Asia Times: Uighurs flex their muscles


	January 23, 2002	atimes.com

China

Uighurs flex their muscles
By Sean L Yom
With permission from Foreign Policy in Focus

History

The Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the northwestern and largest province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), is the homeland of the Uighur people, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group. Historically, this region lay at the crossroads of several civilizations, and it currently lies along the borders of eight countries, including Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. In 1757, the Manchus of the Q'ing Dynasty (1644-1911) invaded and consolidated the area into the dominion of the Chinese polity (Xinjiang literally means "new land").

Until 1949, China strained to keep a tenuous grip on the region. Frequent Uighur rebellions and insurgencies, aimed at expelling the growing Chinese presence, scarred the region's political terrain and seriously challenged Chinese authority. Uighur nationalists declared independence in both 1933 and 1944; both secession attempts lasted several years before being ultimately suppressed.

Communist victory in the Chinese Revolution (1949) ended the possibility of Uighur independence or autonomous rule, despite Mao Zedong's pledge that national minorities would enjoy extensive freedom if the Communists emerged victorious. Mao had made such promises during the darker days of the war, when the then-struggling Communists desperately needed broad support from China's many ethnic minorities. Afterwards, however, national unification became the overriding priority of the new regime. In 1955, Xinjiang formally became the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, cementing Chinese rule with the veneer of provincial governance. Today the levers of power in Xinjiang do not belong to Uighurs, and the region is autonomous in name only.

Accordingly, for the past half-century, a seething ethnoreligious conflict has colored the social, economic, and political climate of the XUAR. Uighurs yearn for either independence or at least substantive religious, political, and cultural autonomy; but Beijing has intractably refused either option, instead responding to all such demands with religious and political repression. Disembodied and disengaged from meaningful self-governance, Uighurs present the principal internal Muslim challenge to Chinese rule because they occupy a historic homeland, articulate focused claims to self-determination, and stubbornly resist assimilation into the broader Chinese nation.

Two episodes at the turn of the 1990s spurred Uighur nationalists into their current state of militancy. First, the ignominious Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan suggested that a lone Muslim people struggling against an infidel invader could emerge victorious. The Afghan experience intensely influenced many young Uighur political entrepreneurs, and its symbolic power was eclipsed only by the second event - the serendipitous rise to statehood of the Central Asian republics after the Soviet collapse; seeing that their fellow Turkic Muslims of Central Asia now had their own sovereign lands, Uighur proto-separatists now brandished archetypes for their own prospective nation-state.

Since the early 1990s, Uighurs' increasingly militant demands for independence have translated into a proliferation of separatist literature, numerous protests and riots, selected assassinations and kidnappings of both Uighur and Han Communist Party officials, and infrequent but costly bombing campaigns that in February 1997 extended into Beijing itself - the first incidence of terrorist violence in the capital city since 1949. In response to this burgeoning separatist trend, China has engaged in widespread tactics of repression, stifling public expressions of cultural, religious, and ethnic identity, as well as most forms of political dissent. Thousands of suspected Uighur militants have been jailed and hundreds executed.

The prospects for Uighur independence or autonomy look dim. Uighurs do not enjoy the media spotlight of their southern neighbors, the Tibetans, although they have gradually garnered more international attention - for instance, Erkin Alptekin, a Uighur, was elected as the General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) in early 2001, a post he has held on an interim basis since October 1999. While a Uighur diaspora numbering well over half a million resides in nearby Central Asian republics, China has used political and economic incentives to persuade these countries - most prominently Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan - to reject Uighur separatism. Moreover, in early October 2001 Beijing announced a new campaign against Uighur "splittism" (the government's vague term for any self-determination movement) with the cover that Uighur separatists were engaging in terrorist activities. Broader repression has increased in the XUAR under the pretense of the international war against terrorism; this also means that separatist-inspired violence will continue, since neither side has offered any peaceful resolution or conflict regulating mechanism.

Ethnoreligious context and conflict

According to the 2000 Chinese government census, the XUAR's dominant ethnic groups are the Uighur Muslims (8.7 million, 47 percent) and the Han Chinese (7.5 million, 41 percent); additionally, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other smaller ethnic collectivities inhabit the province. Uighur identity remains structured around not only the Islamic faith but also a Turkic, explicitly non-Chinese ancestry and history, in sharp contradistinction to the perceived Chinese-Communist monolith of atheism that has colonized the region during the past half-century. Han Chinese elites, particularly those in the Communist Party hierarchy, characterize Islam as a feudal or backward religion and fear its resurgence.

The identity of the present people known as Uighur is a rather recent phenomenon. While a collection of nomadic steppe peoples known as the "Uighur" have lived in and around the region since before the eighth century, this identity was lost from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The ethnogenesis of the Uighur identity in the twentieth century and its political expression as a movement for self-determination is directly related to two sets of state policies. The first are those associated with the Stalinist-influenced minority policies of the Chinese Communist Party, particularly the identification of specific nationalities and the provision of educational and other resources for recognized minority nationalities. These included thirteen Nationalities Colleges scattered throughout China, and it is the alumni of these schools who are asserting political leadership among Uighurs.

The second set of policies is those associated with liberalization since 1979 and in particular the expansion of China's trade with Central Asian and other Islamic states. The opening of China to the outside world has enabled Uighurs to build commercial and political contacts beyond China's borders. These contacts have allowed the Uighurs to see themselves as both participants in a global Islamic community (ummah) as well as Muslim citizens of the Chinese nation-state.

Uighurs justifiably hold many grievances against the Chinese government. First, a drastic disparity of living standards divides the Uighur and Han populations. Uighurs face higher unemployment, worse poverty rates, lower life expectancies, and fewer average years of schooling than their Han counterparts. Widespread discrimination against Uighurs perpetuates this entrenched socioeconomic inequality; characterizations of Uighurs as an unsophisticated, lazy, and unproductive people prevent class mobility among ascendant Uighur workers. Second, Uighurs resent the massive influx of Han Chinese since the 1949 revolution. Beijing has encouraged heavy immigration of Han Chinese, who compose almost 90 percent of the PRC's total population, since the early 1960s; while they numbered less than 10 percent of the region's population in 1950, the Han constitute over 40 percent today. Under current demographic trends, Uighurs will become a minority in their own homeland within the next twenty years.

Third, China has engaged in massive economic development schemes with little regard to the Uighur communities that these schemes impoverish, dislocate, or damage. New industries and infrastructural projects have focused on tapping the XUAR's enormous gas, oil, and mineral deposits - but in the process have significantly harmed the region's environment. For the Uighurs, this "modernization" seems more like economic exploitation of the local population and the taking of what is rightfully theirs. Finally, a cycle of religious intolerance toward Islam has sustained intense bitterness toward Beijing. Strict laws limit freedoms of association and expression, particularly regarding the religious arena: Beijing has placed tight regulations upon mosque construction, Islamic publications and media, the content of Qur'anic classes, and exit requirements for Hajj pilgrimages; imams and ulama deemed "subversive" face arrest and interrogation. These constraints have drastically increased recently, driven by Beijing's belief that Uighur militants often use religious activities as a guise for the transmission of their own separatist ideas.

Not all Uighurs support secession. Only a tiny minority actively support or collaborate in separatist violence, and a large segment seems intensely concerned with more immediate worries, such as the deteriorating environment, the repressive climate toward Islam, and the stagnant labor market. For these Uighurs, wider cultural autonomy appears as a more practical and equally desirable option than outright independence. Nonetheless, few Uighurs speak against separatist violence because it remains the only mode of political praxis that actively, frequently, and aggressively contests Chinese authority while powerfully reaffirming their ethnoreligious identity. For this reason, separatists have gained the silent support of many Uighurs.

Main actors

Chinese Communist Party (CCP): The XUAR's political bureaucracy remains filled with Han Chinese, and Uighur elites have mostly ceremonial and symbolic positions. The Communist Party and its associated civil-political institutions fiercely oppose the notion of Uighur independence or autonomy. Some leaders who have spoken in this regard include:

Abulahat Adbdurixit: XUAR chairman; a Uighur critic of "splittism," he fully supports the use of harsh repression to root out ethnoreligious separatists and their violence; Amudun Niyaz: chairman of the XUAR People's Congress Standing Committee; a technocratic-oriented leader interested in stabilizing the XUAR's business and investment climate by smothering Uighur separatism; Wang Lequan: First Secretary of the CCP in the XUAR; his December 1999 secret report became infamous after its recommendation of sending CCP cadres to Uighur villages and towns in order to monitor and report Uighur nationalist sentiment.

Uighur separatists: No embedded financial or political backbone links all Uighur separatist groups, which tend to have short lifespans and small membership bases. Despite the fears of bordering countries, Islamic fundamentalism has not ideologically transformed the organizational content or operational tactics of Uighur ethnoreligious nationalism; relatively few Uighur separatists raise cries for jihad or intifada.

Small, independent, and ideologically distinct militant groups rather than coordinated cells of a unified Turkic-Islamic organization have perpetuated much of the XUAR's separatist-inspired violence; well over a hundred such groups have been identified. Some are based in the XUAR, while others operate from adjacent countries. Some separatists emphasize secular pan-Turkism, while others stress a pan-Islamic dimension. Inter alia, all consider the independence of Xinjiang, which they refer to as Uighurstan or Eastern Turkestan, as their ultimate objective. Even then, significant differences emerge; groups organized around an Islamic identity advocate the creation of an Islamic state ruled by shari'a, while those based upon secular, ethnocultural factors do not articulate such a religiously oriented demand. The following are some prominent actors that provide a sampling of groups:

Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan: According to Russian military analyst Pyotr Sukhanov, this organization has trained over 500 fighters in Islamist camps in Tajikistan, Chechnya, and Afghanistan and stresses the Islamic over the Turkic aspect of Uighur culture. Beijing has alleged that it shares links to Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists;

Home of East Turkestan Youth: Purported to have over 2,000 fighters, many with military experience, this group has been called "Xinjiang's Hamas." Many of its members operate across the borders of the XUAR and Tajikistan or Kazakhstan, and of all the violent separatist movements this is one of the most organized and radical;

East Turkestan National Center: chaired by Reza Berken, a retired colonel in the Turkish military, this Istanbul-based institute advocates non-violent means to independence and has reliable connections to many separatist organizations in the region. Leaders of over 40 Uighur independence groups created the center in late 1998 with the hope that it would become an umbrella association for all Uighur resistance organizations.

Since September 2001, Beijing has vociferously asserted that Uighur separatists have received substantial aid from the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other violent Islamist groups. While most of these claims lay unsubstantiated, a small number of Uighur volunteers have fought in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Kashmir, and some cross-border collaboration between Uighur separatists and Islamist organizations does exist. However, such assistance usually manifests itself as localized weapons smuggling, transportation, and safe harbor for wanted Uighurs rather than coordinated networking as part of a wider political strategy.

Proposed solutions and valuation of prospects

Beijing's domestic priority has remained the same since 1949 - namely, to preserve national unity. The PRC as it exists today is a modern creation; for most of its history, China proper has maintained only weak control over large parts of its territory due to constant foreign influences and domestic strife. For Beijing, any expression of separatism arouses these historically embedded memories of political disunity, heightened by the unexpected disintegration of its communist neighbor, the Soviet Union. Its worst nightmare consists of either the Kosovo effect (repression followed by Western intervention) or the Chechnya syndrome (repression followed by bloody secession followed by violent recapture).

Neither scenario seems likely, however. China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan - countries that in June 2001 formed a strategic regional alliance called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - have maintained that Western interests should play no role in the internecine power struggles of Central Asia. Moreover, even if they could overcome their chronic disarray, Uighur separatists simply do not have the aggregate capability to initiate and sustain a full drive toward secession, given the Chinese military's overwhelming superiority in numbers and weaponry.

Hence, Uighurs remain politically isolated. Beijing's diplomatic efforts with Central Asian countries have ensured that no SCO state will support Uighur independence. The Chinese government also occupies the province with a heavy military presence, since it conducts its primary nuclear testing in the sparsely settled Taklamakan Desert; given the XUAR's military value, Beijing remains extremely wary of exogenous threats, particularly mobilized Islamist groups engaging in organized violence (for instance, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Hizb-ut-Tahrir, two neighboring groups that a handful of ethnic Uighurs have joined). Losing Xinjiang would be disastrous for China in terms of its geostrategic position and national security; granting independence is not - and never will be - a viable policy choice for Beijing.

Greater cultural and religious autonomy emerges as a more plausible option. Immediately lifting some of the more repressive laws against religious practices, for instance, could appease many Uighur moderates while isolating the extreme separatist groups. Concomitantly, promoting more Uighurs to real positions of authority rather than ceremonial posts could also weaken the separatists' base of support, since the separatist organizations rely upon a nationalist discourse that situates China as an oppressive enemy and Uighurs as victims. Over time, involving more Uighurs in the organs of the state could challenge this perception.

However, such a policy would need to overcome two barriers: first, Beijing has grown increasingly concerned that radical Islamist ideologies and organizations might seep into the XUAR, given fellow SCO states' experiences; accordingly, loosening the political noose around the province might result in such cross-border incursions. Second, giving Xinjiang a truly autonomous political status might inspire similarly oppressed minorities across China to engage in organized ethnonationalist movements as well as cloud the future of China's national security vis-a-vis its western frontiers. In particular, the Tibetans, Mongolians, and Hui (another Muslim ethnic minority) - each of which has its own autonomous region - have watched the Uighur drama unfold with great interest.

Historically, the Uighur-China relationship has revolved around cycles of insurgency and repression. These cycles will likely continue without resolution. The international war on terrorism has set off the latest cycle, the first signs of which are the intensification of the PRC's anti-separatist campaign in the XUAR. Unless moderated by the countervailing trends of political and economic liberalization, this repression will likely squelch Islamist militancy. If so, a less-militarized political climate may result in the medium term. But given Beijing's unwillingness to grant the most elementary forms of cultural and religious autonomy, separatist militancy will likely emerge again in Xinjiang. Once Beijing loses patience with the next spate of bombings or assassinations, another enervating wave of repression will follow.

US role

With Washington having embraced a new international war on terrorism, with Islamist movements as it main target, it's unlikely that the US government will make human rights abuses in Xinjiang a high-profile issue in US-China relations. China offered the US support in its war against terrorism largely due to the dynamics of the Uighur problem. It is no coincidence that in the ensuing weeks after September 11, Beijing vigorously accused Uighur separatists of sharing links with Islamist groups associated with either bin Laden or the Taliban regime.

Despite the lack of evidence that the Uighur separatist trend is Islamist terrorism in disguise, Beijing estimates that by offering such unbridled encouragement for US terrorism policy, it can preemptively silence future criticisms of its Uighur policy. This is good news for Beijing, which insists that its policies to contain separatism should remain firmly within its own sphere of influence. For its part, the terrorism of September 11 and the pursuant war in Afghanistan unexpectedly benefited the US by expanding its geopolitical presence in Central Asia, which may bolster existing efforts by the region's government to crack down on Islamist movements. But US presence, economic and military, also concerns Beijing, which has been interested in cementing its own ties in the region.

Despite the new US-China counterterrorism alliance, Washington and Beijing do not entirely see eye to eye on separatist issues. For example, the US does not agree with Beijing's assertions that Uighur separatists should be classified as terrorists. After a meeting on December 6, 2001 with Chinese Vice Foreign Ministers Li Zhaoxing and Wang Yi, US Ambassador Francis Taylor contended, "The legitimate economic and social issues that confront the people in Western China are not necessarily terrorist issues and should be resolved politically rather than using counterterrorism methods." It is doubtful, however, that such differences will translate into high-level public diplomacy on the part of the US to highlight human rights and political development issues in China in the short-term.

The US has never had a consistent foreign policy regarding Muslim minority populations. Although it intervened in Kosovo, US lack of action in Chechnya, the Philippines, and other regions affected by Muslim ethnonationalism and associated repression signifies that Washington's primary concerns tend to be strategic - ie when the host country is a crucial variable in its political and economic calculus. Heeding certain anxieties that Islamist-inspired fundamentalism may "radicalize" the broader tactics and goals of Uighur separatism, the US acknowledges that Uighur separatism is not Islamist terrorism. But it also recognizes the possibility that without stringent political and military controls, external organizations and support could easily swell the ideological or religious intensity of separatist violence in the future.

Although gross human rights violations and careless nuclear testing worry the US, pushing these issues to the forefront of its Chinese policy framework could endanger Washington's economic and political interests in Central Asia. In keeping with its dominant geostrategic interests, it is unlikely that Washington will venture beyond its current role as a critical observer. A higher-profile policy with respect to the plight of the Uighurs could jeopardize Washington's concrete interests, such as access to Central Asian energy reserves, a vibrant economic relationship with China, and a fragile but precious geopolitical presence. Simply put, entering into the Uighur struggle as an operational interlocutor will profit the US little while costing it far too much.

((c) Foreign Policy in Focus. FPIF - "A think tank without walls" - is online at www.fpif.org)