China leans brutally on Muslim Uighur

By: Khadija Chinese

KASHGAR, China: Chinese government under the guise of a “war on terrorism” has launched such an implacable campaign of repression on its Muslim Uighur minority that it's stopped cold nearly all violent attacks.

China shrugged off criticism and pledged anew to obliterate any glimmer of freedom sentiment within the ethnic Uighurs, who number about 8 million.

Today, the Uighurs (pronounced Weegers), who live in arid dun-colored towns and cities on the edge of the forbidding Taklimakan Desert, dwell in resentful coexistence with migrant Han Chinese flooding their homeland. They bristle at how China has restricted their religious freedom, yet fear to speak out amid the pervasive presence of security agents.

Uighurs have numerous complaints, ranging from education and health care to lack of religious freedom. Up to 50 children crowd elementary classrooms.

Authorities limit the religious practice of Uighurs more than of other Muslim minorities, such as the Hui. Under the rubric of the “10 No's,” officials bar those under 18 from entering mosques, ban foreign Muslims from meeting local imams (religious leaders). Mosques routinely are blocked from using loudspeakers. The Chinese government permits Xinjiang's 23,000 mosques to conduct Islamic services.

But unlike cities elsewhere in the Muslim world, Kashgar at prayer time does not echo with the amplified sound of the muzzein's call to prayer. Abdul Ghani, a local municipal official, insists no law prohibits the practice.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, China saw an opening to crack down further on Uighur freedom fighters.

“Over the last three years, tens of thousands of people are reported to have been detained for investigation in the region,” the London-based human rights group Amnesty International said in a report in July. Thousands are believed to toil in forced labor camps. Others have been executed, though how many is unclear.

Uighur activists in exile say they haven't given up on a dream of an independent homeland, which they call East Turkestan, and they don't believe that China's arrest of thousands of Uighur activists and Muslim clerics will bring long-term stability.

"I do not know when the pressure-cooker situation will explode, but I am sure it will happen," said Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the East Turkestan Information Center, an exile group based in Sweden and Germany.

Chinese officials portray Xinjiang as pacified and the Uighurs as a contented part of a national tapestry that includes 55 other ethnic minority groups.

Even as they speak of pacification, officials wield an iron fist in Xinjiang. Most Uighurs spoke only warily. Secret police often tailed a journalist breaking from a group.

At a newly built housing compound in the eastern part of Kashgar, a city near the border with Kyrgyzstan, a crowd of Uighurs grew agitated at a visitor's questions. A weeping woman held her wrists together as if she were handcuffed. Others exhorted a translator: “Tell him the truth!” The translator began to interpret their grievances, only to stop abruptly. “We are not alone,” he said, signaling some agents lurking nearby.

Alim Seytoff, the general secretary of the Uyghur American Association, an exile group that represents some 1,000 Uighurs living in the USm said: “The government basically sees Islam as a threat to China's stability.”

China has rallied a regional security alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to lean on neighboring Central Asian nations to repatriate wanted Uighur extremists. Those returned generally have faced execution.

China also has gotten limited support from the United States.

There is a long history of friction in Xinjiang between the native Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, and the Han. For brief periods in the 1930s and 1940s, this province, which accounts for one-sixth of China's territory, was an independent republic called East Turkestan. Chinese authorities insist the area was settled by the Han 2,000 years ago and have been willing to use as much force as necessary to prove the point. Xinjiang is the only place in China where the death penalty is routinely handed out for political crimes, according to Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, a top military official urged the strengthening of China’s 2.5 million semi-military presence in the westernmost Xinjiang region to combat freedom movement, state press reported on Friday October 8.

END