China Tags Muslims As "Terrorists" In Oil-Rich Area

by Niko Kyriakou

(IPS) NEW YORK -- The Chinese government is using "separatist" and "terrorist" labels to justify religious repression of the Uighur ("Weager") people, a nomadic Muslim minority group in the oil-rich Xinjiang province, says a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights in China.

The 114-page report, "Devastating Blows: Religious Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang," is based on previously undisclosed party and government documents, newspaper articles, and interviews in the province.

It unveils for the first time the network of laws, regulations and policies that China has used since Sept. 11, 2001 to target Uighurs that they claim are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other international terrorist groups.

But the real problem China faces from the province's 8 million Uighurs is not religious terrorism so much as demands for equal rights and autonomy, HRW says.

"China is using the suppression of religion as a whip over Uighurs who challenge or even chafe at Chinese rule of Xinjiang," said Brad Adams, the group's Asia director.

"In other parts of China, individuals have a little more space to worship as they choose. But Uighur Muslims are facing state-ordered discrimination and crackdowns," he said. "The situation is not dissimilar to Tibet, with the Chinese state attempting to refashion a religion to control an ethnic minority."

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, denied the report's allegations Tuesday, saying that as mandated under the country's constitution, all ethnic groups in Xinjiang enjoy full civil rights, including freedom of religion.

But citing official documents, HRW charges that government policy and law enforcement in Xinjiang or formally, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, deny Uighurs religious freedom, the freedom of association, assembly, and expression, print and thought both in schools and at home.

Control can come in many forms, from requiring individuals to shave their beards, to surveillance of mosques or purging religious teachers from schools. Peaceful Uighur activists charged with separatism have been arrested and tortured, and three Uighurs were executed in 1997 in connection with an anti-Chinese riot in the Xinjiang city of Yili.

"Uighurs are seen by Beijing as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state," said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China. "As Islam is perceived as underpinning Uighur ethnic identity, China has taken draconian steps to smother Islam as a means of subordinating Uighur nationalist sentiment."

"Religious regulation in Xinjiang is so pervasive, that it creates a legal net that can catch just about anyone the authorities want to target," Hom said.

Official manuals cited in the report contain catch-all "offences" that allow Chinese authorities to intervene in any religious practices that fail to uphold Marxist views of religion or that are deemed to be "harmful to the good order of society."

The report includes the text of repressive regulations, documents the vast increases in the number of detained Uighurs, and describes how information on religious and ethnic minority issues is classified as "state secrets."

Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan himself has said that the "major task" facing the authorities in Xinjiang is to "manage religion and guide it in being subordinate to the central task of economic construction, the unification of the motherland, and the objective of national unity."

China has been able to hide Xinjiang from international attention by clothing the issue, much as the Russians have clothed Chechnya, in a terrorist mantle.

One of China's most popular magazines, Life Weekly, has run pieces highlighting "China's Fight against Terrorism," which describe Islamic radicals in Xinjiang as Beijing's primary enemy.

But Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a think tank created in collaboration with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, says that a major reason why China offered its support to the U.S. "war on terror" was to gain legitimacy for its repression of Uighur separatists.

The U.S. Ambassador, Francis Taylor, told Chinese ministers in December 2001 that, "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."

But some say it is unlikely that Washington's will uphold this recommendation. Not only is China an important U.S. ally, but, under trade agreements, the U.S. Congress gave up the right to annually review China's human rights record in exchange for greater access to Chinese markets.

Regional pressure on China is also lacking as China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan formed a strategic regional alliance in June of 2001called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance calls for Western interests to be excluded from Central Asia's power struggles and heavy-handed U.S. involvement could jeopardise regional energy interests.

HRW and Human Rights in China are urging the international community to pressure China to repeal regulations and policies that discriminate against Uighurs. They particularly stress the need to challenge China's claims that all separatists are criminals or are connected to international terror networks.

Uighur nationalists unsuccessfully attempted to declare independence in both 1933 and 1944, but dreams of autonomy became impossible after the communist victory in the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

Since 1979, trade liberalization policies have exposed Turkish-speaking Uighurs to higher unemployment and poverty rates, lower life expectancies, and less schooling than the Han Chinese in the region.

Over the last 10 years, the immigration of more than 1.2 million Han, or ethnic Chinese settlers in Xinjiang, has increased their portion of the total population from 10 to 40 percent and threatened the Uighur's cultural survival.

In the early 1990s, Uighur demands for independence of Xinjiang, which they refer to as Uighurstan or Eastern Turkestan, grew increasingly militant, resulting in protests and riots, assassinations and kidnapping, and infrequent bombing campaigns -- one of which hit Beijing in February of 1997.

Groups such as the East Turkestan Youth, known as "Xinjian's Hamas," are said to have more than 2,000 fighters, many with military experience.

The Chinese government occupies Xinjiang with a heavy military presence and conducts most of its nuclear testing in the province's Taklamakan Desert.

But since Sept. 11, 2001, the report says that Xinjiang's independence strategies have moved away from violence and towards an ideological war with China in which literature and art are new weapons affirming Uighur identity.

China is unlikely to grant the Uighurs autonomy anytime soon, as such a move would likely inspire other Chinese minorities.

But FPIF says that removing some of the more repressive laws against religious practices could appease Uighur moderates and isolate extremists. The think tank also says that promoting more Uighurs to positions of real authority could at once improve their status while deflating separatist rhetoric that paints China as an evil giant stepping on Uighur victims.

According to FPIF, few Uighurs actually support or collaborate in separatist violence. Cultural autonomy, economic opportunity, and the cessation of environmental destruction that has resulted from China's mass extraction of the region's rich mineral resources are issues closer to the hearts of most Uighur people.

On the other hand, FPIF says that few Uighurs speak out against separatist violence because separatists remain their only stiff-necked supporters against Chinese rule.