Xinjiang gets Beijing’s eye

HOTAN, China — Down the cramped alleys of Hotan’s main bazaar, flat discs of bread roast in cone-shaped coal ovens. Bearded men in embroidered skullcaps hawk melons and aromatic cumin from donkey carts. On dusty walls of mud and brick, the script is Arabic and the language Turkic.

This is China, though you wouldn’t know it by looking. To the communist government, 2,300 miles east in Beijing, that’s precisely the problem.

In Xinjiang, the Muslim region that makes up an Alaska-size swath of China’s far west, the central government says it is fighting terrorism. But in a region divided from the rest of the land by language and religion, philosophy and tradition, it’s hard to tell exactly who the enemy is.

Is it what the government calls “separatists” — the Turkic members of the Uighur ethnicity who advocate, sometimes violently, the creation of a country called East Turkestan? Is it Islamic extremists backed by global terrorist networks? Have they joined forces?

Or, as some activists say, is it all simply an excuse to come down harshly on people who won’t bend to Beijing’s rule?

“Antigovernment activity and religious extremists and terrorists — they are all the same in nature,” said Zong Jian, deputy Communist Party secretary in Kashgar, a city near the Afghan and Pakistani borders. “They incite people to be involved in violence. That unites them.”

The accusations are vague, and the evidence presented is scant. Local Beijing-backed leaders tell of Uighur separatists who worked with neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban to sow unrest in Xinjiang, of al Qaeda involvement in training camps inside China.

This much is indisputable: The Chinese government fears any whiff of rebellion at the edges of its control, be it by followers of the self-exiled Dalai Lama in Tibet, or the leaders of Taiwan, recently accused by Beijing of waging a “holy war” against it.

In Xinjiang, which borders both Pakistan and Afghanistan and whose 11 million Muslims are the region’s majority, things have been simmering for years. But the problem took on particular urgency after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

That day in 2001 changed China’s approach in two ways: It made Beijing more wary of Islamic extremism, and it gave the government — long criticized for its human rights practices — a globally endorsed excuse to crack down.

“A lot of people sort of feel that they are using the threat of terrorism to strengthen their control of the region,” Dru Gladney, a specialist on Xinjiang at the University of Hawaii, said in December.

Today, government-run provincial television airs programs chronicling al Qaeda’s evils and characterizing the Chinese-Uighur relationship as close. Beijing is trying to broaden ties with Central Asian nations to reduce terrorism at its western edge.

In October, a Uighur named Ujimamadi Abbas was executed in Hotan after being convicted of “ethnic separatism.” No details of his reputed offenses were given. In December, Hasan Mahsum, one of the country’s most wanted men and the leader of the outlawed East Turkestan Islamic Movement, was killed in a shootout with Pakistani authorities.

A week earlier, Mahsum’s name was among 11 “Muslim separatists” on a list issued by China seeking foreign help against Xinjiang’s “terrorist organizations.”

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