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What China Doesn’t Want Others to Know
Posted by: "Egroup" egroup100@yahoo.com.au egroup100
Date: Sun Jul 12, 2009 5:17 am ((PDT)) Uighur Muslims Uprisings By Latheef Farook Violence erupted between the native
Muslims and the Hans Chinese migrant
settlers on Sunday July 5 in the Western Xingjian's predominantly Muslim region
of Uighur where the people's struggle for political and religious freedom has
been suppressed for long by the Chinese authorities. Within five days 156 people, mostly
Uighur Muslims were killed in the city of Urumqi where the authorities ordered the closure of
mosques for prayers last Friday. Defying the order some mosques opened their
doors after worshippers gathered. In view of the seriousness of the
situation Chinese President Hu Jintao left the G8 summit in Italy last week to
deal with the crisis which China accuses US
based Uighur leader Rebiya
Kadeer of being behind . China's vast and strategically important
Xinjiang region, once called Eastern Turkistan, has been the home for
ethnically Turkic Uihgur Muslims who speak a language akin to Turkish. Uihgurs,
who ruled the Silk Road cities, have
lived in the region for more than four millennia and played an important role
in the cultural and mercantile exchanges between the East and West. Uighur has been an integral part of the
history of Central Asia for centuries.
In 1759 the Manchur rulers, invaded and incorporated Uighur into China
and named it as Xingjian Uighur Autonomous Region which the Uighur Muslims resented
from the very inception. Xinjian, rich in mineral resources,
including 38 percent of coal reserves
and 25 percent of the petroleum and natural gas reserves, is China's largest
province accounting for 16 percent of the landmass. Though home to only 1.6
percent of the population, this region has tremendous strategic significance
for China, which conducts nuclear tests at the Lop Nor range. As a policy, both
former Soviet Union and China always used Muslim populated areas for their
nuclear tests despite the fallout, resulting in the wide-scale contamination of
water sources and land causing large number of cancer cases, congenital birth
defects and numerous other related diseases among the Uihgur population. Despite the mineral wealth, more than ninety percent of local Muslims
live below poverty line .Their pleas to
improve their conditions fell on deaf ears of Beijing, forcing Uighurs to
resort to armed struggle for independence soon after the Red Army occupied the
area in 1949. However, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung crushed the Muslim freedom
struggle and designed an aggressive population transfer policy under which Hans
Chinese were brought in from far away places and settled in the midst of
Muslims in Uighur. As a result, there has been a rapid
growth of the Han Chinese community in Xingjian - from an original six percent
in 1949, to forty percent in 1978 turning the Uighurs into second-class.
Beijing's policy of ethnic flooding is similar to what was employed in Tibet
and in most cities, the ratio between the Uighur and Han populations has gone
from being 9:1 to 1:9. China gives preference in employment and the best jobs
to ethnic Han Chinese migrants benefited
most by the money China pours into the province for investment. Han enterprises also exercise a monopoly on
most of the area's scarce resources. Inevitably, Muslims resisted resulting
in the growing animosity between the
two communities. A group of Han children gathered near a statue of Chinese
revolutionary Wang Zhen was once asked why he was considered a hero. The
answer: "because he killed many Uihgurs" from a ten year old is
perhaps somewhat indicative of the feelings of the Han colonialists toward the
indigenous Uighurs. This growing rift took a new turn with the emergence of
independent Central Asian Republics across the border in the aftermath of the
dissolution of the former Soviet Union.
Encouraged by the changes in the Central Asian neighbours, Uighur
Muslims too started intensifying their demand for political and religious
rights. The Chinese authorities
responded by subjecting Uighur Muslims to unbelievable oppression and torture
besides executing a number of people linked to Muslim resistance. The result was violent opposition to
Chinese rule and there were frequent
reports of arrests, trial and execution of "ethnic splittists"
as the Chinese call them. Even peaceful
protests have been met with excessive force.
Chinese leaders adopted `iron fist' policy and even signed agreements with Central
Asian countries to gain their cooperation to crush the Muslim separatist
struggle. According to Germany-based Eastern
Turkistan Information Centre, Beijing tried to exploit the United States led
war on terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 events in New York by
insisting that Muslim freedom fighters in Xingjian as terrorists. Beijing arrests Uihgur Muslims in large
numbers, concludes trials within days, often resulting in death sentence executed
on the same day. The Uighurs are now
"afraid to talk, not just to foreigners, but even to each other". Nevertheless, rejecting a direct link
between its own so called anti-terrorism campaign and the crackdown in
Xingjian, the United States stated that
it does not consider Uighur separatists to be terrorists. Religious Restrictions. Islam, inextricably linked to their
culture and identity, came to the region in 934 AD during the reign of the
Karakhanid kings and Kashgar became one of the major centres of Islam. According to statistics, there have been over
23,700 mosques in the region. However, in Beijing's resolve to destroy this
very identity, the Chinese government has placed growing restrictions on the
practice of Islam in the region. This repressive policy began during
Mao's Cultural Revolution, which was a period of terrible suffering for the
Uihgurs as religion was identified as a "bourgeois" conception and
bore the brunt of the Red Army's wrath. A Human Rights Watch report tells of
how the Uihgurs were forced to breed pigs and mosques were shut down and
occasionally used as pork warehouses to add terrible insult to devastating
injury. According to official sources, around
8,000 Imams indoctrinated in communism,
deliver Friday sermons. Religious
schools have been banned, many mosques closed and the building of new mosques
restricted. The police raid peaceful but
`unauthorised' religious gatherings and those found to be leading the
gatherings have been sentenced to long-term imprisonment. Government employees
risk being fired if they go to mosques. Reiterating this Amnesty International
(AI) said, "fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was banned in
government offices, schools and hospitals. Students face expulsion if they
refused to break the fast. Mosques have been closed down because they were located
near schools and deemed a "bad influence" on young people. The
crackdown was expanded to include other sectors of society". Uighur women working in government
offices too were told not to wear headscarves during work as it was regarded
"feudalistic". Typical headscarves were permitted in school, but
those tied in a religious way, showing only the face, are not acceptable. Some
Muslim women were forbidden from wearing Islamic head covers. Preaching or teaching of Islam outside
government control is considered subversive and Amnesty said that, since the
mid-1990s, several hundred Uighurs accused of such activities have been
executed while thousands more have been detained, imprisoned and tortured. Uighur children have not been taught their
history and traditions in schools. Places and monuments representing the Uighur
heritage have been destroyed and in most of the big cities there is nothing
left to indicate any presence of the Uighur culture. Cultural Crusade Viewing traditional Uighur Muslim
lifestyles as a major element of instability, the Chinese authorities stepped
up their control of Muslim religious and folk customs. A government circular
called on officials to step up surveillance on weddings and funerals as well as
circumcision ceremonies, house-moving rituals and the wearing of earrings.
Uighur government and party officials have been told to seek permission before
attending any such festivals or ceremonies and report back to the government
upon the completion of their activities.
The regulations applied only to Uighur Muslims and not to the whole of
the Xingjian Province. Explaining their plight, a prominent
Uighur leader who wanted his fighters to think of themselves as the wolves of
Turkic legend fighting the Chinese dragon, once said, "The Chinese have
likened the Uighurs to pandas - a species on the edge of extinction". Torture Though denied repeatedly, Amnesty has
recorded hundreds of executions and extra-judicial killings of Uighurs.
Applying incredible torture methods to crush their freedom struggle, China commonly uses painful and brutal torture
methods never used before. According to
state media, that the Chinese government has executed hundreds of Uighur Muslim
freedom fighters. Among them was Alerkin Abula, who founded, in 1993, the East
Turkistan Islamic Party of Allah, fighting for freedom in the Xingjian
province. The former United Nations Human Rights
Commissioner, Mary Robinson, warned Chinese leaders during a visit to Beijing
that they should not use the war on terror as an excuse for widespread
repression in Xingjian. This is a conflict China has been
anxious to hide from its people, foreign governments, overseas investors and
tourists. Beijing has effectively pre-empted often-weak Muslim countries, which
rely on China for political, economic and military assistance, from speaking
out against its repression of Muslims in Xingjian. Diplomats are kept under
close watch and foreign journalists are allowed to visit only in the company of
escorts. Under the circumstances, China's notoriously
repressive birth control policies, including, but not limited, to forced
abortions would seem to suggest that
Xingjian is one of the worst places in the world to be a Muslim right now. This
is especially so in the context of the ongoing global war on Islam and the fast
growing relations between China and Israel known for its conspiracies against
Islam and Muslims. Meanwhile Muslim countries have done
nothing to bring pressure or persuade China to
offer Uighur Muslims their legitimate rights and end their
long-sufferings. The toothless Organisation of Islamic Conference too has
forgotten the Xingjian Muslims and failed even to send a delegation to Beijing
to at least draw attention to their plight. For far too long the world has forgotten,
or ignored, the plight of Uihgur Muslims who are also not exceptionally popular
in the West as, unlike the Buddhists of Tibet who have Dalai Lama, they have no
charismatic leader in exile or celebrity converts in Hollywood to rally to
their cause. It was under these circumstances that
violence broke out when Uighur came following the killing of two Uighur Muslims
in clashes with Han Chinese in a
factory last week. DISCLAIMER: The contents of this email
are not necessarily the views of the Federation of Australian Muslim Students
& Youth Inc Any enquiries should be made direct to the owner of this
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Lakemba 2195 Australia TP: 02-9740 6977 |
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