CHINA'S RESTIVE CORNER OF CENTRAL ASIA
Igor Rotar: 7/09/02

As American-led military missions press on and a government tries to consolidate its power in Afghanistan, many observers worry that global political attention will drift away from Central Asia. That notion ignores the fact that political attention since the antiterrorist campaign began has shone only on Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics that surround it. People in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which borders Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, have practiced Central Asian culture for centuries - and live with state sanctions and growing strains of extremism like those that worry the former Soviet republics. As these pictures show, the region shares much with countries like Kyrgyzstan, even if it does not share the spotlight.

The region's history describes a sometimes bloody tension between Chinese and Central Asian traditions. According to official statistics from the People's Republic of China, 16.5 million people live in Xinjiang's largest province, East Turkestan. Ethnic Chinese comprise about half the region's population, with people of Turkic descent making the balance. Of these, Uighurs - a predominantly Muslim ethnic group - make up the largest group, representing 42 percent of the total population. In ancient times, Uighur civilization exerted a powerful impact on both China and Central Asia, before falling to Manjur invaders from China in 1759. Invaders called the land "Xinjiang," which means "new border." Uighurs have revolted against the Chinese over 400 times since then. Relations have been particularly bad since the early 1950s, when Beijing started a mass forced migration of ethnic Chinese into East Turkestan. In 1949, some 200,000 Chinese in Xinjiang made up about 10 percent of the population; the Chinese population has since increased forty times over, and its share has increased fivefold. In the early 1990s, a Uighur separatist underground began to organize.

Uighur separatists intermittently organize terrorist acts. They exploded a bus in Kaxgar in 1990 and another in Urumchi, the capital, in 1992. Sometimes, violence has arisen without terrorism. In 1990, after the authorities barricaded a mosque, locals in the Kaxgar suburb of Barin spontaneously rebelled. A similar uprising occurred five years later in Khotan, after authorities removed a popular imam. Most seriously, clashes between police and citizens in Inin, on the Kazakhstan border, left about 25 dead and injured roughly 200 people in February 1997. Beijing consistently treats Uighur separatism as a threat to national security. "In private conversations one can criticize Communists but never speak in support of the Uighur independence as it may result in immediate arrest," a Uighur citizen told EurasiaNet. If the government exaggerates the Uighur threat, most Uighurs demonize the government and people who look like its leaders: many Uighurs will never get into a taxi with a Chinese driver or go to Chinese restaurants that do not cook in accordance with Halal codes. Many Uighurs do not travel beyond Xinjiang, as in other parts of China they have difficulty finding Halal food.

This animosity stands in marked contrast to other Central Asian communities' relative tolerance of ethnic Russian occupation during Soviet times. One possible reason is that Muslim doctrine prescribes much closer ties to Jews and Christians - so-called "people of the book" - than to practitioners of other religions. Another is that Russian migration to Central Asia forged a much smaller demographic shift than Xinjiang saw, except in Kazakhstan. In 1979, Russians did not exceed 12 percent of the population in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

The Chinese government, though, has targeted Uighurs' faith as a motivation for their intransigence. The state forbids Muslims who work for national companies to attend mosques. Signs on mosque doors say that teenagers may not enter, which has nothing to do with Islamic law. While the state prohibits religious teachings outside mosques, it has gone to some length to show respect for Uighurs' national culture. Like Soviet leaders of a bygone era, Chinese officials support Uighur language schools and institutes, TV and radio programs and newspapers. In some ways, the Chinese government has extended itself further than the Soviets ever did, by providing special kitchens and food for Muslim soldiers and investing heavily in East Turkestan's development.

In 1994, a visitor to East Turkestan saw people getting around mostly on horses or bicycles; eight years later, cars are common. In the mid-1980s, the capital of Urumchi featured depressing standardized five-story buildings; nowadays, the city center features plush skyscrapers. Even separatists admit that living standards have significantly improved over the past decade. But they refuse to merge their culture with China's, preferring to preserve "parallel worlds." Most Uighurs, even in urban areas, speak almost no Chinese. (In Central Asian Soviet republics, most educated people spoke fluent Russian.) And the government's strict religious intolerance leads separatists to forge alliances with Islamic radicals in former Soviet states. If the United States and its allies seriously intend to learn about extremist activities, they might do well to become more familiar with East Turkestan.

On May 31, 1998, a jitney exploded in Osh, Kyrgyzstan's southern capital, killing two and injuring 12. Two days later, an explosion in a residential building killed two people including a woman who was eight months pregnant. Kyrgyz authorities (who have faced accusations of intolerance and corruption in their own clashes with citizens) arrested five people for the crimes eighteen months later. According to official Kyrgyz sources, three of these citizens were Chinese, and all of them wanted to provoke a conflict between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the southern part of the republic. [For more information, see the Eurasia Insight archives]. The three Chinese detainees reportedly belonged to a separatist organization and had received training from Khattab, the notorious Jordanian who fought alongside Muslim separatists in Chechnya.

The travels of these Uighur separatists may also reveal patterns of extremist networking. Reportedly, Uighur Islamists are raising money among the 400,000 ethnic Uighurs in the former Soviet Union to finance an insurrection in China. In January 2001, Uighur terrorists killed Negmat Bazakov, chairman of Kyrgyzstan's "Ittipak" Uighur Cultural and Enlightenment Society, as well as an official from China. Kyrgyz Uighurs who requested anonymity told EurasiaNet that Negmat Bazakov forfeited his life by refusing to donate money to the Uighur underground across the border.

Editor's Note: Igor Rotar is the Central Asia representative for Keston Institute (UK).

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Posted July 9, 2002 © Eurasianet
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