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  • STRATFORD: China and the Enduring Uighurs

    STRATFORD: China and the Enduring Uighurs

    By Rodger Baker

    On Aug. 4, four days before the start of the Beijing Olympics, two ethnic Uighurs drove a stolen dump truck into a group of some 70 Chinese border police in the town of Kashi in Xinjiang, killing at least 16 of the officers. The attackers carried knives and home-made explosive devices and had also written manifestos in which they expressed their commitment to jihad in Xinjiang. The incident occurred just days after a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) claimed responsibility for a series of recent attacks and security incidents in China and warned of further attacks targeting the Olympics.

    Chinese authorities linked the Aug. 4 attack to transnational jihadists, suggesting the involvement of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which Beijing has warned is the biggest terrorist threat to China and the Olympics. Despite the Chinese warnings and TIP claims and the intensified focus on the Uighurs because of the Aug. 4 attack, there is still much confusion over just who these Uighur or Turkistani militants are.

    The Uighurs, a predominately Muslim Turkic ethnic group largely centered in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, have their own culture, language and written script distinct from their Han Chinese counterparts. Uighur ethnic nationalists and Islamist separatists have risen several times to challenge Chinese control over Xinjiang, but the Uighur independence movement remains fractured and frequently at odds with itself. However, recent evolutions within the Islamist militant Uighur movement, including growing links with transnational jihadist groups in Central and Southwest Asia, may represent a renewed threat to security in China.

    Origins in Xinjiang
    Uighur nationalism traces its origins back to a broader Turkistan, stretching through much of modern day Xinjiang (so-called “East Turkistan”) and into Central Asia. East Turkistan was conquered by the Manchus in the mid-1700s and, after decades of struggle, the territory was annexed by China, which later renamed it Xinjiang, or “New Territories.” A modern nation-state calling itself East Turkistan arose in Xinjiang in the chaotic transition from imperial China to Communist China, lasting for two brief periods from 1933 to 1934 and from 1944 to 1949. Since that time, “East Turkistan” has been, more or less, an integral part of the People’s Republic of China.

    The evolution of militant Uighur separatism — and particularly Islamist-based separatism — has been shaped over time by both domestic and foreign developments. In 1940, Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan (Islamic Party of Turkistan or Turkistan Islamic Movement ) emerged in Xinjiang, spearheading a series of unsuccessful uprisings from the 1940s through 1952, first against local warlords and later against the Communist Chinese.

    In 1956, as the “Hundred Flowers” was blooming in China’s eastern cities, and intellectuals were (very briefly) allowed to air their complaints and suggestions for China’s political and social development, a new leadership emerged among the Uighur Islamist nationalists, changing the focus from “Turkistan” to the more specific “East Turkistan,” or Xinjiang. Following another failed uprising, the Islamist Uighur movement faded away for several decades, with only minor sparks flaring during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

    In 1979, as Deng Xiaoping was launching China’s economic opening and reform, there was a coinciding period of Islamic and ethnic revival in Xinjiang, reflecting the relative openness of China at the time. During this time, one of the original founders of Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan, Abdul Hakeem, was released from prison and set up underground religious schools. Among his pupils in the 1980s was Hasan Mahsum, who would go on to found ETIM.

    The 1980s were a chaotic period in Xinjiang, with ethnic and religious revivalism, a growing student movement, and public opposition to China’s nuclear testing at Lop Nor. Uighur student protests were more a reflection of the growing student activism in China as a whole (culminating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident) than a resurgence of Uighur separatism, but they coincided with a general movement in Xinjiang to promote literacy and to refocus on religious and ethnic heritage. Amid this revival, several Uighur separatist or Islamist militant movements emerged.

    A critical moment occurred in April 1990, when an offshoot of the Uighur Islamist militant movement was discovered plotting an uprising in Xinjiang. The April 5 so-called “Baren Incident” (named for the city where militants and their supporters faced off against Chinese security forces) led Beijing to launch dragnet operations in the region, arresting known, suspected or potential troublemakers — a pattern that would be repeated through the “Strike Hard” campaigns of the 1990s. Many of the Uighurs caught up in these security campaigns, including Mahsum, began to share, refine and shape their ideology in prisons, taking on more radical tendencies and creating networks of relations that could be called upon later. From 1995 to 1997, the struggle in Xinjiang reached its peak, with increasingly frequent attacks by militants in Xinjiang and equally intensified security countermeasures by Beijing.

    It was also at this time that China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), enlisting Central Asian assistance in cracking down on Uighur militants, many of whom had fled China. In some ways this plan backfired, as it provided common cause between the Uighurs and Central Asian militants, and forced some Uighur Islamist militants further west, to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they would link up with the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), among others.

    Among those leaving China was Mahsum, who tried to rally support from the Uighur diaspora in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey but was rebuffed. Mahsum and a small group of followers headed to Central Asia and ultimately Afghanistan, where he established ETIM as a direct successor to his former teacher’s Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan. By 1998, Kabul-based ETIM began recruiting and training Uighur militants while expanding ties with the emerging jihadist movement in the region, dropping the “East” from its name to reflect these deepening ties. Until the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ETIM focused on recruiting and training Uighur militants at a camp run by Mahsum and Abdul Haq, who is cited by TIP now as its spiritual leader.

    With the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, ETIM was routed and its remnants fled to Central Asia and Pakistan. In January 2002, Mahsum tried to distance ETIM from al Qaeda in an attempt to avoid having the Uighur movement come under U.S. guns. It did not work. In September 2002, the United States declared ETIM a terrorist organization at the behest of China. A year later, ETIM experienced what seemed to be its last gasps, with a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation in South Waziristan in October 2003 killing Hasan Mahsum.

    A Movement Reborn?
    Following Mahsum’s death, a leaderless ETIM continued to interact with the Taliban and various Central Asian militants, particularly Uzbeks, and slowly reformed into a more coherent core in the Pakistan/Afghanistan frontier. In 2005, there were stirrings of this new Uighur Islamist militant group, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), which established a robust presence on the Internet, posting histories of the Uighur/Turkistan people in western China and Central Asia and inspirational videos featuring Mahsum. In 2006, a new video surfaced calling for jihad in Xinjiang, and later that year there were reports that remnants of ETIM had begun re-forming and moving back into far western Xinjiang.

    It was also around this time that Beijing began raising the specter of ETIM targeting the Olympics — a move seen at the time as primarily an excuse for stricter security controls. In early January 2007, Beijing raided a camp of suspected ETIM militants near the Xinjiang border with Tajikistan, and a year later raided another suspected camp in Urumchi, uncovering a plot to carry out attacks during the Olympics. This was followed in March by a reported attempt by Uighur militants to down a Chinese airliner with gasoline smuggled aboard in soda cans.

    Publicly, the Uighur militant issue was quickly swept aside by the Tibetan uprising in March, leaving nearly unnoticed an anti-government protest in Hotan and a series of counterterrorism raids by Chinese security forces in late March and early April that reportedly found evidence of more specific plots to attack Beijing and Shanghai during the Olympics.

    In the midst of this security campaign, TIP released a video, not disseminated widely until late June, in which spokesman Commander Seyfullah laid out a list of grievances against Beijing and cited Abdul Haq as calling on Uighur Islamist militants to begin strikes against China. The video also complained that the “U.S.-led Western countries listed the Turkistan Islamic Party as one of the international terrorist organizations,” an apparent reference to the United States’ 2002 listing of the ETIM on the terrorist exclusion list.

    In addition to linking the TIP to the ETIM, the April video also revealed some elements of the movement’s evolution since the death of Mahsum. Rather than the typical rhetoric of groups closely linked to the Wahabi ideology of al Qaeda, TIP listed its grievances against Beijing in an almost lawyer-like fashion, following more closely the pattern of Hizb al-Tahrir (HT), a movement active in Central Asia advocating nonviolent struggle against corrupt regimes and promoting the return of Islamic rule. Although HT officially renounces violence as a tool of political change, it has provided an abundance of zealous and impatient idealists who are often recruited by more active militant organizations.

    The blending of the HT ideologies with the underlying principles of Turkistan independence reflects the melding of the Uighur Islamist militancy with wider Central Asian Islamist movements. Fractures in HT, emerging in 2005 and expanding thereafter, may also have contributed to the evolution of TIP’s ideology; breakaway elements of HT argued that the nonviolent methods espoused by HT were no longer effective.

    What appears to be emerging is a Turkistan Islamist movement with links in Central Asia, stretching back to Afghanistan and Pakistan, blending Taliban training, transnational jihadist experiential learning, HT frameworks and recruiting, and Central Asian ties for support and shelter. This is a very different entity than China has faced in the past. If the TIP follows the examples set by the global jihadist movement, it will become an entity with a small core leadership based far from its primary field of operations guiding (ideologically but not necessarily operationally) a number of small grassroots militant cells.

    The network will be diffuse, with cells operating relatively independently with minimal knowledge or communication among them and focused on localized goals based on their training, skills and commitment. This would make the TIP less of a strategic threat, since it would be unable to rally large numbers of fighters in a single or sustained operation, but it would also be more difficult to fight, since Beijing would be unable to use information from raiding one cell to find another.

    This appears to be exactly what we are seeing now. The central TIP core uses the Internet and videos as psychological tools to trigger a reaction from Beijing and inspire militants without exposing itself to detection or capture. On July 25, TIP released a video claiming responsibility for a series of attacks in China, including bus bombings in Kunming, a bus fire in Shanghai and a tractor bombing in Wenzhou. While these claims were almost certainly exaggerated, the Aug. 4 attack in Xinjiang suddenly refocused attention on the TIP and its earlier threats.

    Further complicating things for Beijing are the transnational linkages ETIM forged and TIP has maintained. The Turkistan movement includes not only China’s Uighurs but also crosses into Uzbekistan, parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and spreads back through Central Asia all the way to Turkey. These linkages may have been the focus of quiet security warnings beginning around March that Afghan, Middle Eastern and Central Asian migrants and tourists were spotted carrying out surveillance of schools, hotels and government buildings in Beijing and Shanghai — possibly part of an attack cycle.

    The alleged activities seem to fit a pattern within the international jihadist movement of paying more attention to China. Islamists have considered China something less imperialistic, and thus less threatening, than the United States and European powers, but this began changing with the launch of the SCO, and the trend has been accelerating with China’s expanded involvement in Africa and Central Asia and its continued support for Pakistan’s government. China’s rising profile among Islamists has coincided with the rebirth of the Uighur Islamist militant movement just as Beijing embarks on one of its most significant security events: the Summer Olympics.

    Whatever name it may go by today — be it Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement or the Turkistan Islamic Party — the Uighur Islamist militant movement remains a security threat to Beijing. And in its current incarnation, drawing on internationalist resources and experiences and sporting a more diffuse structure, the Uighur militancy may well be getting a second wind.

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  • Has China got a terrorist problem?

    Has China got a terrorist problem?

    From The Times
    August 5, 2008

    The Uighur attack in the northwest was shocking but not a precursor to a bigger outrage

    Rosemary Righter

    The Olympics will open on Friday inside a triple ring of steel. Anti-terrorism precautions have been an unavoidable feature of the Games since the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972, but China has taken things to extremes.

    It has mobilised 110,000 police and other security forces in Beijing itself, plus 1.4 million security “volunteers” with Red Guard-style armbands and no fewer than 300,000 spy cameras. The security bill for Beijing alone exceeds £3 billion. Outside the capital, cities hosting Olympic events will be patrolled by 34,000 troops, surface-to-air missiles guard key sites, and 74 military aircraft, 48 helicopters and 33 naval vessels have been placed on high alert. While insisting that none of this will dampen the “festive atmosphere”, the Chinese official in charge dourly insists that “safety is the main symbol for success of the Games”.

    Not a rat will scurry Chinese streets undetected – and that, charge those few dissidents who have not already been arrested or shipped out of town, is the real purpose. The Communist Party is obsessed, they say, not by terrorists, but by fear that demonstrations by law-abiding citizens will mar the image of China’s “harmonious society”. “One world, one dream” is the slogan, and woe betide anyone whose dreams deviate from the party line. Far from redeeming its pledge that to be awarded the Olympics would improve respect for human rights, China has seized the excuse for a crackdown. By po-facedly lumping together as “terrorist threats” not just separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, but the nonviolent though eccentric “Falun Gong evil cult” and “common citizens who are discontented”, Chinese officialdom reinforced the cynics’ case.

    It would carry cynicism too far to say that this week’s brutal attack, almost certainly by Uighur militants, on a border police garrison in the far northwestern frontier city of Kashgar was nicely timed to still such criticism. Killing 16 police, it has badly shaken the nation and compels fresh examination of China’s assertion that it has a serious terrorist problem in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and that Uighur separatists have the Olympics in their sights. The attack is also a big embarrassment, given the massive security clampdown that China has mounted in recent months across this, its largest province.

    But it does not, however shocking, prove Beijing’s point. The fact that this was the deadliest terrorist incident on Chinese soil for a decade and that the attackers were arrested indicates, to the contrary, that violence in Xinjiang is ill-organised. Nor does it prove, contrary to Chinese assertions since 9/11, that the Uighurs are a fount of Islamist terrorism, inspired by if not linked to al-Qaeda. The truer analogy is between Xinjiang and Tibet.

    Both these vast terrains are officially classed as “autonomous regions”. To walk the streets of Kashgar or Khotan, the scene of demonstrations earlier this year, is to sense immediately how much more they have in common with Kabul than with China proper. In both, that autonomy is mocked by heavy-handed Han Chinese domination of government and economic life: not for nothing does Xinjiang, only sporadically under Chinese control until it was conquered by the Qing dynasty in the 16th century, mean “New Dominion”.

    The Uighurs have been at odds with the Chinese for centuries. Like the Tibetans, they fear becoming a minority in their own land, where officially encouraged Chinese migration under the slogan “Go West”, accelerating over the past decade with the aggressive development of Xinjiang’s rich oil and mineral resources, has lifted the Han Chinese from 5 per cent to 40 per cent of the population. Like the Tibetans, the 8.5 million Uighurs of Xinjiang are treated as second-class citizens; a US congressional committee records that in 2006, the Xinjiang Communist Party reserved 800 out of 840 Civil Service job openings for Han Chinese – using the excuse that “the cultural level of the people here is quite low”. Their mosques are closed or razed at will; their traditional homes are being demolished in the name of modernisation; and they fear, with some reason, that their language and culture are being reduced to the level of tourist attractions.

    A decade ago these discontents spasmodically erupted in attacks by separatists, chief among them the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). A few Uighurs did train with al-Qaeda – 22 ended up in Guantanamo. But their purchase in Xinjiang was marginal even then, and the Chinese security presence has, by most expert reckoning, reduced ETIM to fewer than 100 fighters. The Uighurs are a disgruntled lot, but they are not by and large Islamists and they are realistic enough to recognise independence as a pipedream.

    China does not have a terrorist problem, in Xinjiang or anywhere else. It might not even have a nationalist problem in Xinjiang if it gave Uighurs a fairer deal. Beijing needs to wake up, smell the kebabs, and acknowledge the Uighurs’ right to be themselves. The threat to the Olympics is minimal.

  • Top of the Agenda: China Border Attack

    Top of the Agenda: China Border Attack

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

    – China border attack in Xinjiang highlights Olympic terror threat.
    – Zawahiri rumors swirl; Pakistani Taliban denies reports.
    – Zuma hearings open in South Africa.
    – Attacks in Mogadishu break fragile calm.
    Top of the Agenda: China Border Attack

    Chinese state media report this morning that sixteen policemen have been killed in an attack on an outpost (Xinhua) in Xinjiang province in western China. Officials billed the incident, in which two assailants reportedly used grenades and knives, as a terrorist attack (BBC).

    The attack highlights unrest in Xinjiang province, where some in the large Uighur Muslim community accuse the Chinese government of imperialist governance. A new CFR.org Backgrounder gives an in-depth look at political tensions in the province.

    The incident also raises concerns about disruptions to the Beijing Olympic Games, which begin in four days. Local activist groups and Western human rights watchdogs have seized on the games to protest Chinese government positions on an array of issues, from the Tibet region to Chinese business interests with a Sudanese regime accused of rampant abuses in Darfur. The Guardian reports on a blog that Chinese officials are increasing security measures ahead of the games. The New York Times surveys the views of experts on the terrorist threat posed by various groups during the Olympics.

    Background:

    – This Backgrounder profiles the main Islamist separatist group in China’s Xinjiang region, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

    – This Backgrounder looks at the many issues on which activist groups have used the Olympics to apply pressure to the Chinese government.

  • Homes Raided in Xinjiang

    Homes Raided in Xinjiang

    Chinese authorities in Gulja, which saw an armed crackdown on protests in 1997, are raiding homes in a security campaign they say is aimed at the country’s huge migrant population but which activists abroad say targets minority Muslim Uyghurs. 

    Photo: AFP.

    URUMQI, China: Paramilitary and police man their posts in front of a propaganda billboard during Olympic Torch Relay festivities in the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, June 17, 2008.

    WASHINGTON—Authorities in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have launched a house-to-house search campaign in a Uyghur city known as a traditional center of opposition to Beijing’s rule.

    “The campaign started a few weeks ago,” an officer at a police station near Gulja city [in Chinese, Yining] said. “In the past two weeks we’ve searched only once. It isn’t scheduled, but the searching occurs at random times. Sometimes the searches take awhile,” he said.

    He denied that the campaign was aimed specifically at the Muslim ethnic minority Uyghur people, among whom opposition to China’s rule is widespread.

    “The campaign isn’t targeted at specific people,” he said. “It is targeted only at specific areas,” said the officer, who is based in the village of Toghrak [in Chinese, Tuogelake], near Gulja city.

    I can’t provide information on this campaign to the outside world. The local media haven’t reported this campaign yet. So I can’t reveal any more information.”

    Police officer

    He said the aim of the campaign was to discover people who have been engaged in illegal activities and to crack down on people without household registration papers or a national identity card, or those with no clear account of themselves.

    He declined to give details of how many people had been detained in the raids, and on what charges.

    ‘No legal process’

    “I can’t provide information on this campaign to the outside world. The local media haven’t reported this campaign yet. So I can’t reveal any more information,” he said.

    The Germany-based exile group, the World Uyghur Congress, said a total of 279 households were raided in and around Gulja, affecting a total of 1,253 local residents.

    “Recently the Chinese Public Security Bureau have been bursting in on the homes of more than 1,000 Uyghur people without any prior warning or any legal process and searching them,” spokesman Dilxat Raxit said.

    “At the same time, anyone who refuses to have their homes searched gets beaten up by the police. More than 30 people have been detained so far.”

    He said Uyghurs whose homes had been raided had reported that their copies of the Quran had been confiscated by police.

    “Once they get inside the Uyghur people’s homes, they are confiscating their copies of the Quran,” he said. “This campaign is being expanded at the moment to county towns. On the eve of the Olympic Games, Uyghur people can’t even feel safe inside their own homes when they have shut the door.”

    ‘Clean-up’ operation

    An officer who answered the phone at the Uchderwaza police station in a predominantly Uyghur neighborhood of downtown Gulja confirmed a large-scale “clean-up” operation was under way in the area.

    “Yes,” the officer said. “It’s not just in Gulja. It’s the same across the country…The main targets are transient sectors of the population.”

    Asked if the homes of Uyghurs had been searched, he said the operation wasn’t targeted at any ethnic group, but instead at China’s huge floating population of temporary migrant workers.

    “Here in Gulja, we need to gather more intelligence about temporary residents,” he said, adding that people would normally be detained only if they “resisted” the police operation.

    “There are many who we just penalize on the spot, but some have been taken in under administrative detention too. Typically those are the people who try to hinder our attempts to carry out our job,” the officer said.

    Dilxat Raxit said all the Uyghurs in the Gulja area were permanent residents with their papers in order, and that there weren’t any people among them with none of the three officially recognized forms of identification.

    Social stability

    “Uyghur people keep themselves to themselves and don’t travel much. Of course they are denying it. The reason is simple…China is hijacking the Olympics as an excuse to launch another fear campaign among Uyghurs and it is trying to avoid the concern of the international community about the Uyghurs,” he said.

    Local media reported recently that Communist Party leaders of the Ili autonomous district held a meeting on public security recently, ordering a crackdown on anyone without one of the three widely accepted forms of identification specified by the Toghrak police officer.

    Xinjiang Peace News, a government-sponsored Web site, reported on a recent social stability campaign in Mongolkure [in Chinese, Zhaosu] county, also in Ili.

    Security measures were to include stopping petitioners from going public with their complaints, forbidding public meetings, and stepping up intelligence gathering with the cultivation of more informants in local communities, the report said.

    Closer attention was to be paid to “religious people, strangers without backgrounds, and former prisoners,” while a close eye was to be kept on local mosques, whose imams were to be “re-educated,” it added. County law enforcement officials had also called for more trials and more arrests.

    A police officer who answered the phone at the Mongolkure public security bureau didn’t deny the existence of the campaign but declined to provide details.

    National security

    “The reason is very simple. It’s because this is a matter of national security,” he said. “I can’t tell you anything.”

    U.S.-based Uyghur activists also called for international intervention to stop the campaign, which they said targets their ethnic minority.

    American Uyghur Association general secretary Alim Seytoff said prominent Uyghur businesswoman and dissident in exile Rebiya Kadeer had called on the U.S. Congress to intervene.

    “Rebiya Kadeer hopes the United States will send a delegation to the Uyghur region to stop this campaign,” he said.

    Many Uyghurs, who twice enjoyed short-lived independence as the state of East Turkestan during the 1930s and 40s, are bitterly opposed to Beijing’s rule in Xinjiang. Beijing blames Uyghur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence in the Xinjiang region. But diplomats and foreign experts are skeptical. International rights groups have accused Beijing of using the U.S. “war on terror” to crack down on non-violent supporters of Uyghur independence.

    Overseas rights groups say untold numbers of people were killed in the Gulja unrest of February 1997, in a crackdown that went largely unnoticed by the outside world.

    Original reporting in Uyghur by Jilil and Shohret Hoshur, and in Mandarin by Yan Xiu. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie and Omer Kanat. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

  • Turkish stretch of railway linking Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan launched

    Turkish stretch of railway linking Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan launched

    ANKARA, Turkey: The Associated Press – The presidents of Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan have launched the construction of the Turkish stretch of a railway linking their nations.

    The US$600 million rail line will connect the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, with the eastern Turkish city of Kars, via the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

    The project is one of several linking oil-rich Azerbaijan and Central Asia with Turkey and European markets while bypassing Russia.

    A groundbreaking ceremony in Kars Thursday marked the start of the 50 mile (76 kilometer) Turkish section of the 110 mile (180 kilometer) railroad.

    “We are launching the iron Silk Road,” Turkey’s Abdullah Gul said. “It will link China in Asia to London.”

    The Silk Road was an ancient Asian trading route. The railway will be operational in 2011.

    Source: International Herald Tribune, July 24, 2008

  • East vs. West in Central Asia

    East vs. West in Central Asia

     

    By Adrian Pabst

    To Our Readers

    The Moscow Times welcomes letters to the editor. Letters for publication should be signed and bear the signatory’s address and telephone number.
    Letters to the editor should be sent by fax to (7-495) 232-6529, by e-mail to oped@imedia.ru, or by post. The Moscow Times reserves the right to edit letters.

    Email the Opinion Page Editor

    In a little-noticed news story last week, U.S. lawmakers strongly condemned what they called China’s brutal pre-Olympic crackdown in the far northwest Xinjiang region, which is populated by the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group. This condemnation related to a closed July 9 trial of 15 Uyghurs on terrorism charges, ending in the summary execution of two of the accused, three suspended death sentences and the remaining 10 receiving life imprisonment.

    China responded by reporting that in the preceding week alone it had received three “significant” threats, leading police to arrest 82 people in five separate suspected terrorist rings for allegedly plotting attacks against the forthcoming Olympic Games. Meng Hongwei, the Chinese deputy minister for public security, declared that the threats had come from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and that the arrests had been made in Xinjiang, where separatist groups are said to operate.

    It is still unclear whether Monday’s two bomb blasts in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, in which two people were killed, were in any way related to Islamic terrorism or separatist movements, but the attacks will undoubtedly fuel fear and suspicion with the Olympics just three weeks away.

    Faced with the protest from U.S. congressmen, the authorities in Beijing swiftly denied any injustice and accused Washington of meddling in its internal affairs. A similar pattern of mutual accusation and recrimination — reminiscent of the worst of the Cold War — is already well-established throughout Central Asia. It has become a key battleground in the struggle for global influence and power, with its Muslim populations caught in the middle.

    With the tacit support of neighboring Russia, the government of Kyrgyzstan has arrested numerous Uyghurs, whom it views as criminal, separatist and terrorist. Likewise, Uzbek leaders accuse ethnic Uyghurs from China and Central Asian countries of participating in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU. Alongside the radical Islamic group Akromiya, the IMU was charged with fomenting unrest, leading to the Andijan massacre of May 2005, when several hundred civilians are believed to have been killed by Uzbek security forces.

    In a region increasingly interconnected by migration and trade, the stateless Uyghurs, who represent over half a million people, provide an easy target for authoritarian rulers. The Uyghur cause has been defended by international human rights bodies, but it has also been hijacked by some foreign agencies and political movements.

    In the name of universal human rights, the United States and its allies blame China and Central Asian countries for persecuting Muslim minorities. According to the influential Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, “the Chinese government should not be permitted to use the ‘war on terror’ or Olympic security as a front to persecute the Uyghurs.”

    China, Russia and their Central Asian partners accuse the West of double standards and illegitimate interference. They say they are simply defending their territorial integrity against secessionist threats. They suspect the United States and others of orchestrating the Muslim minorities and supporting secessionism to strengthen the Western presence in Central Asia.

    Both are right about each other, but wrong about Asian Islam. In fact, both the East and West pursue questionable goals and policies. Under the cloak of the “global war on terror,” both sides intervene against Islamic extremists in order to advance their rival interests. In a region rich in minerals, oil and gas, the United States established military bases in Manas, just north of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek and in Karshi-Khanabad, in southern Uzbekistan, not far from the Tajik border. These are both key locations in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida-related networks in nearby Afghanistan. China has undoubtedly exaggerated the terrorist threat in order to suppress political opposition and extend its sphere of influence in Central Asia.

    But the East-West clash is not limited to the small but growing numbers of Islamic extremists. Increasingly, both sides also wage a battle for the soul of indigenous Muslims. Islam has been present in China and parts of Central Asia since the late 7th century. Muslims were integrated into the Chinese Empire during the golden age of cosmopolitan culture under the Tang Dynasty. Islam became part of Central Asian cultures and developed a civic identity through trade and political participation.

    This important legacy is increasingly under threat. Citing the danger of international terrorism, Western governments sponsor programs promoting a modern Islam that is liberal and moderate. But it is unclear whether this strategy is really to the benefit of native Muslims or whether it is aimed at producing a more pro-Western Islam. Fearing separatism, the East denies indigenous Muslims any form of self-determination and reinforces a brutal regime of persecution and assimilation. Like Tibet, Xinjiang province is nominally autonomous but in reality ruled by Beijing’s iron fist. The crackdown on religious freedom in China and Central Asia also affects many other religious minorities, including numerous Christians.

    All this matters because increasing interference from East and West is undermining traditional Islam in Central Asia and weakening its ability to combat from within the growing threat of radicalization. If Central Asian Muslims succeed in preserving and extending their brand of indigenous traditional Islam, then they will be better equipped to withstand political manipulation by the West and cultural assimilation by the East.

    Adrian Pabst teaches religion and politics at the University of Nottingham and is a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies. This comment appeared in The National.