|
|
|
|
Foreign Affairs
China’s “War on Terror”: September 11 and Uighur Separatism
By Chien-peng Chung
In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States, China has launched its own “war on terror.” Beijing now labels as terrorists those who are fighting for an independent state in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, which the separatists call “Eastern Turkestan.” The government considers these activists part of a network of international Islamic terror, with funding from the Middle East, training in Pakistan, and combat experience in Chechnya and Afghanistan.
In fact, separatist violence in Xinjiang is neither new nor driven primarily by outsiders. The region’s Uighurs, most of whom practice Sufi Islam and speak a Turkic language, have long had their national ambitions frustrated by Beijing. The latest wave of Uighur separatism has been inspired not by Osama bin Laden but by the unraveling of the Soviet Union, as militants seek to emulate the independence gained by some Muslim communities in Central Asia. For a decade now, Xinjiang has been rocked by demonstrations, bombings, and political assassinations. According to a recent government report, Uighur separatists were responsible for 200 attacks between 1990 and 2001, causing 162 deaths and injuring more than 440 people. In the largest single incident, in 1997, as many as 100 people may have been killed during a pro-independence uprising in the town of Ili, with the government and the separatists blaming each other for the fatalities. These incidents have occurred despite the best efforts of the Chinese authorities to suppress them. As part of their continuing “strike hard” campaign against crime, for example, Chinese police recently reported the arrest of 166 separatist “terrorists” and other “major criminals” in a series of raids carried out in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital.
The separatists have accused the regime of resorting to arbitrary arrest, torture, detention without public trial, and summary execution. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has alleged that members of a shadowy “Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement” have obtained funds and training from al Qaeda. As the security environment in Xinjiang grows increasingly tense, the conflict shows just how complicated such struggles can be, and how inadequate purely repressive approaches are in dealing with them.
Beg To Differ
China’s Qing dynasty completed its annexation of what is now Xinjiang in 1759, and the region’s first demand for independence can be traced to an uprising by a local chieftain named Yakub Beg in 1865. He fought fierce battles against the armies of the Chinese court and even managed to secure, in return for trade concessions, diplomatic recognition from tsarist Russia and the United Kingdom. Although finally defeated in 1877, Beg’s campaign set a precedent by calling for Uighur independence based on appeals to religion and ethnicity.
With the end of China’s imperial era, the Uighurs (in combination with other local Muslim groups) twice briefly achieved statehood. From 1931 to 1934, and again from 1944 to 1949, separate regimes calling themselves the Eastern Turkestan Republic were set up in Xinjiang. The first, which started in the city of Hami, . . .
Chien-peng Chung is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore.