Mick Hartley

I’ve posted about Xinjiang before (and here) – that’s the huge area north of Tibet, about the size of Western Europe, where, like Tibet, the native population and culture are being swamped by the Han Chinese. Except in Xianjing the native culture isn’t Buddhist, but Muslim. Michael Sheridan in the Sunday Times today reports on how the Chinese are using the “war on terror” as a pretext for further repression:

Today China is waging a propaganda and security battle to guarantee its control over Xinjiang, its name for the vast province rich in minerals and strategic supplies of oil and gas which are vital to the expanding Chinese economy.

China claims that Al-Qaeda has trained more than 1,000 members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, classified as a terrorist group by America and the United Nations.

The group took its name from the short-lived Republic of East Turkestan that was declared in Xinjiang after the second world war, then crushed by the communist revolution of 1949.

China has persuaded Pakistan and Kazakhstan to hand over captured militants for interrogation, secret trials and execution, a policy that may have fuelled the fundamentalist rage now gripping Pakistan…

But the iron-fisted security policy has made more enemies than friends. Extensive travel and interviews in Xinjiang this month unveiled a society segregated by religion and ethnicity, divided by reciprocal distrust, living in separate sections of tightly policed cities.

The same human rights abuses that exist across China – forced labour for peasants, children trafficked to slave as beggars, girls lured into sweatshops – deepen political tensions here and turn young men to violence.

Two western intelligence officers said the Chinese consistently exaggerated Uighur terrorist links with Al-Qaeda to exploit any opportunity to strike at their home-grown opponents. Chinese information was unreliable and no western intelligence service had handed back Muslim citizens to China, they said.

One of the officers said the real concern was that Chinese repression was creating recruits for terrorism. […]

All over Xinjiang, China can point to growing prosperity, cleaner water, new schools, paved roads, modern hospitals, efficient airports, cybercom-merce and huge energy plants.

The price, say Uighurs, is the slow extinction of their identity. Their children take compulsory Chinese lessons. Teaching in Uighur is banned at the main university. Their fabled literature, poetry and music are fading under the assault of karaoke culture. Their history is rewritten.

For western tourists, who come to Xinjiang to roam the ruins of the Silk Road, the Chinese have erected a new museum in Urumqi. It portrays the final Chinese conquest of this harsh territory, first claimed by the Han emperors in the era before Christ.

The slick exhibits equate its 9m Uighurs with the 4,900 Tartars, 11,100 Russians and 14,500 Uzbek inhabitants.

“All cooperate as one family under the glorious nationality policy of the party,” an inscription in Chinese characters proclaims.