More and more signs of domestic unrest are emerging from within China.
Recently, hundreds of Muslim women in black veils gathered outside the market in this oasis city in an impromptu protest. Some carried signs demanding an independent state.
"I saw the demonstration myself. There were 500 to 700 women in black, waving placards for East Turkestan," said Wu Jiangliang, a hydroelectric company employee.
China handled the unrest forcefully, ensuring the stability of a region rich in oil, coal and minerals. Police moved quickly to quell the March 23 protest, arresting numerous women and shooing others away. It drew only minor notice.
"The Chinese are too bad, really bad," said Hama. He said that the Chinese had broken up a protest of about 200 people last month. He put his wrists together as if handcuffed, saying, "I can't say more or I'll get arrested."
As China grapples with protests in Tibet, it also faces unrest on its Central Asian frontier. Resentment against the Chinese has long been an issue in the traditionally Muslim western region, which borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia. Recent problems in Xinjiang came after nearly a month of anti-government riots and protests in Tibet and other provinces with sizable Tibetan populations.
Such clashes are growing as the Olympic Games approach, with the world's spotlight on China and its human rights record. However, the situation with the Muslim minority Uighurs is even more complicated because China worries about separatist sentiment.
And if you can believe the Chinese government, these unhappy muslims are beginning to take action.
China's Public Security Ministry said this month that it broke up a terror ring of 35 members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement — a militant group that calls for separation from China and is on the U.S. terror list — in Xinjiang in recent weeks suspected of plotting to kidnap athletes, foreign journalists and other visitors to the August Olympics.
Last month, Chinese officials accused the East Turkestan Islamic Movement of trying to crash a domestic flight from Xinjiang, though the details of the case remain sketchy.
Analysts fear that the combination of Han immigration and government repression fosters a potentially violent despair among the Uighurs, whose adherence to Islam has been used by Beijing to demonize them at home and abroad sijnce 9/11.
"It's a systematic Chinese policy to portray Uighurs as splittists and terrorists," says Rebiya Kadeer, a businesswoman who now heads the American Uighur Association and is the leader of an exile movement seeking greater rights for her roughly nine million compatriots who live in Xinjiang. Like Mutallip, Kadeer was once a rich businesswoman in Xinjiang but fell afoul of the authorities and served a six year jail sentence for revealing state secrets to foreigners. Two of her sons are still in prison in China. "It's a Chinese tool to have the Han feel a sense of animosity toward Uighurs," Kadeer says. "Look at it now! They have extracted all the natural resources and the oil. We're left in the darkness."
Beijing's security chiefs see a more sinister trend at work. On three occasions — most recently on April 10 — officials in the Chinese capital have announced that security forces foiled planned attacks by what they called Muslim separatists groups from the province. Details were scant, but the most recent announcement alleged that some 45 Uighurs in the provincial capital Urumqi had been arrested in raids that uncovered plans to kidnap athletes and others attending the 2008 Beijing Olympics. An earlier report alleged that a young Uighur woman had tried to smuggle a bomb aboard a commercial aircraft in an attempt to bring it down.
The history of Muslims in China goes back a way.
The history of the Uighurs can be traced back 2,600 years. According to a history compiled by the London Uighur Ensemble, a group formed to popularize the traditional and popular music of the Uighurs, the nomadic tribes of that era rose "to challenge the Chinese Empire" and to become "the diplomatic arm of the Mongol invasion."
China's ethnic Uighurs are moderate Muslims who are related to the Turks. Like the Kurds of Asia Minor and the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Uighurs are a dissatisfied transnational ethnic minority spread across several countries, without an independent homeland or a strong leader. They are located mainly China, but also Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The London Ensemble notes that the ethnic minority "staged several uprisings" against the Nationalist Chinese government in the period before the Communists took control of the country. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs established an independent Islamic Eastern Turkestan republic, but that attempt at a nation state ended after military intervention by the Soviet Union. With the establishment of the Maoist government in China in 1949, the tribal homeland came under Chinese communist rule.
This whole thing has me confused. Who am I rooting for?
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