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  • Restive Muslims face China's heavy hand

    Restive Muslims face China's heavy hand
    By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers

    * Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008

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    A Muslim woman with her head completely covered in a brown cloth walks by a bread vendor in Khotan, China, in April 2008. Some Muslims in China's far west are adopting more conservative practices.

    Tim Johnson / MCT

    A Muslim woman with her head completely covered in a brown cloth walks by a bread vendor in Khotan, China, in April 2008. Some Muslims in China's far west are adopting more conservative practices. | View larger image

    KHOTAN, China — Almost unnoticed amid the wide-scale protests by Tibetans over the past month is the opportunistic social unrest among the 8 million or so Muslim Uighurs in China's resource-rich far western territory.

    Recently, hundreds of Muslim women in black veils gathered outside the market in this oasis city in an impromptu protest. Some carried signs demanding an independent state.

    "I saw the demonstration myself. There were 500 to 700 women in black, waving placards for East Turkestan," said Wu Jiangliang, a hydroelectric company employee.

    China handled the unrest forcefully, ensuring the stability of a region rich in oil, coal and minerals. Police moved quickly to quell the March 23 protest, arresting numerous women and shooing others away. It drew only minor notice.

    China also has broken up what it said were two terrorist rings that intended to disrupt the Beijing Summer Olympic Games and thwarted what it said was a terrorist attempt last month on a commercial airliner.

    But as state officials employed a firm hand against restive Uighurs, pronounced WEE-gers, they also publicly demonized those behind the social unrest. Critics now say that while the state has stabilized ethnic areas, the harsh language may exacerbate tensions.

    "The problem is that China's policies are alienating," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. "They are efficient in that political repression works. But they increase ethnic tensions."

    Conversations in the marketplaces and along the sandy streets of this city reveal that Han Chinese and Uighurs live side by side but share little except mistrust and fear.

    "I don't have Chinese friends," said a Uighur shopkeeper who identified herself only as Ayguzal. "Chinese people never come in here."

    At midnight in a karaoke bar in a hotel frequented by Han Chinese businessmen, a young Han asked a visitor a question over the thumping music.

    "Are you scared?" he wanted to know.

    Asked if he meant afraid of the Muslims, he replied: "They hate us."

    Khotan, known in Mandarin as Hetian, sits on the edge of the sprawling Taklimakan Desert. The vast majority of the million or so residents are Uighurs .

    A series of bombings and assassinations shook the surrounding Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the 1990s, but a repressive campaign that included numerous executions halted that terrorism.

    Han merchants have migrated to Khotan in increasing numbers this decade to trade in jade, which is excavated from a local riverbed.

    Some adhere to the government line that the Han majority enjoys harmonious relations with all 56 ethnic minority groups dwelling in China, and particularly with the Uighurs.

    "We are all one people," said Huang Ziyong, a jade merchant who arrived in 1993 from Sichuan province. Huang hasn't bothered to study Uighur, which shares linguistic roots with Turkish. "I can't speak their language."

    When speaking confidentially, Uighurs are quick to pour out grievances.

    Some complain of family-planning policies that have left Uighur mothers dead from second-trimester abortions. Others said that few senior party or regional officials are ethnic Uighurs , despite pledges decades ago that the region would enjoy autonomy.

    Since 2006, controls have stiffened. Muslim shopkeepers aren't allowed to pray in their stores, and state employees are discouraged from practicing religion at all.

    "The government has taken away everyone's passports and kept them in the local police station," said a farmer who gave his name only as Muttursun.

    Tensions in Khotan rose early this year when state security arrested a prominent Uighur jade merchant, Mutallip Hajim, who was known to help young Muslim students with his philanthropy. On March 3, police gave Hajim's body to his family, saying he'd died of a heart attack. He was 38 years old.

    "They suspected he was a leader supporting demonstrations," said Rebiya Kadeer, an exile leader who is president of the World Uighur Congress.

    Kadeer, speaking by telephone from the United States, said Hajim had been tortured and that a number of Uighur men were subsequently arrested, enraging their wives and leading to the women's March 23 protest. The women also were angry that the government discourages them from wearing black headscarves.

    "The government has been really heavy-handed," Kadeer said. "The Uighurs are ready to take to the streets and the government knows that. This is only the tip of the iceberg."

    Beijing frequently asserts that separatists and terrorists lurk among the Uighur population, stoking fear in ordinary Uighurs that they may face accusations at any time.

    "They've got the political sword of Damocles over their heads. If you smear someone as a separatist, they are in big trouble," Bequelin said.

    Xinjiang leaders have accused Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami, a movement active in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, of spreading tens of thousands of pamphlets in major cities, including Khotan, earlier this year. The group advocates the creation of a pan-global Islamic state, or caliphate.

    In the most recent alleged terrorist case, the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing said April 10 that agents had smashed a ring of 35 radicals in Xinjiang who planned to disrupt the Olympics with kidnappings and mass poisonings. It provided no details about where the arrests took place or the identities of those arrested.

    Foreign terrorism experts suggest that China may be conflating criminal activity with potential terrorism, a sign that it's jittery about stability before the Olympics.

    After a Jan. 27 raid in the regional capital of Urumqi, authorities said Muslim militants threw grenades at police, injuring seven officers. Two militants allegedly were killed, and 15 were captured.

    But when an Agence France-Presse journalist went to the middle-class housing development in Urumqi, residents dismissed reports of a grenade-tossing clash.

    "That's nonsense," one resident told the news agency. "Everybody would have heard something like that," said another resident.

    China claims that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement has links to global terrorist cells, a charge that some experts dismiss.

    "There's just no clear connection between al Qaida and East Turkestan," said Dru C. Gladney, a professor at Pomona College in California. "(Osama) bin Laden has never mentioned them."

    Many Chinese now quickly associate Uighurs with trouble.

    "The general perception of Uighurs has shifted in China at large. Now mention 'Uighurs,' and it's, 'Oh, dangerous terrorists!'" Bequelin said. "It may be the longest-lasting effect of this campaign."

    ABOUT THE UIGHURS

    The history of the Uighurs can be traced back 2,600 years. According to a history compiled by the London Uighur Ensemble, a group formed to popularize the traditional and popular music of the Uighurs, the nomadic tribes of that era rose "to challenge the Chinese Empire" and to become "the diplomatic arm of the Mongol invasion."

    China's ethnic Uighurs are moderate Muslims who are related to the Turks. Like the Kurds of Asia Minor and the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Uighurs are a dissatisfied transnational ethnic minority spread across several countries, without an independent homeland or a strong leader. They are located mainly China, but also Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

    The London Ensemble notes that the ethnic minority "staged several uprisings" against the Nationalist Chinese government in the period before the Communists took control of the country. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs established an independent Islamic Eastern Turkestan republic, but that attempt at a nation state ended after military intervention by the Soviet Union. With the establishment of the Maoist government in China in 1949, the tribal homeland came under Chinese communist rule.

    To read the AFP story, go to AFP: Months later, Xinjiang 'terror' raid remains a mystery

    McClatchy Newspapers 2008
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    I am waiting for the response that it is only a minor law and order problem and nothing more!!


    "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

    I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

    HAKUNA MATATA

    Comment


    • #3
      It's a pity this isn't as 'hip' as the Tibet issue.

      Comment


      • #4
        Isn't it interesting that the Moslem world which is so quick to come out in support of their Moslem brethren being oppressed, imagined or otherwise, are so conspicuous by their silence?

        Is it because these Moslems are not racially similar to the Arabs or is it because they are thrilled by the rise of China as another seat of global power?

        Is this what is known as Political Islam?


        "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

        I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

        HAKUNA MATATA

        Comment


        • #5
          Isn't it interesting that the Moslem world which is so quick to come out in support of their Moslem brethren being oppressed, imagined or otherwise, are so conspicuous by their silence?
          Pakistan was happy to throw Uighurs at the Northern Alliance but handed over pro-democracy Uighurs and Uighurs who supported the armed struggle against the reds.
          To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Ray View Post
            is it because they are thrilled by the rise of China as another seat of global power?
            Bingo. China may oppress these people but it has good relations with many Muslim countries. It doesn't invade them, support puppet dictatorships, support Israel, etc. China is better than the US to them. I think Xinjiang is either the price to pay or it really isn't that bad of a situation. (not my opinion before I get called a Muslim "in hiding" )

            Comment


            • #7
              :)) Soviet union to China.

              Comment


              • #8
                Unrest in Xinjiang: China Seeks Musharraf's Good Offices
                by B. Raman

                The unrest against the Chinese Government has spread from Tibet to the Muslim majority Xinjiang province of China. Since the beginning of this year, there were already indications of the revival of the Uighur independence movement as seen from the discovery of an Uighur sleeper cell in Urumqi, the capital of the province, by local officials of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which is the Chinese internal intelligence and security agency. This was followed on March 7, 2008, by an aborted attempt by three Uighurs---one of them a woman--- to blow up a civil aviation plane going from Urumqi to Beijing with the help of gasoline concealed inside a soft drink can, which had been smuggled into the plane. The attempt was thwarted by alert security guards on board the plane.

                2. There was a fairly big demonstration against the Chinese authorities at Khotan in the Xinjiang province on March 23, 2008. About 1,000 Uighurs, including many women, participated in the demonstration. The protest was triggered off by two events. Firstly, the alleged death in the custody of the Ministry of Public Security of Mutallip Hajim, a wealthy jade trader and popular philanthropist, who had been arrested on a charge of belonging to the sleeper cell discovered in January, 2008. Secondly, the anger of the local women over a long-standing order banning women from wearing scarves over their heads. Many of the Uighur women, who participated in the demonstration, defiantly covered their heads with scarves. The news of the demonstration was first broken by the US-run Radio Free Asia, which covered it on the basis of reports received from its sources in Xinjiang and Uighur political exiles in Turkey. The local authorities of Xinjiang initially denied and ridiculed the reports of the Radio, but they admitted on April 2, 2008, that a demonstration did take place. According to a statement from the Khotan government in the Xinjiang region, "extremist forces" tried to incite an uprising in a local market place on March 23. "A small number of elements... tried to incite splittism, create disturbances in the market place and even trick the masses into an uprising," an official statement issued by the authorities said. It added: "Our police immediately intervened to prevent this and are dealing with it in accordance with the law."


                3. The belated official confirmation of the incident has strengthened the credibility of the broadcasts of Radi Free Asia, which has now reported that the local authorities have undertaken house-to-house searches in the area looking for extremist suspects. Other independent reports from Tibetan sources also speak of a crack-down in Urumqi and other places, during the course of which over 100 Uighur Muslims have been detained for interrogation.

                4. The continuing unrest in the Xinjiang province, which is attributed to pro-Western Uighur groups operating from Turkey and the Central Asian Republics as well as the pro-bin Laden groups operating from Pakistan, has unnerved the Chinese authorities, who are worried that the pro-Western Uighurs and the Tibetan youth might join hands to disrupt the Olympics. The pro-Western Uighur groups and the Tibetans have links with each other and with the intelligence agencies of the Baltic States through the Holland-based Unrepresented Nations' and Peoples' Organisation, allegedly funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Elements belonging to the organisation, which had played an active role in the anti-Moscow movement in the Baltic States, have now joined hands with the US-funded National Endowment For Democracy for supporting the anti-Beijing revolts in Tibet and Xinjiang and for encouraging a similar revolt in Hong Kong, with the help of Falun Gong elements. The Chinese are also worried about likely threats to the Olympic Torch from pro-Al Qaeda Uighur elements and from the students of the Lal Masjid of Islamabad, when it transits Islamabad on April 16 before being taken to New Delhi.

                5. According to reliable Pakistani sources, in response to a request from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has agreed to visit Urumqi during a long-pending six-day state visit to China from April 10, to attend a meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia and appeal to the local Muslims to co-operate with the local authorities and not to let themselves be misled by the followers of the Dalai Lama. He is expected to visit a local mosque in Urumqi and address the local Muslim personalities there. Musharraf, who is keen to project himself as still enjoying the confidence of China, has welcomed the request of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and agreed to try to help the Chinese out.

                6. Reports of continued peaceful demonstrations by Tibetan monks and students have been received from Tibet, Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, but there have been no fresh incidents of violence. Radio Free Asia has been disseminating detailed instructions to its listeners in Tibet and Xinjiang as to how to overcome the jamming of its broadcasts by the Chinese.

                7. Pakistan and Nepal have been playing a double game in the recent events. Pakistan has been pretending to co-operate with the Chinese against the Uighur extremists. At the same time, it has allowed Radio Free Asia to produce many of its Uighur language programmes in Pakistani territory. Similarly, the Government of Nepal has been co-operating with the Chinese authorities for monitoring the activities of the Tibetan Youth Congress from Nepalese territory. At the same time. it has allowed Radio Free Asia to produce and transmit many of its Tibetan language programmes from the Nepalese soil.

                (The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: [email protected])

                Source: South Asia Analysis Group Unrest in Xinjiang: China Seeks Musharraf's Good Offices

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