Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 13:58:03 -0700
Subject: RE: NYTimes.com Article: China, in Harsh Crackdown, Executes Muslim Separatists 



>
>China, in Harsh Crackdown, Executes Muslim Separatists
>
>December 16, 2001 
>
>By CRAIG S. SMITH
>
>
> 
>
>HOTAN, China - A crowd gathered in a sports stadium beneath
>a blue morning sky here in October to watch court officials
>sentence a man to death, a scene that has been played out
>hundreds of times across China this year as part of the
>Communist Party's latest drive against crime. 
>
>But this rally was different. The man, Metrozi Mettohti,
>34, was given the death penalty for trying to "split the
>country" and for storing weapons as part of a persistent
>and occasionally violent separatist movement among China's
>Uighurs, the Turkic- speaking ethnic group of nine million
>people, most of them Muslims, concentrated along the
>country's far western border. 
>
>Six other men were given jail terms of up to 12 years that
>day for separatist activities, said local residents and
>activists abroad. According to one account, Mr. Mettohti
>shouted "Long live Eastern Turkestan!" - the name of the
>country separatists would like to create - before being
>gagged. 
>
>After the rally, local people say, he was put in the back
>of a truck, driven to a village outside of town and shot in
>the back of the head. The execution could not be officially
>verified. 
>
>The fragile, fertile strip between China's rugged western
>mountains and its vast western desert is the only place in
>the country where people are regularly put to death for
>political offenses. The country's current anticrime drive,
>coupled with a renewed focus on Islamic militancy in the
>wake of the American-led war on terrorism, has only
>increased the pace of the executions, Uighurs say. 
>
>"The government gives very little information about the
>people who are executed, and news of executions isn't
>published outside the places where they occur," said a
>young Uighur man in Hotan, speaking in the privacy of a car
>in a region where most everyone is jittery when talking to
>outsiders. 
>
>"Have you heard of `hazat?' " he said, using the Uighur
>word for jihad, or Islamic holy war. But he was startled
>when he saw the word written in a reporter's notebook and
>insisted that his cellphone number be torn from the same
>page. 
>
>Then he thought better of discussing politics at all, and
>with good reason. His brother had been released just days
>earlier after nearly a decade in jail for publishing
>separatist tracts. "The secret police are everywhere," the
>young man said. "You never know who they are." 
>
>Most of the Uighurs condemned to death here are charged
>with murder or with otherwise causing deaths, but some,
>like Mr. Mettohti, are being executed for lesser
>transgressions. 
>
>The Chinese government says the executions are meant to
>keep the separatist threat in check, arguing that Beijing
>is battling Islamic terrorists not unlike those the United
>States is fighting in Afghanistan, just a few hundred miles
>away. 
>
>But Uighurs say that the number of executions is
>incommensurate with the threat posed by separatists and
>that many innocent people have been swept up in the
>crackdown. Some of those charged with separatism are simply
>frustrated young men demanding their rights, they say,
>adding that the war against terrorism war has given Beijing
>the political cover to pursue policies that are meant to
>erode their cultural identity. 
>
>At least 25 Uighurs have been executed this year and scores
>more are waiting on death row, say people who track these
>executions in the local news media. They say the number is
>probably much higher because the government in August
>stopped publicizing most of the executions, which Uighurs
>say are part of a larger effort to suppress legitimate
>dissent and accelerate the ethnic group's assimilation into
>the country's larger Han Chinese population. 
>
>This sparsely populated area's oases once watered camels
>and fortified travelers with raisins, mutton and bread
>while they paused between mountains and desert on the
>fabled Silk Road. The Uighurs' local economy is still made
>up of such stuff. 
>
>Though called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region today,
>its autonomy is largely symbolic because all major policy
>decisions are made by the Communist Party and almost all of
>the region's senior party posts are held by ethnic Chinese.
>Though Uighurs accounted for more than 90 percent of the
>region's population when the party came to power in 1949,
>they account for less than half now. 
>
>Hopes for an independent homeland increased after the
>breakup of the Soviet Union, when a cluster of new,
>independent Turkic countries appeared on China's western
>border. But a quick Chinese crackdown dashed those hopes.
>By the late 1990's, the separatist movement had turned
>increasingly violent, culminating in a series of bombings
>and clashes with the police in 1996 and 1997. 
>
>The Uighurs are at the eastern end of a swath of
>Turkic-speaking Central Asia that stretches from the
>Bosporus to the western edge of the Mongolian steppes and
>includes 120 million people. 
>
>For centuries, the area was ruled by various khans until
>the Qing dynasty took control here in the mid- 18th
>century. The Qing court consolidated its hold on the region
>in the mid-19th century with the help of China's legendary
>General Zuo Zongtang (better known in the West as General
>Tso, for whom a popular chicken dish is named). He renamed
>the area Xinjiang, or New Territory. 
>
>Today, Xinjiang is China's largest province, accounting for
>one-sixth of the country's land and much of its valuable
>natural resources, most notably oil. 
>
>Despite centuries of Chinese rule, though, the Uighurs have
>maintained a vibrant culture, with writers and musicians
>continuing to produce popular works - some now banned by
>the government - in the Turkic language. 
>
>They re-established contact with the Muslim world in the
>1980's as the country opened up again. Some Uighurs were
>allowed to travel to Mecca for the hajj, Islam's annual
>pilgrimage, and many young Uighurs who made the trip
>brought back a renewed sense of their religious and
>cultural identity. 
>
>How many Uighur separatists are operating in Xinjiang today
>is impossible to estimate. China says several hundred
>Uighurs have received training from the Afghan Taliban, and
>several Uighurs are among the Taliban fighters who have
>been captured in Afghanistan in the last few weeks. But the
>number of serious separatists inside China is still
>believed to be small. 
>
>"This is mostly social and civil unrest by disorganized,
>disgruntled, fairly impulsive young men, not a widespread
>movement," said Dru C. Gladney, a professor of Asian
>studies at the University of Hawaii who follows
>developments in Xinjiang. 
>
>The unrest of the late 1990's resulted in a surge of
>executions. Amnesty International reported that at least
>190 people, an average of nearly two a week, were put to
>death in Xinjiang from January 1997 to April 1999. 
>
>Several of the executions this year have taken place in
>Yili, known as Yining in Chinese, where a Uighur
>demonstration protesting China's restrictive policies
>erupted into a riot in February 1997. At least nine people
>died in the melee, scores of Uighurs were arrested and many
>of them were sentenced to death or long prison terms. 
>
>As recently as Oct. 15, two Uighurs were executed in Yili
>for their roles in the riots, according to local press
>reports. Three other Uighurs were given the death penalty
>with a two- year suspension and six more were sentenced to
>jail terms, two for life. 
>
>The repression has deepened Uighur resentment of the
>Chinese, but has also eroded sympathy for the separatists.
>In Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road market town, talk of the
>political tensions are nervously dismissed by most people,
>many of whom say the desire for independence remains, but
>the hope for it is gone. 
>
>"We just want to make money and live in peace," said a
>young Uighur businessman in Kashgar. "The separatists have
>brought pressure on everyone." 
>
>The anticrime campaign is not likely to stop the periodic
>violence. 
>
>In September, local Uighurs say, a gun battle on the road
>from Kashgar to the Pakistan border left one policeman and
>two Uighurs dead. A third Uighur involved in the incident
>was caught and is expected to be executed soon. 
>
>The government has called for an intensification of the
>crackdown in Xinjiang. 
>
>China's vast state security apparatus monitors tens of
>thousands of people whose allegiance to the Communist Party
>is suspect. While the majority of Chinese enjoy a level of
>freedom today unprecedented in the 52 years since the
>Communist Party took control, the party is unforgiving and
>unrelenting in its pursuit of anyone who challenges its
>rule. 
>
>In Uch Turfan, or Wushi, a county seat in a crook of the
>snowy-peaked Heavenly Mountains, which separate China from
>Kyrgyzstan, armed guards patrol bridges and children
>scatter in panic when a strange car stops near them. 
>
>The town has been a center of anti- Chinese sentiment since
>the mid-18th century, when Qing troops were sent here to
>quell a Uighur uprising. 
>
>According to Uighur legend, seven girls retreated to a
>rocky mount at one end of town and resisted the troops for
>days until they were killed by cannon fire. Access to their
>tomb atop the mount is now blocked by a locked gate. 
>
>Local residents, most of whom are reluctant to speak to
>foreigners, say 28 Uighurs were sentenced at a rally
>outside the town's movie theater on Nov. 11. Among them was
>a man who had translated the United Nation's Universal
>Declaration of Human Rights into the Uighur language and
>distributed it to others. He was reportedly given a 20-year
>jail term. 
>
>Most of the others were also charged with political
>activities and two were executed immediately after the
>rally. Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the East Turkestan
>Information Center, based in Sweden, said the men were
>political activists, but an Uch Turfan court official,
>reached by telephone, insisted that the men had been
>executed for murders unrelated to politics. 
>
>China acknowledges that its prisons hold nearly 2,000
>political prisoners, most serving sentences for endangering
>state security, according to China's Justice Department. 
>
>But those numbers do not include people locked up in the
>country's reform-through-labor camps, to which the Public
>Security Bureau has the power to sentence people without
>trial. In the last three years, there has been a marked
>increase in the imprisonment of religious activists in such
>camps, including Uighur Muslims. 
>
>Nor does the Justice Ministry's count include political
>activists charged with other criminal offenses. Many of the
>state's political enemies are convicted of disturbing
>social order, illegal publishing or even consorting with
>prostitutes. 
>
>Thousands of people are held for days, weeks or even months
>in Public Security Bureau detention centers and Communist
>Party guest houses while under investigation for political
>crimes. The country's Religious Affairs Bureau has even put
>bishops loyal to the pope into retirement homes where they
>are neither allowed to leave nor receive visitors. 
>
>The political activists in Xinjiang stand out because of
>the potency of their dissent and the power of the
>government's reaction. 
>
>Many towns in southern Xinjiang are populated almost
>entirely by Uighurs, and Chinese rule of the territory has
>long been marked by Uighur uprisings. 
>
>In 1933, the short-lived Eastern Turkestan Islamic Republic
>was declared in Kashgar. A decade later, Uighurs tried to
>found another republic farther north in Yili and governed a
>semiautonomous area there under Kuomintang control until
>the Communists took over in 1949. Uighurs in Hotan staged
>another failed uprising in 1954 before lapsing into decades
>of isolation under Mao. 
>
>Fearing that Islamic orthodoxy could be used as a cloak or
>catalyst for political activism, China is quietly trying to
>stop its spread and suppress its religious practices.
>Dozens of illegal religious schools and unauthorized
>mosques have been shut this year, according to people and
>press reports here. Government employees risk their jobs if
>they go to mosques, and women working for the government
>are forbidden to wear veils. 
>
>The government denies that it has also stepped up efforts
>to dissuade Uighurs from observing Ramadan, Islam's holy
>month of daylight fasting. But Uighurs say that restaurants
>and food stalls are given tax breaks if they stay open in
>the daytime and that schoolchildren are prohibited from
>going home at lunchtime and are encouraged to eat a noon
>meal at school. 
>
>Mainstream Uighurs say the repression and the drumbeat of
>executions threaten to turn a small ethnic- based movement
>into a more volatile religious one. 
>
>Near the medieval bazaar in this ancient Silk Road town
>where Mr. Mettohti lived stands a beige-brick mosque, which
>is closed and uncompleted, leaving local Muslims yet again
>without their traditional home for the festivals at the end
>of Ramadan. 
>
>Asking why the mosque's main gate remains boarded up, years
>after construction began, makes residents visibly nervous. 
>
>"We wanted to build it taller, but the government would
>not agree," said a young Uighur man with a thick black
>mustache. 
>
>To isolate orthodox Uighur Muslims, some of whom have been
>influenced by the extreme Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia and
>Pakistan, Beijing is mounting a political re-education
>campaign for 8,000 imams in charge of the region's
>state-sanctioned mosques. 
>
>The campaign started in mid- March and will run until the
>end of December. The Muslim leaders are required to attend
>seminars on religious and political policies set by the
>government and on Xinjiang history as written by the
>Communist Party. 
>
>"These lessons are essential to the long-term stability of
>Xinjiang," said a recent report by the official New China
>News Agency, "as they will guide our students away from
>ideological confusion and mistakes."
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/international/asia/16CHIN.html?ex=1009535839&ei=1&en=8f1290e8fcad5296
>
>
>
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