#turquestan

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El Turquestan durant l'invasió mongola (W. Barthold, 1977).

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Mapa del Turquestan i contrades veïnes.

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Yurta turcomana, Turkmenistán

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Experts have questioned the Chinese government's claim that recent attacks in the Xinjiang region were planned abroad by "Islamic extremists". Analysts and Xinjiang experts said on Friday there is no evidence that Chinese Muslim groups had been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan to carry out the attacks.

Last weekend, ethnic Uighur assailants stormed a restaurant in the city of Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang, killing the owner and a waiter, and then hacking four people to death on a nearby street.

According to state media, at least 14 people were killed and 42 injured in two separate incidents.

The attacks were the latest in several bursts of violence that have jolted Xinjiang - where many Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic-speaking people, resent the influx of Han Chinese.

The Chinese government blamed the attacks on Muslim fighters and responded by ordering a full-scale security clampdown on Xinjiang.

"Those criminals who dare to test the law and commit violent terrorist acts will be shown no leniency, no appeasement and no soft heart," Meng Jianzhu, the public security minister, said on Thursday.   Meng made the comments, posted on the government's website , during an anti-terrorism meeting in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi.

"Recent occurrences of violent terrorist crimes in Xinjiang have caused numerous casualties among innocent people, and seriously impacted Xinjiang's economic and social development and ethnic unity," he said.   Those words were the closet Meng came to explicitly referring to the weekend's violence. He avoided any mention of Pakistan, where China had said that separatist groups receive training.

Experts sceptical

China has blamed the surge in violence on the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), who it says trains in Pakistan - an ally of China.

Analysts and Uighur activists confirm that Chinese Muslim activists have been to Taliban-controlled regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but say there is no evidence that they are being trained to carry out attacks in China.

"I don't think there is any reason to assume that any organization is orchestrating. Barring any evidence, it's ridiculous to make such a claim," Dru Gladney, an expert on Xinjiang politics at the US-based Pacific Basin Institute, said.

In fact, some experts even question whether the ETIM is still active.

"I have seen no irrefutable evidence that ETIM still exists ... or that it is responsible for the recent round of violence,'' Gardner Bovingdon, a professor of Central Asian studies at Indiana University, said.

Bovingdon is the author of a history of the Uighur struggle.

Overseas Uighur activists say that China's claim of "Islamic terrorism" is a smokescreen designed to obscure the true reasons for which some have turned to violence.

Many Uighurs complain of discrimination in the job market, and say government efforts to boost development in Xinjiang have mainly benefited the Han majority, and attracted more to move there.

Furthermore, many are angry about tightened restrictions on their culture, religion and language.

Since 2009's Urumqi riots, the Chinese government has imposed a series of oppressive policies on the Uighur community - restricting everything from mosque attendance to fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. 

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If Cowboys and Aliens - the hilarious summer blockbuster featuring Daniel "007" Craig and Harrison "Indiana Jones" Ford - were to be set in Xinjiang, China's Far West, the cowboys would be ethnic Uyghurs and the aliens, the Han Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). Of course this is no summer fun - rather an explosive, decades-long tragedy.  Chinese media, following the official spin by the government of Kashgar City, has blamed a group of "religious extremists" led by "militants trained in overseas terrorist camps" for last weekend's latest conflagration in Xinjiang, which left six dead and 15 wounded.  The "terrorist group" is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which emerged in the mid-1980s, widely considered in China as the most dangerous of the East Turkestan "separatist" groups. The official story is that militants "set fire to a restaurant" and then, wielding sickles and knives, started "killing civilians at random".  Geopolitical ramifications may be dire. As ETIM is based in the porous AfPak tribal areas, this amounts to China directly accusing Pakistan of harboring them. Beijing, as well as the UN, consider ETIM to be a terrorist organisation. Yet as the tribal areas largely escape Islamabad's rule, even the ISI is not keeping tabs on how many Uyghurs are embedded in Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda networks.  What's raising eyebrows is that Beijing, which Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Gillani describes as "Pakistan's best friend" and is unanimously viewed by the Islamabad establishment as an "all-weather friend", has condoned the Kashgar City accusation only one day after ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha was in China discussing exactly the Uyghur situation.  Moreover, China now joins India and Afghanistan in forcefully protesting against hardcore separatist or jihadist outfits based in Pakistan. The last thing embattled Islamabad needs at the moment is Beijing suspecting that it harbors and protects "terrorists".  A new Cultural Revolution  The response in Xinjiang was harsh but subdued. Two Uyghur suspects were swiftly killed by local police outside Kashgar while the PLA blanketed the city centre with paramilitary units and anti-riot vehicles - especially in sensitive People's Square, with its trademark giant statue of Mao Zedong. On the other side of the spectrum, star exile Rebiah Kadeer, president of the Washington-based World Uyghur Congress (and regarded as the plague in Beijing) said in an emailed statement that she could not blame Uyghurs "who carry out such attacks for they have been pushed to despair by Chinese policies".  Uyghurs have become a minority in Xinjiang - around 41 per cent and declining, due to the relentless influx of Han Chinese - but make up the majority in Kashgar. After the opening of the Karakoram Highway between China and Pakistan, up to the mid-1990s thousands of young Uyghurs studied Islam abroad, going to religious schools in Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. A few also went to Yemen and Qatar.  The problem, China would argue, is that those who returned to Xinjiang were in most cases Deobandis, Salafis and Wahhabis. Over the past few years Uyghurs returning from Central Asia also opened Hizb-ut Tahrir cells in Xinjiang. Hizb-ut Tahrir is extremely critical of Beijing's policies.    So the infernal mechanism of the Urumqi riots in July 2009 that killed nearly 200 people seems to be back in business.  Even if what happened in Kashgar is far from being meaningless violence by a bunch of savage Uyghurs, or a foreign conspiracy to undermine Chinese sovereignty and its now non-stop road to prosperity, what's worrying is that this is not the official spin only; the narrative is shared by an overwhelming majority of Chinese public opinion. As much as there is a Red Guard revival going on in China - a feverishly patriotic neo-Cultural Revolution in which Twitter and Facebook-style groups have replaced Mao's Little Red Book - Chinese intellectuals overwhelmingly criticise Beijing for being too "soft" on its ethnic minorities, demanding it must crack down harder against Uyghurs and Tibetans.  Silk Road or bullet highway?  Oil and gas-rich Xinjiang consists of 1.6mn square kilometres, vast deserts, and borders no less than 8 Asian countries. Xinjiang is much more than China's "frontline against terrorism". It is also at the core of China's dream of being the star of the New Silk Road. Even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her recent trip to Chennai in India, fell under the spell. "Let's work together to create a new Silk Road", she said, identifying "an international web and network of economic and transit connections". The US State Department, the Pentagon and Washington think tanks have all caught Silk Road fever. Ambitious New Silk Road strategies are being churned out, all trying to deconstruct a myriad of historical, social, cultural and economic factors that may coalesce in the resurgence of New Silk Roads. The roads, of course, are ultimately about trade - from China, through the Central Asian "stans" and the Caucasus, across Eurasia towards Europe.  The historic Silk Road - actually, a maze of interconnected roads - once spanned South, Central, and East Asia and a great deal of the Middle East.  But a full 21st-century revival of the Silk Road would imply, at a minimum (and that's a very short list): 

Peace in Afghanistan (which would entail finishing the 2,200-kilometre ring road, perennially under construction for the past nine years and funded mostly by the US and Saudi Arabia).

No more UN or US sanctions against Iran.

No more Uzbekistan trade barriers against neighboring Tajikistan (a subplot of the water wars, as the Tajiks plan to build a huge hydropower project and the Uzbeks accuse them of "stealing" their waters).

The end of Turkmenistan's isolation - where traveling in and out is still an odyssey.

A stable, jihadist-free Pakistan.

A joint India-Pakistan resolution of the Kashmir drama.

And, as far as China is concerned, a stable Xinjiang where Uyghurs and Han Chinese are treated equally. 

China should not underestimate Central Asia's ethnic solidarity with the Uyghurs.  On a parallel track, there are enlightening similarities on how Beijing treats resource-rich Xinjiang and how Islamabad treats resource-rich Balochistan. A great deal of Balochis, angered by decades of discrimination and exploitation by the central government, have as much of a separatist fire in their bellies as Uyghurs.   Autonomy or jihad? Then there's the specter of the Arab Spring. Chinese think tanks have been working overtime churning out extremely detailed reports for the collective leadership on how China should respond to the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) democratisation drive. Hosni Mubarak's trial in Egypt may have ruffled a few feathers in Beijing. But the fact that the House of Saud basically deployed a ruthless region-wide counter-revolution strategy may have served to silence Chinese fears (this is not unrelated to the simple fact that Saudi Arabia is a key oil supplier to China).   The burning question is what will it take for Beijing to fine-tune its modernisation model as applied to Xinjiang - finally grasping the cumulative root causes of Uyghur frustration and anger.  Beijing essentially sees it as a war, as most of the Israeli establishment regards the Palestinian "problem".  Significantly, al-Qaeda also sees it as war; it has identified China as an enemy and has called for Uyghurs to engage in a holy war against the Chinese government in Xinjiang.  Yet an ethnic abyss and hunger for blood are counter-productive - and bad for business. The problem is of course immense; Uyghurs don't feel a shared history with China, and, moved by the memory of ancient powerful empires - which at times were rivals of China - and a recent, botched independence stretch with the Republic of East Turkestan, they don't see integration as a historical inevitability.  But real political autonomy for Uyghurs, with better socio-professional prospects, would do wonders for China's Silk Road interests with key players such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and would be a small price to pay for China to fully profit from the benefits of the New Silk Road.   Otherwise, expect legions of desperate "cowboy" Uyghurs going the jihadi way and starting to blow up "alien" Chinese pipelines.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for the Asia Times. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at [email protected].

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

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Twenty-one people, including police officers and social workers, have been killed in violent clashes in China's ethnically divided western region of Xinjiang in what the government is calling an act of terrorism.

Al Jazeera's Marga Ortigas said on Wednesday police were investigating an arson attack in the region where the violence began.

"The region has been the focal point for ethnic and racial tensions for quite some time now," Ortigas said.

A local official confirmed to the AFP news agency on Wednesday that the battle had taken place.

"Twenty-one persons were killed in all... including social workers and policemen," the official said.

He told the news agency that the violence broke out on Tuesday when three local officials reported a group of suspicious men armed with knives hiding inside a home in Selibuya township outside the city of Kashgar.

The death toll was the highest for a single incident in months in Xinjiang, which sees recurrent outbreaks of violence pitting Muslim minority Uyghurs against the authorities and majority ethnic Han Chinese migrants. 

'Uyghur repression'

Tianshan Net, a government-run news website, described the fighting as a "violent terror incident".

It said 15 of those killed were either police or social workers, with 11 of them being members of China's Uyghur ethnic minority, who mainly live in Xinjiang.

Six "gang members" were shot dead in the violence, while eight more were captured, the report said.

The source who spoke to AFP confirmed the contents of the report, but said he did not know how many police were among the dead.

The incident points to the chaotic nature of much of the Xinjiang violence, as well as problems with how authorities respond.

Armed units are often stationed in larger towns and barracks and must be specially summoned by commanders before they can respond.

The Uyghurs have long alleged discrimination in China because of their culture, language and Muslim religion.

Last week, the US State Department released a report claiming "severe official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, association, and harsh restrictions on the movement" of Uyghurs by the Chinese government.

Hua Chunying, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, said the case is still being investigated, but accused those involved for plotting "to carry out violent terrorist activities".

"China is a country ruled by the law," said Hua. "Cracking down on crimes and ensuring the safety of citizens and their property is what the constitution and the law of China entitles the public security authorities to do".

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Just hours before her death sentence and execution, Rebiya Kadeer found herself shackled inside Liudaowan Prison in China's far-western Xinjiang region. If only to calm her nerves, she assured herself that her death was for her fellow Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in the world’s most populous country. 

When asked for her last wish, Kadeer requested to see her children. It was denied. Her time was up. Then she was off to court to hear the verdict of her trial, on allegations that she stole state secrets. After almost six years in prison, Kadeer was released in March 2005, just a few months ahead of President Bush’s visit to China. Diplomatic pressure apparently helped persuade China to commute her death sentence.

In many ways, Kadeer's personal woes mirror the troubles confronting the 10 million Uyghurs, whom one activist called "the other Tibetans you never heard of". As China’s once in every decade leadership transition starts, Kadeer is calling on the country’s presumptive leader Xi Jinping to carry out political and economic reforms in the oil and mineral-rich Xinjiang region.

“One oppressed nation’s history and fate can be changed by one thousand or even just one freedom fighter’s voice,” Kadeer told Al Jazeera. “If I’m chosen to be that voice, I should keep going with my fight."

The Uyghurs have long alleged discrimination in China because of their culture, language and Muslim religion.

China’s leaders, however, dispute Kadeer’s claims, viewing them as a threat to national sovereignty.

Ma Yuanchun, spokesman for the Chinese consulate in New York, called Kadeer “a separatist out to split Xinjiang from China”. Xinjiang constitutes one-sixth of China's land area. 

Kadeer says reforms are critical to the survival of the Uyghurs as an ethnic group. In a seperate statement, she said Uyghurs and China "could have a fair and common future" if their cultural and religious rights as respected. 

But experts believe issues surrounding minorities in China will continue to be sidelined by other problems such as corruption, labour unrest and geopolitical disputes with neighboring Asian countries.

'Violent terrorists'

When Kadeer talks about the plight of the Uyghurs, it is also personal. Two of her children are in jail, locked up by the Chinese government following Kadeer’s election as president of the World Uyghur Congress in 2006. Kadeer said her sons are being punished for her activism.

Like any mother fretting about her children, Kadeer mused about her son Alim being single and unable find “a beautiful bride” while in prison. Meanwhile her other son Ablikim was arrested on the day his child was born.

“I hope that one day Ablikim will be able to hold his son, my grandson, in his own hands,” Kadeer said. “I pray for them day and night. My family has sacrificed a lot but they are supportive of my fight...”

Ethnic tensions in Xinjiang have sometimes escalated into bloody confrontations like the July 2009 riots in the regional capital Urumqi that left hundreds dead.

In another incident in December 2011, seven Uyghurs were killed in the province of Khotan. They were accused of being “violent terrorists” on their way to “jihad training” in Kashmir. But the US-based Radio Free Asia said the group, which included women and children, was only trying to escape China so they could freely practice their religion. 

Kudret Emin, a Uyghur college student living in exile in the US, told Al Jazeera that his people are too afraid to talk about politics and voice their complaints to Chinese officials for fear of being sent to jail. He says his family are some of the only Uyghurs who managed to leave China in recent years.

Link to Islam

In all these episodes of violence, the Uyghurs' affiliation to Islam has become an excuse for blame, said Henryk Szadziewski of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. Since 9/11, the situation has worsened, he said.

“Islam has undergone a tough time in its image across the globe,” Szadziewski said. “So yes, there is an image problem.”

Dru Gladney, a Uyghur scholar from Pomona College in California, said what worries China is that the Uyghurs' brand of Islam is “being tied into politics”. In the 1930s and ‘40s there were two attempts to establish an East Turkestan Republic with a Uyghur majority in Kashgar Province.

Notwithstanding those strong sentiments, Gladney said that the Uyghurs “tend not to be resistant” to authorities. But he also pointed out that Uyghurs are “very frustrated” because “they feel disadvantaged” in their native land.

Until now, the legitimacy of the Uyghurs’ claim of Xinjiang remains a contentious issue. Bovingdon Gardner, a Central Asia expert at Indiana University said, “there is no clear international historical answer to the question”. But, he said, that also applies to China’s own claim to the area.

“There isn’t any universal agreement on what constitutes sovereign claim of a territory,” Gardner said. “There’s no lever with which to sort of pry apart the claims of China and Uyghurs in that case.”

Pointing to the victory of communist revolutionary Mao Zedong in 1949, Gladney added that “history is always written by the conquerors”.

US policy

Despite continued lobbying by the 1,000 or so Uyghur exiles in the US, members of the minority say the White House has not made significant efforts to address the issue. While then-US President George Bush met Kadeer twice, no actual foreign policy change toward China was implemented.

Neither President Barack Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have met Kadeer.

“I don’t think that they [Uyghurs] will have a decisive impact on American foreign policy towards China,” said Howard French, a China expert at Columbia Journalism School. Realpolitik dictates foreign policy priorities, and human rights are not on top of that list, he said.

With volatile issues at stake from North Korea and Iran to Syria, where the US needs China’s cooperation, many observers suggest America would be reluctant to alienate China.

“It’s clear that China has successfully pressured the United States” noted Gladney, pointing to China’s enormous financial leverage.

But that does not mean China should ignore the grumblings of the Uyghurs, French said. “If this was a human being and we are talking about medical terms, we would say that it is a chronic condition,” he said. “It’s not going away.”

An enduring fight

On the same day she sat for an interview, Kadeer led more than a hundred people to protest in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington DC calling on China to stop the “human rights abuses” in Xinjiang and to release “political prisoners”.

Aside from the issue of autonomy, Kadeer also sought attention to Uyghur asylum-seekers, who are oftentimes deported to China, where they sometimes face imprisonment. Earlier this year, for instance, two Uyghur refugees who fled to Cambodia were deported to China and later sentenced to life in prison. Another was meted 17 years, according to the state news agency, Xinhua.

Recently, Kadeer also called on China to respect the Uyghurs right to observe Ramadan and the Eid celebrations, which have been banned. She also helped expose the harvesting of live organs in Chinese prisons, a controversial practice that was recently discussed before the US Congress.

“I have to save my people because they are still living in a prison,” Kadeer said. “As others have fought for my own freedom, I should also fight for other people who don’t have freedom.”

But whether or not China’s leaders, who are gathered in Beijing for the 18th National Congress, are finally listening to Kadeer’s muted cry, remains a mystery.