China's Uighurs trapped at
Guantanamo By Adam Wolfe
The Pentagon
wants to release more than 12 of some two dozen Uighur
detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but Washington
for strategic and political reasons will not return
the detainees, captured in Afghanistan, to China, which
considers them terrorists and Xinjiang separatists.
China would be expected to deal with them harshly.
Since other countries, concerned about their own
diplomatic relations with China, are unwilling to accept
the detainees, the United States faces a serious threat to
its diplomatic relationship with China if it grants the
detainees asylum in the US.
This difficult
situation in Cuba highlights the complexities that
underscore, and threaten to undermine, Washington's
policy on China's western Xinjiang region, one populated
by Muslim Uighurs seeking greater autonomy, independence
or just better treatment.
Recent riots between
Hui Muslim Chinese and Han Chinese in central China's
Henan province left at least 150 dead and resulted in
the imposition of martial law. And the situation in
Xinjiang and Uighur-Han relations are far more tense
than in Henan, boding ill for any returning Uighurs who
had fought in Afghanistan against US forces.
History of the Xinjiang region
China's Xinjiang region is the traditional home of
the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who converted to Islam
in the 1300s. In 1949, the newly
established communist government of China took control of the region.
To consolidate its power in the area, Beijing began to
resettle Han Chinese people in Xinjiang, a policy
leading to a dramatic shift in the demographics of the
region: the Han population has increased from 7% to over
40% since 1949.
The Uighur population often felt
slighted by Beijing and resented that Han Chinese were
given state-sponsored jobs after moving to Xinjiang,
while Uighurs were offered few economic opportunities.
In the early 1990s, this resentment began to form the
foundation of a sometimes-violent opposition movement.
After seeing the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy
movements, the Tibetan autonomy or independence
movements within China, and witnessing the former Soviet
Central Asian states gain their independence to the
west, the Uighurs in Xinjiang began to speak out against
Beijing's control. This movement lacked the clear
leadership of the Tibetan campaign being fought to their
south, and it quickly became fractured. Militant groups
emerged to challenge China's rule forcefully, while
non-violent groups agitated within China and sought
backing from Western governments.
Beijing
focused on the violent groups, while Washington
highlighted the grievances of the non-violent groups. The
1990 uprising in Baren, a small town near Kashgar, led
by the Free Turkestan Movement and claimed 22 lives was
used by Beijing as an excuse to crack down on the Uighur
population in Xinjiang. Throughout the 1990s, Beijing's
efforts to increase its control over Xinjiang were
answered by a series of attacks by militant Uighur
groups. Washington's position on the attacks was that
they were being launched by a small minority within the
opposition movement, which had legitimate grievances
with the Chinese government.
While the US promoted
human-rights issues in Xinjiang, Beijing claimed
that the attacks were being waged by groups that had
ties to terrorist organizations in Central Asia. In many
cases these claims were valid, but Washington's strategic
goals were to promote human rights in China and
weaken the government's control of its western periphery
regions, in case a conflict should arise between
the two states in the long term; it was not in the
United States' interests to provide a justification for China
to rein in the Uighur groups seeing greater autonomy or
separation. To this end, Washington dismissed Beijing's
claims that Uighur groups fought on the side of the
Taliban during the 1996 revolution in Afghanistan as
propaganda - and an excuse to persecute political
dissidents.
To achieve greater control over the
Xinjiang region, China pushed for the formation of the
Shanghai Five, a regional organization that integrated
the security forces of China, Russia, Tajikistan,
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to suppress separatist
movements within each country. In this period, the
member countries' concerns were more closely aligned
with Beijing than with Washington's goal of promoting
democracy and pluralism in the former Soviet states. The
Shanghai Five admitted Uzbekistan in June 2001 and was
renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). It
has become one of Beijing's dominant tools for achieving
regional influence in Central Asia.
Xinjiang
in the 'war on terror' Although Washington monitored
the actions of the militant Uighur groups prior
to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
on September 11, 2001, they were not seen as a threat
to US objectives in the region. This changed after
Uighur militants were captured and killed during the
invasion of Afghanistan while fighting alongside the Taliban
and al-Qaeda. There are reportedly two dozen
Uighur militants captured during fighting in
Afghanistan, and being held at Guantanamo Bay.
While Washington's long-term goals for Xinjiang
were little altered by the new "war on terrorism", it
became difficult to reconcile support for Uighur
freedoms and the desire to eliminate any group that
aligned itself with al-Qaeda. Although many in
Washington were skeptical that any Uighur groups would
attack outside of the Xinjiang region, they also hoped
to exploit any ties that might exist between these
groups and al-Qaeda. This put Washington in the
uncomfortable position of cooperating with China on
Xinjiang affairs or ignoring possible opportunities to
weaken the operational capabilities of Osama bin Laden's
organization.
The administration of President
George W Bush pursued a path that mitigated these
concerns. The State Department and the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) quickly began differentiating
between violent groups that had ties to international
terrorist organizations and nonviolent groups that were
campaigning for greater autonomy and religious freedom
within the Xinjiang region. Some of the groups that were
singled out as violent were the United Revolutionary
Front of Eastern Turkestan, which has ties to groups in
Kazakhstan and took up arms against China in 1997; the
Wolves of Lop Nor, which has claimed responsibility for
several train bombings and assassinations in Xinjiang;
and the Xinjiang Liberation Organization and Uighur
Liberation Organization, which have been active in
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and are tied to the
assassinations of Uighurs thought to be cooperating with
the Chinese government.
The main way the US
sought to combat these violent groups was through
bilateral agreements with the Central Asian countries in
which these militants were training and operating. This
method was chosen as a way to undermine the importance
of the SCO to the member states' security strategies and
to decrease the influence the organization allowed to
China. However, there has also been some amount of US
cooperation with China on combating these organizations.
It was widely viewed that Washington placed the East
Turkestan Islamic Movement on the official US list of
terrorist organizations on August 26, 2002, as a sign of
cooperation with Beijing after the US attacks in
September 2001.
The Bush
administration, however, also has attempted to maintain its
previous position of supporting greater religious freedom
within China and weakening Beijing's control over its
western provinces. To this end, the administration has
been consistent in stating China must not use the "war
on terrorism" as "an excuse to persecute minorities"
within its territory. Washington has also increased its
funding and support for nonviolent Uighur groups, such as
the East Turkestan National Congress and the Regional
Uighur Organization. Most prominently, the Uighur
American Association received a grant from the
US-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy - a
first for a Uighur exile group.
No easy
answers These competing agendas have made
Washington's position on the Xinjiang region difficult
to sustain, and the desire to free the Uighur detainees
from Guantanamo Bay has further complicated the problem.
Washington cannot return the detainees to China for two
reasons: their repatriation would be seen as a
justification of China's discriminatory policy toward
its Uighur citizens, which would make it more difficult
for Washington to promote the peaceful instability it
favors in the Xinjiang region, and there are genuine
concerns for the detainees' safety if they return to
China.
Last week's widely reported violence in
the Henan province in central China in which fighting
between Han Chinese and Hui Muslims left 150 dead and
ended with a declaration of martial law exemplifies
Washington's concerns about repatriating the detainees.
Hui Muslims are not generally thought to be a threat to
Chinese rule and are better integrated into Chinese
society than the Uighur Muslims. China's record on
human-rights issues has led to a weapons sales ban from
Western governments and has greatly shaped Washington's
approach to Beijing since the peaceful Tiananmen Square
pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. Sending the
detainees to a country in which it can be reasonably
assumed that they would be tortured or persecuted would
also be a violation of international law. There is
little reason to believe that the US will change its
opposition to China's human-rights record to repatriate
the Uighur detainees.
It is also unlikely that
Washington will grant the detainees US asylum, even if
the detainees are deemed to be no threat to US national
security. This would risk creating a rift between
Beijing and Washington that the US cannot allow when it
is relying on Beijing's cooperation in nuclear arms
negotiations with North Korea. If Washington is serious
about freeing the detainees - and it does appear that
this is the case - then there is only one workable
solution to the problem: finding a third party to accept
the detainees, a country with an acceptable human-rights
record.
The Financial Times reported that
Washington has approached Switzerland, Finland, Norway,
Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, Austria and Turkey to
accept the detainees. So far, none of the countries has
been willing to accept them. Many of these countries are
attempting to increase their economic ties to China, and
accepting the detainees might make this more difficult.
One way around this would be for the US to allow the
United Nations to negotiate the repatriation, but this
is unlikely to happen. The UN High Commissioner for
Refugees is concerned that UN involvement would threaten
China's cooperation on the humane treatment of North
Korean refugees, and not sending them back to Pyongyang
that would be expected to torture, persecute and very
possibly kill them.
Conclusion Why the
Uighur Muslims were captured, and why they were deemed
no longer to pose a threat to the US, is not clear.
However, there is little chance that the detainees will
be freed from US custody any time soon, because there is
little maneuverability for Washington's Xinjiang policy.
The US will continue to search for a country that will
accept the detainees, but China's importance to global
capital markets makes this unlikely to succeed.
Most likely, the detainees will be sent to another
US-run facility that operates under clearer international
laws - this may help to promote the idea that
Washington is dedicated to finding a solution to the
problem that is consistent with international law and
makes repatriation in another country less politically
risky. Previously, Washington has sent Iranian
and Syrian detainees to a US-run prison in Afghanistan
after no acceptable country was found willing
to accept them. The current situation of the two
dozen Uighur Muslims is the result of complicated,
and sometimes contradictory, policy decisions and no
simple solution will present itself to allow for their
release.
Adam Wolfe is a
communications analyst and a contributor to the Power
and Interest News Report. His analyses have been printed
in many publications, including the Center for Security
Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He
has a degree in communications from the University of
Wisconsin.
Published with permission of
thePower and Interest News Report,
an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide
insight into various conflicts, regions and points of
interest around the globe. All comments should be
directed tocontent@pinr.com .
