favour
The events of early July 2009 - which mainly, not not exclusively, occurred in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi - reflect the deeper processes of rapid economic growth and social transformation during in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, the national policies of China's leadership in opening the economy, creating new labour-market mechanisms, and encouraging internal-migration flows have had profound effects in this region (as elsewhere).
These processes have accompanied China's historic shift from a centrally planned to a market economy, which has made it the manufacturing centre of the world. Many have benefited, but there have also been great problems, including new development gaps - between urban and rural areas, coastal regions and inland/frontier areas, and prosperous and poor in the same places. In addition, there are huge insecurities: many people in China have lost the assurance of a lifetime job and the social safety-nets that they enjoyed a generation ago.
Also on Xinjiang in openDemocracy:
James Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)
Henryk Szadziewski, "Kashgar"s old city: the politics of demolition" (3 April 2009)
Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation" (6 July 2009)
Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs" (9 July 2009)
Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert" (14 July 2009)
Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink" (15 July 2009)In Xinjiang, this "uneven development" has in the eyes of many Uyghurs become institutionalised along ethnic lines to their disadvantage; the result has been that they have been increasingly marginalised in the region's economic life (see Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert", 14 July 2009).
The Uyghur intellectual and scholar Ilham Tohti - who was detained in the wake of the Urumqi events - has offered two examples. First, the Xinjiang production and construction corps is an all-embracing institution that brings together the communist party, government, army, farms, and factories; it has taken the best farmland in Xinjiang and diverted rivers from the upper streams to its further advantage. Second, Xinjiang has been supplying oil, coal, gas and cotton to more developed Chinese regions, yet locals have to pay higher prices for some of those products than are charged in inland Chinese areas.
Ilham Tohti argues that China's Xinjiang policy is worse even than "colonialism". When foreign capital comes to china or other less-developed countries, local people at least have the chance to be "exploited" in "sweatshop factories". But when China establishes state farms, businesses, and oil companies on its own territory, it imports large numbers of Chinese workers to the area concerned. Uyghur workers have in the main not been absorbed by state factories in Xinjiang; some though have been sent 4,000 kilometres away to work in factories in Guangdong province, where the deaths of two of them in a conflict with Han Chinese workers on 25-26 June 2009 played a role in the outbreak of the violence in Urumqi (see Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs", 9 July 2009).
An ideological disguise
Chinese communist forces entered Xinjiang in 1949 and disbanded the republic of East Turkestan. Since then, under successive systems of effective local independence and regional autonomy, China has created a facade of equality between the "nationalities". In practice, however, the new China continues to implement some elements of an older "frontier strategy": that is, using large-scale Chinese emigration to consolidate the strategically important regions across its western frontier (see "China and its Continental Borders", China Perspectives [2008/3]).
Human Rights Watch estimates that Han Chinese in Xinjiang composed 6% of the entire regional population in 1949, but had become 40% by 2007. The current figure does not include either members of the Chinese military and their families, or unregistered migrant workers. In addition, the aforementioned Xinjiang production and construction corps is the largest ever of its kind; its control of farms, mines, factories, towns, schools, hospitals, police and courts makes it in effect an independent kingdom transplanted into Xinjiang (and, significantly, it is praised by Chinese media as a "deterrence to guarantee the state's unity").
The establishment of Chinese immigration and dominance in Xinjiang, however, took place under the disguise of an ideology that was at once "supranational" and "socialist". In the communist doctrine of "proletarian internationalism", nations and national sentiments - whether of the Chinese or non-Chinese peoples - are regarded as temporary, destined to disappear into a nation-less communist commonwealth at a higher level of development.
Also in openDemocracy on Tibet:
Tenzin Tzundue, "Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown" (15 August 2006)
Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories" (18 March 2009)
Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq" (27 March 2008)
Donald S Lopez, "How to think about Tibet" (28 March 2008)
George Fitzherbert, "Tibet's history, China's power" (28 March 2008)
Dibyesh Anand, "Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind" (1 April 2008)
Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt" (4 April 2008)
Wenran Jiang, "Tibetan unrest, Chinese lens" (7 April 2008)
Ivy Wang, "China's netizens and Tibet: a Guangzhou report" (8 April 2008)
Wang Lixiong, "China and Tibet: the true path" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Chinese intellectuals and Tibet: a letter" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Tibet scholars and China: a letter" (22 April 2008)
Chang Ping, "Tibet: looking for the truth" (8 May 2008)
Fred Halliday, "Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure" (9 May 2008)
Woeser, "The Fear in Lhasa" (10 March 2009)
Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present" (18 March 2009)
Temtsel Hao, "Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009) The supranational policy and this associated ideology were equally against local ethnic nationalisms and manifestations of Chinese chauvinism, the latter including the oppressive policies toward non-Chinese peoples pursued by (for example) the pre-1949 Chinese warlords, the Manchu dynasty, and the Kuomintang. The legitimacy of Xinjiang's integration into China is based on the claim that the common interests of the toiling masses of Chinese and non-Chinese alike made unnecessary any demands for national self-determination by local non-Chinese peoples.
An ethnic revival
Since the late 1980s the supranational emphasis of Chinese nationality policy and theory has increasingly collided with the effects of China's market-reform policies. The older official ideology has little purchase on the emergent social realities, and the state's response has been to swerve to the right by emphasising statist cohesion and the idea of an all-inclusive Chinese nation. These notions need legitimacy, which is met in part by theories that have emerged to compete for prominence - among them the "Zhong Hua nation", the "descendants of Yan and Huang", the "people of the dragon", and other quintessences of "Chinese culture" and "Chineseness".
The period when China's official ideology has swung rightwards has coincided with the country's acquisition of tremendous economic strength and political influence in the international arena. The perception of a rising China is acutely felt at home. In particular, it acts to reinforce Han Chinese ethnic identity and nationalist sentiment; this in turn influences the internal ethnic relationship, by heightening the sense of insecurity felt by non-Chinese minorities facing economic marginalisation and cultural assimilation (see Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt", 4 April 2008).
Two more positive factors intensify the process of a sharpening of ethnic identity in regions such as Xinjiang. First, many people in Xinjiang share close ethnic affinities with those in the five central Asian and majority-Muslim states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These states, which emerged out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, represent a powerful reminder to the Uyghur in Xinjiang of their distinct identity and potentially different political loyalty in relation to their Han Chinese neighbours.
Second, the past two decades have witnessed the spread of new communication technologies such as the internet and the mobile phone. These have facilitated new forms of discourse, organisation and information flows on the part of the Uyghurs and comparable peoples. The connections between people in Xinjiang and those across the border or in the wider diaspora are an important part of this (see Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation", 6 July 2009).
At the same time, the creation of online networks also creates the possibility that false or malicious rumours can have nefarious effects in the real world; the Guangdong violence and that in Urumqi were characterised by the online fanning of hatred between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.
Much of this online orchestration of prejudice exploits pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. It is important to recognise here that these can work both ways. For example, at the national people's congress in Beijing in 2004, I witnessed the then Xinjiang governor Ismail Tiliwaldi react with visible irritation to a formulaic question from a Hong Kong journalist that invited his comment on the large number of common crimes allegedly committed by Uyghurs in Chinese cities. Tiliwaldi reminded the questioner of the need for balanced reporting, and added that ethnic population-exchange went in both directions.
The huge number of Chinese people who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades include many who have been through China's own prison system; some too are survivors of the many large state prisons scattered across Xinjiang's Gobi desert). Indeed, from the Manchu dynasty to 1949, Xinjiang played a role not unlike colonial-era Australia to Britain, as the enforced destination of many of its convicts. Members of local non-Chinese minorities complain about the high proportion of convicts among the Chinese immigrant population.
The emergence of deep divisions along ethnic lines - even when they fall, as they usually do, very far short of violence - suggests that much more than cosmetic repairs and propaganda spins will be needed if the fundamental problems in areas such as Xinjiang are to be addressed.
A quiet end
Today, many Chinese regard the old system of nationality-based regional autonomy as a proven failure. They criticise what they perceive as the central state's excessively benign policy towards ethnic minorities, claiming that this extends even to treating people as above the law. They blame especially the so-called "two restraints and one leniency" policy announced by the CCP in 1984, which enjoins leniency in restraining and prosecuting crimes committed by members of minorities.
These attitudes fuel nostalgia for the "good old days" of the 1950s, when Xinjiang was under the iron reign of General Wang Zhen - notorious for his merciless handling of ethnic and religious affairs, including the massacre of large numbers of minority people. Even Mao Zedong criticised Wang Zhen for his "ultra-left" zealotry and later removed from his Xinjiang post.
Wang Lixiong recounted his personal experience in Xinjiang in his book Our West Region is Your East Turkistan. He encountered the sharp contrast of views expressed by the different nationalities about General Wang Zhen and to the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai,who had ruled Xinjiang in the 1930-40s. The ethnic minorities in Xinjiang regarded Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as ruthless mass-killers; some even called Wang Lequan, the current Xinjiang party boss, "Wang Shicai". But most Chinese in Xinjiang see Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as national heroes who expanded and consolidated Chinese territory.
These attitudes influence political beliefs. Many influential Chinese figures - including Qian Xuesen, and other leading intellectuals and dissidents - have asked the Chinese authorities to re-examine the "favouritist" nationality policy. Some even have called for the cancellation of the existing nationality-based autonomous regions, and returned Xinjiang to its status as a Chinese province. The American model of "melting-pot" assimilation is widely regarded as the solution to China's ethnic problems.
Wang Lixiong too has more recently argued that China can do without the system of nationality-based regional autonomy, as long as individual rights are guaranteed under a democratic system. He says: "If individual rights are guaranteed, naturally the rights of ethnic groups consisting of individuals can be guaranteed; hence the nationality-based regional autonomy is no longer needed" (see Asia Week interview with Wang Lixiong, in Woeser's blog).
An impossible problem
A wider view, however, suggests that there is little empirical evidence in international history for the view of Chinese dissidents that democracy is something of a miracle solution to ethnic conflicts. Dibyesh Anand wisely comments that a "non-communist democratic China may not necessarily be more accommodative of minority interests" (see Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink", 15 July 2009).
In theory, China historically incorporated non-Chinese regions not via the will of leaders or by naked conquest, but by forging agreements with local ethnic elites - either radical (in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia) or conservative (Tibet). The basis of these agreements is a compromise between Chinese communist goals and non-Chinese nationalist demands for national autonomy or liberation. The pacts include the "seventeen-point agreement" and many other directives promulgated by Chinese communists and local non-Chinese communist and nationalist collaborators around 1949. The legitimacy of the nationality-based regional-autonomy system derives from these agreements (see James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [C Hurst, 2007]).
In another words, the major ethnic minorities of the autonomous regions consider that they joined the People's Republic of China in 1949 as groups - with their elites (revolutionary or conservative as the case may be) as their political representatives in the new system.
But after 1949, the ethnic elites within the system were gradually purged and replaced by more obedient ethnic cadres, who became the only legitimate representatives of their groups left within the system. China's lordly policy toward non-Chinese nationalism means that non-Chinese minority cadres have more worries than their Chinese counterparts about defending local interests (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009).
Now, sixty years on from 1949, the nationality system may serve a legitimation purpose for China as a multi-ethnic state - but in practice it has lost its original meaning. China is at a crossroads: after decades of capitalist reform, state control - including the nationality system - is in deep tension with forces of unrestrained economic change.
In this respect, the call for American-style assimilationism to deal with non-Chinese minorities represents support for a market-forces solution: one that (it is argued) tends to break down regional and ethnic barriers, and replace ethnic relations with individually-based economic relations. The logic is that as a result the state's core character would change from a multi-ethnic one into a homogenous nation-state.
A tough choice
The way Chinese authorities have responded to the Xinjiang riots has been criticised by both the Chinese public and Uighur exile groups. It is Chinese authority's supranational (even ostensibly "neutral") stance - seeing the riots not as an ethnic incident but as a political one - that is scorned come by Chinese (for the "official" position, see Fu Ying, "Unity is Deep in China's Blood", Guardian, 13 July 2009).
For the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other non-Chinese minorities, the great concern is how far Chinese authority can resist increasingly populist opinion and retain this limited neutrality. The answer to this question will affect how far and how much non-Chinese minorities can identify with the state. As China's society becomes more loose and state power recedes, government policy is more and more subject to social influences.
The Chinese authorities face a tough choice over how they maintain the state's legitimacy and deal with ethnic relations (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009). If they seek to respond to growing Han Chinese ethnic nationalism by accelerating assimilation of non-Chinese groups, this would provoke the minority-nationalist causes with which the Chinese state found some accommodation in 1949: national self-determination and national liberation. But if they seek to amend and improve existing multi-ethnic arrangements to improve inter-ethnic relations in autonomous regions, they risk severe problems with Chinese business interests and popular opinions.
China has no easy way out. The fires of Lhasa, and now Urumqi, cannot be extinguished without the most intelligent and sophisticated policy mix. But even that might not be enough. Several genies are out of the bottle, and flying free. Welcome to the 21st century, China.
B’nai Brith Canada draws attention to Uyghur Muslim plea for help
B’nai Brith Canada draws attention to Uyghur Muslim plea for help
Written by the Jewish Tribune staff
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
TORONTO – B’nai Brith Canada has issued a call to all nations and peoples of goodwill not to let the plight of ethnic minorities in China go unchallenged at a time when authorities seem intent on fanning the flames of inter-ethnic conflict.
The Jewish human rights group issued this call in the wake of the unfolding turmoil in the capital of China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the Uyghur people have long been subject to discrimination and oppression.
“The violence and bloodshed on the streets of China’s Urumqi city is yet another example of the brutality of the Chinese regime that has a long and well-known history of human rights abuses,” said Frank Dimant, executive vice-president, B’nai Brith Canada.
“We once again call on Canada to use its good influence on the world stage to draw attention to the plight of Uyghur Muslims in China. We further urge the community of nations to raise their collective voices to ensure that no more blood is spilled as ethnic strife intensifies in the region.”
Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 July 2009 )
http://www.jewishtribune.ca/TribuneV2/index.php/200907221857/B-nai-Brith-Canada-draws-attention-to-Uyghur-Muslim-plea-for-help.html
Written by the Jewish Tribune staff
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
TORONTO – B’nai Brith Canada has issued a call to all nations and peoples of goodwill not to let the plight of ethnic minorities in China go unchallenged at a time when authorities seem intent on fanning the flames of inter-ethnic conflict.
The Jewish human rights group issued this call in the wake of the unfolding turmoil in the capital of China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the Uyghur people have long been subject to discrimination and oppression.
“The violence and bloodshed on the streets of China’s Urumqi city is yet another example of the brutality of the Chinese regime that has a long and well-known history of human rights abuses,” said Frank Dimant, executive vice-president, B’nai Brith Canada.
“We once again call on Canada to use its good influence on the world stage to draw attention to the plight of Uyghur Muslims in China. We further urge the community of nations to raise their collective voices to ensure that no more blood is spilled as ethnic strife intensifies in the region.”
Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 July 2009 )
http://www.jewishtribune.ca/TribuneV2/index.php/200907221857/B-nai-Brith-Canada-draws-attention-to-Uyghur-Muslim-plea-for-help.html
State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009 - China
State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009 - China
Contributed by Marusca Perazzi
The year 2008 was marked by a spectacular Olympic Games, intended to promote China's prestige and influence, a devastating earthquake in western Sichuan province, and a string of social instability issues, infringements of rights and denial of fundamental freedoms, highlighting the challenges the Chinese authorities face in governing a Han-dominant multi-ethnic China.
Governance and 'Regional National Autonomy'
In 2008, the government announced its ambitious goal of attaining democratic social progress by 2020, through its official articulation of the Chinese 'nation'. China has never recognized any minority as 'indigenous' or as having special rights. The 'autonomous' regions, districts, and counties where most minorities live, and that today cover 64 per cent of China's territory, offer mostly symbolic recognition of 'minority autonomy', as the Han Chinese increasingly dominate even in those areas.
During 2008 mounting turmoil in minority-populated areas revealed the contradicitons of living under national policies that force minorities to forge a closer identification with the 92 per cent Han majority. While the government promoted more non-Han regional governors to work on the implementation of minority policies, it ensured that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) remained firmly in control. It also continued to grant some minorities, including the Dai and Yao, more freedom to promote their cultural heritage. Through permitting expressions of ethnic identity, such as ethnic folklore and music, that do not challenge the state's control over minority affairs, the authorities bolstered the country's self-image as a tolerant and united multicultural society.
Minority rights and fundamental freedoms
Deep-seated issues for both the Han majority and minorities in governance and the rule of law, employment and social welfare, land seizure and expropriation came to a head in 2008. Central and local authorities heavily monitored and circumscribed minorities' activities, disregarding genuine discontent caused by discriminatory national policies that prevent them from fully enjoying their rights. The March 2008 Tibetan protests and riots in Lhasa, fuelled by deep resentment towards Han dominance, spilled over into Tibetan-inhabited areas in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu, leading to increased tensions, including between Tibetan Buddhists and Hui Muslims.
The authorities relied on emergency measures to ensure stability, to quell rising dissent and to keep dormant frustration from escalating in minority-inhabited areas in Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Hubei, Guangxi, Heilongjiang and Yunnan. Instead of addressing the underlying institutional factors, the state stepped up security in the Tibet Autonomous Republic (TAR) and the strategic Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Republic (XUAR), home to Muslim Turkic-speaking Uyghur and Hui Sunni, and cracked down on protests in Hotan and Kashgar. Some religious minorities were concerned about measures that support atheism in schools; deny the full exercise of rights of belief, freedoms of expression and movement; and fail to tackle discriminatory practices in education and employment. The government continued to subject minority Buddhists, Muslims and Christians to a strict regulatory framework. It also silenced Tibetan and Uyghur voices, by imposing curfews, preventing mass prayers and impeding international pilgrimages. The public security bureau closely monitored minority rights activists and often equated their peaceful activism with social unrest to be repressed. In the TAR, the authorities renewed the 'patriotic education' campaign to convince the masses to 'fight splittism and protect stability'. Across the country, religious leaders were targeted for ongoing state indoctrination and the circulation of religious publications and texts was curtailed.
Harassment of minority communities along the North Korean border intensified, with local authorities preventing unregistered children of mixed ethnic origin from accessing schooling. The administration in XUAR barred minority children from participating in religious activities, and prohibited teachers from publicly expressing their faith, and students from attending services and receiving private religious teaching. Following the September 2008 local ban on headscarves in Hotan, Muslim women were forced to unveil their faces in public, and others were discouraged from fasting during Ramadan. In Sichuan's Tibetan areas, monks were reportedly removed from monasteries, and hundreds of children shifted from the attached schools to public schools to receive compulsory education.
The authorities used 'anti-terrorism' as a justification to crack down on all forms of perceived dissent on the part of minorities in the TAR and the XUAR. This included prohibitions on language use, harassment of defence lawyers, forced disappearances, widespread arrests and sentencing of an unknown number of Tibetans and the indictment of 1,154 Uyghurs charged with 'endangering state security'. Unaffiliated and unregistered religious groups, including Christians in the eastern regions, continued to be subject to government interference and increased police surveillance, arrests, detention and torture. In November 2008, the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) criticized the discriminatory treatment of minority groups in China and the 'alleged reluctance of police forces and the authorities to conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into discriminatory or violent practices'.
Language policies, identity challenges, and resistance in minority education
The state's achievements in its endeavour to provide 'free' basic education for all are creditable. However, China's minorities have been mainly treated as a single entity in education reforms, and the cultural, regional and developmental differences that distinguish them have been largely ignored. The implementation of national education policies has produced mixed results and additional challenges for minority groups during 2008. The National Commonly Used Language Law (2000) guarantees standard Chinese (Putonghua) as the national common language in the political, economic, social and education spheres. There are no formal restrictions in using Putonghua and minority languages simultaneously, but there have been increased limitations on the official use of minority languages and access to education and employment have consequently been affected.
The government reiterated its emphasis on the application of minorities' language policies (of over 120 spoken languages, both with and without a written script), while incorporating the mastering of Putonghua, the official form of spoken Chinese. Such policies have worked best to reduce illiteracy in communities without a formal writing system (Dongxiang), or where language use is limited to some social domains (Zhuang). For others with well-established written scripts (Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Yi), where minority groups strongly identify with their native language, policies that limit their use in school have been met with increasing resistance. Minority learners and parents increasingly perceive formal schooling to be more about repressing minorities' culture than promoting their education and cultural integration. The 2008 UNESCO Education for All global monitoring report sees this trend as of particular relevance to predominantly pastoralist minority communities. For the Daurs, Ewenkis, Hezhen and Tibetans, in fact, formal education poses further problems, ranging from accessibility of schools to the availability of bilingual teachers qualified to work with pastoralist children. Nomadic Mongolian communities also continued to sacrifice their linguistic and cultural heritage in education. The government has yet to balance policy to support linguistic diversity and also take into account minorities' education needs.
The amended China Compulsory Education Law (2006), adopted to ensure attainment of compulsory education in rural areas, increases central government control over teaching materials in minority classes and advanced further the use of Putonghua. Mongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs in 2008 continued to suffer disproportionately from unequal or restricted access to quality education or the implementation of inappropriate education strategies. In the Tibetans' case, unwanted assimilation imposed through exclusionary education policies and practices, including bilingual teaching, neither serves the aim of communities' self-development, nor does it open the way to better prospects for employment, housing and adequate standard of living.
The government's commitment to invest more financial and human resources to redress discriminatory practices in language use and development of disadvantaged minorities, have yet to impact on the structural and institutional limitations. The 2007-8 increased level of governmental funding has not led to the educational development of minority communities. Additional investment is required to help remove gender-based discrimination towards minority girls affected by power relations in the community and family commitments, including early marriage, and changes in institutional education policies that do not respect their traditional roles. Gender awareness advocacy pilots in Guangxi and education initiatives in the Gansu significantly increased the enrolment of minority girls in schools by providing financial support, teacher training to minority women and community participation in school planning. But commitments such as training of minority teachers and improved school management in minority areas still have some way to go.
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4a66d9bbc.html
Contributed by Marusca Perazzi
The year 2008 was marked by a spectacular Olympic Games, intended to promote China's prestige and influence, a devastating earthquake in western Sichuan province, and a string of social instability issues, infringements of rights and denial of fundamental freedoms, highlighting the challenges the Chinese authorities face in governing a Han-dominant multi-ethnic China.
Governance and 'Regional National Autonomy'
In 2008, the government announced its ambitious goal of attaining democratic social progress by 2020, through its official articulation of the Chinese 'nation'. China has never recognized any minority as 'indigenous' or as having special rights. The 'autonomous' regions, districts, and counties where most minorities live, and that today cover 64 per cent of China's territory, offer mostly symbolic recognition of 'minority autonomy', as the Han Chinese increasingly dominate even in those areas.
During 2008 mounting turmoil in minority-populated areas revealed the contradicitons of living under national policies that force minorities to forge a closer identification with the 92 per cent Han majority. While the government promoted more non-Han regional governors to work on the implementation of minority policies, it ensured that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) remained firmly in control. It also continued to grant some minorities, including the Dai and Yao, more freedom to promote their cultural heritage. Through permitting expressions of ethnic identity, such as ethnic folklore and music, that do not challenge the state's control over minority affairs, the authorities bolstered the country's self-image as a tolerant and united multicultural society.
Minority rights and fundamental freedoms
Deep-seated issues for both the Han majority and minorities in governance and the rule of law, employment and social welfare, land seizure and expropriation came to a head in 2008. Central and local authorities heavily monitored and circumscribed minorities' activities, disregarding genuine discontent caused by discriminatory national policies that prevent them from fully enjoying their rights. The March 2008 Tibetan protests and riots in Lhasa, fuelled by deep resentment towards Han dominance, spilled over into Tibetan-inhabited areas in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu, leading to increased tensions, including between Tibetan Buddhists and Hui Muslims.
The authorities relied on emergency measures to ensure stability, to quell rising dissent and to keep dormant frustration from escalating in minority-inhabited areas in Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Hubei, Guangxi, Heilongjiang and Yunnan. Instead of addressing the underlying institutional factors, the state stepped up security in the Tibet Autonomous Republic (TAR) and the strategic Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Republic (XUAR), home to Muslim Turkic-speaking Uyghur and Hui Sunni, and cracked down on protests in Hotan and Kashgar. Some religious minorities were concerned about measures that support atheism in schools; deny the full exercise of rights of belief, freedoms of expression and movement; and fail to tackle discriminatory practices in education and employment. The government continued to subject minority Buddhists, Muslims and Christians to a strict regulatory framework. It also silenced Tibetan and Uyghur voices, by imposing curfews, preventing mass prayers and impeding international pilgrimages. The public security bureau closely monitored minority rights activists and often equated their peaceful activism with social unrest to be repressed. In the TAR, the authorities renewed the 'patriotic education' campaign to convince the masses to 'fight splittism and protect stability'. Across the country, religious leaders were targeted for ongoing state indoctrination and the circulation of religious publications and texts was curtailed.
Harassment of minority communities along the North Korean border intensified, with local authorities preventing unregistered children of mixed ethnic origin from accessing schooling. The administration in XUAR barred minority children from participating in religious activities, and prohibited teachers from publicly expressing their faith, and students from attending services and receiving private religious teaching. Following the September 2008 local ban on headscarves in Hotan, Muslim women were forced to unveil their faces in public, and others were discouraged from fasting during Ramadan. In Sichuan's Tibetan areas, monks were reportedly removed from monasteries, and hundreds of children shifted from the attached schools to public schools to receive compulsory education.
The authorities used 'anti-terrorism' as a justification to crack down on all forms of perceived dissent on the part of minorities in the TAR and the XUAR. This included prohibitions on language use, harassment of defence lawyers, forced disappearances, widespread arrests and sentencing of an unknown number of Tibetans and the indictment of 1,154 Uyghurs charged with 'endangering state security'. Unaffiliated and unregistered religious groups, including Christians in the eastern regions, continued to be subject to government interference and increased police surveillance, arrests, detention and torture. In November 2008, the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) criticized the discriminatory treatment of minority groups in China and the 'alleged reluctance of police forces and the authorities to conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into discriminatory or violent practices'.
Language policies, identity challenges, and resistance in minority education
The state's achievements in its endeavour to provide 'free' basic education for all are creditable. However, China's minorities have been mainly treated as a single entity in education reforms, and the cultural, regional and developmental differences that distinguish them have been largely ignored. The implementation of national education policies has produced mixed results and additional challenges for minority groups during 2008. The National Commonly Used Language Law (2000) guarantees standard Chinese (Putonghua) as the national common language in the political, economic, social and education spheres. There are no formal restrictions in using Putonghua and minority languages simultaneously, but there have been increased limitations on the official use of minority languages and access to education and employment have consequently been affected.
The government reiterated its emphasis on the application of minorities' language policies (of over 120 spoken languages, both with and without a written script), while incorporating the mastering of Putonghua, the official form of spoken Chinese. Such policies have worked best to reduce illiteracy in communities without a formal writing system (Dongxiang), or where language use is limited to some social domains (Zhuang). For others with well-established written scripts (Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Yi), where minority groups strongly identify with their native language, policies that limit their use in school have been met with increasing resistance. Minority learners and parents increasingly perceive formal schooling to be more about repressing minorities' culture than promoting their education and cultural integration. The 2008 UNESCO Education for All global monitoring report sees this trend as of particular relevance to predominantly pastoralist minority communities. For the Daurs, Ewenkis, Hezhen and Tibetans, in fact, formal education poses further problems, ranging from accessibility of schools to the availability of bilingual teachers qualified to work with pastoralist children. Nomadic Mongolian communities also continued to sacrifice their linguistic and cultural heritage in education. The government has yet to balance policy to support linguistic diversity and also take into account minorities' education needs.
The amended China Compulsory Education Law (2006), adopted to ensure attainment of compulsory education in rural areas, increases central government control over teaching materials in minority classes and advanced further the use of Putonghua. Mongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs in 2008 continued to suffer disproportionately from unequal or restricted access to quality education or the implementation of inappropriate education strategies. In the Tibetans' case, unwanted assimilation imposed through exclusionary education policies and practices, including bilingual teaching, neither serves the aim of communities' self-development, nor does it open the way to better prospects for employment, housing and adequate standard of living.
The government's commitment to invest more financial and human resources to redress discriminatory practices in language use and development of disadvantaged minorities, have yet to impact on the structural and institutional limitations. The 2007-8 increased level of governmental funding has not led to the educational development of minority communities. Additional investment is required to help remove gender-based discrimination towards minority girls affected by power relations in the community and family commitments, including early marriage, and changes in institutional education policies that do not respect their traditional roles. Gender awareness advocacy pilots in Guangxi and education initiatives in the Gansu significantly increased the enrolment of minority girls in schools by providing financial support, teacher training to minority women and community participation in school planning. But commitments such as training of minority teachers and improved school management in minority areas still have some way to go.
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4a66d9bbc.html
China Fears Ethnic Strife Could Agitate Uighur Oasis
China Fears Ethnic Strife Could Agitate Uighur Oasis
Alan Chin for The New York Times
The oldest section of Kashgar, in the Xinjiang region of western China, is the heart of Uighur culture, but it is being razed for modernization projects.
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By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: July 22, 2009
KASHGAR, China — Ali the tour guide seemed nice enough and his English flowed with grammatical perfection — a useful attribute in a city where most people speak a Turkic language that sounds nothing like Chinese.
Alan Chin for The New York Times
Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, above, was closed during the recent turmoil in Urumqi. A protest outside the mosque was quickly dispersed.
“Sure, I will take you wherever you want to go, but first I have to call my friend and see if he will drive us,” Ali said, turning away. After a quick exchange, he hung up the phone and politely announced that his friend was actually a government minder who would soon be arriving to guide the would-be clients away from any potential trouble.
The destination his “friend” had in mind? The airport, where the reporters, subject to a ban on foreign journalists, would be escorted onto the next flight out of town.
“Sorry,” Ali said as the journalists prepared to flee in a taxi. “But if I didn’t make that call, I would get in big trouble.”
Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis and backpacker lure, has been besieged by fear since ethnic rioting about two weeks ago claimed at least 197 lives in Urumqi, the capital of this northwestern expanse known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Although the two cities are separated by about 700 miles of punishing desert and snow-draped mountains, the authorities are especially anxious about potential unrest in Kashgar, a city of 3.4 million that is 90 percent Uighur, a Muslim minority that has long had a mercurial relationship with the Han Chinese who govern Xinjiang.
The authorities have good reason to be skittish. Last August, at least 16 military police officers were killed in an attack here, unnerving the government just as dignitaries and athletes were arriving in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. The police called it a terrorist strike by two Uighur men armed with explosives and machetes, though some witnesses later challenged that version of events.
In the early 1990s, Kashgar was also the scene of bombings and demonstrations; at least 21 people were killed and thousands were arrested during one particular army crackdown. The city has long been a crucible for Uighur self-determination, even if nationalist aspirations were never the same after a Chinese warlord vanquished the newborn East Turkestan Republic, a short-lived nation that called Kashgar its capital for a few months in 1933.
Although it is rapidly being bulldozed in the name of modernization, Old Kashgar and its ancient dusty warrens remain the heart of Uighur culture and a beguiling draw for tourists. To China’s leadership, however, the city is also an incubator for those seeking to create a Uighur homeland by the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and a handful of other predominantly Muslim countries whose names end with “stan.”
This time around, Kashgar has been relatively quiet. During the turmoil in Urumqi, a crowd of 200 people tried to protest outside the city’s Id Kah Mosque, the largest in China, and were quickly dispersed by the police.
But while journalists in Urumqi can roam with relative freedom, the few foreign reporters who made it to Kashgar were promptly hustled out of town.
“The situation may look calm now, but it could change at any second,” a local government official told Mark MacKinnon, a writer for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, as he and his colleagues were sent to the airport.
The uncertainty and sense of isolation have been only magnified by the blocking of access to the Internet and shutdown of text messaging and international phone service that has severed communications in Kashgar and the entire region. The blackout has been especially challenging for export companies, banks, factory owners and academics, and some of them say they have been told that Internet and phone service will be curtailed until at least October, when China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution.
“I’m expecting a group of Swiss tourists next week, but I have no way of knowing whether they’re still coming,” said one beleaguered tour operator.
Like Urumqi, which has been flooded with soldiers since July 5, Kashgar is patrolled by young men in military camouflage, many of whom ride through the city day and night, their green army trucks draped with ostensibly calming slogans like “National Separatists Are Our Enemy.”
But the government’s most effective weapon against potential trouble is largely unseen: the neighborhood committees made up of appointed Uighur cadres and citizens who, driven by fear or ambition, are ready to do the government’s bidding.
“You have to be careful because informers are everywhere,” said Ismail, a secondary school teacher who used only one name for his own safety. He said his brother had been detained after publicly criticizing plans to tear down the old mud-and-straw homes that, until recently, flanked Kashgar’s historic mosque. “I would not trust anyone if I were you,” he said.
To China’s nervous leadership, Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis filled with dusty warrens, could be an incubator for those seeking to create a Uighur homeland in the Xinjiang region.
His words were not hyperbole. By late last week, hotel clerks, tour guides and taxi drivers had been instructed to be on the lookout for pesky foreign journalists. A woman employed by a state-owned tourism company told of a meeting during which her boss warned that people caught assisting reporters would lose their jobs — as would members of their immediate families.
The campaign appeared to be extremely effective. When his passengers asked to be taken to a rural county known for its unemployed and disaffected residents, one Uighur driver called the police and then warned other drivers against helping the passengers escape.
After several close encounters with the authorities, the foreigners made it to the well-irrigated countryside that forms a lush buffer between Kashgar and the vast Taklimakan Desert stretching 590 miles to the east. In one town, a group of old men hacking at the soil spoke rapturously about the pace of modernization that had made farming, and their lives, much easier.
“We have electricity, fertilizer and motorbikes now,” one of the men said.
Later, after some gentle prodding, the farmers allowed that life was not without difficulties. One man, pointing to a row of unfinished brick houses, said local officials had demolished the villagers’ old homes and promised that the government would pay for the construction of new ones.
“The homes they’re building are half as large, and now we have to pay half their cost,” he said as his neighbors nodded with disgust. “We don’t have that kind of money.”
The men continued on for a while, speaking animatedly as the tour guide’s face registered a kaleidoscope of troubled expressions. Their ranting done, the guide, a graduate student best left unidentified, paused before declining to render their words into English.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s better for everyone if I just pretend I didn’t hear that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/asia/23kashgar.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em
Alan Chin for The New York Times
The oldest section of Kashgar, in the Xinjiang region of western China, is the heart of Uighur culture, but it is being razed for modernization projects.
Article Tools Sponsored By
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: July 22, 2009
KASHGAR, China — Ali the tour guide seemed nice enough and his English flowed with grammatical perfection — a useful attribute in a city where most people speak a Turkic language that sounds nothing like Chinese.
Alan Chin for The New York Times
Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, above, was closed during the recent turmoil in Urumqi. A protest outside the mosque was quickly dispersed.
“Sure, I will take you wherever you want to go, but first I have to call my friend and see if he will drive us,” Ali said, turning away. After a quick exchange, he hung up the phone and politely announced that his friend was actually a government minder who would soon be arriving to guide the would-be clients away from any potential trouble.
The destination his “friend” had in mind? The airport, where the reporters, subject to a ban on foreign journalists, would be escorted onto the next flight out of town.
“Sorry,” Ali said as the journalists prepared to flee in a taxi. “But if I didn’t make that call, I would get in big trouble.”
Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis and backpacker lure, has been besieged by fear since ethnic rioting about two weeks ago claimed at least 197 lives in Urumqi, the capital of this northwestern expanse known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Although the two cities are separated by about 700 miles of punishing desert and snow-draped mountains, the authorities are especially anxious about potential unrest in Kashgar, a city of 3.4 million that is 90 percent Uighur, a Muslim minority that has long had a mercurial relationship with the Han Chinese who govern Xinjiang.
The authorities have good reason to be skittish. Last August, at least 16 military police officers were killed in an attack here, unnerving the government just as dignitaries and athletes were arriving in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. The police called it a terrorist strike by two Uighur men armed with explosives and machetes, though some witnesses later challenged that version of events.
In the early 1990s, Kashgar was also the scene of bombings and demonstrations; at least 21 people were killed and thousands were arrested during one particular army crackdown. The city has long been a crucible for Uighur self-determination, even if nationalist aspirations were never the same after a Chinese warlord vanquished the newborn East Turkestan Republic, a short-lived nation that called Kashgar its capital for a few months in 1933.
Although it is rapidly being bulldozed in the name of modernization, Old Kashgar and its ancient dusty warrens remain the heart of Uighur culture and a beguiling draw for tourists. To China’s leadership, however, the city is also an incubator for those seeking to create a Uighur homeland by the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and a handful of other predominantly Muslim countries whose names end with “stan.”
This time around, Kashgar has been relatively quiet. During the turmoil in Urumqi, a crowd of 200 people tried to protest outside the city’s Id Kah Mosque, the largest in China, and were quickly dispersed by the police.
But while journalists in Urumqi can roam with relative freedom, the few foreign reporters who made it to Kashgar were promptly hustled out of town.
“The situation may look calm now, but it could change at any second,” a local government official told Mark MacKinnon, a writer for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, as he and his colleagues were sent to the airport.
The uncertainty and sense of isolation have been only magnified by the blocking of access to the Internet and shutdown of text messaging and international phone service that has severed communications in Kashgar and the entire region. The blackout has been especially challenging for export companies, banks, factory owners and academics, and some of them say they have been told that Internet and phone service will be curtailed until at least October, when China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution.
“I’m expecting a group of Swiss tourists next week, but I have no way of knowing whether they’re still coming,” said one beleaguered tour operator.
Like Urumqi, which has been flooded with soldiers since July 5, Kashgar is patrolled by young men in military camouflage, many of whom ride through the city day and night, their green army trucks draped with ostensibly calming slogans like “National Separatists Are Our Enemy.”
But the government’s most effective weapon against potential trouble is largely unseen: the neighborhood committees made up of appointed Uighur cadres and citizens who, driven by fear or ambition, are ready to do the government’s bidding.
“You have to be careful because informers are everywhere,” said Ismail, a secondary school teacher who used only one name for his own safety. He said his brother had been detained after publicly criticizing plans to tear down the old mud-and-straw homes that, until recently, flanked Kashgar’s historic mosque. “I would not trust anyone if I were you,” he said.
To China’s nervous leadership, Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis filled with dusty warrens, could be an incubator for those seeking to create a Uighur homeland in the Xinjiang region.
His words were not hyperbole. By late last week, hotel clerks, tour guides and taxi drivers had been instructed to be on the lookout for pesky foreign journalists. A woman employed by a state-owned tourism company told of a meeting during which her boss warned that people caught assisting reporters would lose their jobs — as would members of their immediate families.
The campaign appeared to be extremely effective. When his passengers asked to be taken to a rural county known for its unemployed and disaffected residents, one Uighur driver called the police and then warned other drivers against helping the passengers escape.
After several close encounters with the authorities, the foreigners made it to the well-irrigated countryside that forms a lush buffer between Kashgar and the vast Taklimakan Desert stretching 590 miles to the east. In one town, a group of old men hacking at the soil spoke rapturously about the pace of modernization that had made farming, and their lives, much easier.
“We have electricity, fertilizer and motorbikes now,” one of the men said.
Later, after some gentle prodding, the farmers allowed that life was not without difficulties. One man, pointing to a row of unfinished brick houses, said local officials had demolished the villagers’ old homes and promised that the government would pay for the construction of new ones.
“The homes they’re building are half as large, and now we have to pay half their cost,” he said as his neighbors nodded with disgust. “We don’t have that kind of money.”
The men continued on for a while, speaking animatedly as the tour guide’s face registered a kaleidoscope of troubled expressions. Their ranting done, the guide, a graduate student best left unidentified, paused before declining to render their words into English.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s better for everyone if I just pretend I didn’t hear that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/asia/23kashgar.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Xinjiang widens crackdown on Uighurs
Xinjiang widens crackdown on Uighurs
By Kathrin Hille in Kashgar
Published: July 19 2009 17:13 | Last updated: July 19 2009 17:13
The government of the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang is stepping up security amid a widening crackdown on Uighurs after ethnic unrest earlier this month that left more than 190 dead and many more wounded.
The move came as Nuer Baikeli, Xinjiang’s regional governor, admitted in a public statement on Sunday that Chinese police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in the region, in a rare government admission of the deaths inflicted by security forces. He claimed that the rioting was an attempt by exiled separatists to split Xinjiang from China.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
China adds special riot squad to arsenal - Jul-19
In depth: China’s Uighurs - Jul-10
Xinjiang riots damage Sino-Turkish ties - Jul-14
Analysis: Trouble at the margin - Jul-10
Police kill two Uighurs in Urumqi - Jul-13
Sources informed of security planning in the wake of the unrest said the government was flying more armed police into Xinjiang as the need for continued heavy presence in and around Urumqi, the regional capital, was stretching troops thin in other parts of the region.
Armed police levels are to be raised to 130,000 before October 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
In the worst ethnic unrest in China since the Cultural Revolution, Uighurs attacked majority Han Chinese in Urumqi on July 5 after taking to the streets to protest against an ethnic clash at a factory in south China in June which left two Uighurs dead.
More than 4,000 Uighurs had been arrested since July 5, said a source briefed on security matters.
According to a person present at a Communist party meeting discussing the crackdown, Urumqi’s prisons are full and newly arrested people are being held in a People’s Liberation Army warehouse.
Armed police have established checkpoints on all roads leading in and out of Urumqi. This week all vehicles were being stopped and all passengers on long-distance buses leaving Urumqi had to disembark for identity checks.
Private cars without Uighur passengers were waved through after a quick document check for the drivers.
Vehicles with Uighur drivers or with Uighur passengers were being searched at gunpoint.
A source who receives regular briefings on the security procedures said: “It may have been possible for Uighurs to get out of Urumqi on the same day but now no one is going to slip through the net.”
The regional government warned at the weekend that Uighurs could try to take hostages and then demand that they be exchanged for members of their ethnic group.
Security is also tight beyond the regional capital. Armed police were stopping vehicles at motorway entrances and exits, toll stations and entrances and exits of towns and cities between Urumqi and Kashgar, which is south-west of the capital.
Several rural counties in Xinjiang, which the government suspects to be the home of most Uighurs involved in the riot, have been closed off entirely.
On Sunday thousands of ethnic Uighurs rallied in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to protest against the crackdown on Uighurs in China.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5aa932ee-747c-11de-8ad5-00144feabdc0.html
By Kathrin Hille in Kashgar
Published: July 19 2009 17:13 | Last updated: July 19 2009 17:13
The government of the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang is stepping up security amid a widening crackdown on Uighurs after ethnic unrest earlier this month that left more than 190 dead and many more wounded.
The move came as Nuer Baikeli, Xinjiang’s regional governor, admitted in a public statement on Sunday that Chinese police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in the region, in a rare government admission of the deaths inflicted by security forces. He claimed that the rioting was an attempt by exiled separatists to split Xinjiang from China.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
China adds special riot squad to arsenal - Jul-19
In depth: China’s Uighurs - Jul-10
Xinjiang riots damage Sino-Turkish ties - Jul-14
Analysis: Trouble at the margin - Jul-10
Police kill two Uighurs in Urumqi - Jul-13
Sources informed of security planning in the wake of the unrest said the government was flying more armed police into Xinjiang as the need for continued heavy presence in and around Urumqi, the regional capital, was stretching troops thin in other parts of the region.
Armed police levels are to be raised to 130,000 before October 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
In the worst ethnic unrest in China since the Cultural Revolution, Uighurs attacked majority Han Chinese in Urumqi on July 5 after taking to the streets to protest against an ethnic clash at a factory in south China in June which left two Uighurs dead.
More than 4,000 Uighurs had been arrested since July 5, said a source briefed on security matters.
According to a person present at a Communist party meeting discussing the crackdown, Urumqi’s prisons are full and newly arrested people are being held in a People’s Liberation Army warehouse.
Armed police have established checkpoints on all roads leading in and out of Urumqi. This week all vehicles were being stopped and all passengers on long-distance buses leaving Urumqi had to disembark for identity checks.
Private cars without Uighur passengers were waved through after a quick document check for the drivers.
Vehicles with Uighur drivers or with Uighur passengers were being searched at gunpoint.
A source who receives regular briefings on the security procedures said: “It may have been possible for Uighurs to get out of Urumqi on the same day but now no one is going to slip through the net.”
The regional government warned at the weekend that Uighurs could try to take hostages and then demand that they be exchanged for members of their ethnic group.
Security is also tight beyond the regional capital. Armed police were stopping vehicles at motorway entrances and exits, toll stations and entrances and exits of towns and cities between Urumqi and Kashgar, which is south-west of the capital.
Several rural counties in Xinjiang, which the government suspects to be the home of most Uighurs involved in the riot, have been closed off entirely.
On Sunday thousands of ethnic Uighurs rallied in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to protest against the crackdown on Uighurs in China.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5aa932ee-747c-11de-8ad5-00144feabdc0.html
Saturday, July 18, 2009
China says police shot dead 12 Uighurs this month
China says police shot dead 12 Uighurs this month
Sat Jul 18, 2009 10:13am EDT
By Max Duncan
URUMQI, China, July 18 (Reuters) - Chinese police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in Xinjiang this month, regional governor Nuer Baikeli said on Saturday, in a rare government admission of deaths inflicted by security forces.
In Xinjiang's worst ethnic unrest in decades, Uighurs attacked majority Han Chinese in regional capital Urumqi on July 5 after taking to the streets to protest against an ethnic clash at a factory in south China in June which left two Uighurs dead.
The violence left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 wounded, mostly Han Chinese who launched revenge attacks in Urumqi days later. About 1,000 people, mostly Uighurs, have been detained in an ensuing government crackdown.
Asked to elaborate on the casualties, the governor said most of the victims sustained head wounds after they were bludgeoned with bricks and iron rods.
Police shot dead 12 armed Uighurs attacking civilians and ransacking shops after they ignored warning shots fired into the air, said Nuer Baikeli, a Uighur, a Turkic people who are largely Muslim and share linguistic and cultural bonds with Central Asia.
Of the 12, three were killed on the spot, while nine died either on their way to or after arriving at hospital.
"In any country ruled by law, the use of force is necessary to protect the interest of the people and stop violent crime. This is the duty of policemen. This is bestowed on policemen by the law," the governor said.
Beijing cannot afford to lose its grip on a vast territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.
DVD FOOTAGE
Police exercised the "greatest restraint", the governor said in a 100-minute interview with a small group of reporters, including from Reuters.
"Most of the victims were innocent civilians," Nuer Baikeli said. "The violent elements were most inhuman, barbaric ... extremely vicious, unscrupulous and brutal."
The unrest was Xinjiang's "most abominable, had the most serious consequence and the worst impact" since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, he said.
The government handed out copies of a four-odd-minute DVD with footage from police and surveillance cameras inside and outside a mosque purportedly showing three Uighurs trying to force Muslim worshippers to take to the streets.
The knife-wielding trio chased some of the worshippers when they refused, according to the footage. Two of the three were shot dead when they tried to attack patrolling police.
Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tension, fostered by an economic gap between many Uighurs and Hans, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants who now are the majority in most key cities.
Nuer Baikeli insisted the rioting was an attempt by exiled separatists to split Xinjiang from China.
He denied the government had a policy of migrating Hans to Xinjiang or forcing Uighurs to work in Chinese cities.
Nuer Baikeli said stability has been restored, and he defended the government shutting down the Internet and blocking cell phones from receiving or sending text messages, saying the moves were aimed at preventing unrest from spreading.
"Internet control was necessary ... It became a tool to spread false information," the governor said.
Xinjiang needs stability, ethnic unity and harmony to develop its economy, he said, adding that the government would invest 3 billion yuan ($441.2 million) over the next five years to give a facelift to the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar. (Additional reporting and writing by Liu Zhen and Benjamin Kang Lim)
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLI462648
Sat Jul 18, 2009 10:13am EDT
By Max Duncan
URUMQI, China, July 18 (Reuters) - Chinese police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in Xinjiang this month, regional governor Nuer Baikeli said on Saturday, in a rare government admission of deaths inflicted by security forces.
In Xinjiang's worst ethnic unrest in decades, Uighurs attacked majority Han Chinese in regional capital Urumqi on July 5 after taking to the streets to protest against an ethnic clash at a factory in south China in June which left two Uighurs dead.
The violence left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 wounded, mostly Han Chinese who launched revenge attacks in Urumqi days later. About 1,000 people, mostly Uighurs, have been detained in an ensuing government crackdown.
Asked to elaborate on the casualties, the governor said most of the victims sustained head wounds after they were bludgeoned with bricks and iron rods.
Police shot dead 12 armed Uighurs attacking civilians and ransacking shops after they ignored warning shots fired into the air, said Nuer Baikeli, a Uighur, a Turkic people who are largely Muslim and share linguistic and cultural bonds with Central Asia.
Of the 12, three were killed on the spot, while nine died either on their way to or after arriving at hospital.
"In any country ruled by law, the use of force is necessary to protect the interest of the people and stop violent crime. This is the duty of policemen. This is bestowed on policemen by the law," the governor said.
Beijing cannot afford to lose its grip on a vast territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.
DVD FOOTAGE
Police exercised the "greatest restraint", the governor said in a 100-minute interview with a small group of reporters, including from Reuters.
"Most of the victims were innocent civilians," Nuer Baikeli said. "The violent elements were most inhuman, barbaric ... extremely vicious, unscrupulous and brutal."
The unrest was Xinjiang's "most abominable, had the most serious consequence and the worst impact" since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, he said.
The government handed out copies of a four-odd-minute DVD with footage from police and surveillance cameras inside and outside a mosque purportedly showing three Uighurs trying to force Muslim worshippers to take to the streets.
The knife-wielding trio chased some of the worshippers when they refused, according to the footage. Two of the three were shot dead when they tried to attack patrolling police.
Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tension, fostered by an economic gap between many Uighurs and Hans, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants who now are the majority in most key cities.
Nuer Baikeli insisted the rioting was an attempt by exiled separatists to split Xinjiang from China.
He denied the government had a policy of migrating Hans to Xinjiang or forcing Uighurs to work in Chinese cities.
Nuer Baikeli said stability has been restored, and he defended the government shutting down the Internet and blocking cell phones from receiving or sending text messages, saying the moves were aimed at preventing unrest from spreading.
"Internet control was necessary ... It became a tool to spread false information," the governor said.
Xinjiang needs stability, ethnic unity and harmony to develop its economy, he said, adding that the government would invest 3 billion yuan ($441.2 million) over the next five years to give a facelift to the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar. (Additional reporting and writing by Liu Zhen and Benjamin Kang Lim)
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLI462648
Challenges go beyond Uighurs
Challenges go beyond Uighurs
Domination by Beijing, migration of ethnic Han are key issues
By Austin Bay | Saturday, July 18, 2009
Rioting last week between ethnic Han Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Province left 180 people dead and 1,000 injured. Chinese police and paramilitary forces arrested 1,500.
The Beijing government insistently weighs media coverage of China. The ethnic clashes so troubled Chinese President Hu Jintao that he left the economic summit of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations. Mr. Hu's hasty departure, in front of the cameras of every global news organization, indicates how serious the Chinese government views the violence in its far northwestern province.
Although officially designated the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the region is not autonomous and, as time passes, less Uighur. Beijing dominates provincial politics, which is one reason the region's 9 million Uighurs chafe. For the Turkic and predominantly Sunni Muslim Uighurs, Beijing's policy of "Sinicization" is a key source of friction. The policy promotes the centralization of Chinese state authority on China's periphery, in the "delicate" border areas that make Beijing very nervous.
The migration of ethnic Han Chinese is another facet. The Han and Han subgroups are the dominant ethnic group in China, and to ethnic Uighur activists, the slow but massive Han migration into Xinjiang amounts to cultural and ethnic drowning and eventual Uighur assimilation as the Han population swells.
The Tibetans make the same accusation for the same reasons. Tibetans have rioted -- last year, 200 Tibetans died in a Beijing-ordered crackdown.
Uighurs, like Tibetans, have had their own state. An East Turkestan Republic briefly existed in the 1940s as distracted Chinese nationalists and communists fought the Japanese and their own civil war. The victorious communist army returned in 1949, and East Turkestan disappeared from the map. It has not disappeared from Uighur memory, however, as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) indicates.
ETIM is a testament to Uighur desperation. It is an al Qaeda affiliate. Radical Islamists offer money, weapons training and promises. One promise is: Follow Osama bin Laden, and when he establishes the global caliphate, Islamist Uighurs will rule a revived East Turkestan, just like Spanish Muslims will reconquer Spain. The four recently released Guantanamo Bay Uighurs (arrested in Afghanistan, now starting a restaurant in Bermuda) likely fell for such propaganda.
In the wake of the riots, al Qaeda's North African affiliate, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), threatens to attack Chinese workers in Africa. The Uighurs have received some ethnic support from very distant but concerned cousins. A senior Turkish government official has demanded that Turks boycott Chinese-made goods because of the Chinese crackdown. Turkey has a record for supporting the rights of ethnic Turkic peoples throughout Asia.
Turkey is also a member of NATO -- an American audience may not immediately note that fact, but Beijing's foreign ministry does.
That leads to the strategic issues that pulled Mr. Hu from the G-8 summit.
As the minorities on the periphery see it, China's "Han core" is fighting a slow war of expansion. Beijing, however, scans its borders and sees challenges and threats. Vietnam remains a latent enemy. In 1979, China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody border war. The South China Sea is a potential war zone, as Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, China and, yes, Taiwan, have conflicting claims. Taiwan is an armed thorn. Beijing's generals have been telling the world the mainland will acquire Taiwan -- preferably by diplomacy, but by force if required.
The Koreas pose problems. North Korean nukes rattle East Asia. China fears a collapse in Pyongyang would have dire economic consequences but -- worse, from Beijing's perspective -- could produce a United Korea. Imagine a super-South Korea -- modern, wealthy, militarily capable and biting into China like a bulldog.
Japan, Russia, Mongolia: The Japanese are ancient antagonists, Russia occupies Siberia (which China claims the czars stole), and the Mongolians want to be U.S. allies.
As for Central Asian Turkic peoples, Beijing fears the collapse of the Soviet Union is not complete, at least in terms of ethnic political aspirations. The Uighurs are symptomatic.
China's absorption of Tibet remains incomplete, and south of Tibet lies India. India and China fought a war in 1962.
China's Han? Perhaps the core is not so solid. Chinese Han regions (e.g., Guangdong in the south) see differences in language, culture, history and economic development.
President Hu, call your office.
Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/18/challenges-go-beyond-uighurs/
Domination by Beijing, migration of ethnic Han are key issues
By Austin Bay | Saturday, July 18, 2009
Rioting last week between ethnic Han Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Province left 180 people dead and 1,000 injured. Chinese police and paramilitary forces arrested 1,500.
The Beijing government insistently weighs media coverage of China. The ethnic clashes so troubled Chinese President Hu Jintao that he left the economic summit of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations. Mr. Hu's hasty departure, in front of the cameras of every global news organization, indicates how serious the Chinese government views the violence in its far northwestern province.
Although officially designated the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the region is not autonomous and, as time passes, less Uighur. Beijing dominates provincial politics, which is one reason the region's 9 million Uighurs chafe. For the Turkic and predominantly Sunni Muslim Uighurs, Beijing's policy of "Sinicization" is a key source of friction. The policy promotes the centralization of Chinese state authority on China's periphery, in the "delicate" border areas that make Beijing very nervous.
The migration of ethnic Han Chinese is another facet. The Han and Han subgroups are the dominant ethnic group in China, and to ethnic Uighur activists, the slow but massive Han migration into Xinjiang amounts to cultural and ethnic drowning and eventual Uighur assimilation as the Han population swells.
The Tibetans make the same accusation for the same reasons. Tibetans have rioted -- last year, 200 Tibetans died in a Beijing-ordered crackdown.
Uighurs, like Tibetans, have had their own state. An East Turkestan Republic briefly existed in the 1940s as distracted Chinese nationalists and communists fought the Japanese and their own civil war. The victorious communist army returned in 1949, and East Turkestan disappeared from the map. It has not disappeared from Uighur memory, however, as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) indicates.
ETIM is a testament to Uighur desperation. It is an al Qaeda affiliate. Radical Islamists offer money, weapons training and promises. One promise is: Follow Osama bin Laden, and when he establishes the global caliphate, Islamist Uighurs will rule a revived East Turkestan, just like Spanish Muslims will reconquer Spain. The four recently released Guantanamo Bay Uighurs (arrested in Afghanistan, now starting a restaurant in Bermuda) likely fell for such propaganda.
In the wake of the riots, al Qaeda's North African affiliate, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), threatens to attack Chinese workers in Africa. The Uighurs have received some ethnic support from very distant but concerned cousins. A senior Turkish government official has demanded that Turks boycott Chinese-made goods because of the Chinese crackdown. Turkey has a record for supporting the rights of ethnic Turkic peoples throughout Asia.
Turkey is also a member of NATO -- an American audience may not immediately note that fact, but Beijing's foreign ministry does.
That leads to the strategic issues that pulled Mr. Hu from the G-8 summit.
As the minorities on the periphery see it, China's "Han core" is fighting a slow war of expansion. Beijing, however, scans its borders and sees challenges and threats. Vietnam remains a latent enemy. In 1979, China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody border war. The South China Sea is a potential war zone, as Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, China and, yes, Taiwan, have conflicting claims. Taiwan is an armed thorn. Beijing's generals have been telling the world the mainland will acquire Taiwan -- preferably by diplomacy, but by force if required.
The Koreas pose problems. North Korean nukes rattle East Asia. China fears a collapse in Pyongyang would have dire economic consequences but -- worse, from Beijing's perspective -- could produce a United Korea. Imagine a super-South Korea -- modern, wealthy, militarily capable and biting into China like a bulldog.
Japan, Russia, Mongolia: The Japanese are ancient antagonists, Russia occupies Siberia (which China claims the czars stole), and the Mongolians want to be U.S. allies.
As for Central Asian Turkic peoples, Beijing fears the collapse of the Soviet Union is not complete, at least in terms of ethnic political aspirations. The Uighurs are symptomatic.
China's absorption of Tibet remains incomplete, and south of Tibet lies India. India and China fought a war in 1962.
China's Han? Perhaps the core is not so solid. Chinese Han regions (e.g., Guangdong in the south) see differences in language, culture, history and economic development.
President Hu, call your office.
Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/18/challenges-go-beyond-uighurs/
Friday, July 17, 2009
Witnesses Describe Two-Way Violence
Witnesses Describe Two-Way Violence
2009-07-17
Vivid new accounts describe violence on both sides in a deadly ethnic clash in northwestern China.
AFP
A Uyghur man walks past armed Chinese security forces in Urumqi, July 17, 2009.
HONG KONG—Witnesses to deadly ethnic violence between minority Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of northwest China have described brutality on both sides of the conflict.
A Uyghur shop owner said that on July 5 he saw thousands of young Uyghurs in the streets around People's Square at the heart of the regional capital, Urumqi, who had come out to demand an inquiry into the deaths of Uyghur migrant workers at the hands of a Han Chinese mob at a factory in southern China.
"The first time I saw them was on People's Square. I heard they had gone there to request a meeting with officials and a reply on the [Shaoguan] toy factory incident, and that the officials didn't come out," he said.
"The police starting detaining people, and after that happened the Uyghurs went to Nanmen district."
"At the beginning there wasn't any fighting. More than 1,000 people went to Shanxi Alley to protest," he said, referring to an area of downtown Urumqi.
Gunshots reported
Another Uyghur, who was in the vicinity of Urumqi's Grand Bazaar, said that just past 8 p.m. he saw clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs near the Baojian Hospital. After that, he saw a mob of more than 20 Uyghurs attack any Han Chinese they saw.
"I went over to the Rebiya Trade Building. The Uyghurs were fighting the paramilitary police. I came back to Eryuan [the No.2 Hospital], and I saw more than 20 young Uyghur men. They attacked any Han Chinese they saw and injured them," he said.
He said that after 9 p.m. he began to hear gunshots near the Grand Bazaar.
He added that he saw a Uyghur mob beat a Han woman and he tried to stop them, saying they shouldn't attack women. He later saved a Han man and his mother and took them to hospital.
"I think more than 500 people died, Han and Uyghur together."
"There were more deaths of Han Chinese on the evening of July 5. There were more Uyghur deaths on July 6 and 7," he said.
Trapped in hotel
Uyghurs visiting Urumqi on business from neighboring Kazakhstan said they were trapped in their hotel, also near the Rebiya Trade Building.
"There [were] about 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese people moving around as a mob, breaking in around the Hualin district and saying that they would kill all the Uyghurs in Urumqi," he said.
"They were moving around with sticks and knives, but the police did not stop them."
The three businesspeople, two men and one woman who had stayed in the same hotel together, said they saw heavy violence against Uyghurs in their part of town.
"The number of dead Uyghurs right in front of my hotel building was around 150 to 200," the first Uyghur businessman said.
A businesswoman traveling with him said that none of the violence against Uyghurs was described by official media.
‘It was chaotic’
"I heard men and women shouting and crying. I looked outside and saw that the Chinese police were chasing people. They were running, and girls were screaming," she said.
"It was so chaotic, and I got scared ... They were beating and kicking the young men and detaining them ... Girls were running away, crying and screaming. I did not know what to do. I just watched. So much blood was shed."
"Towards the evening, there was a blackout, and then the shooting started," she said.
A second businessman in the group added: "We saw Han Chinese citizens carrying metal bars and axes, chasing, beating, and killing Uyghurs wherever they saw them."
Beijing has blamed the ethnic strife in the region on Washington-based Uyghur dissident Rebiya Kadeer, who said the rioting in Urumqi was sparked after a peaceful protest demanding an investigation into the deaths of Uyghur migrant workers at a toy factory in southern China was suppressed violently by police.
Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, religious controls, and continued poverty despite China's ambitious plans to develop the vast hinterland to the northwest.
China accuses some Uyghur separatist groups of links to international terrorism.
Original reporting in Cantonese by Hailan, and by RFA's Uyghur service. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Copyright © 1998-2009 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/witnesses-07172009121028.html
2009-07-17
Vivid new accounts describe violence on both sides in a deadly ethnic clash in northwestern China.
AFP
A Uyghur man walks past armed Chinese security forces in Urumqi, July 17, 2009.
HONG KONG—Witnesses to deadly ethnic violence between minority Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of northwest China have described brutality on both sides of the conflict.
A Uyghur shop owner said that on July 5 he saw thousands of young Uyghurs in the streets around People's Square at the heart of the regional capital, Urumqi, who had come out to demand an inquiry into the deaths of Uyghur migrant workers at the hands of a Han Chinese mob at a factory in southern China.
"The first time I saw them was on People's Square. I heard they had gone there to request a meeting with officials and a reply on the [Shaoguan] toy factory incident, and that the officials didn't come out," he said.
"The police starting detaining people, and after that happened the Uyghurs went to Nanmen district."
"At the beginning there wasn't any fighting. More than 1,000 people went to Shanxi Alley to protest," he said, referring to an area of downtown Urumqi.
Gunshots reported
Another Uyghur, who was in the vicinity of Urumqi's Grand Bazaar, said that just past 8 p.m. he saw clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs near the Baojian Hospital. After that, he saw a mob of more than 20 Uyghurs attack any Han Chinese they saw.
"I went over to the Rebiya Trade Building. The Uyghurs were fighting the paramilitary police. I came back to Eryuan [the No.2 Hospital], and I saw more than 20 young Uyghur men. They attacked any Han Chinese they saw and injured them," he said.
He said that after 9 p.m. he began to hear gunshots near the Grand Bazaar.
He added that he saw a Uyghur mob beat a Han woman and he tried to stop them, saying they shouldn't attack women. He later saved a Han man and his mother and took them to hospital.
"I think more than 500 people died, Han and Uyghur together."
"There were more deaths of Han Chinese on the evening of July 5. There were more Uyghur deaths on July 6 and 7," he said.
Trapped in hotel
Uyghurs visiting Urumqi on business from neighboring Kazakhstan said they were trapped in their hotel, also near the Rebiya Trade Building.
"There [were] about 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese people moving around as a mob, breaking in around the Hualin district and saying that they would kill all the Uyghurs in Urumqi," he said.
"They were moving around with sticks and knives, but the police did not stop them."
The three businesspeople, two men and one woman who had stayed in the same hotel together, said they saw heavy violence against Uyghurs in their part of town.
"The number of dead Uyghurs right in front of my hotel building was around 150 to 200," the first Uyghur businessman said.
A businesswoman traveling with him said that none of the violence against Uyghurs was described by official media.
‘It was chaotic’
"I heard men and women shouting and crying. I looked outside and saw that the Chinese police were chasing people. They were running, and girls were screaming," she said.
"It was so chaotic, and I got scared ... They were beating and kicking the young men and detaining them ... Girls were running away, crying and screaming. I did not know what to do. I just watched. So much blood was shed."
"Towards the evening, there was a blackout, and then the shooting started," she said.
A second businessman in the group added: "We saw Han Chinese citizens carrying metal bars and axes, chasing, beating, and killing Uyghurs wherever they saw them."
Beijing has blamed the ethnic strife in the region on Washington-based Uyghur dissident Rebiya Kadeer, who said the rioting in Urumqi was sparked after a peaceful protest demanding an investigation into the deaths of Uyghur migrant workers at a toy factory in southern China was suppressed violently by police.
Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, religious controls, and continued poverty despite China's ambitious plans to develop the vast hinterland to the northwest.
China accuses some Uyghur separatist groups of links to international terrorism.
Original reporting in Cantonese by Hailan, and by RFA's Uyghur service. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Copyright © 1998-2009 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/witnesses-07172009121028.html
Thursday, July 16, 2009
If China had drawn some stupid cartoons instead…
July 16, 2009
If China had drawn some stupid cartoons instead…
Posted: 06:02 PM ET
Police brutality in China killed two ethnic Uighurs earlier this week.
Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com
The recent violence in China’s western Xinjiang province has been called the ““worst civil turmoil since 1989.” This human rights catastrophe has led to the deaths of nearly 200 Uighur ethnic Muslims in the region.
But what if rather than cracking down on the Uighurs, China had drawn sophomorically offensive cartoons (a la Danish newspapers circa December 2005) instead? This different approach probably (and sadly) may have inspired a more global outcry from the greater Muslim world.
Not since the now infamous Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989 has the world seen such civil turmoil inside China. The tension revolves around the fulcrum of ethnic identity, societal discrimination and flat-out racism between the predominant ethnic majority Han Chinese (from the eastern parts of China) and minority ethnic Uighur Muslim populations indigenous to Xinjiang province along China’s western frontier.
Xinjiang is a massive western region that accounts for nearly one-sixth of China’s total land area. And it is home to the majority of the Uighurs in China. At its height in the 9th century, the Uighur empire stretched from the Caspian Sea into eastern China. The Uighurs also managed to establish independent republics twice during the 20th century before being annexed by the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Since then, the Chinese government has actively promoted the migration of the dominant Han Chinese to Xinjiang, and since the 1950’s the region’s ethnic Han community has grown from 5 to 40 percent of the region’s total population.
Although the region has seen enormous economic growth in recent years, local Uighurs have become increasingly resentful of Beijing’s political and economic control. After an Uighur uprising in 1990, for example, the Communist Party took steps to accelerate the integration of Xinjiang into China by stepping up migration into the area and increasing the security presence of baton-wielding police forces. It took control over freedom of religion in the region as well.
According to BBC World News,, Chinese authorities say more than 140 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded in riots in the mainly Muslim region since protests erupted last month. According to a recent article in Newsweek magazine in June, a resentful laborer spread rumors that Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women, leading a vengeful Han mob to attack Uighur workers. When authorities were slow to the arrest the attackers, Uighurs in Xinjiang took to the streets in protest.
Moises Naim recently noted in Foreign Policy, that “…In different countries, mullahs, imams, and assorted [Muslim] clerics have found the time to issue fatwas [religious decrees] condemning among other practices, Pokémon cartoons, total nudity during sex for married couples, and the use of vaccines against polio, not to mention Salman Rushdie. They have yet to find the time to say anything about China’s practices toward Uighurs…”
Prominent Uighur Muslims like Rebiya Kadeer (who was once celebrated by the Chinese government as the richest woman in China) have been vocal against the Chinese government’s policies of what they consider to be discrimination for years, saying that its policies “keep many Uighurs poor and badly educated.”
Outside of China’s borders, however, there has been scant coverage of the violence. And the greater Muslim world has been largely silent on the human-rights abuses taking place in the region.
One reason for this large silence may be that most people have never heard of Uighurs before. Since they are not Arab, it is not surprising that their plight is not within the current zeitgeist radar of the greater Muslim and Arab world.
Furthermore, an even more sobering thought occurs when one thinks that perhaps if the Uighurs were not Muslim we may have seen more media coverage of their situation. What would the American evangelical Republican apparatchik do if the Uighurs were Christians? We can assume that they might be indignant towards China and their continued human-rights abuses against the Uighurs.
Either way, sadly, if the Chinese government had drawn some moronic newspaper cartoons instead, we might have heard some more global condemnations (from all sides of the global political velvet rope) on these blatant human-rights violations occurring on our global watch today in China.
Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, contributor for True/Slant, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/16/if-china-had-drawn-some-stupid-cartoons-instead%E2%80%A6/
If China had drawn some stupid cartoons instead…
Posted: 06:02 PM ET
Police brutality in China killed two ethnic Uighurs earlier this week.
Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com
The recent violence in China’s western Xinjiang province has been called the ““worst civil turmoil since 1989.” This human rights catastrophe has led to the deaths of nearly 200 Uighur ethnic Muslims in the region.
But what if rather than cracking down on the Uighurs, China had drawn sophomorically offensive cartoons (a la Danish newspapers circa December 2005) instead? This different approach probably (and sadly) may have inspired a more global outcry from the greater Muslim world.
Not since the now infamous Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989 has the world seen such civil turmoil inside China. The tension revolves around the fulcrum of ethnic identity, societal discrimination and flat-out racism between the predominant ethnic majority Han Chinese (from the eastern parts of China) and minority ethnic Uighur Muslim populations indigenous to Xinjiang province along China’s western frontier.
Xinjiang is a massive western region that accounts for nearly one-sixth of China’s total land area. And it is home to the majority of the Uighurs in China. At its height in the 9th century, the Uighur empire stretched from the Caspian Sea into eastern China. The Uighurs also managed to establish independent republics twice during the 20th century before being annexed by the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Since then, the Chinese government has actively promoted the migration of the dominant Han Chinese to Xinjiang, and since the 1950’s the region’s ethnic Han community has grown from 5 to 40 percent of the region’s total population.
Although the region has seen enormous economic growth in recent years, local Uighurs have become increasingly resentful of Beijing’s political and economic control. After an Uighur uprising in 1990, for example, the Communist Party took steps to accelerate the integration of Xinjiang into China by stepping up migration into the area and increasing the security presence of baton-wielding police forces. It took control over freedom of religion in the region as well.
According to BBC World News,, Chinese authorities say more than 140 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded in riots in the mainly Muslim region since protests erupted last month. According to a recent article in Newsweek magazine in June, a resentful laborer spread rumors that Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women, leading a vengeful Han mob to attack Uighur workers. When authorities were slow to the arrest the attackers, Uighurs in Xinjiang took to the streets in protest.
Moises Naim recently noted in Foreign Policy, that “…In different countries, mullahs, imams, and assorted [Muslim] clerics have found the time to issue fatwas [religious decrees] condemning among other practices, Pokémon cartoons, total nudity during sex for married couples, and the use of vaccines against polio, not to mention Salman Rushdie. They have yet to find the time to say anything about China’s practices toward Uighurs…”
Prominent Uighur Muslims like Rebiya Kadeer (who was once celebrated by the Chinese government as the richest woman in China) have been vocal against the Chinese government’s policies of what they consider to be discrimination for years, saying that its policies “keep many Uighurs poor and badly educated.”
Outside of China’s borders, however, there has been scant coverage of the violence. And the greater Muslim world has been largely silent on the human-rights abuses taking place in the region.
One reason for this large silence may be that most people have never heard of Uighurs before. Since they are not Arab, it is not surprising that their plight is not within the current zeitgeist radar of the greater Muslim and Arab world.
Furthermore, an even more sobering thought occurs when one thinks that perhaps if the Uighurs were not Muslim we may have seen more media coverage of their situation. What would the American evangelical Republican apparatchik do if the Uighurs were Christians? We can assume that they might be indignant towards China and their continued human-rights abuses against the Uighurs.
Either way, sadly, if the Chinese government had drawn some moronic newspaper cartoons instead, we might have heard some more global condemnations (from all sides of the global political velvet rope) on these blatant human-rights violations occurring on our global watch today in China.
Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, contributor for True/Slant, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/16/if-china-had-drawn-some-stupid-cartoons-instead%E2%80%A6/
The New Great Game
The New Great Game
Charles Hill, 07.16.09, 12:01 AM EDT
China's best-kept secret is out.
For years it's been a closely held secret: The People's Republic of China is an empire desperately trying to make the world think it's a state.
The riots by Uighurs in China's far northwest are not something new; the place really erupted back about the time of the American Civil War. Clashes between Han Chinese moving into the basin, range and uplands inhabited by the much different ethnic people of the Central Asian heartland began at least 2,000 years ago in the Han Dynasty. Some of the most powerful pieces in Chinese literature, like the Tang Dynasty Ballad of the Army Carts by the eighth-century poet Du Fu, tell of the bitter hardships of lonely soldiers sent to garrison military settlements far to the west of China proper.
The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) conquered East Turkestan in the 18th century and began to consolidate control there in the late 1800s. But the Qing court, terminally beleaguered by Western encroachments along the China coast, was too feeble to impose central control on its far-flung takings.
The collapse of the Qing in 1912 intensified China's Search for a Political Form, as historian Jack Gray titled it. Mao Zedong's successful guerrilla wars and 1949 takeover imposed the form: a Communist internationalism under which the acquisitions of dynastic empires past, as well as ethnic and nationalistic movements, were swiftly and powerfully subsumed by a Marxist-Maoist ideology aimed at bringing world revolution. The new People's Republic of China declared the far northwest to be its "Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region."
Ever since the rise and conquests of the Arabs in the seventh century, waves of Muslim influence began to reach Chinese Central Asia. Arab traders, indigenous converts, mystical Sufi enthusiasts and, eventually, the radical Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood arrived and even played a role in bringing about an end to the Qing Dynasty. Across the years, one constant theme was periodic rebellion by Muslim Uighurs and a growing sense in Beijing that the locals were intractable, treacherous and violent.
With China's rise to wealth and power in the post-Mao era, the PRC, now lacking the cover of world revolution, was forced to find some way to legitimate its possession of Xinjiang. World history's age of empire had ended by the mid-20th century. Communist China's evil twin, the USSR, had been the territorial successor to the Tsarist empire as Mao's PRC had been to the Qing.
Related Stories
You state: "a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chin....
At the Cold War's end, the Soviet Union came apart; its counterparts to China's Xinjiang became independent sovereign states and UN members. The PRC, determined to avoid a like fate, began a fervent campaign to convince the international community that all lands behind its borders, acquired in the imperial past, are inviolable internal possessions of its sovereign statehood.
Whatever the forum, notably in the United Nations and its associated international agencies, and whenever an issue touches on sovereign statehood, as when Kosovo was detached from Serbia in 2008, the PRC can be counted on as the most determined defender of the proposition that nonintervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state within the Westphalian international system is the most sacrosanct principle of world affairs. China takes every care to present itself as the perfect, and most particular, international citizen.
It's no wonder why. China's vast borderlands today encompass a dizzying variety of languages, ethnicities, religions and nationalities: Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs are the most prominent; a lengthy list of other distinctive minority peoples are spread all along China's southern and southeastern marches.
And yet China's apparent ambitions beyond its borders seem to belie its insistence on tightly wound statehood. Some of the Qing possessions not still under PRC control are in its sights--Taiwan and the entirety of the South China Sea down to Brunei are included. As the U.S. Navy is starting to realize, a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chinese "lake." If nominally still in the category of international straits or high seas, these waters would become de facto a "no go" zone for the world's shipping. Chinese authorities would have to be prenotified and approve passage there--imperial-era influence regained.
The 1989 Tiananmen killings occurred when students confronted soldiers. The uprising was crushed but left a feeling that the Chinese Revolution, which might be dated back to 1911 or even 1839, was not over. Predictions were that when the next round came, it would not be students but urban workers who would have to be put down. The Uighur riots of July 2009 look something like that but with the added volatility of ethnicity and religion at work as well.
The epicenter of the Islamist war on world order (a more accurate term than the "war on terror") is now on the Afghan-Pakistan border, a fact that should be keeping China's leaders sleepless in Beijing as a restive Uighur population in "East Turkestan," as the locals call it, offers a new front for radical Islamist warfare. Perhaps this possibility was in President Hu Jintao's thoughts as he broke off from the G-8 summit in Italy to return to oversee the Xinjiang crisis.
The July riots in Urumqi are not just one more case of "every 30 years a small rebellion," as the Uighur-Han confrontation has been described. A new concatenation of claims is taking shape.
The Chinese will have to accelerate their program to overwhelm Xinjiang with Han-dominated population, culture, and economy--to complete their centuries-long imperial plan even as they insist on their privileges as a sovereign state.
The Uighurs and their external supporters in the World Uighur Congress will seek a solution in the autonomy promised by the original creation of the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region, but they won't get it any more than Tibetans will be allowed true autonomy in their autonomous region, where another process of Chinese-ization has been long under way.
By frustrating legitimate Uighur aspirations, Beijing will provide al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants with the means to radicalize the Muslim population of China's northwest in a jihad. China's minorities policy recognizes the existence of ethnic nationalities like Uighurs and Tibetans but refuses to recognize religion. This plays into the hands of Muslim extremists. Beijing has already branded the Uighur uprising as "Islamic terrorism."
The idea of a ''clash of civilizations'' may be superseded by a clash of ''spheres of influence,'' an old concept in world affairs that has raised its head again. China is extending its de facto power westward to fit its de jure state boundaries. Russia is seeking a sphere of influence over its lost territories in Central Asia; Russia approves what the PRC is doing with the Uighurs because it wants approval for its own ambitions in the area. The U.S. has important interests there as a staging area for its ''Af-Pak'' counter-insurgency efforts.
And the rising power Turkey has come on the scene to claim a sphere of influence across all the Turkic ethnic-linguistic Central Asian lands that range well inside China's borders. The Turkish prime minister has called the situation in Xinjiang a "genocide." There are layers of complex factors in play here involving power politics, economic exploitation, ethnic rivalries and religion. A new "Great Game" is under way, and the Chinese Revolution is still not over.
Charles Hill, a former U.S. diplomat, is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he is co-director of the Hoover working group on Islamism and International Order.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/15/uighurs-china-great-game-russia-al-qaeda-opinions-contributors-charles-hill.html
Charles Hill, 07.16.09, 12:01 AM EDT
China's best-kept secret is out.
For years it's been a closely held secret: The People's Republic of China is an empire desperately trying to make the world think it's a state.
The riots by Uighurs in China's far northwest are not something new; the place really erupted back about the time of the American Civil War. Clashes between Han Chinese moving into the basin, range and uplands inhabited by the much different ethnic people of the Central Asian heartland began at least 2,000 years ago in the Han Dynasty. Some of the most powerful pieces in Chinese literature, like the Tang Dynasty Ballad of the Army Carts by the eighth-century poet Du Fu, tell of the bitter hardships of lonely soldiers sent to garrison military settlements far to the west of China proper.
The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) conquered East Turkestan in the 18th century and began to consolidate control there in the late 1800s. But the Qing court, terminally beleaguered by Western encroachments along the China coast, was too feeble to impose central control on its far-flung takings.
The collapse of the Qing in 1912 intensified China's Search for a Political Form, as historian Jack Gray titled it. Mao Zedong's successful guerrilla wars and 1949 takeover imposed the form: a Communist internationalism under which the acquisitions of dynastic empires past, as well as ethnic and nationalistic movements, were swiftly and powerfully subsumed by a Marxist-Maoist ideology aimed at bringing world revolution. The new People's Republic of China declared the far northwest to be its "Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region."
Ever since the rise and conquests of the Arabs in the seventh century, waves of Muslim influence began to reach Chinese Central Asia. Arab traders, indigenous converts, mystical Sufi enthusiasts and, eventually, the radical Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood arrived and even played a role in bringing about an end to the Qing Dynasty. Across the years, one constant theme was periodic rebellion by Muslim Uighurs and a growing sense in Beijing that the locals were intractable, treacherous and violent.
With China's rise to wealth and power in the post-Mao era, the PRC, now lacking the cover of world revolution, was forced to find some way to legitimate its possession of Xinjiang. World history's age of empire had ended by the mid-20th century. Communist China's evil twin, the USSR, had been the territorial successor to the Tsarist empire as Mao's PRC had been to the Qing.
Related Stories
You state: "a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chin....
At the Cold War's end, the Soviet Union came apart; its counterparts to China's Xinjiang became independent sovereign states and UN members. The PRC, determined to avoid a like fate, began a fervent campaign to convince the international community that all lands behind its borders, acquired in the imperial past, are inviolable internal possessions of its sovereign statehood.
Whatever the forum, notably in the United Nations and its associated international agencies, and whenever an issue touches on sovereign statehood, as when Kosovo was detached from Serbia in 2008, the PRC can be counted on as the most determined defender of the proposition that nonintervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state within the Westphalian international system is the most sacrosanct principle of world affairs. China takes every care to present itself as the perfect, and most particular, international citizen.
It's no wonder why. China's vast borderlands today encompass a dizzying variety of languages, ethnicities, religions and nationalities: Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs are the most prominent; a lengthy list of other distinctive minority peoples are spread all along China's southern and southeastern marches.
And yet China's apparent ambitions beyond its borders seem to belie its insistence on tightly wound statehood. Some of the Qing possessions not still under PRC control are in its sights--Taiwan and the entirety of the South China Sea down to Brunei are included. As the U.S. Navy is starting to realize, a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chinese "lake." If nominally still in the category of international straits or high seas, these waters would become de facto a "no go" zone for the world's shipping. Chinese authorities would have to be prenotified and approve passage there--imperial-era influence regained.
The 1989 Tiananmen killings occurred when students confronted soldiers. The uprising was crushed but left a feeling that the Chinese Revolution, which might be dated back to 1911 or even 1839, was not over. Predictions were that when the next round came, it would not be students but urban workers who would have to be put down. The Uighur riots of July 2009 look something like that but with the added volatility of ethnicity and religion at work as well.
The epicenter of the Islamist war on world order (a more accurate term than the "war on terror") is now on the Afghan-Pakistan border, a fact that should be keeping China's leaders sleepless in Beijing as a restive Uighur population in "East Turkestan," as the locals call it, offers a new front for radical Islamist warfare. Perhaps this possibility was in President Hu Jintao's thoughts as he broke off from the G-8 summit in Italy to return to oversee the Xinjiang crisis.
The July riots in Urumqi are not just one more case of "every 30 years a small rebellion," as the Uighur-Han confrontation has been described. A new concatenation of claims is taking shape.
The Chinese will have to accelerate their program to overwhelm Xinjiang with Han-dominated population, culture, and economy--to complete their centuries-long imperial plan even as they insist on their privileges as a sovereign state.
The Uighurs and their external supporters in the World Uighur Congress will seek a solution in the autonomy promised by the original creation of the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region, but they won't get it any more than Tibetans will be allowed true autonomy in their autonomous region, where another process of Chinese-ization has been long under way.
By frustrating legitimate Uighur aspirations, Beijing will provide al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants with the means to radicalize the Muslim population of China's northwest in a jihad. China's minorities policy recognizes the existence of ethnic nationalities like Uighurs and Tibetans but refuses to recognize religion. This plays into the hands of Muslim extremists. Beijing has already branded the Uighur uprising as "Islamic terrorism."
The idea of a ''clash of civilizations'' may be superseded by a clash of ''spheres of influence,'' an old concept in world affairs that has raised its head again. China is extending its de facto power westward to fit its de jure state boundaries. Russia is seeking a sphere of influence over its lost territories in Central Asia; Russia approves what the PRC is doing with the Uighurs because it wants approval for its own ambitions in the area. The U.S. has important interests there as a staging area for its ''Af-Pak'' counter-insurgency efforts.
And the rising power Turkey has come on the scene to claim a sphere of influence across all the Turkic ethnic-linguistic Central Asian lands that range well inside China's borders. The Turkish prime minister has called the situation in Xinjiang a "genocide." There are layers of complex factors in play here involving power politics, economic exploitation, ethnic rivalries and religion. A new "Great Game" is under way, and the Chinese Revolution is still not over.
Charles Hill, a former U.S. diplomat, is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he is co-director of the Hoover working group on Islamism and International Order.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/15/uighurs-china-great-game-russia-al-qaeda-opinions-contributors-charles-hill.html
In the Middle East, Little Outcry Over China's Oppressed Uighurs
In the Middle East, Little Outcry Over China's Oppressed Uighurs
By Abigail Hauslohner / Cairo Thursday, Jul. 16, 2009
Armed Chinese paramilitary police in riot gear disembark a truck outside a mosque in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 13, 2009.
Armed Chinese paramilitary police in riot gear disembark a truck outside a mosque in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 13, 2009.
David Gray / REUTERS
The fatal stabbing of an Egyptian Muslim woman in a German courtroom two weeks ago sparked anger across the Muslim world and fueled demands for a formal apology from Germany. But while the region rages about the story of the "headscarf martyr," holding her up as a symbol of persecution, the plight of China's Muslim population has provoked a more muted response.
On July 5, riots broke out between China's minority Muslim Uighur population and the majority Han Chinese in the far western Xinjiang province. The government responded with a violent police crackdown and, in the end, at least 192 people were left dead. But, says Diaa Rashwan, a political analyst at the government-backed Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo: "There is not a lot of interest or attention paid to these events in the Arab and Muslim world." (See pictures of the unrest in Urumqi.)
Many Arabic news media covered the story only sporadically or failed to pick up on it until days after the riots began, and opinion writers — who were especially prolific in defense of the headscarf martyr — had very little to say about the Muslims in China. An article over the weekend in Saudi Arabia's Arab Times likened the struggle of their Uighur "co-religionists" to that of the Palestinians, and compared the Han Chinese to the Jews; and an editorial in Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper last week urged the international community to pay more attention to the crackdown. But calls for Muslim and Arab leaders to condemn the violence in China remains conspicuously absent from the regional press. (See pictures of the unrest in Urumqi.)
Which isn't necessarily surprising. Most of the region's governments — and what is largely a state-sponsored press — have several reasons to ignore China's ethnically and religiously charged clashes. To some Arab regimes, the bloody images of riot police clashing with Uighur protesters in Xinjiang's capital last week were strikingly familiar, because the same thing happens at home. "They make the same systematic separation of opponents, of Islamic groups, of opposition groups, and they arrest many and they kill many," says Essam el-Erian, a leader of Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood, comparing Arab regimes to the Chinese government. "How could they criticize the Chinese? They are in the same boat." (Read "A Brief History of the Uighurs.")
Indeed, the Uighurs and the popular Islamist Muslim Brotherhood have much to commiserate over. The Uighurs complain of religious and cultural persecution and economic marginalization by China's Han-dominated government. Not unlike Egypt's heavy-handed treatment of the Brotherhood — which is banned from participating in politics, and whose members are frequently subject to arrests and interrogations — China also limits the Uighurs' international travel, and maintains a degree of control over the sermons they provide at local mosques.
So far, Turkey has been the only government in the region to offer strong condemnation of China's actions, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan likening the crackdown to "genocide." Turkey shares linguistic and cultural ties with China's Uighurs, and its leaders' criticism of the Chinese government is made easier, says Erian, because "they have a democratic system." (Read "China's War in the West.")
This week, some signs of protest were also evident in Jordan, where, according to U.S.-funded Arabic satellite network Al-Hura, 40 Jordanian lawmakers submitted a letter to the head of parliament calling on the government to formally condemn the events in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the Jordanian Moderate Islamic Party encouraged Arab and Islamic governments to take a stance on the "practices against Muslims in Germany and China." But no formal government statements have followed.
A large factor in the regional silence, according to local analysts, is trade. "There are other political and economic interests and challenges," says Hala Mustafa, editor-in-chief of Egypt's government-affiliated Al-Ahram Quarterly Democracy Review. China has a significant economic presence in the Middle East, particularly where it fills the gaps left by U.S. sanctions. According to U.S. government statistics, China is both Iran and Sudan's biggest trade partner, and either the main or secondary source of imports for most of the other countries in the region. (Read: "How Iran Might Beat Future Sanctions: The China Card.")
There is also a potential double standard to consider. In the case of Egypt, "China is not involved in or critical about any of the political challenges in Egypt and it doesn't interfere on this level," says Mustafa. "That makes Egypt more reserved towards any clashes that Muslims are involved [with] in China."
Even so, some predict the official reaction will come — in time. "I think in the next days and weeks there will be more attention, because it just started in the Arab media," says political analyst Rashwan, adding that Muslim organizations in the Middle East will also start to publicly voice support for the Uighurs. In the most extreme case yet, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb this week called for attacks on Han Chinese in North Africa in retaliation for Muslim deaths. (See pictures of China after the riot deaths on LIFE.com.)
And while the Iranian government, which waged its own violent crackdown on opposition protesters last month, has remained relatively mute on the issue, several of the country's high-ranking Shi'ite clerics have also spoken out against China's actions. "Defending the oppressed is an Islamic and humanitarian duty," Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani said on Wednesday, according to the Tehran Times.
Still, the chances that the region's heads of states will follow suit seem unlikely.
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