China/Islam: Chinese Uygar confusion and terrorism
Source: iina
BEIJING, 19 Shawwal/17 Sept (IINA)-Four men accused by the government
of being behind the bloodshed this summer that claimed dozens of lives
in the far western region of Xinjiang have been sentenced to death, the
state news media reported on Thursday. Two other men were given 19-year
prison terms.
Scores of people were detained after a series of violent outbursts in
Kashgar and Hotan, two Silk Road outposts whose large Uighur
populations have chafed under Chinese rule for years.
The condemned men — Abdugheni Yusup, Ablikim Hasan, Muhtar Hasan and
Memetniyaz Tursun — are all Uighurs. They were convicted of homicide,
leading a terror group, manufacturing illegal explosives, arson and
“other crimes.” A report in the state-run Xinjiang Legal Daily said the
trials, which took place on Tuesday in Kashgar and Hotan, were “open and
fully protected the suspects’ legal rights.”
Uighur exile groups, however, said that the defendants were tortured
into giving confessions and were denied adequate legal representation.
“This was not a fair legal process by any means,” said Dolkun Isa,
secretary general of the World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group that
is based in Germany. “These sentences are political decisions, not legal
ones.”
The Communist Party has struggled for years to quell ethnic tensions
in Xinjiang, a vast and thinly populated area of desert and snowcapped
peaks that has extensive oil and gas reserves. Making up one-sixth of
China’s land area, it is considered a strategic buffer between the
Chinese heartland and its eight South and Central Asian neighbors,
including Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.
Uighurs are Sunni Muslims who speak Turkic and were once the majority
in Xinjiang, but years of government-encouraged migration of Han
Chinese to the region have diluted their dominance, and they now make up
less than half of Xinjiang’s 22 million people.
For many Uighurs, six decades of Chinese rule have been marked by
heavy-handed policies that they say marginalize their language, culture
and religion. Their resentment of Beijing, which is apparent even to a
casual visitor, is also fed by a widespread perception that Beijing’s
economic policies unfairly favor the Han.
That anger helped fuel violence three years ago in the regional
capital of Urumqi that left nearly 200 people dead, many of them Han.
The government responded with a “strike hard” campaign against dissent
that sent many Uighurs to jail.
Like much of what occurs in Xinjiang, the most recent violence is
clouded by conflicting accounts. The first episode, on July 18, has
officially been called a premeditated attack on a police station in the
ancient desert oasis of Hotan in which a police officer and two hostages
were killed. Exile groups, however, say that nearly two dozen people
died, most of them unarmed Uighurs who had peacefully gathered outside
the station house seeking information about previously detained young
men.
There is less dispute about the pair of bloody attacks that rocked
Kashgar 12 days later. On July 30 and 31, assailants wielding knives and
homemade explosives rampaged through a street lined with food stalls
and a restaurant, slashing and stabbing bystanders. According to the
state news media, 18 people died, including six attackers shot by the
police.
Reached by telephone on Thursday, officials at the Communist Party
headquarters in Hotan and Kashgar declined to comment on the violence.
The Chinese authorities are quick to paint each episode as a
sophisticated act of terrorism, rather than a violent outburst of ethnic
discontent. This month, a murky group calling itself the Turkistan
Islamic Party claimed responsibility for the violence and suggested that
the attackers had trained at camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
Although those claims appeared to lend credence to government
assertions that the violence in Xinjiang was orchestrated by “outside
separatists,” many experts say the low-tech nature of the attacks cast
doubts on such contentions.
On the same day that the death sentences were announced, the Chinese
news media trumpeted a doubling of state-directed investment in
Xinjiang, to a total of $155 billion over the next four years.
Comments