East Turkistan(Xinjiang)'s culture being 'renovated' by Han majority


Chinese version of progress rankles Muslim minority


ANDREW CHUNG


SPECIAL TO THE STAR


KASHGAR—The Chinese word chai is made up of seven brush strokes that obliquely slash their way through each other, perhaps fittingly, since it means, "demolish."


Recently, the word was ominously painted upon dozens of mud-and-brick homes and businesses in the old Uighur neighbourhoods that make up the heart of this dusty frontier city, warning, like gang-markings for death, of their impending destruction.


Kashgar, once a Silk Road oasis on the fringes of China's northwest Xinjiang province, is under renovation.


Hundreds of traditional buildings have already been knocked down, and along with them their distinctive Uighur and Arabic architecture that evokes hundreds of years of history — the very things tourists come so far to see.


The government has also started renovating around the 15th-century Id Kah mosque — the largest Muslim worship site in China where hundreds of new stores and restaurants soon will convert the environs into a commercial magnet.


It's not surprising that China's relentless economic rise would reach its hinterland.


But the transformation, so welcome in other cities, is only making the relationship between the Chinese and Kashgar's independence-minded Uighurs — marred over the years by bombings, violence and death — worse than it already is.


"I am very worried that I will have to move far away," says Tursan, a silk and fabric seller.


"We have no other choice but to accept it. We're afraid to disagree."


Most Uighurs walking along Chasa Rd. — amid the familiar din of ruddy-faced men pounding copper, the thick smoke of charred lamb and the whiff of spiced tea — don't want their full names published, saying they fear recriminations for criticizing government policy.


All along its median, though, Uighur men — and boys — are ripping up the dirt road in preparation for a wide, new paved one. Buildings have been marked for demolition.


"When my shop is destroyed, what will I do?" a shoemaker asks. "How will I earn a living? I am so poor as it is. Just look at my own shoes."


Indeed, his toes peek out of broken, leather flaps.


"I'm not against development," he says. "But most Uighurs in Kashgar are very poor. Now, they are destroying what little we have."


For some, the old heart of Kashgar is a beautiful snapshot of history; for others, it's an eyesore.


The earthy brown adobe dwellings, some set high on lumpy hills, stand peacefully along narrow, winding alleyways that, during the day, alternate dim shade and blinding sunlight.


Most of the homes have no toilets or even running water.


Walls are slowly crumbling and nearly everyone complains they are too small.


"Some places are not safe," says driver Akbar Ablimit, who recently moved into a modern apartment and sends his children to Chinese schools.


"The government is doing a good job cleaning up the city."


Some areas will be improved rather than demolished. And residents forced to move will, in theory, be given compensation. In practice, however, many families fall through the gaps.


Even those who counsel the government on tourism issues fear it is moving too fast.


"I have advised them not to destroy too much," says John Hun, a major tour operator. "Otherwise, they will look back and say, `Where is the history?'"


One travel agent rubs his fingers together and says: "A lot of people are making a lot of money off this."


For the majority of Uighurs, Kashgar's renovation is simply another slap in the face.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


`There are Uighurs in government, but we all know they are just dolls'


Yasin, restaurant waiter in Kashgar


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Their identity, based on their Turkic-language and Islamic faith, is ethnically entirely distinct from that of the Han Chinese — the country's majority ethnic group.


And Kashgar is as far away from Beijing, China's capital, as Vancouver is from Toronto.


Uighurs have been struggling for independence since the 18th century, when the region they call "East Turkestan" was swallowed by the Qing dynasty.


There is a fierce mistrust of the Han, who for years have migrated — with Beijing's encouragement — to Xinjiang.


In 1949, when the new Communist government was pledging more Uighur autonomy, the Han made up just 5 per cent of the province's population. At more than 40 per cent now, they are set to eclipse the Uighurs' dominance.


In part, this has helped Beijing develop the northwest's vast mineral and oil riches, leading to 11 per cent economic growth last year — better than in the rest of China.


But observers note that it's mostly the Han who benefit with preferential access to the best jobs, better education and domination of the region's commerce.


It's true for all of Xinjiang's cities that, compared with Uighurs, the Han live in newer neighbourhoods. Signs are written in Chinese, with Uighur an afterthought.


At the Kashgar airport, announcements are only in Chinese, and absurdly, English.


Generally, the two groups stay away from each other. Han student Wen Sen says the relationship is "getting better," yet he still won't approach a Uighur on the street.


Similarly, Uighur foodstall owner Akbar says: "We don't like each other. They think we are all like (Osama) bin Laden or Saddam Hussein."


The Chinese government has harshly curtailed religious freedom in the past, and Uighurs will not forgive Beijing for using the Taklimakan Desert as a nuclear test site.


Now, they think it is the Han who have decided to destroy their homes and businesses in Kashgar.


"There are Uighurs in government, but we all know they are just dolls," says Yasin, a restaurant waiter.


Colin Mackerras, a professor of Chinese studies at Brisbane's Griffith University, says traditional culture is being lost as the city gets "Sinocized." And while development raises peoples' incomes, he adds, the Chinese "could be more sensitive about it."


"In theory, the Uighurs are in charge, but in practice the Chinese influence is much greater," says Mackerras, who studies China's minorities.


Uighur separatists show no reticence about using violence. The 1990s saw widespread riots and murders of Han in Kashgar, with the government calling in army and air support. Officials blamed a 1997 Beijing bus bombing on Uighur extremists and the United States has placed one Uighur group on its list of terrorist organizations.


In response, Chinese authorities viciously cracked down on separatist activities among Uighurs and continue to publicize the executions of those it calls terrorists.


Recently, though, keen to attract investment, Beijing has portrayed the relationship as improving and seems to have eased its chokehold on religious activities.


The provincial chairman said at a recent press briefing that the security situation "is very good."


But the relationship is anything but stable. In fact, earlier this year, a vicious gang fight between Han and Uighur middle school students brandishing knives and machetes broke out in the small Xinjiang petroleum city of Karamay, sources there told the Star.


And the renovation in Kashgar, Uighurs say, is only making people more restive.


Inside the Id Kah, a large sign explains what the government has done for the mosque over the years, including the addition of toilets and extra rooms.


"The Chinese government pays special attention to the religious and historical cultures of the ethnic groups," says the sign. "And such policies ... are very popular."


Not so, it seems, for many in Kashgar

Payvand's Iran News ...


6/24/04


Report on the death penalty worldwide lists China, Iran and Iraq as top executioners for 2003


Hands Off Cain's 2004 report, edited by Elisabetta Zamparutti and published in Italian by Marsilio, is dedicated to Levy Mwanawasa, the President of Zambia. President Mwanawasa is also the author of the foreword to this year磗 edition.


Since his election in 2001, President Mwanawasa has given a strong boost to the process of democratisation in the country. A strongly abolitionist Baptist, he has moreover refused to sign any death warrants since he took office.


In April 2003, he set up a constitutional review commission with the abolition of the death penalty as one of the terms of reference for its tasks.


On May 21, 2003, President Mwanawasa refused to authorise the execution of scores of people, and decided to commute their death sentences to life in prison instead.


On February 27, 2004 he commuted the death sentences of 44 soldiers convicted of treason to jail terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. He has also announced that Government intends to propose the abolition of the death penalty to Parliament. In the meanwhile, he has ordered the review of all capital trials that resulted in death verdicts.


On May 7, 2004, President Mwanawasa commuted a further 15 death sentences, handed out for murder and robbery with violence, to jail terms of between 20 and 50 years.


The last execution in Zambia took place in January 1997, when in a single day, eight people were put to death. Since then, Zambia has had a de facto moratorium on capital punishment, that continues to be observed thanks to the firm beliefs of President Mwanawasa, who has declared that: "You cannot be slaughtering people like chickens and I will not sign any death warrant for as long as I remain president. I do not want to be the chief hanger."


THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTS OF 2003


The worldwide situation to date


The worldwide situation concerning the death penalty has once again registered a trend towards abolition in the past year. The countries or territories that to different extents have decided to give up the practice of capital punishment total 133, including the first months of 2004. Of these 81 have abolished the death penalty completely; 14 have abolished it for ordinary crimes; 1, Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe is committed to abolish it and in the meanwhile apply a moratorium on executions; 5 are observing moratoriums and 32 countries are de facto abolitionist, not having carried out executions for at least 10 years.


Countries that retain the death penalty number 63 - this is 3 down from 2002, when there were 66 retentionist states - and not all of these put people to death regularly. In 2003, in fact, only 29 retentionists carried out executions. This was 5 countries less that executed people than in 2002, when 34 states were recorded as having carried out executions. Yet the number of known executions for 2003 is significantly higher than the 2002 total: 5,599 executions to 4,101 the previous year. This increase is attributable to the simple fact that Chinese officials, for the first time, released near official statistics on the number of executions carried out annually in China, where information relating to capital punishment is classed as a state secret. At least 5,000 executions were carried out in the country in 2003, but the number was again probably much higher. Even this figure is already considerably higher than the ones given in previous years by the media and abolitionist organizations.


In relative terms therefore, the number of executions worldwide has in fact diminished in comparison to previous years.


Asia however remains the continent that executes the highest number of people. Considering that in China there were at least 5,000 executions, the total of executions in Asia for 2003 amounts to 5,474. In 2002, 3,946 executions had been recorded in Asia, but the number of reported executions in China, the top executioner worldwide, was always thought to be much lower than reality.


Africa continues to cut down on the use of capital punishment: 56 executions were recorded continent-wide in 2003, down 7 from the 63 registered in 2002.


Europe would be a death-penalty free zone if it wasn磘 for Belarus that in 2003 carried out at least 1 execution.


North and South America would also be death penalty free, were it not for the 65 people put to death in the United States (down from 71 in 2002) and the 3 people put to death in Cuba after a few years of suspension of capital punishment.


Top executioners for 2003: China, Iran and Iraq


Of the 63 countries worldwide retain the death penalty, 48 are dictatorial, authoritarian or illiberal states. These countries accounted for at least 5,525 executions, or 98.7% of the world total of executions in 2003. One country alone, China, carried out at least 5,000, or 89.3% of the executions that took place during 2003. Iran was responsible for at least 154 executions. Iraq, up to April 9 when US Central Command chief General Tommy Franks suspended the death penalty - as the US-led coalition invaded the country and toppled Saddam Hussein磗 regime - had already executed at least 113 people.


Vietnam carried out 69 executions; Saudi Arabia 52; Kazakhstan at least 19; Pakistan at least 18; Singapore at least 14; and Sudan at least 13.


Many of these countries do not issue official statistics on the practice of the death penalty therefore the number of executions may be much higher. In some countries, executions are completely covert, and news of them does not even filter through to the local media. Two cases in point are North Korea and Syria.


The conclusion that can be drawn from such a picture is that the definite solution to the problem of capital punishment - more than by tackling the issue in itself - is better achieved through the establishment of democracy, the rule of law and the promotion and respect of political rights and civil liberties.


Authoritarian states once again take the podium as the top executioners of the year in 2003: China, Iran and Iraq (up to April 9, 2004)


China, where reality exceeds the worst estimates


The number of death sentences passed, as the number of executions carried out, are classed as state secrets in China, nevertheless one fact emerges clearly: China is the world磗 top executioner. Information on the real extent of the judicial massacre that takes place in China is beginning to filter through sources within the ruling Communist regime. The number of people put to death in the PRC is much higher than the highest estimates by western media or abolitionist organisations.


In 2003, according to a judicial source, 5,000 people were executed in China. Chen Zhonglin, a member of the People磗 National Congress (Parliament) in Beijing, said that China carries out 10,000 executions every year. His declaration was published on the China Youth Daily in March 2004. This was the first time that a similar declaration was published by a state-controlled newspaper.


In Disidai, or The Fourth Generation a Communist Party member writing under the pseudonym Zong Hairen said 15,000 people had been sent to their death in China between 1998 and 2001. The book was published in 2002.


In June 2003, Chinese President Hu Jintao praised the 磗trike-hard?campaign launched in April 2001, that led to the execution of thousands of people, and announced that it would continue for at least another year. On December 11, People磗 Supreme Court President Xiao Yang called for the perpetuation of the campaign that had resulted in 819,000 death sentences or jail terms exceeding 5 years.


People accused of violent and non-violent crimes alike were fed to the shredder that is China磗 capital punishment system - terrorists and separatist militants, murderers and robbers, kidnappers and rapists, drug-traffickers and small time peddlers, smugglers of weapons and cigarettes, counterfeiters of banknotes and invoices, pimps and tomb-raiders, corrupters and corrupted - were put on trial in mass public rallies, forced to wear placards announcing their name and crime, and then taken to a field and shot.


China磗 Attorney General, Han Zubin, called for measures against "separatists, terrorists and adherents to evil cults" to be stepped up for the sake of "national security." In the five years up to 2003, 3,500 people had been charged with "crimes against the state", including murder, bomb attacks and arson, but also non-violent political dissent. Han confirmed that the total included suspected practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement branded an "evil cult" by the Communist authorities and outlawed in 1999.


China has also accused of terrorism activists for an enhanced Tibetan autonomy and leaders of the Uighur people in the Islamic northwest of the country.


In 2003, the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners to sell for transplants was once again denounced.


Iran, again in the top three


Iran, along with China, regularly features among the countries that execute most people in the world. Though China remains by far the most prolific executioner, Iran, in proportion to its population, applies capital punishment just as much. In 2003, 154 executions were recorded in Iran, including a woman and a minor. This total is significantly less than in 2002, when 316 executions were registered, including a woman stoned to death, but as with other illiberal countries, the real number of people put to death by the state is probably much higher. Iranian authorities do not issue official statistics on the death penalty, and HOC磗 total is based on news reports by Iranian media, that very likely do not carry news of every single execution.


Iran does not limit itself to the death penalty. Its interpretation of Sharia law prescribes whippings for sexual relations before marriage, lashings for drinking alcohol and amputation of hands and feet for petty thieves.


Iraq, the last executions under Saddam


The execution of political opponents and military 碿onspirators?- a hallmark of Saddam Hussein磗 regime - were kept up till its fall on April 9, 2003. The US Central Command suspended the use of the death penalty on that day, and the Coalition Provisional Authority upheld the ban. Capital punishment still features in Iraqi laws, and though the provisional constitution makes no mention of the death penalty, a new constitution in all probability will re-introduce it. On June 6, the newly-appointed Justice Minister Malek Dohan al Hassan affirmed that after the handover of power by the CPA to Iraqi authorities on June 30 his country would resume executions, and that the former president Saddam Hussein may be liable to it. This, HOC notes, would definitely not be the best way to present the new Iraq to the world.


Hands Off Cain recorded at least 113 executions for the first few months of 2003, the majority of which were carried out following summary trials. Past estimates for executions under Saddam Hussein磗 dictatorship seem to have fallen far short of the real number of victims - by tens of thousands. The Coalition Provisional Authority said that at least 300,000 people had been buried in mass graves. Officials from human rights organisations talked of 500,000 victims and some Iraqi political parties estimate that more than 1 million people were executed and buried in secret places.

assalam allaikum


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Assalam o 'aleikom



brothers and sisters could you please answer me something ?? is it allowed for a muslim man to grow his hair long ?


I heard Men could grow there hair to shoulder length, please if any of you know and could help me i would appreciate it


shokrenn

Rumsfeld approved use of dogs, clothing removal, hooding


JUNE 23--In a bid to counter charges that military leaders approved the torture of suspected al-Qaeda detainees, the Department of Defense yesterday released classified memos detailing the U.S. government's evolving interrogation (or "counter-resistance strategies") policies with regard to prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. On the following pages, you'll find a selection of these DoD memos, beginning with the below October 2002 request from a Gitmo commander seeking approval of certain interrogation methods, including the removal of clothing, using dogs to intimidate inmates, and "the use of stress-positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours." In a December 2002 "action memo," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved most of the tactics, though he scribbled a note wondering about the efficacy of one approach: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" In January 2003, Rumsfeld rescinded his approval of many of the interrogation techniques pending a DoD study. In April 2003, Rumsfeld issued a memo describing the newly approved counter-resistance techniques for "unlawful combatants" held at Guantanamo Bay. (14 pages)


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Joshua Kurlantzick


From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2004


Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland. Edited by S. Frederick Starr. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004, 528 pp. $89.95


Summary: Three new books detail Xinjiang's long history of oppression. As they show, Beijing's rule there has always been harsh -- but never so bad as in the last few years.


Joshua Kurlantzick is Foreign Editor of The New Republic.


You've Got Dissent: Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing's Counter Strategies


Michael Chase and James Charles Mulvenon. Santa Monica: Rand, 2002.


China's Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy


Anita Chan. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.


Rights Beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle Over Human Rights


Rosemary Foot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.


The Tiananmen Papers


By Andrew J. Nathan


Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001


East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia


Daniel A. Bell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.


"Xinjiang -- China's Muslim Far Northwest." Michael Dillon. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003, 201 pp. $95.00.


"Wild West China: The Taming of Xinjiang." Christian Tyler. London: John Murray, 2003, 320 pp. ?0.00 (paper, ?.99).


After 1949, Beijing's brutal pacification of Xinjiang -- a vast province in western China -- was almost completely ignored in the West for the next 40 years. Unlike other groups persecuted by China (such as the Tibetans), Xinjiang's Muslim inhabitants, the Uighurs, have had no charismatic, English-speaking spokesperson or unified exile organization; the Uighurs' few prominent exiles lived in Turkey, and they spent most of their time squabbling among themselves. Xinjiang thus rarely made it onto the agenda of foreign governments, and with the region largely closed to foreigners, few academics or human rights groups could study it.


Within the past decade, however, news from Xinjiang has started to seep out. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, China was suddenly confronted with newly independent neighbors in Central Asia -- states with close ethnic ties to the Turkic Uighurs. Uighurs began traveling to these Central Asian states, Pakistan, the Middle East, and even the United States, often returning to Xinjiang more determined than ever to fight for independence. Worried about growing Uighur separatism, Beijing tightened its control of Xinjiang, turning the region into the death-penalty capital of the world.


But unlike during past repressions, this time foreign governments and human rights organizations began to take notice -- partly because of China's greater openness, and partly because Central Asia had suddenly become an important energy producer. Massive oil deposits were found in the region -- Xinjiang itself is now known to have China's biggest petroleum reserves -- and foreign oil companies, with the backing of their respective


nations, arrived in Central Asia en masse. Germany, Iran, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and other new players began to increase their involvement in the region. Beijing, worried about losing its influence there, ramped up its own plans to develop western China as a bridge to Central Asia; these plans included increasing the movement of ethnic Han migrants into Xinjiang.


Then came September 11, 2001. Following the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the United States entered Central Asia in force, establishing military bases throughout the region to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda -- bases that have put U.S. troops within several hundred miles of the Chinese border. Xinjiang suddenly found itself at the center of a battle between China, Russia, and the United States for control of Central Asia.


Into this tumultuous mix now come three important new books on Xinjiang. The most accessible, Wild West China, is a general history of the region by Christian Tyler, a former correspondent for the Financial Times. The other two, Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland, edited by S. Frederick Starr, head of Johns Hopkins University's Central Asia studies program, and Xinjiang -- China's Muslim Far Northwest, by Michael Dillon of the University of Durham, are more academic attempts to draw a three-dimensional portrait of modern Xinjiang's people, economy, religion, culture, and dangerously tense politics. Because western China was largely closed to foreign writers until the early 1990s, and Beijing has once more restricted journalists' access to the region since September 11, all three books are valuable additions to the little that is known about Xinjiang in the West.


Dillon and Starr do a good job of putting China's current involvement in Xinjiang into historical context. Foreign rulers have always viewed the region as a wild place needing to be tamed and have frequently treated the Uighurs as second-class citizens. Only the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, has gone so far as to try to destroy the Uighurs altogether, in a process of de facto demographic genocide.


Unfortunately, as Central Asia has recently grown more important, Washington and key actors in the region have essentially sacrificed the Uighurs to geopolitics. The United States has largely accepted China's attempt to link Uighur separatists to international Islamic terror networks, glossing over the Uighurs' legitimate concerns in the process. Washington has even abetted this linkage and Beijing's crackdown on various Uighur groups.


The United States, however, need not choose between Xinjiang and China. It could simultaneously defend the Uighurs' rights and fight the war on terror. Unfortunately, none of these three books offers much help in this regard, since they present only facile, familiar suggestions for how the West can minimize Beijing's repression and keep the Uighurs from becoming radicalized. They fail to mention what would be a far better approach: foreigners should use China's own weaknesses -- its dependence on foreign oil and its need to keep opening its economy -- as leverage to force Beijing to temper its repressive Xinjiang policies.


THE BAD OLD DAYS


The idea of Xinjiang as a contiguous entity is relatively new. As Tyler's book colorfully captures, from the premodern era until the mid-eighteenth century, Xinjiang was either ruled from afar by Central Asian empires or not ruled at all. Its vast, barren deserts made it difficult to conquer: in the early twentieth century, the well-traveled British archaeologist Aural Stein visited Xinjiang and was overwhelmed by its inhospitality, marveling at its "desolate wilderness, bearing everywhere the impress of death." When Chinese rulers did manage to conquer Xinjiang, they found maintaining large armies there nearly impossible. In 104 BC, Emperor Wudi sent 60,000 men to conquer the West; only 10,000 came back alive.


Tyler brings the region's premodern history to life, skillfully employing individual anecdotes to illustrate its wild past, including the introduction of Sufi Islam in the tenth century and the later development of the Silk Road trade route, which passed through Xinjiang. The other two books, which are drier but fact-filled, fill in Tyler's overly broad narrative with rich detail and more nuanced assessment.


Although the reader has to dig through the sprawl of details in these books to find central themes, the implications of history for modern Xinjiang are clear. Tyler has titled his book Wild West China because the Uighurs' relationship with Beijing resembles that of the Native Americans with Washington: as China began to develop into a state with a distinct national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Chinese, with their own version of manifest destiny, began to see Xinjiang as a place inhabited by barbarians ready for civilizing. As a result of what Tyler calls "Chinese orientalism," Beijing even convinced itself that untamed Xinjiang would welcome China's intervention -- conveniently ignoring the region's historical and cultural links to the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Chinese thus underestimated the resistance Xinjiang would mount to Han culture.


By the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, as the Qing dynasty consolidated its power, it began to expand its borders, nearly doubling China's size in an effort to, among other things, protect it from the Great Game machinations of Russia and the United Kingdom. This time, when China conquered Xinjiang it came to stay, securing its annexation of the region with brutal tactics. Tyler describes the slaughter of more than a million people during this period, and James Millward and Peter Perdue, two contributors to the Starr book, detail the Qing dynasty's creation of small, self-sustaining military colonies in Xinjiang -- the precursors of China's massive modern-day military structure there.


Over the next 200 years, interactions between Beijing and the Uighurs set the stage for the worse confrontations to come. Here again, all three books are better at relating details than broader themes, but a few constants still manage to emerge. The Chinese government, unable to see Uighurs as equal to the Han, never offered them autonomy. Instead, Beijing forced the natives to do unpaid labor and barred them from local political positions. Misrule stoked local anger, and a series of uprisings resulted. In one blood-drenched revolt in 1825, tribespeople massacred 8,000 Chinese soldiers, prompting a harsh response from the central government.


As the twentieth century dawned, China's pacification of Xinjiang remained incomplete. With its central government weakened by rebellions, the overthrow of the monarchy, and general chaos, China could not completely consolidate its rule over the west. Wily local warlords took advantage of Beijing's distraction, and three times before 1949, Uighur leaders founded short-lived independent states, which remain important symbols for Uighurs today; as Dillon writes, the bank notes of the last free Xinjiang republic, crushed in 1949, are still revered by many Uighurs as symbols "of a once and future state." The last Xinjiang republic even included a relatively democratic constitution that promised freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.


THE RISE OF THE RADICALS


Although the Qing and Nationalist governments managed to conquer Xinjiang, they never attempted to colonize the vast region. After the communists took over, however, everything changed. Although some scholars see the last few hundred years of Chinese repression in Xinjiang as a continuum, the authors of these books are correct to point out that CCP rule has been drastically different from its predecessors' and has succeeded in radicalizing some Uighurs as never before.


Although it initially promised Xinjiang significant autonomy, once the CCP consolidated its hold over the country in the 1950s, it began to adopt much stricter policies toward the Uighurs. For the first time ever, Beijing had a radical ideology to spread and secure borders within which to spread it. But communist ideology, when combined with the traditional Chinese view of the Uighurs as barbarians (Mao Zedong's wife famously hated ethnic minorities) and a fear of concentrated ethnic groups, wreaked locust-like devastation in Xinjiang. Across China, the CCP targeted the wealthy, the educated, and the devout, but in Xinjiang the terror was worse. As Millward writes in the Starr book, "only in Xinjiang did the party face a majority, non-Chinese-speaking Islamic population with a well-established clerical organization." Thousands of mosques were shuttered, imams were jailed, Uighurs who wore headscarves or other Muslim clothing were arrested, and during the Cultural Revolution, the CCP purposely defiled mosques with pigs. Many Muslim leaders were simply shot. The Uighur language was purged from school curricula, and thousands of Uighur writers were arrested for "advocating separatism" -- which often meant nothing more than writing in Uighur. Meanwhile, Beijing forced Xinjiang's nomadic farmers into collectives, which, thanks to the region's limited arable land, were even less productive than those in other parts of the country. The scars left by such misguided policies remain today, and many of Xinjiang's greener parts are turning into desert.


During the postwar period, the CCP also began a campaign to change the demographics of Xinjiang while also exploiting its natural resources to feed eastern China's growing cities. Beijing forced birth control on the Uighurs and simultaneously encouraged massive Han migration into the region, using economic incentives or simply forcing Chinese to move west. The results of these policies were devastating: whereas in 1941 Uighurs made up more than 80 percent of Xinjiang's population, by 1998, they made up less than 50 percent. Urumqi, Xinjiang's largest city, is now a Han metropolis, with the few Uighurs confined to small ghetto-like areas where they pose for pictures and desperately hawk cheap carpets to visitors.


Starr and Dillon argue that such policies have had two contradictory effects on Xinjiang. Some Uighurs have simply given up. Nearly 500,000 crossed into the Soviet Union in the early 1960s or turned to drugs; Xinjiang now has a serious heroin problem, and hence a major HIV problem as well. Others, however, have rebelled. Starr argues that by targeting Uighurs for their ethnicity and religion, Mao was the first Chinese leader to "nourish one of the most serious centripetal movements in Xinjiang's long history: the rise of pan-Uighur identity." Indeed, thanks to Beijing's policies, instead of fighting among themselves, as the Uighurs had done for centuries, after 1949 many began to settle their intra-ethnic differences and build a sense of Uighur solidarity. By 1954, Uighur uprisings began breaking out in the city of Khotan, and in the 1960s, Xinjiang resisted the Cultural Revolution more forcefully than most other parts of China.


After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uighurs saw their cousins in Central Asia found sovereign states, and resistance to Chinese rule exploded. Throughout the 1990s, large numbers of Uighurs rallied in the streets of Xinjiang's cities. Dillon writes that, like underground fires, these protests were difficult to predict: "smoldering, impossible to extinguish, and flaring up from time to time in unexpected places." Sometimes they turned violent: in one particularly bloody clash in the town of Baran in 1990, nearly 3,000 Uighurs were killed in a battle with Chinese police. Many new separatist organizations -- most, but not all, of which advocated nonviolence -- sprang up. One such group, the East Turkestan National Congress, has advocated creating a secular, democratic government in Xinjiang. But other groups have targeted Chinese installations in Xinjiang, and occasionally in Beijing, with bombing campaigns.


Meanwhile, interest in Islam surged, thanks to state intolerance and the Uighurs' greater exposure to other Muslim societies. Although Xinjiang has no real tradition of strict orthodoxy or Islamist radicalism, Islam began to seem one of the best means to resist Beijing's control. Young Uighur men began holding clandestine maxrap meetings to discuss current religious and political issues, and attendance at mosques has soared.


Beijing has responded to this latest surge in Uighur nationalism with a campaign titled, with typical Chinese understatement, "Strike Hard, Severe Repression." Thousands of Uighurs were arrested in the 1990s and many were executed at public rallies. After September 11, the number of arrests increased sharply, and Beijing embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to tie the Uighurs to al Qaeda. The Chinese government, with little apparent evidence, claimed that more than 1,000 Uighurs had traveled to Afghanistan to train with al Qaeda and other Islamist groups, and charged that Osama bin Laden himself had offered large sums of money to Uighurs to create an Islamist terrorist campaign in Xinjiang. Although the East Turkestan National Congress has explicitly condemned al Qaeda and there are few signs that the Uighurs have links with international Islamist terror groups, Beijing announced early this year that the "Strike Hard" campaign would be extended indefinitely.


(MIS) CALCULATED INDIFFERENCE


Unfortunately, outside countries, including the United States, have facilitated China's harsh repression of the Uighurs. Tyler's and Starr's volumes too often ignore this complicity. For one thing, countries in Central Asia and the West have been far too credulous in accepting that the battle in Xinjiang is part of the larger war on terror. This result can be explained, in part, by China's growing economic clout, which has allowed it, for example, to convince the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (composed of China, Russia, and several Central Asian states) to focus on counterterrorism. Beijing has also convinced Central Asian countries to deport Uighur "terrorists" -- often simply members of nonviolent Uighur separatist groups -- to China for prosecution, and to ban exile Uighur groups from operating on their soil.


Even Washington has played along. By refusing to define the opponents in its war on terror, the Bush administration has allowed China to lump its separatists into the same group as al Qaeda. The United States has even directly aided Beijing's crackdown at times -- by placing one obscure Uighur separatist group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, on the State Department's list of global terrorist organizations, for example. As Graham Fuller and Jonathan Lippman, two contributors to the Starr book, argue, this "U.S. declaration [was] catastrophic" for the Uighurs. The United States, previously the main defender of Uighur rights (Radio Free Asia is a primary source of information in the Uighur language), had now given Beijing "carte blanche to designate all Uighur nationalist ... movements as 'terrorist.'"


Unfortunately, all three books shy away from predicting how the Uighurs will respond to this latest crackdown. Starr correctly recognizes that the Uighurs -- thanks to rising HIV rates, the environmental and social destruction caused by mass migration, a new influx of Han Chinese, the most sophisticated anti-Uighur propaganda yet from Beijing, and the perceived loss of their greatest ally, the United States -- are now more desperate than they have been since 1949. Although none of the authors spells it out, this pressure could lead the Uighurs to become even more radicalized and to turn to the very Islamist groups with which Beijing has accused them of cooperating.


Moreover, as transportation improves within China, increasing numbers of Uighurs will make common cause with other disgruntled groups in the People's Republic. Already, some Uighur leaders have made contact with Tibetan exiles and Chinese labor leaders, and Uighur exile groups have begun to emulate the Tibetan model, using the Internet to court international human rights groups.


None of the books, however, offers realistic prescriptions for how the international community can help prevent Xinjiang from radicalizing. The authors devote a few brief pages to calling on foreign actors to push Beijing to restore freedoms in Xinjiang but do not discuss the best way to do so. Certainly, Washington should not abet Beijing's crackdown by placing Uighur groups on global terror lists, and President George W. Bush could take a page from the playbook of Ronald Reagan, who maintained relations with a communist adversary (in that case, the Soviet Union) while simultaneously giving major speeches about the need to protect human rights.


But simply suggesting that China should stop its repression, without laying out how or why it might, is not very useful. Washington is not powerless.


It could, for example, convince the few nations that actually have leverage over China -- namely, the oil producers in the Persian Gulf -- to help protect the Uighurs from further marginalization. Over the next two decades, as China's economy expands, it will become the largest oil importer in the world. Already, eastern China has suffered from significant energy shortages, and the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that China's petroleum imports will rise by nearly 1,000 percent over the next 20 years. China has accordingly begun to court Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil producers. In the past, when gulf states have expressed concern about the plight of fellow Muslims in Xinjiang, Beijing has responded favorably; these gulf nations might now push China to allow the Uighurs more autonomy, as even some in the CCP have considered.


More important, the United States could push China to open up Xinjiang's economy, as it has opened the economy of coastal China. Xinjiang is one of the few places left in China where the state still dominates economic activity. The military, state petroleum companies, and state-run construction companies together represent more than 80 percent of the province's industrial assets and favor ethnic Han workers and investors. If Beijing were to reduce state control, making it easier for private entrepreneurs in Xinjiang to flourish, the Uighurs likely would benefit, since they have the best links to traders in Central Asia. Indeed, in the few parts of Xinjiang where the state has a lesser role in the economy -- the bazaars of Kashgar and other southern cities -- Uighur traders already dominate these sectors of the economy. Relaxing economic restrictions would thus be the best way to limit Xinjiang's crisis. A Uighur middle class, with some economic freedom and limited autonomy, would be less prone to radicalism. That is an outcome in everyone's interest, including Beijing's -- whether it recognizes it or not.

The Washington Times


The trade and investment framework agreement the United States signed recently with Central Asian countries was motivated just as much by U.S. counterterror priorities as commercial considerations. The agreement is welcome, if overdue.


The United States has long had geopolitical interests in Central Asia. The five Asian nations that signed the agreement -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- gained independence from the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. For about 10 years, therefore, the United States has had a vested interest in ushering these countries into the global free-market system. Some of these countries, particularly Kazakhstan, are rich in energy resources, and their development will help fulfill President Bush's objective of diversifying global energy resources. The agreement is geared toward finding ways to expand trade and investment, and is broadly seen as a precursor to a formal trade agreement.


The agreement won't lead to a trade bonanza. U.S. exports to the region totaled $548.1 million last year, while imports amounted to $570.5 million. Still, Central Asian countries are an important frontier in the counterterror effort. While Muslim militancy has taken root in parts of South and Southwest Asia, it has appeared only sporadically in Central Asia. Muslim fundamentalists are trying to make inroads into the region, so the international community must remain vigilant. Trade and development will be an important vehicle for delivering hope and opportunity to the people of Central Asia, and a bulwark against nihilistic fundamentalism.


In touting the agreement, known as a TIFA, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick signaled the broad U.S. interest in the region. "We look forward to working closely through the TIFA to further strengthen our bilateral economic relationships and our relationship with the region as a whole," he said.


Central Asian countries generally have a ways to go toward improving their records on human rights and democratic freedoms. A final trade agreement could be offered as a carrot for making headway in these areas. Economic development and democratization are important building blocks for modernization and a barrier to the global terrorist threat.


Copyright ?2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.


=======================================================


June 19, 2004


Page A12


Letters to the Editor


Tighter trade ties


I find myself largely in agreement with your editorial "Trade vs. terror in Central Asia" (yesterday). We, too, welcome the trade and investment framework agreement. It will further expand U.S. private businesses' interest in Kazakhstan's rapidly developing economy.


There are many reasons why Americans should be increasingly comfortable doing business in my country. First, and perhaps foremost, we get along very well together. There are almost 400 U.S. companies in Kazakhstan, and the U.S. investment in our economy stands at $9 billion. American companies themselves estimate their investment in Kazakhstan will reach $200 billion before the decade is over.


These businesses see benefits in our growing civil society and democracy. Our president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has just called for a sweeping series of reforms designed to further modernize our political system.


One major proposal would broaden the powers of Parliament, increasing the numbers of deputies in both houses and developing a new system of forming the government through a parliamentary majority mechanism.


His proposals also would bring the budget watchdog, the Accounting Committee, under the control of Parliament, much like the U.S. General Accounting Office. Our human-rights stance would be strengthened with the introduction of jury trials and the broadening of the powers of the human-rights ombudsman.


Political life in Kazakhstan is lively. We have two major political parties, yet for our election in September, 11 parties will be fielding candidates. About half of them are opposition parties, and a new election law will ensure transparency and open competition.


"You can't just declare democracy. You can only build it through hard work," Mr. Nazarbayev said last week. We understand we have many challenges ahead, and we look forward to continuing to work with you as we build prosperity and fight terrorism together.


Given the choice, any thinking person prefers trade over terror and democracy over totalitarian rule.


KANAT B. SAUDABAYEV


Ambassador


Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan


Washington

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta


London, May 28


China, the inscrutable middle kingdom, the ancient heaven on earth, the country with one of the highest growth rates and the biggest population, the country with a single party communist (sort of) governance structure and the country with the largest number of neighbours, is indeed an interesting one. But what is more interesting is how it creates problems for its friends. The first problem has to do with the Uighur issue and the second with the Tibetans. In this column we take a look at the first one and in next week's column, we will take a look at the Tibetan problem.


China has good relationships with the Muslim world, not to mention others, but it’s the relationship with the Muslims which is germane to this argument. None of these relationships are as close as those with Iran and Pakistan, although China (because of the Taiwanese recognition issue and its presence on the UNSC) has very good relationships with the other OIC nations as well.


It is a little noted fact, that China usually sides with the OIC countries in almost any kind of UNSC or UNGA resolutions, but that is neither here nor there. But the closest relationship is with Pakistan. Pakistan and China, as both sides frequently proclaimed to the world are “time-tested”, and share an "all weather friendship". This is, of course, compared to USA, which is called as a "fair weather friend", with due reason, mind you. As far as Pakistan is concerned, USA only loves Pakistan when it needs to, but when it doesn’t, it is dropped as quickly as one would when handed a red hot shovel. USA loved Pakistan when fighting communism in the 50's, then during the Afghanistan imbroglio in the 70's and 80's, and now again during the war against terror. Other than explicit foreign policy driven interests, USA doesn’t give two hoots about Pakistan. Hence a "fair weather friend".


China on the other hand, is an all weather friend. Or as General Musharraf described the relationship as being "deeper than the oceans, higher than the mountains". China has stuck with Pakistan through thick and thin. It has very deep links with Pakistan in the military, business and political side. It is not surprising that besides Saudi Arabia, China is one of the first destinations of any leader (a generalissimo or prime minister). China helped Pakistan in the international arena as well as in the United Nations. China has also helped in the nuclear weapons program, the nuclear energy program, several huge national infrastructure projects (including the development of the strategic Gwadar port), the Navy, the Air Force, the Karakorum Highway, and so on and so forth. One does wonder what China gets out of all this benevolent munificence towards Pakistan, other than getting Pakistan to keep India busy and away from China. Be that as it may, Pakistan doesn’t really have anything to offer China, with the potential exception of a through road to the Middle East and Arabian sea, but the logistics are crippling and challenging. One viewpoint is that since a huge amount of China's exports and imports pass through the straits of Malacca (which are infested with pirates and a natural choke point), the Tibet, Karakorum highway, down to Karachi, and the Gwadar route offer an alternative route to the Indian Ocean. Anyway, that's peanuts compared with all what China has given to Pakistan. So one would expect that the last thing Pakistan would do is to muck around with China and upset it. Well, “official” Pakistan doesn’t, but then, there is a big gulf between “official” Pakistan and what “unofficial” Pakistan does. But before we go into what Pakistan has done or not done, let us take a look at the problem.


The problem is with the Uighurs. Uighurs are one of the 5 main ethnic groups of China, besides the Han, Manchu, Tibetan, and Mongolian groups. They live in western China, an area which is bounded by mountains, snow steppes, deserts and similar forbidding conditions. It is as far away from an ocean as one potentially could be. They have had an impact on world history for the past 2000 years and I am afraid that for most of these 2000 years, they have had conflicts with the dominant Han Chinese.


Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame were heavily involved in this region and with the Uighur people. While nomadic in nature for most of their earlier history, the Uighurs came under the Buddhist sway till about the 1400's. After this, Islam came to town and the Uighurs became Muslims. In the mid 18th century, Xinjiang and the Uighurs came under Manchu control, but it has been a fact of Uighur life that they have always rebelled against the Chinese, usually not with much success. During this time, the Chinese had a bit of a spat with the Russian empire and after some peace treaties, the land we know as Xinjiang came into being.


In the early part of the 20th century, Xinjiang was a hotbed of separatist activity, with competing parties being variously backed by the Japanese, British, internal warlords, and also the Chinese communist party. In 1945, the first serious threat to Chinese sovereignty was due to the announcement of the Eastern Turkistan Republic, claiming sovereignty over Xinjiang with a firm Islamic flavour. In 1949, most of the leaders of the republic died mysteriously. Funnily enough, the Chinese communist government then took over Xinjiang. By the 1950's, anybody who was part of the ETR was pushed aside, imprisoned, killed or prosecuted. After some desultory negotiations, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was formed in 1955. In terms of being a buffer state against Russian expansion and to keep the rebellious Uighurs under control, the central Chinese government promulgated a policy of settling ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang, with the result that a province, which formerly was 3/4th Uighur ended up less than 1/2 Uighur now. Then Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward created the greatest cultural and social dislocation in Uighur life since Genghis Khan rampaged through the countryside. In the 1960's, China used Xinjiang province's Lop Nor area for its nuclear testing grounds. China has also cracked down heavily on the Uighur religious practices and mosques have been destroyed and public worship frowned upon. Religion is an anathema anyway to the communists, and to top it all, Islam was seen as a focal point besides separatism for the Uighurs even though until then it was more of a moderate Islam, greatly influenced by Buddhism.


After the Soviet Union fell and the Turkic republics of Central Asia were formed, the simmering insurgency moved up a gear, with the Uighurs returning from Islamic countries where they had gone for studies and support, bringing back the Wahhabi flavoured Islam they were subjected to. Car bombs were introduced, assassinations of ethnic Han Chinese and generalised rioting against the harsh Chinese rule were practiced, which all had the sad result of the government cracking down hard. And when the Chinese crack down hard, it means hard. Torture, summary execution, long tough imprisonment, internal exile, deaths, you name it, were widely used. The 9/11 incident changed the world (read USA's) reaction to Chinese repression. While before the Uighurs could at least get a hearing in the world capitals, after the 9/11 attacks, they were reduced into the "Islamic Terrorists" category and China was given a "get out of jail free" card.


Now we come to the ‘dear’ friend Pakistan. Before 9/11 and the latest Afghan War, Pakistan was heavily involved in various rebellions and spats going around in the world ranging from Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the 'Stans from the Fergana Valley, Xinjiang, Kashmir, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and the like. It was like the country had been one of the exporters of Islam driven fervour terror. I know “Islamic Terrorism”, is a very stupid term, but there are pretty good reasons to say what came out of Pakistan (or rather what the foaming mullahs defined it as) was definitely Islamic and it definitely was terrorism. There were and still are, militant training camps, reported big involvement of the shadowy intelligence agencies, etc. etc. That is your "unofficial" Pakistan. The aftermath of the Russian Afghan War gave rise to this virulent, “take-out-the-infidels-with-a-sword” kind of philosophy and because the state liked the idea of having cheap terrorist labour for Kashmir, it allowed these camps and the philosophy behind them to grow. These people were quite fungible, Uighurs will fight in the Kashmiri rebellion, or Sudanese will go fight in Bosnia or Jordanians will go to Chechnya. After all, it was all part and parcel of the great enterprise of the mullahs.


Unfortunately, once one has given the green light for people to think of Pakistan as a nice little place for “Islamic terrorism”, everybody who is interested will make a beeline to Pakistan, and that is just what they did. Just search in google about the number of nationalities and territories that were represented by the terrorists captured in Pakistan and you will get an idea. You will find Chechens, Yemenites, Kuwaitis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Thai, Philippinoes, Bosnians, Afghans, Kashmiris, Indonesians, etc. etc. It was indeed a great melting pot. And here is where Pakistan had problems. All these groups were fighting the infidels all around the world, and Uighurs were no different from say Chechens or Kashmiris, as far as these militants were concerned. Another fascinating inconsistency that the Pakistani generals were caught under! The Chinese are too polite to complain loudly in public (except to the Taiwanese), but since the late 1990s some reports revealed that the Chinese protested bitterly to Pakistan. Some experienced China watchers have reported how Pakistan was hauled over the coals with several senior Pakistani officials called in for a grilling in Beijing about how Pakistan is apparently letting these Uighurs run around loose in Pakistan.


As usual, Pakistan showed its spine and fine martial spirit, just like it showed to the USA, and caved in. The police and intelligence agencies moved in, Uighurs in Pakistan were targeted, killed, deported, imprisoned or what have you. Many were directly sent back to China (guess what happened to them) like Ismail Kadir for example. Others were reported to have been handed over to the Americans who then sent them over to that tropical Caribbean paradise of Guantanamo Bay. Every time I read that some Uighur has been given that treatment by Pakistan, I wince for many reasons, not least for the wigging that the Chinese would have given their "friends".


It is an interesting state of affairs. For all the pious and self righteous mouthing about the desire for Kashmiri self determination, that Pakistan raises in the various international forums, there is nary a peep about the Uighurs. For that matter, the various left groups are also suspiciously silent about the cultural genocide and repression that China is undertaking in Xinjiang. If one was a bit cynical and evil, one would chuckle about the way these self-righteous people have been hoisted by their own petards. Self determination and fighting for freedom principles are great, but Xinjiang becomes an inconvenient issue. The cause of Palestine is heard all over the world, but Xinjiang is so inconvenient that the mere mention of it causes embarrassment and shuffling of the feet. After all Alfred Adler said : “It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.”


All this to be taken with a grain of salt!


(Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta, currently working on a doctorate at Kings College in International Relations and Terrorism, also holds a Doctorate in Finance and Artificial Intelligence from Manchester Business School. He works in the City of London in various capacities in the Banking Sector. He also lectures at several British Universities.)

can't agree where this writer is coming from about Jihad and I do not know why he mixed this thesis up with information as to the recent UAA annual conference. Such use of the word in asociation with the Uyghur is uncalled for in my view and can only give a bad impression about them and by implication the UAA especially as he ties it in for whatever reason with news of the UAA conference.


The Coming Chinese Jihad


By Stephen Schwartz


Weekly Standard | June 17, 2004


IN EARLY JUNE, partisans of democracy in China commemorated the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of June 3-4, 1989 -- one of the events of a remarkable year that dramatized the accuracy of Ronald Reagan's description of communism as evil. In retrospect, the killing of students and workers protesting peacefully in Beijing's famous square can be seen as a kind of forewarning that the fall of the Soviet empire would not bring the final end of communism.


One observance of the Tiananmen anniversary, in Washington over Memorial Day, brought new lessons about China. This was the fourth national convention of the Uighur American Association (UAA).


The Uighurs (pronounced "Weeghers") are a Turkic people in the region of northwestern China that Beijing calls Xinjiang and the Uighurs call Eastern Turkestan. They are linked to Tiananmen in the person of Wu'er Kaixi, a prominent figure in the 1989 democracy movement, and a Uighur, who spoke at the recent convention.


The Uighurs, who number at least 9 million, are overwhelmingly Muslims, of the Sufi variety. The primary message the conference spokesmen sought to convey to Americans is simple. As Wu'er Kaixi put it, "Beijing will never accept political or ethnic pluralism, without significant pressure from other countries. Nationalism is the basis of the Communist Party's continued domination of China." As evidence, he cited Beijing's unsympathetic attitude toward Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and other properties it considers rightfully its own, as well as the Communist authorities' intention, noted in official Chinese media and Western news reports in May, to impose unification by 2008.


There are only a thousand or so Uighurs in America, but we are likely to hear more of them as their aggrieved community inside China resists the intensifying nationalism sponsored by Beijing.


"We are in the same position as the Tibetans," says Erkin Alptekin -- president of the World Uighur Congress in Munich, a former Uighur-language broadcaster for Radio Liberty, and a leading figure at the UAA convention. "The Chinese want to replace us with their own people as colonists, and assimilate those of us who remain, wiping out our culture." Alim Seytoff, UAA president, points out that Uighur-language education is now limited, and university courses must be taught in Chinese. There are no independent media in the Uighur tongue, and U.S.-funded Radio Liberty, Alptekin's former employer, discontinued its Uighur-language service in 1979 as a favor to the Chinese.


At the same time, the Uighurs have a curious bit part in the saga of Islamic extremism.


First, there are reportedly 22 Uighurs among those interned at Guantanamo Bay. According to Alptekin, there are several reasons for this. Some Uighurs were trained by the Chinese, in tandem with the Pakistanis, to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.


Chinese repression drove other Uighurs to flee into Afghanistan (which has a short border with China); these people were natural targets for al Qaeda and Taliban recruitment. Still others were Uighur children sent by their parents to Pakistan to escape Communist indoctrination -- only to be trained in jihad and shipped off to fight in Kashmir, then to defend the Taliban.


A Uighur organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), was declared a terrorist group by the State Department in 2002 at the insistence of the Chinese, who alleged it had ties to al-Qaeda. However, information about the ETIM is hard to come by, and before September 11, 2001, according to Alptekin, the Chinese party secretary of Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, denied there was terrorism in his bailiwick. The global war on terror has been "hijacked by Beijing," according to Alptekin, as an excuse to brand all Uighurs as Islamist radicals.


Alptekin insists, however, that he and his World Uighur Congress have made nonviolence a basic principle of their activities. Armed resistance to the Chinese would only lead to more victimization, he told me. Few Uighurs seek their own state, Islamic or otherwise. According to Wu'er Kaixi, "we don't ask for independence, but for respect, and an end to forced assimilation."


Chinese respect for minority rights will doubtless be a long time coming, and in the meantime foreigners can exploit local grievances for their own benefit. Central Asian experts have long warned that the vast tracts where the Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims live have been infiltrated by Saudi/Wahhabi agents. Before September 11, according to the Uzbek authorities, these agitators dreamed of seizing the oil-rich and nuclear-technology-littered states of former Soviet Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Uzbekistan, and joining them to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Grabbing a slice of Eastern Turkestan from the Chinese was considered a major side goal.


China probably has more Muslims living outside a Muslim-ruled state than any other country. In addition to the Uighurs, the vast country has a Chinese-speaking Muslim community of up to 20 million called the Hui, also living in the northwest. The Hui have been the object of extensive evangelism, going back a century, by Wahhabis from Arabia, assisted by Hui returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca. As presented by Professor Dru C. Gladney of the University of Hawaii at Moana, a leading Western expert on Chinese Islam, Wahhabism in Chinese dress enjoys the backing of the Communist authorities. In a 1999 paper entitled "The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Islamic Fundamentalism among the Muslim Chinese?" Gladney averred that Beijing has supported an explicit Wahhabi trend in Chinese Islam, through a movement called the Yihewani. This group takes its name from the extremist Ikhwan, or brotherhoods that helped found the Saudi state in the 1920s and then emerged, in somewhat different form, as the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.


According to Gladney, Chinese Wahhabism has millions of devotees, who show all the characteristics of the creed's Saudi inventors, beginning with hatred of Sufism. With the founding of the People's Republic of China, the state quickly suppressed all Sufi orders, and endorsed the Chinese Wahhabis, financing an official "China Islamic Association" under their influence (much like the puppet "Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association" and similar phony Christian bodies). Beijing renewed state patronage of the Yihewani after Mao's so-called Cultural Revolution, which featured widescale depredations against all religious groups.


So while ethnic suppression has driven some Uighurs toward al-Qaeda, official Chinese Islam promotes the Wahhabi ideology from which al-Qaeda sprang. Either way, ordinary Chinese Muslims, whose total numbers are unknown, are being shoved in the wrong direction.


The lesson here was well articulated by Erkin Alptekin: "The United States should raise the problem of the Uighurs to the same level as that of the Tibetans, and pressure China to open dialogue with all its minorities," even if the Chinese government resents it. The alternative: more, rather than fewer, recruits for Islamist terrorism, drawn from the turbulence of China.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Stephen Schwartz, an author and journalist, is author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror. A vociferous critic of Wahhabism, Schwartz is a frequent contributor to National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications.


Stephen Sullivan


more info you can go to this link :www.uyghuramerican.org

new exhibition of relics from the Silk Route shows how religions merged and heresies flourished. It's a revelation, says William Dalrymple


Saturday June 19, 2004


The Guardian


Urumqi monster from the British Library Silk Road exhibition. Photo courtesy of the British Library / British Museum


Some 1,500 years ago, in the same area of northern Pakistan that American troops are scouring for Osama bin Laden, there flourished the Silk Route Kingdom of Gandhara. It was ruled at one point by a dynasty of Bactrian Greeks, descendants of Alexander the Great's stranded legions, with such wonderfully unlikely names as Diomedes of the Punjab and Menander of Kabul. At its height in the sixth century AD, traders came to Gandhara from all over the world, bringing painted glass from Antioch, porphyry from upper Egypt, ivories from south India and lacquers from the China coast. Hellenistic in spirit, Buddhist in religion, Gandhara's principle icon was a meditating Buddha, dressed in a Greek toga.


The British began discovering Gandharan Buddhas in the late-19th century, and one of the first men to be dazzled by them was a young Hungarian Jewish emigre intellectual called Aurel Stein. He spent hours in the Lahore Museum, then run by Rudyard Kipling's father, studying the beautiful sculptures. Intrigued, he soon began walking the Karakorums to find further relics of this unlikely Greco-Buddhist world.


He was in the right place at the right time. Rumours had already begun circulating in India about early Sanskrit manuscripts emerging from the sands of Chinese Central Asia. From his reading of Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim who ventured across the Gobi desert to visit the Buddhist shrines of India, Stein knew the oasis towns of the Silk Route to the north of the Himalayas had once been sophisticated outposts of Buddhist civilisation, but no one suspected anything had survived the twin onslaughts of the austere monotheism of Islam and the encroaching desert sands. Stein jumped at the chance to explore the area - and what he found surpassed anyone's wildest expectations.


The sands had perfectly preserved every detail of the life that had once been lived in those lost cities - including, crucially, their sacred texts. "In this ever-dry ground," wrote Stein, "time seems to have lost all power of destruction." Although this was not always an unmitigated blessing (at one point Stein found himself digging through mountains of perfectly preserved turds left by generations of Chinese frontier guards), manuscripts, frescoes and painted silk banners soon emerged from the ground as if newly painted. Even the most perishable of grave-goods - such as fancy pastries dating from the time of Christ - emerged intact after 2,000 years in the ground.


Most remarkable of all, at the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas at Dunhuang, Stein persuaded a Taoist monk to part with a recently discovered library that had been bricked up in the wall of an ancient temple. Only when he got the hoard back to the British Museum did it become apparent that the bundle of documents included the earliest printed book in the world, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of AD868.


Stein's reputation, however, has not shown the same ability to survive the passage of time as the objects he brought back from the Silk Road. The lack of any glittering Tutankhamen-style death-masks meant that the British Museum quickly consigned his collections to its basements. Outside academia, his name was soon forgotten.


Now the British Library is making amends, and looks set to complete the process of Stein's rehabilitation begun by Peter Hopkirk in his book Foreign Devils on the Silk Road . Its exhibition The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith shows, for the first time, the sheer wonder of the artefacts Stein brought back from his 25,000 miles of archaeological travels. Of the 400 treasures on show, over 250 are items excavated by Stein and 150 belong to the British Library, alongside rarely seen loans from China, Japan, Germany and France.


Although it contains no spectacular gold treasures, this is one of the most surprising and stimulating shows to be mounted in the capital for years. It concentrates on the Central Asian section of the Silk Route in the pre-Islamic period and, more specifically, on the stories and lives of the people who lived then. On show is a prayer for bad period pains, a piece of seventh-century anti-war poetry and a letter apologising for drunken behaviour at a dinner party.


There are some beautiful early-medieval silk paintings: my favourite is a humorous cari-cature of a beak-nosed storyteller, walking the Silk Route with a tame tiger and a backpack full of Buddhist scrolls. Yet every bit as moving as these delicate paintings are the simple remnants of everyday Silk Route lives: a felt slipper or a broken mousetrap.


Today, of course, what draws most travellers to the oasis cities of the Silk Route - Kashgar, Khotan, Samarkand - is their breathtaking remoteness. Yet what most distinguished these places in the early first millennium AD was the opposite: the fabulously wealthy and cosmopolitan nature of the societies that thrived there. Central Asia was the centre of first-century AD globalisation: ideas of art, decorum, dress and religion passed backwards and forwards, melding to create unexpected cultural fusions. Strange heresies and heterodoxies grew and flourished in this environment - something that is dazzlingly apparent from the show's very first exhibit.


As you walk into the gallery, you are immediately confronted with the carved marble funerary monument of a Sogdian trader from sixth-century Samarkand, who died far from home on the edge of the Gobi. He is shown pot-bellied and fork-bearded, sitting down with his Chinese wife under a tented canopy as Sogdian and Chinese dancers strut their stuff to the music of harps, lutes and Indian tabla. Elsewhere on the monument we see the merchant's Zoroastrian funerary rites being performed by a long-robed magus, a veil over his mouth to prevent his breath polluting the sacred fire. A dog stands to one side to drive away the spirit of defilement. Yet the promiscuous nature of the intermingled religious ideas of the time is indicated by the presence, on the very next panel, of the Sogdian goddess Nana, who has no relationship with Zoroastrian beliefs, but whose four arms and lion mount show instead the influence of Hindu-Himalayan Tantrism.


Trade and religion were often fellow travellers: in Syriac, the language of west-Asian trade, the word for merchant ("tgr") was the same as that for missionary. One religion that travelled eastwards along the Silk Route, and was brought to Central Asia by Mesopotamian merchants, was Manichaeism. It was founded by the prophet Mani in Babylon in the third century AD. Brought up in a heterodox ascetic environment where Christian and Jewish Gnostic ideas mingled with Zoroastrianism, Mani went on a pilgrimage to Gandhara where he encountered Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Conceiving all creation as the product of a great struggle between light and dark, good and evil, he saw his religion as a fulfilment of all these different religious currents, and accepted Adam, Zoroaster and the Buddha as prophets, while also subscribing to the Hindu idea of the transmigration of souls. His ideas rapidly spread from Carthage in the west (where the young St Augustine briefly converted to Manichaeism) to Xi'an, the Chinese terminus of the Silk Road in the east, before disappearing by the late Middle Ages.


Stein's discoveries of a Manichaean library recovered not only several of the sacred texts of this lost faith, such as the Great Hymn of Mani, but also images of the vegetarian Manichaean elect, in long white robes and tall, cylindrical hats. Perhaps the strangest image in the show is an eighth-century fragment showing Jesus as an unbearded Manichaean prophet, mounting to heaven in a crescent-shaped moon boat.


No less strange are the relics from the brief moment when Central Asia converted en masse to Nestorian Christianity. Expelled from the Byzantine empire in the fifth century, the church had taken root with astonishing speed further to the east. By the seventh century, Nestorian archbishops watched over cathedrals as far apart as Bahrain, Kerala, Kashgar and Lhasa. By 660AD there were more than 20 Nestorian archbishops east of the Oxus, and Nestorian monasteries in most Chinese cities.


Genghis Khan had a Nestorian guardian and at one point the Mongol Khans nearly converted to Nestorianism, which might have made the church the most powerful religious force in Asia. But instead, by the early years of the 20th century, a series of genocidal reverses brought the church to the verge of extinction.


Archaeologists have recently recovered many relics of this lost eastern Christian church: last month SOAS in London displayed some of the remarkable hybrid gravestones discovered at Quanzhou (the ancient Zaitun) on the China coast. But nothing in Zeitun can match the most beautiful image in the Silk Route show: that of a Nestorian Christian saint from Samarkand, which at first sight appears to be Buddhist. The figure is wearing Buddhist-style robes and is sitting cross-legged in the mudra of preaching; only the two Maltese crosses that the saint is wearing - one on his headdress, the other on his torc - shows his true faith.


The saint represents the familiar in utterly unfamiliar garb - yet that this is so is itself a feature of our prejudices and assumptions. Today we think of Christianity as a western religion, forgetting that it is really an eastern one: it was born in Jerusalem and received its intellectual superstructure in Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. At the Council of Nicea in 325AD, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out, there were more bishops from Persia, Central Asia and India than from western Europe. This extraordinary show makes you re-examine that eastern world - and that is why it should not be missed.


The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith is at the British Library, London NW1, until September 12. Details: 0870 444 1500.