THE REALITY OF CHINA'S ISLAMIC TERRORIST THREAT

I've been saying this for some time now. China is the world's public enemy #1. Accept no substitute.

Shi Dagang, a senior Communist party official in Kashgar, claimed yesterday that China faced a long struggle against terrorism, perpetrated by local and foreign separatists seeking to establish an independent state of East Turkestan in the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province. "They are trying to turn 2008 into a year of mourning for China," he said. "This is the reality that we have to face, a combination of internal and external forces, jointly coordinating a series of attacks."

As ever with terrorism, militancy and counter-terrorism, particularly when it comes to statements by officials or politicians, "reality" is a relative term.

The threat apparently came from groups called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation. But the exact nature of these groups is unclear.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Beijing joined a long list of repressive governments with Islamic minorities (or indeed majorities) around the world who suddenly discovered al-Qaida in their back garden. This of course was an extremely opportune find, as it diverted attention from any domestic causes for local violence while simultaneously releasing a flood of diplomatic and economic advantages from Washington, where President Bush's administration was in full first-term "you are with us or against us" mode.

However, desultory violence and resistance by a small minority of Uighur Muslims in China's south east had long predated 9/11. There were more than 200 attacks between1990 and 2001 in the region – all relatively low level but often lethal nonetheless. In the autumn of 2001, American troops captured 22 ethnic Uighur from China in Afghanistan and, despite denials that they were Islamic militants fighting for the Taliban or enrolled in al-Qaida, incarcerated them in Guantánamo Bay, where Chinese intelligence experts were among the first to interview them. Five were later released. Evidence against at least some of the others is not, according to at least one recent US court judgment, strong.

Nonetheless in January 2002, a Chinese government study reported that the ETIM has received money, weapons, training and other logistical support from al-Qaida. Certainly scores of Uighurs left China to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and it seems likely that ETIM leader Hahsan Mahsum was killed in raids on camps linked to al-Qaida in 2003. However, evidence of recent collaboration is difficult to find. The latest intelligence is that there are scatterings of Uighurs in Afghanistan or in the Pakistani tribal areas, but none have any rank within or even any real contact with al-Qaida proper. This is unsurprising given that Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have never showed much interest in Chinese Muslims. But officials are right when they talk about a long struggle. The last decade has seen ideology of Islamic militancy spread in the southeast of China, leading to a spike in violence of a very fragmented, disorganised nature. The Olympic games and the media attention they attract are an incentive to strike, or at least threaten to.

The amateurish and unfocused nature of the attacks seems to confirm the unstructured nature of Uighur militancy. Of course, given the fearsome efficiency of China's security services, any greater organisation would probably be suicidal, but given the distances and lack of communication it is probably impossible anyway. They can only survive in small self-forming units which remain "below the radar" until launching their strike. If there are international ties they are as likely to be with members of what was once known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (and is now the Turkistan Islamic party) than anyone from the Middle East. The East Turkestan Liberation Organisation appears to be a new name – and an odd one given its 1960s nationalist, third-world sound. Claims of responsibility, videos full of boastful rhetoric and the occasional attack do not reveal much of the reality of what is going on in Xinjiang. Nor, sadly, do the claims of government officials.