Struggle at the Center of Asia: China vs. the Uighurs. Mike Jeffers Reports

Xinjiang’s Tumultuous History
Wariness over Xinjiang has its roots in the long, evolving history of western China. “It has historically served as a buffer for Beijing for potential Asian and Russian invaders from the West,” said Baker. But depending on who you talk to, you’ll find starkly different versions of history. Some Uighur and some Han Chinese have revised their versions to serve their respective purposes.

“Chinese insecurity about Xinjiang is based on a 200-year history of outside involvement and intervention in this frontier region,” said James A. Millward, a China and Central Asia expert at Georgetown University, in a 2005 report to Congress. “The Chinese view of the region’s history stresses foreign interference above all else as the source of trouble in Xinjiang from the 18th Century to the present.”

From the ninth to the 14th century, a dynasty of Uighur kings controlled the region. The Uighurs at that time were not Muslims. Descending from nomads from the steppes of central Asia, they converted to Manichaeism and then to Buddhism before being converted to Islam in the 1400s.

China re-conquered Xinjiang in 1759, and by 1884 it was completely absorbed as a province. Aside from two brief periods when the Uighurs established a republic called East Turkestan in 1931–1934 and then 1944–49, Xinjiang would never regain its independence.

Those separatist movements proved unsuccessful, but it has been a constant challenge for Beijing to maintain its control. In 1990, the Chinese official media reported a counterrevolutionary riot in the southern part of the province near Kashgar in which 22 people died. In February 1997, a pro-independence uprising left as many as 100 dead.

A group called the Organization for Turkestan Freedom in 1997 claimed responsibility for a bus bombing in Beijing that injured 30 people. More recently, Uighur riots and violence have broken out in Xinjiang and even in eastern China, including a June 2009 riot in a Guangdong factory between Uighur and Han migrant workers.

Beijing often contends that the Germany-based World Uighur Congress and Kadeer are connected directly to the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement and had a direct hand in the July 2009 uprising in Xinjiang, a claim that Kadeer and her organization vehemently deny.

“We oppose all forms of violence,” Kadeer said in a statement on her group’s Web site. “The Uighur people’s response to the continuing brutality of Chinese rule has been peaceful because the Uighur people do not want a future that is predicated on violence and bloodshed.”

Kadeer once had a successful career as a department store owner in Urumqi. She was even appointed to serve on the Beijing government’s national advisory group, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and was a delegate to the U.N. World Conference on Women in 1995.

In 1999, however, Kadeer was jailed on charges of harming national security in China. She was reportedly on her way to meet a delegation from the U.S. Congressional Research Service when she was picked up. She was released in 2005, in part because of U.S. diplomatic pressure, and left for the United States.

Meanwhile, the Uighur relationship with the U.S. has been complicated. Terrorism experts say that after that group’s leader was killed in 2003, some members reorganized into similar groups, including the Turkestan Islamic Party, and received training from al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While the East Turkistan Islamic Movement has been linked with violent attacks since 2007 – some targeting Olympic preparations.

While no one disputes that the ETIM has been responsible for separatist attacks, experts say it does not represent a majority of Uighurs. Dru Gladney, a Uighur expert at the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California, said no solid evidence points to the existence of other organized separatist movements.

“The characterization of the Guantanamo Uighurs as ‘ETIM terrorists’ is a misnomer at best and at worst a calculated mischaracterization of a group of people whom the Bush administration and the Department of Defense determined comprise no threat to the U.S.,” Gladney testified to Congress in June 2009.

But Stratfor’s Baker offered a different perspective that helps explain Chinese wariness of the Uighurs. “There are elements of the Uighur separatist movement that are very closely linked to Central Asian Pakistan and Afghan militants, right down to links to al Qaeda and links to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” Baker said.

“ETIM history goes back to the 1940s and ’50s in various forms, sometimes based in Xinjiang. Currently, it appears the base of operations is in the Pakistani border area, moving closer to Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.” The point is, the debate isn’t settled over the intensity and intent of the separatist movement.

To a certain extent, the level of sympathy to separatist groups can be broken down geographically within Xinjiang. In the southern city of Kashgar you are much more likely to encounter Uighurs who identify with al Qaida or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and will at times openly express sympathy with the causes propagated by such organizations.

However, in prosperous and cosmopolitan areas of the province — where living with Han Chinese has been a reality for much longer — the majority of Uighurs seemingly rejects terrorism and advocate advancing their cause within China’s system.