The Chinese government is claiming “big victories” in its attempt to subdue separatist activities in the western part of the country.
The rebels of Xinjiang are fighting for an independent state of East Turkistan. Since the onset of the global “war on terror,” officials in Beijing have used the campaign as justification to crack down on what it sees as troublesome terrorist elements.
The French Press Agency reported that Chinese authorities in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region have declared victory in smashing what they called separatists, religious extremists and terrorists, according to an official Chinese government press release.
“Our five-year unabated attack on hardened national minority separatists, leaders of religious extremist forces and violent criminal terrorists has achieved a series of big victories,” Xinjiang party boss Wang Lequan said at a regional parliamentary session.
Wang was quoted by the China News Service as telling delegates the regional government employed 15,000 people a year to tackle separatist and extremist activities.
The campaign would continue under a “high pressure, strike hard” campaign in which the government would maintain “the attack initiative, strike early and deal with the punishment later,” Wang said.
Human-rights groups that condemn China’s record and accuse Beijing of extending its crackdowns to groups peacefully calling for political change are alarmed at how the international community, especially the West, is embracing China’s crackdown in its western regions.
“The Chinese government’s call for a crackdown on domestic ‘terrorism’ raises fears that repression of Muslim ethnic groups in the Xinjiang will increase, and the dismal human-rights situation in the region will further deteriorate,” an Amnesty International statement said.
Several hundred ethnic Uighurs in the region accused of involvement in separatism have been executed since the mid-1990s, with thousands of others detained, imprisoned and tortured, Amnesty added.
The group also criticized the government’s practice of sending in work teams to carry out “patriotic education” inside mosques and schools, interfering in Muslim religious practices.
According to Asiaweek, China is pushing ahead full bore in its campaign in the western region and is seeking global help to achieve its political aims.
A recent Asiaweek article stated that “Beijing hopes that enlisting in America’s war on terrorism could aid its efforts to suppress separatist movements in Xinjiang.”
Says Asiaweek, “It didn’t take long for the Chinese government to sense the opportunity on its own home front presented by America’s global war on terror. In a meeting last week with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan took pains to refer to his country’s battle against ‘Eastern Turkistan terrorists’ – hitherto classified by Beijing as Xinjiang separatists.
“Once the nexus of the ancient Silk Road linking West and East, the province is now the site of China’s richest oil and gas deposits. But its proximity to Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and its restive population of 8 million Muslim ethnic minorities are seen as a threat to development. After the Communist Party took power in 1949, Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group with strong cultural ties to the Turkic peoples of central Asia, declared an independent state of East Turkistan. Beijing soon crushed the rebellion and quickly worked to make sure it would never happen again.
“One way to do that was sponsored migration by Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic group. Uighurs, once 93 percent of the population, now comprise less than 50 percent. But nationalism hasn’t died. In recent years, a rash of riots and bombings combined with the rise of Wahhabism, a more radical form of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia, have led to yet another crackdown. Beijing thinks it can use evidence of links between Uighur activists and al-Qaida to get the U.S. on its side – or at least off its back.”
“We have a chance – at least the White House admits Russia’s attack on Chechnya is justifiable. Why not the same for China?” asks Professor Zhu Feng, director of the International Security Program at Peking University.
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