Turkistan 'terrorists' hurt Uyghur
cause By J Z Adams
The
Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) harbors the lofty
and unrealistic goal of expelling Chinese
"occupiers" from Xinjiang province and create an
independent State called "East Turkistan".
East Turkistan, according to the plan,
would eventually be part of a Central Asian
Islamic caliphate called "Turkistan", the name for
Central Asia preferred by Islamists that
incorporates present day Xinjiang province,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan
and Tajikistan.
Xinjiang province is
China's "Uyghur Autonomous Region" just as Tibet
is the "Tibetan Autonomous Region". In actuality,
both are heavily regulated by Beijing. China's
largest administrative division, Xinjiang makes
China a Central Asian power. The
province borders Russia,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan
and Pakistan and is the source of 30% of China's
future petroleum needs.
Reflecting this
geography, for millennia Xinjiang has been caught
between the influences - and armies - of the
Mongols, Manchus, Han Chinese Arabs, Persians, and
Turkic groups.
However, never before has
Xinjiang been so locked into the Chinese state.
The Han Chinese population in Xinjiang has grown
from less than a small percentage one century ago
to half the population of the province today. An
urban rumor among Uyghurs in Xinjiang's ancient
city and former Silk Road trading point, Kashgar,
is that the Chinese government "imports" 25,000
Han Chinese per month to "Hanify" the population
and raise land prices until Uyghurs are forced to
the periphery of the city.
Given the
province's population trends - and the pace of
reconstruction in old cities like Kashgar - it
will be hard for Xinjiang to ever regain its
distinct Uyghur character. The TIP is trying to
rectify this and the grievances that make up its
raison d'etre are the same basic grievances as
Xinjiang's overall Uyghur population, although the
TIP's use of al-Qaeda-style violence generates
little support.
In fact, since the TIP has
such a limited record of attacks in China, despite
its terror-charged rhetoric, the group undermines
peaceful protest movements in Xinjiang and abroad
that seek more autonomy and democratic rights for
the Uyghurs.
In a video and written
statement posted on online jihadi forums in
September, the leader of the TIP, Abdul Shakoor
Turkistani, delineated the government policies
that TIP opposes:
Mandatory education, which he says has caused
the apostasy of Muslims from their religion.
The policy of enforced bilingual education
which forces Uyghurs to learn Mandarin as they
progress in school.
The emigration of Muslim females from Xinjiang
to the "Chinese region," or "inner China" as it is
known to Uyghurs, in order to find work in China's
major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and
Guangzhou.
The policy of birth control, a legacy of the
former one-child policy, which he describes as
"threatening" to the Uyghur population;
The policy of densely settling Chinese in the
Muslim population, which he says has led to the
marginalization of the Muslims as Han Chinese
overtake the Uyghurs in traditionally Uyghur
cities like Kashgar.
The policy of looting and transporting out of
"Turkistan" valuable resources, especially
petroleum.
The testing of nuclear weapons in Xinjiang,
which took place 46 times from 1946 to 1996 at Lop
Nur in Xinjiang.
The TIP's prolific output
of online media by far trumpets its terror
credentials. The group has yet to carry out an
attack in China for which the evidence traces back
to the TIP. There is a long list of attacks that
the TIP has claimed and that the media has given
the TIP credit for, but the TIP's relationship to
the attacks has turned out to be bogus, or dubious
at best. Even the group's responsibility for an
attack in Kashgar in August 2011 - which the media
attributed to the TIP and which was claimed by the
group in a video statement - does not hold up to
scrutiny. Most likely, the TIP had very little to
do with it.
The attack in Kashgar began on
the evening of July 30, 2011 with an explosion on
a street lined with pedestrians and food stalls
frequented by Han Chinese. Shortly after, two
Uyghur men hijacked a truck, killed its driver,
and then steered the truck onto the sidewalk and
into the food stalls and then stabbed people at
random.
The next day, on July 31, another
attack occurred on a popular dining and shopping
street for Han Chinese. After two more explosions
at a restaurant, as many as 10 Uyghur men
allegedly shot and stabbed people
indiscriminately, including the firefighters who
came to the rescue. Overall, more than 10
civilians and eight attackers were killed and more
than 40 others wounded in the two days.
While massacring civilians has the
hallmark of al-Qaeda-style violence that the TIP
would most certainly endorse, a look at the facts
places doubt on TIP involvement. For one, the
Chinese authorities after having at first pinned
the attacks on the Pakistan-based East Turkistan
Islamist Movement (ETIM) fighters, an organization
that preceded the TIP, then affirmed through
investigation that the attacks were carried out
and organized by local Uyghurs.
The main
weapons used in the attacks were knives, which
caused all the fatalities, while the explosives
were "homemade". Later reports placed into
question whether there actually were guns used in
the attacks since all the deaths were caused by
stabbing. The attackers did not hold a TIP logo or
shout any slogans about the TIP, and the TIP's
post-attack video included a clip of one of the
attackers, but not of the other 10, which makes
one question why would not the TIP show clips of
all of the attackers it trained if it was really
responsible?
Similarly, in 2008 a TIP
commander, Seyfullah, claimed in a video that the
TIP carried out a spate of bombings in China in
the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games,
including on buses in Kunming and Shanghai and a
building in Wenzhou. A Chinese man, however, later
confessed to the Kunming bombings, the Shanghai
bombings were reportedly caused by a passenger's
inflammable goods, and the Wenzhou attack
reportedly took place at the site of a gambling
ring and was carried out by a man angry over his
debts. While previous TIP claims may have been
true and a Chinese cover-up brilliant, the TIP
still provides no concrete evidence of its
carrying out attacks.
The TIP continues to
issue more online media propaganda, possibly to
establish a pedigree as a bona fide terror group
like the Islamic Movement Uzbekistan (IMU) or
because compelling online videos attract jihad
funders from abroad.
A video released by
the TIP on online jihadi websites in February
included for the first time a Russian speaker,
perhaps to attract Central Asians' attention. A
man with a red henna-dyed beard claiming to be a
"mujahid" named Yahya speaks on behalf of the
"Jamaat Turkestan" in the territory of Khurasan.
He says the "Jamaat Turkistan," meaning Turkistan
Society - possibly an alternate name for the TIP -
moved into the territory of Khurasan (ie the
tribal regions of Pakistan), "along with our
families and have found shelter there in October
2001," which coincides with the flight of many
Central jihadis from Northern Afghanistan to
Khurasan as a result of the US invasion at that
time.
Yahya compared the combined North
Atlantic Treaty Organization forces' invasion of
Afghanistan in October 2001 with the Chinese
invasion of Turkistan in 1949 China and to
Russia's invasion of Tatarstan. He says that in
Tatarstan they live under sharia law and that all
people there train in the handling of weapons, the
conduct of guerilla war, and urban fighting
tactics. A representative of Turkistan appears on
the video and says that, "All land is the land of
Allah! And we are ready to fight those who are
against Islam!"
The TIP's media wing,
Voice of Islam (Islam Avaz), posted the third
edition of its video series "Tourism of the
Believers" on February 2. The second edition of
the series was released one week earlier on
January 24. The first edition was posted on the
same online forum, shmukh al-Islam, in October
2011. In addition, from 2008-2011 the TIP ran nine
editions of an online magazine called "Islamic
Turkistan" which discussed the history of Islam in
Turkistan, the reasons why jihad against China is
necessary, and other common international jihadi
themes.
Since the grievances of the
Uyghurs in Xinjiang are generally recognized to be
legitimate by the international community, the
TIP's videos serve to add a jihadi element to an
otherwise peaceful movement. The attacks
attributed to the TIP in Xinjiang are likely
exaggerations or false claims and worsen
perceptions of the Uyghur cause from the
international community.
The existence of
such a terrorist organization also provides fodder
for the Chinese government to clamp down on the
Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Thus, above all, the TIP
seems to serve the benefit of the group's online
media producers who rake in funds from
international jihadi donors while inducing no
strategic military or moral benefit for the
Uyghurs on the whole.
J Z Adams
is a lawyer and international security analyst
based in Washington, DC. He writes regularly on
Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Nigeria and runs
an open-source research, translation, and due
diligence team through http://zopensource.net/
and can be reached at
Zopensource123@gmail.com.
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