Tag: Uighurs

Anger China or defend Uighurs? Turkey walks fine line.

Beijing urged Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to retract his statement that China is committing “genocide” against its Muslim minority.

Istanbul – Developments in China’s restive Xinjiang Province and the attacks against the minority Muslim Uighurs there may not have led to vocal protests in most of the Muslim world. But in Turkey, the events in western China have led to large protests in the streets and strong words from Turkish officials.

The comment raising the loudest outcry has been Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s accusation last week that China is committing “genocide” against the Uighurs, a statement that Beijing is now pressuring him to retract.

Experts say that taking its criticism of China too far could backfire on Ankara, which has been working to improve both its diplomatic and trade relations with Beijing.

An estimated 184 people have died in the recent violent clashes between Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Chinese officials have claimed that most of those killed have been Han.

Turkey’s minister of industry and trade, Nihat Ergun, last week called for a boycott of Chinese goods, while Mr. Erdogan, speaking on television last Friday, said: “The incidents in China are, simply put, tantamount to genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise.”

Uighurs as ‘brothers’

“There is a lot of sensitivity among the Turkish public about the Uighurs. They consider them as real brothers,” says Sami Kohen, a political affairs columnist for Milliyet, a Turkish daily.

“Turks originally came from that part of Asia to Anatolia, and the language that Uighurs use is much closer to the language that Turkey speaks than others in Central Asia,” he continues.

The Turkish president’s official flag, for example, has 16 stars on it, representing “Turkish states” established throughout history. One of the stars commemorates the Uighur state that existed around the 8th century.

Adds Mr. Kohen: “There is quite a large Uighur community in Turkey, and they are quite strong. They have a lobby and they have been quite strong in defending their cause.”

Turkey raises its global profile

Turkey has, in recent years, been working to raise its foreign policy profile and establish itself as a regional political and economic power. Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, actually visited Urumqi as part of a recent state visit shortly before the violence broke out there. Turkey signed a reported $1.5 billion worth of trade deals during the visit.

But analysts say Ankara’s criticism could lead to a rupture with Beijing.

“The Turks really have a tough decision to make, whether they keep this going or back off. This is a major test for Turkey’s new foreign policy,” says Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This is a serious problem for the Turks from every angle.”

Ankara now also needs to decide if it will grant a possible request to visit Turkey by Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur diaspora activist based in the United States whom China has accused of being behind the violence in Xinjiang.

“All hell is going to break loose if she shows up in Turkey, especially after the comment that Erdogan made,” Mr. Aliriza says.

Take it back, China says

The Chinese government now appears to be pushing back against Turkey. A Tuesday editorial in the government-controlled English-language China Daily urged Erdogan to “take back his remarks … which constitute interference in China’s internal affairs.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, in a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart, blamed the violence in Xinjiang on “three evil forces,” state news agency Xinhua said, referring to “extremism, separatism, and terrorism.”

For Turkey, which has had its share of domestic violence and terrorism, both from Islamic extremists and Kurdish separatists, these are not meaningless words.

The Christian Science Monitor

July 15, 2009
Xinjiang Energy Risk Rises

2009-07-13

China’s energy risk grows with reliance on Xinjiang.

AFP

The sun rises over the Tazhong oilfield in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Oct. 12, 2006.

BOSTON–China’s growing energy reliance on Xinjiang has raised risks for China’s government as it tries to control unrest in the far northwestern region, experts say.

The outbreak of deadly riots in Urumqi on July 5 has been linked to the killing of two Uyghur migrant workers in an ethnic attack at a toy factory in southern Guangdong province on June 26.

But the violence also follows years of tension over the government’s “Develop the West” program, focusing on Xinjiang’s energy resources and strategic links to Central Asia.

Projects like the massive West-to-East gas pipeline have brought waves of Han workers to thinly-settled Xinjiang since 2000, when former President Jiang Zemin launched the investment policy for western provinces and autonomous regions.

Xinjiang’s gas has been tapped to fuel distant Shanghai since the 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) pipeline opened in 2004. A second West-to-East project is under way to bring gas from Turkmenistan on a 7,000-kilometer route through Xinjiang to China’s east coast.

Gas reserves

Oil has also been flowing across Xinjiang through a 1,000-kilometer pipeline from Kazakhstan since 2005.

In addition to the energy funnelled through Xinjiang, China has been exploiting the region for its own resources. Xinjiang contains gas reserves of 1.4 trillion cubic meters, more than any other region or province, the official China Daily reported in February.

Gas production from Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin field accounted for more than a fifth of China’s total output last year.

In 2008, the region produced 27.4 million tons of oil (550,000 barrels per day), or over 14 percent of China’s output, making it the country’s second-biggest oil center.

Xinjiang also has 40 percent of China’s coal reserves, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The region has at least 11 rail projects in progress and 3.5 billion yuan ($512 million) in highway work scheduled this year.

Strategic importance

These broad energy and investment interests have heightened the Chinese government’s determination to suppress Uyghur autonomy in Xinjiang, said S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Washington-based Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

“This is one of the true red lines of Chinese policy, as much as Taiwan, and it’s certainly of more strategic importance to them than Tibet,” Starr told Radio Free Asia.

“This is the case not only because of the resources–oil and gas and other resources–of Xinjiang itself, but also because it’s a transit point for energy from the west.”

Starr said that Uyghur citizens are aware that the benefits of energy development are distributed very differently in neighboring Kazakhstan since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“The money is going to the new Kazakh state and its people. It’s not going off to Moscow anymore,” Starr said.

By contrast, the mostly-Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang see little of the region’s energy wealth. And the unequal distribution of Xinjiang’s energy benefits has deepened Uyghur resentment and raised resistance to exploitation by Beijing, said Starr.

“This is not going to be dealt with simply with the fist, as the Chinese have so far tried to do,” he said.

Vulnerability

Robert Ebel, senior adviser to the energy and national security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, agrees that the government’s “Develop the West” plan could turn into a vulnerability if it increases China’s reliance on Xinjiang energy and transit routes.

“That’s going to raise the stakes to make sure that the region is kept quiet and keep the people from going out into the streets whenever they think they have a reason to do so,” said Ebel.

China is also developing a variety of energy import routes from Russia and southeast Asia, reducing the risk of a strategic crisis with energy supplies over time, Ebel said. But the long stretches of pipeline through Xinjiang’s vast mountains and deserts would be impossible to protect if they become targets.

“You cannot protect a pipeline along its entire length,” Ebel said, though he believes China will try to minimize the risk of disruption by threatening harsh punishments.

Starr said the best course for Beijing to protect its energy investments in Xinjiang would be to address Uyghur complaints.

True Autonomy

“The easiest thing for the Chinese to do would be to acknowledge that they’re not dealing with separatists, they’re not dealing with Islamic extremists,” he said.

Granting true autonomy to Xinjiang in keeping with its designation as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, first made by former Chairman Mao Zedong, would likely satisfy the demands of the majority of Uyghurs, Starr argued.

“It would guarantee the security of energy transit through the region and the extraction industries including oil and gas that are based there,” he said.

Starr said that Uyghurs’ main complaints are that they do not have enough voice in government, feel outnumbered by incoming Han Chinese and do not get a fair share of the region’s wealth.

“If China addresses [these complaints], it will increase its energy security, not decrease it,” Starr said.

Original reporting by Michael Lelyveld. Edited for the Web by Richard Finney.

https://www.rfa.org/english/commentaries/energy_watch/energy-risk-07132009103219.html

July 13, 2009
Washington is Playing a Deeper Game with China

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, July 11, 2009

https://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-is-playing-a-deeper-game-with-china/14327

After the tragic events of July 5 in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, it would be useful to look more closely into the actual role of the US Government’s ”independent“ NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). All indications are that the US Government, once more acting through its “private” Non-Governmental Organization, the NED, is massively intervening into the internal politics of China.

The reasons for Washington’s intervention into Xinjiang affairs seems to have little to do with concerns over alleged human rights abuses by Beijing authorities against Uyghur people. It seems rather to have very much to do with the strategic geopolitical location of Xinjiang on the Eurasian landmass and its strategic importance for China’s future economic and energy cooperation with Russia, Kazakhastan and other Central Asia states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The major organization internationally calling for protests in front of Chinese embassies around the world is the Washington, D.C.-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC).

The WUC manages to finance a staff, a very fancy website in English, and has a very close relation to the US Congress-funded NED. According to published reports by the NED itself, the World Uyghur Congress receives $215,000.00 annually from the National Endowment for Democracy for “human rights research and advocacy projects.” The president of the WUC is an exile Uyghur who describes herself as a “laundress turned millionaire,” Rebiya Kadeer, who also serves as president of the Washington D.C.-based Uyghur American Association, another Uyghur human rights organization which receives significant funding from the US Government via the National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED was intimately involved in financial support to various organizations behind the Lhasa ”Crimson Revolution“ in March 2008, as well as the Saffron Revolution in Burma/Myanmar and virtually every regime change destabilization in eastern Europe over the past years from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Kyrgystan to Teheran in the aftermath of the recent elections.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in a published interview in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The NED money is channelled through four “core foundations”. These are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to Obama’s Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the US Chamber of Commerce.

The salient question is what has the NED been actively doing that might have encouraged the unrest in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and what is the Obama Administration policy in terms of supporting or denouncing such NED-financed intervention into sovereign politics of states which Washington deems a target for pressure? The answers must be found soon, but one major step to help clarify Washington policy under the new Obama Administration would be for a full disclosure by the NED, the US State Department and NGO’s linked to the US Government, of their involvement, if at all, in encouraging Uyghur separatism or unrest. Is it mere coincidence that the Uyghur riots take place only days following the historic meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

Uyghur exile organizations, China and Geopolitics

On May 18 this year, the US-government’s in-house “private” NGO, the NED, according to the official WUC website, hosted a seminal human rights conference entitled East Turkestan: 60 Years under Communist Chinese Rule, along with a curious NGO with the name, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO).

The Honorary President and founder of the UNPO is one Erkin Alptekin, an exile Uyghur who founded UNPO while working for the US Information Agency’s official propaganda organization, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as Director of their Uygur Division and Assistant Director of the Nationalities Services.

Alptekin also founded the World Uyghur Congress at the same time, in 1991, while he was with the US Information Agency. The official mission of the USIA when Alptekin founded the World Uyghur Congress in 1991 was “to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the [USA] national interest…” Alptekin was the first president of WUC, and, according to the official WUC website, is a “close friend of the Dalai Lama.”

Closer examination reveals that UNPO in turn to be an American geopolitical strategist’s dream organization. It was formed, as noted, in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing and most of the land area of Eurasia was in political and economic chaos. Since 2002 its Director General has been Archduke Karl von Habsburg of Austria who lists his (unrecognized by Austria or Hungary) title as “Prince Imperial of Austria and Royal Prince of Hungary.”

Among the UNPO principles is the right to ‘self-determination’ for the 57 diverse population groups who, by some opaque process not made public, have been admitted as official UNPO members with their own distinct flags, with a total population of some 150 million peoples and headquarters in the Hague, Netherlands.

UNPO members range from Kosovo which “joined” when it was fully part of then Yugoslavia in 1991. It includes the “Aboriginals of Australia” who were listed as founding members along with Kosovo. It includes the Buffalo River Dene Nation indians of northern Canada.

The select UNPO members also include Tibet which is listed as a founding member. It also includes other explosive geopolitical areas as the Crimean Tartars, the Greek Minority in Romania, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (in Russia), the Democratic Movement of Burma, and the gulf enclave adjacent to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and which just happens to hold rights to some of the world’s largest offshore oil fields leased to Condi Rice’s old firm, Chevron Oil. Further geopolitical hotspots which have been granted elite recognition by the UNPO membership include the large section of northern Iran which designates itself as Southern Azerbaijan, as well as something that calls itself Iranian Kurdistan.

In April 2008 according to the website of the UNPO, the US Congress’ NED sponsored a “leadership training” seminar for the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) together with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. Over 50 Uyghurs from around the world together with prominent academics, government representatives and members of the civil society gathered in Berlin Germany to discuss “Self-Determination under International Law.” What they discussed privately is not known. Rebiya Kadeer gave the keynote address.

The suspicious timing of the Xinjiang riots

The current outbreak of riots and unrest in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in the northwest part of China, exploded on July 5 local time.

According to the website of the World Uyghur Congress, the “trigger” for the riots was an alleged violent attack on June 26 in China’s southern Guangdong Province at a toy factory where the WUC alleges that Han Chinese workers attacked and beat to death two Uyghur workers for allegedly raping or sexually molesting two Han Chinese women workers in the factory. On July 1, the Munich arm of the WUC issued a worldwide call for protest demonstrations against Chinese embassies and consulates for the alleged Guangdong attack, despite the fact they admitted the details of the incident were unsubstantiated and filled with allegations and dubious reports.

According to a press release they issued, it was that June 26 alleged attack that gave the WUC the grounds to issue their worldwide call to action.

On July 5, a Sunday in Xinjiang but still the USA Independence Day, July 4, in Washington, the WUC in Washington claimed that Han Chinese armed soldiers seized any Uyghur they found on the streets and according to official Chinese news reports, widespread riots and burning of cars along the streets of Urumqi broke out resulting over the following three days in over 140 deaths.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency said that protesters from the Uighur Muslim ethnic minority group began attacking ethnic Han pedestrians, burning vehicles and attacking buses with batons and rocks. “They took to the street…carrying knives, wooden batons, bricks and stones,” they cited an eyewitness as saying. The French AFP news agency quoted Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Uighur American Association in Washington, that according to his information, police had begun shooting “indiscriminately” at protesting crowds.

Two different versions of the same events: The Chinese government and pictures of the riots indicate it was Uyghur riot and attacks on Han Chinese residents that resulted in deaths and destruction. French official reports put the blame on Chinese police “shooting indiscriminately.” Significantly, the French AFP report relies on the NED-funded Uyghur American Association of Rebiya Kadeer for its information. The reader should judge if the AFP account might be motivated by a US geopolitical agenda, a deeper game from the Obama Administration towards China’s economic future.

Is it merely coincidence that the riots in Xinjiang by Uyghur organizations broke out only days after the meeting took place in Yakaterinburg, Russia of the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as Iran as official observer guest, represented by President Ahmadinejad?

Over the past few years, in the face of what is seen as an increasingly hostile and incalculable United States foreign policy, the major nations of Eurasia—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan have increasingly sought ways of direct and more effective cooperation in economic as well as security areas. In addition, formal Observer status within SCO has been given to Iran, Pakistan, India and Mongolia. The SCO defense ministers are in regular and growing consultation on mutual defense needs, as NATO and the US military command continue provocatively to expand across the region wherever it can.

The Strategic Importance of Xinjiang for Eurasian Energy Infrastructure

There is another reason for the nations of the SCO, a vital national security element, to having peace and stability in China’s Xinjiang region. Some of China’s most important oil and gas pipeline routes pass directly through Xinjiang province. Energy relations between Kazkhstan and China are of enormous strategic importance for both countries, and allow China to become less dependent on oil supply sources that can be cut off by possible US interdiction should relations deteriorate to such a point.

Kazak President Nursultan Nazarbayev paid a State visit in April 2009 to Beijing. The talks concerned deepening economic cooperation, above all in the energy area, where Kazkhastan holds huge reserves of oil and likely as well of natural gas. After the talks in Beijing, Chinese media carried articles with such titles as “”Kazakhstani oil to fill in the Great Chinese pipe.”

The Atasu-Alashankou pipeline to be completed in 2009 will provide transportation of transit gas to China via Xinjiang. As well Chinese energy companies are involved in construction of a Zhanazholskiy gas processing plant, Pavlodar electrolyze plant and Moynakskaya hydro electric station in Kazakhstan.

According to the US Government’s Energy Information Administration, Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field is the largest oil field outside the Middle East and the fifth largest in the world in terms of reserves, located off the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, near the city of Atyrau. China has built a 613-mile-long pipeline from Atasu, in northwestern Kazakhstan, to Alashankou at the border of China’s Xinjiang region which is exporting Caspian oil to China. PetroChina’s ChinaOil is the exclusive buyer of the crude oil on the Chinese side. The pipeline is a joint venture of CNPC and Kaztransoil of Kazkhstan. Some 85,000 bbl/d of Kazakh crude oil flowed through the pipeline during 2007. China’s CNPC is also involved in other major energy projects with Kazkhstan. They all traverse China’s Xinjiang region.

In 2007 CNPC signed an agreement to invest more than $2 billion to construct a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to China. That pipeline would start at Gedaim on the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and extend 1,100 miles through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to Khorgos in China’s Xinjiang region. Turkmenistan and China have signed a 30-year supply agreement for the gas that would fill the pipeline. CNPC has set up two entities to oversee the Turkmen upstream project and the development of a second pipeline that will cross China from the Xinjiang region to southeast China at a cost of some $7 billion.

As well, Russia and China are discussing major natural gas pipelines from eastern Siberia through Xinjiang into China. Eastern Siberia contains around 135 Trillion cubic feet of proven plus probable natural gas reserves. The Kovykta natural gas field could give China with natural gas in the next decade via a proposed pipeline.

During the current global economic crisis, Kazakhstan received a major credit from China of $10 billion, half of which is for oil and gas sector. The oil pipeline Atasu-Alashankou and the gas pipeline China-Central Asia, are an instrument of strategic ‘linkage’ of central Asian countries to the economy China. That Eurasian cohesion from Russia to China across Central Asian countries is the geopolitical cohesion Washington most fears. While they would never say so, growing instability in Xinjiang would be an ideal way for Washington to weaken that growing cohesion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization nations.

William Engdahl is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.

July 13, 2009
MASSACRE IN EASTERN TURKISTAN by Hasan Celal Guzel

Columnist Hasan Celal Guzel comments on the unrest in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. A summary of his column is as follows:

“Do you know what place, outside Turkey itself, has the world’s largest Turkish population? Eastern Turkistan… There are nearly 38 million Uighur Turks living in eastern Turkistan now, despite the genocidal policies they have faced. The Uighur Turks are the grandchildren of a great culture and civilization which established the Hun, Gokturk, Uighur and Karahanli states, and they are our kin. Did you notice the flag a Uighur Turkish woman was carrying in news reports from Urumchi (the region’s capital) this week? This flag is the same as ours, except for its color. The Uighur Turks in eastern Turkistan have a highly developed Turkish consciousness.

Eastern Turkistan voluntarily attached itself to the Ottoman Empire during the Yakup Khan era (1820-1887). Yakup Bey sent his son, Yakup Khan Tore (Hodja Tore), to seek help from the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz, who then dispatched ships and weapons to Eastern Turkistan. Unfortunately, the region was invaded by the Chinese after Yakup Bey’s death in 1878, but in the 1930s the Uighur Turks rejected the occupation and, after a series of battles, declared the Eastern Turkistan Islam Republic in 1933, and the Eastern Turkistan Republic in 1944. But following communist China’s 1949 invasion, the territory was renamed the Xinjiang (Sincan) Uighur Autonomous Region, and Eastern Turkistan Turks have been trying to survive China’s occupation, captivity and atrocities ever since.

The late Uighur Turkish leader Isa Yusuf Alptekin, who was my close friend, said that forces have tried to silently erase the Eastern Turkistan Turks from history. The massacre of Uighur Turks by the Chinese army and paramilitaries in Urumchi is happening in front of the eyes of the entire world. Although the official death toll is 156, we know that more than 1,000 Turks have been killed and 6,000 Uighur young people who were detained are being threatened with death. Even as the region’s Chinese governor said that the Turks protesting the cruel regime would be executed, he guaranteed protection to migrant Chinese Hans living there. What’s happening in Eastern Turkistan is no mere massacre, but a genocide. Muslim Turks are used as guinea pigs in nuclear tests; babies are killed due to obligatory abortions; everybody who seeks the right to a humane life and liberty is executed without due process; Chinese militant migrants are being systematically settled in the region year after year; and hundreds of thousands of young people are forced to work in torture work camps. In short, there are widespread and blatant violations of human rights.

In our country, Turks are called to account for Armenians who were made to emigrate 100 years ago, but nobody talks about the millions of Turks who were massacred in Rumeli, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Some 800,000 Iraqi Turks who were killed and forced to migrate following the US invasion of Iraq are now all but lost. Think about it: if even a small fraction of the events in Eastern Turkistan had happened somewhere else in the world, how loud would the criticism be? Seyit Tumturk, head of the East Turkistan Culture and Solidarity Association, told me that Uighur Turk leader Rabia Kader might be brought from Washington to Ankara to address the Uighur Turks at a press conference and calm down the situation. We welcome this suggestion. If we stay silent in the face of this massacre so as not to ruin our relations with China, we would be culpable in the eyes of the Turkish nation and history. The remarks made so far from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu are praiseworthy. But they need to do more. Alptekin wrote shortly before his death that as long as the Eastern Turkistan issue isn’t solved humanely and the sun of liberty doesn’t rise in his country, a stain will forever mark his people. He added that he hoped Turkey would work to solve the Eastern Turkistan issue. We all should second this wish.”

Turkish Press Review, 9.7.2009

Aloso other related news / articles:

China Bans Public Gatherings in Urumqi Amid Mourning

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics?pid=20601080

Death Toll Debated In China’s Rioting

Officially, 184 People Died on Sunday

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/11/AR2009071100464.html?hpid=topnews

A Strongman Is China’s Rock in Ethnic Strife

As ethnic Han gangs roamed the streets of Urumqi on Tuesday at dusk, seeking revenge against Muslim Uighur rioters who killed scores of Han two nights earlier, a balding Communist Party bureaucrat abruptly appeared on the city’s television screens to call for calm.

China’s Ethnic Fault Lines

Rising tensions and resistance to Beijing’s control challenge China’s ‘harmonious’ society

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203547904574279952210843672

China’s Ethnic Fault Lines

Rising tensions and resistance to Beijing’s control challenge China’s ‘harmonious’ society

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203547904574279952210843672

A Guide to China’s Ethnic Groups

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/08/AR2009070802718.html?hpid=topnews

Rumbles on the Rim of China’s Empire

July 12, 2009
An Ethnic Struggle in China Goes Global

Ethnicity without borders: Han Chinese mob in Urumqi in search of Uighurs (top); Supporters of Uighurs protest outside Chinese consulate in Istanbul

Thanks to electronic media, Uighur protests spawn ethnic pandemic

Dru Gladney

YaleGlobal, 9 July 2009

CLAREMONT: It took just a few minutes for news of the attack on Muslim migrant workers that left at least two dead in a toy factory in Southern China to travel 3000 miles to their homeland, the Uighur Autonomous Region known as Xinjiang. Ten days later, the ensuing riot in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and largest city in all of Central Asia, led to 156 dead and over 1500 arrested. Iranian-style, the Chinese government not only reacted swiftly and harshly to the protesters, but also attempted to seal off the region and shut down all international communications and access to global media. They did, however, cover much of the uprising on their own state-run television stations and allowed foreign journalists into the riot zone.

Sympathy protests have not only spread to the traditionally restive southern oasis towns of Kashgar and Khotan, but also as far away as the Netherlands, Munich and Istanbul, where large numbers of Uighurs have staged protests in front of the Chinese embassies.

The Chinese government has blamed a female Muslim American émigré Rebiya Kadeer, as well as international organizations based in Washington, DC, Munich and London, for “masterminding” the uprising from afar. At the same time, in Washington, the US government is preparing for the release of the remaining 17 Uighurs from Guantánamo, Cuba to the tiny island country of Palau (after previously resettling several others in Bermuda and Albania). From the South Pacific, to the Caribbean, to Southern China, to the heart of Central Asia, to the capitals of the major Western states, a previously unknown group of Muslims from a remote corner of China have captured the world’s attention. The new media of Twitter, Skype, YouTube, video- and text-messaging have linked these disparate peoples and places like never before, contributing to perhaps the world’s first “ethnic pandemic.” Spreading across China and around the globe almost instantaneously, the events in Urumqi have brought attention to a minority Muslim people of whom most had never heard.

After decades of civil war, the region known as Eastern Turkestan was brought firmly under Chinese control when it was “peacefully liberated” by the PLA in 1949. At that time, the Han population was approximately five percent of the total, with the Uighur population in the vast majority. The unchecked migration into the region of the Han, who have often received preference for both skilled and unskilled jobs, has further marginalized the indigenous Uighurs, especially the younger male working population. Not finding work at home, and prevented from travelling abroad, many of these Uighur men have been forced to look for work across China, leading to ethnic rivalry of the kind seen recently in the Xuji toy factory in Shaoguan, Guandong.

Some believe this contagion could have been stopped at the border. Resembling less the Tibetan unrest of 2008 than the Rodney King riots of 1990s Los Angeles (when a brutal beating of an African-American man by the police triggered widespread violence), this uprising is the worst violence in Xinjiang since the founding of the People’s Republic (which will celebrate its 60th anniversary this year); and it has nothing to do with separatism, terrorism or the Islamic religion. Yet China makes little distinction between separatists, terrorists, and civil rights activists – whether they are Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese or Falun Gong members. This “mass incident” was precipitated by fatal attacks on Uighur workers, mentioned above, due to an “unintentional scream” of a female Han Chinese worker who now admits being startled when she mistakenly walked into a male Uighur workers’ dormitory. This led to the spread of a false rumor that the Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women, disseminated by Han workers disgruntled by over 800 Uighurs from Xinjiang receiving priority for jobs in the factory. (There are now approximately 1.5 million ethnic minorities working in Guangdong alone through a state-sponsored preferential employment program.) Yet the underlying ethnic tensions in Xinjiang that provided fertile pre-conditions for such an angry response suggests that a cure might not be easily found.

For the past 50 years, the Chinese government has tried through minority affirmative action policies and strict controls to integrate the region known as Eastern Turkestan into a “harmonious” part of the People’s Republic. The last census taken in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region revealed that though the nearly 8.4 million Uighur residents maintain a bare majority in their own land, the resident Han Chinese population has risen to 38% (the Uighur population stands at 42%). Nevertheless in terms of education, health and mortality, the Uighur lag far behind the Han in quality of life, and even behind most other Muslim groups in the region. (There are seven other official Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, including over 1 million Kazakhs and 500,000 Hui, as well as Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and others).

Despite the extraordinary transformation of the region due to economic investment and infrastructural development, with the goals of harvesting its vast mineral and oil deposits and further integrating the region into China, the Uighur people believe they have not benefitted as much as have the masses of Han migrants living in “their” homeland. The viral dissemination of this conflict suggests that global communications not only foster greater awareness of this region, but may even exacerbate its underlying problems.

The tensions between Han and Uighur in Xinjiang have been simmering for decades, but the downturn in China’s economy as part of the global fiscal crisis has caused further pressure, as the Uighurs feel discriminated against in their own region. The fact that protests took place initially in Urumqi, where Uighurs are only 12.8 percent of the population and Han are 75.3 percent, is significant in that previously most of the violent incidents took place in the southern oasis towns such as Kashgar, Khorla, and Khotan, where Uighurs are much more numerous. Due to the rural nature and inaccessibility of these towns, separated by vast deserts and high mountains, news rarely reached the outside world. Now, thanks to the widespread availability of electronic media, especially in urban centers like Urumqi, the Uighurs can give voice to their anger and seek world sympathy.

All pandemics have three aspects: the initial virus, the vector transmission and an available host. The viral pre-conditions for this epidemic include severe unemployment, unequal opportunities, uneven distribution of wealth and ethnic discrimination. The new media that allow for rapid global dissemination provide many different vectors for transmission of information as well as dis-information. The available hosts are now dispersed worldwide through an active and increasingly connected Uighur diaspora, who are concerned for their people and seek to effect change in their homeland. Some estimate that there are nearly a million Uighurs outside of China, with the majority of them dispersed across Central Asia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States. Increasingly, the Uighur community in Washington, DC, led by Rebiya Kadeer, is speaking with a more unified voice. Following the example of the Tibetan Government in Exile, it has disavowed independence, supported greater autonomy and peaceful resolution of conflicts, and rejected violence and radical Islam.

After the riots in Tibet last year, the world is beginning to see that Xinjiang faces many problems related to sovereignty and Chinese rule, and that these problems have less to do with religious conflict than with social justice, ethnic relations, and equal opportunity. Given the ubiquity of the new media, it will be impossible to quarantine the ethnic pandemic spreading across China and indeed the world. News and popular expression have continued to Twitter out of China despite the government’s efforts to halt its spread. A remedy needs to be found not in shutting down these new media, but in addressing the complaints and general well-being of its populace.

Dru Gladney’s most recent book is Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and other Subaltern Subjects. He is President of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College.

July 11, 2009
Urumqi: a Quiet “Open Prison”

2009-07-10

A man contacted by RFA in Urumqi tells about his fears while the official Chinese media strive to portray a city under control and life back to normal.

RFA

Chinese People’s Armed Police in front of the Grand Bazaar in Urumqi, on July 9.

Official Chinese media are describing the city of Urumqi as “quiet” following several days of ethnic violence between Muslim Uyghurs and the majority Han Chinese.

“Major streets in Urumqi seemed peaceful Friday,” said the official Xinhua news agency.

“Life back to normal in Urumqi,” said a caption over a Xinhua picture showing residents buying vegetables in a market.

But Uyghurs, who say their grievances are routinely ignored and suppressed as “separatism” by Beijing, describe the atmosphere as anything but normal.

One man in Urumqi, reached by telephone by RFA, said that for its Uyghur minority, Urumqi was “an open prison.”

Xinhua did acknowledge that “security remained tight” and that “some mosques were shut on Friday “for security reasons.”

By RFA’s count, only two mosques were open in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) with a population of 2.3 million people.

White mosque opened

On Friday, Uyghur men demanded that they be admitted to the White Mosque near the neighborhood where some of the worst violence occurred following Uyghur protests, a police crackdown, and ethnic clashes that left at least 184 dead, according to an official Xinhua report.

A New China News agency (Xinhua) picture showing “Urumqi residents buying vegetables at a market,” as proof that normalcy has returned to the regional capital on July 10.

The police decided to open the mosque, apparently in order to avoid yet another clash.

According to the Associated Press, a group of 10 policemen blocked a small demonstration not far from the White Mosque.

About 40 Uyghur men and women “began to march, shouting, crying and pumping their fists in the air as they walked.”

“The Uyghur people are afraid,” said Madina Ahtam, a woman in a multicolored headscarf, who spoke English. “Do you understand? We are afraid. … The problem? Police.”

Police “pushed journalists away from the area and detained at least four foreign journalists, holding them for several hours.”

Death toll

China on Saturday issued its latest casualty figures – 137 ethnic Han Chinese and 46 Uyghurs. A man of Hui nationality was also reported to have been killed.

Many Uyghurs believe that this understates the Uyghur death toll.

In an interview on Friday with AP Television, Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uyghur leader, said that China’s casualty toll for the unrest has greatly understated the number of Uyghur killed.

The man contacted by RFA said that Uyghurs were currently unable to move freely around the city.

The man’s name is not disclosed in order to protect him from retaliation.

“We cannot go out freely,” he said. “Whenever they see some Uyghur people gathering up, they are forcing them to go inside.”

“Fully armed police are marching around in the street, in front of our doors. Just below my house, there are police officers, and they can break in and take me away at any time.”

This man seemed to express a kind desperation displayed by many in the city.

“The heart of the Uyghur people in our land is broken,” he said. “We can only ask God for help. No one is here to protect us.”

Foreign reactions

Overseas, The Organization of the Islamic (OIC) condemned the “disproportionate” use of force in Xinjiang, according to Agence France-Presse.

The OIC called on China to carry out an “honest” investigation into the clashes and find those responsible for the killings.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters that the issue should be taken to the United Nations’ Security Council.

The head of Indonesia’s largest Muslim political party, the Prosperous Justice Party, called for the U.N. and Western countries to put pressure on China to stop the “slaughter” of Uyghurs and Han Chinese.

Original reporting in Uyghur by Erkin. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamber. Written for the Web by Dan Southerland.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/eyewitness-07102009094007.html

July 11, 2009