Page 122 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Uyghur separatism and nationalism in Xinjiang 111
arrests and the closure of more mosques and schools, and this will stoke up further
resentment and increase the potential for more conflict in the future.
The authorities will continue to pursue militant armed groups and will, in all
probability, eliminate some of them. Other groups are likely to replace them and
given the challenging terrain of Xinjiang and the unreliability of Chinese intelli-
gence gathering in the Uyghur community, not all of them will be wiped out.
Some degree of long term low intensity conflict is very likely and could include
armed attacks on security forces, armed robberies and sabotage.

The impact of 11 September 2001 and
the ‘war on terror’
China reacted to the attacks on New York and Washington by restricting the
access of foreigners to Xinjiang, which has a 70 kilometre border with
Afghanistan, and by declaring that separatism in Xinjiang was a terrorist phe-
nomenon and that China should be given carte blanche to deal with it as the
authorities saw fit. This provoked international concern from Human Rights quar-
ters including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.
Although the anti-terrorist rhetoric has remained, China has actually done very
little that is new to suppress separatism in Xinjiang, it has largely continued with
the policies that it began in 1996 with the Strike Hard campaign. China was
clearly using the cover of the ‘war on terror’ to clamp down on Islam per se in
Xinjiang and implied that the Uyghurs’ struggle for independence was nothing
other than the activities of a branch of al Qaeda. As has been demonstrated how-
ever, the Uyghur movement predates al Qaeda by many decades at least and any
connection is tenuous and difficult, if not impossible, to prove.
Rohan Gunaratana has repeated suggestions that the militancy dates from the
return to China of Uyghurs sent to Afghanistan by the Chinese government or the
PLA to assist, or at least liaise with, the mujahidin who were resisting the Soviet
invasion of 1979 (Gunaratana 2002: 172–173). While this would have been
entirely consistent with China’s interests at that late stage of the Sino-Soviet dis-
pute, there has, not surprisingly, never been any clearly documented evidence that
this took place. The presence of Uyghurs in Mazar-e-Sharif at the end of the war
in Afghanistan in 2002, and the detention of twenty-two of them in the US deten-
tion centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is, however, a matter of fact. Some of these
Uyghurs may have been trained in camps on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border that
were supported by al Qaeda and there are reports of others who have escaped
from Xinjiang and moved through Central Asia and Afghanistan to the ‘tribal
areas’ of Pakistan, notably Hasan Mehsum who was shot dead in south Waziristan
on 2 October 2003.
Nevertheless, the Chinese government has stated explicitly that its opposition
to separatism in Xinjiang is part of the ‘war on terror’. At a press briefing in
Shanghai on the occasion of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting
in October 2001, Zhu Bangguo, speaking on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, identified Eastern Turkistan forces as part of the global terrorist