For the
past six months, the international journey of the Olympic flame to Beijing for
the 2008 Games has been disrupted regularly by protestors demonstrating about a
variety of issues. Some of these are China’s support for regimes in Sudan, North
Korea and Myanmar, the political status of Taiwan, and the persecution of the
Falun Gong movement. The number one grievance, however, has been China’s
occupation of Tibet and the oppression of its local inhabitants. From Athens to
London, from Paris to San Francisco, and from Jakarta to Canberra, the Tibetans’
plight has brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets; some activists
have even physically assaulted the torch-bearers, and many have been arrested.
Despite this, the global mass media, almost without exception, have portrayed
these activists as heroic, courageous and inspiring. In recent months, another segment of Chinese society has been organising similar protests against the Olympic flame’s journey through their areas. These protests have barely warranted a mention in the mainstream media, their cause not one to be celebrated or even whispered. Where it has been discussed, it has usually been in the context of fighting terrorism. Several of these activists have been arrested, detained and even executed for their dissent. They demand the end of Chinese human-rights abuses against their people and to the dilution of their culture by the mass migration of Han Chinese to their region. Their solution is the liberation of their land from Chinese occupation. The only difference is that their religion is not Buddhism but Islam. They are the Uighurs of China’s oil-rich northwestern province of Xinjiang.
History
The Uighurs are an ethnically Turkic Muslim people who have lived in what is now known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) for over 4,000 years. Known as Eastern Turkestan for hundreds of years, Xinjiang is located along the famous “Silk Road”, beyond the Great Wall, the natural boundary of China. Islam entered the region in the middle of the tenth century and has flourished among the Uighurs ever since. The Uighurs ruled an independent kingdom, with a mixed Muslim and Buddhist population, that stood until 1759, when the Manchu Chinese invaded and destroyed it; their domination lasted until 1864. During this period, the Uighurs revolted 42 times against Manchu rule, trying to regain their independence. In the revolt of 1864, the Uighurs were successful in expelling the Manchu from East Turkestan, and founded the independent Kashgaria kingdom under the leadership of Yakub Beg. This kingdom was recognized by the Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia and Britain.
However, twelve years later, in 1876, a large Manchu force, with the aid of the British, once again attacked and conquered East Turkestan. After this invasion, East Turkestan was renamed “Xinjiang”, which means “New Territory”, and it was annexed by the Manchu Empire on November 18, 1884. What followed were several rebellions by various Uighur movements which succeeded in setting up an independent Islamic Eastern Turkestan Republic in both 1933 and 1944. With the rise of the Communist Party in China in 1949, however, the most brutal chapter in the history of the Muslims of Xinjiang commenced.
After occupying the province in the 1950s, the Communist regime began a programme of settlement of Han Chinese in Xinjiang in a process of colonisation to secure, control and exploit the region; since then there has been an enormous influx of Han immigrants into Xinjiang. Today, the Han population has risen from just over 6 percent of the region’s population in 1949 to about 40 percent now: that is more than eight million out of a total of 20 million inhabitants.
Religious Persecution
Currently, Xinjiang is the only province of China to have a Muslim majority; it and occupied Tibet are the only administrative regions of China in which the ethnic Chinese still constitute a minority. It is China’s largest ‘annexed’ province, accounting for 16 percent of its landmass with only 1.6 percent of its population. Xinjiang has tremendous strategic significance for China: nuclear tests have been conducted at the Lop Nor Range; a large portion of China’s mineral resources are found there, including 38 percent of its coal reserves and 25 percent of its petroleum and natural gas reserves. Despite this wealth, more than 90 percent of Muslims live below the poverty line. Money has poured in, but has mostly benefited the Han Chinese.
The
Uighurs find themselves in a very similar situation to that of the people of
Tibet. Like the Tibetans, Uighurs have endured decades of discrimination and
oppression under Chinese rule. A religious and ethnic minority, they are
routinely denied basic civil, religious and political rights. For them, China
has been in occupation of their land, known to them as East Turkestan, for
several centuries. Several separatist movements, such as the East Turkestan
Islamic Party (ETIP), have emerged during this time, leading to even more severe
repression, designed to suppress Uighur nationalist sentiment. As Islam is
perceived as the ideology underpinning Uighur ethnic identity, the government
also represses most outward expressions of Islam. Actions that are strictly forbidden for Uighurs include celebrating Islamic festivals, studying religious texts or dressing in Islamic garb at state institutions, including schools. The Chinese government vets who can be an imam, what version of the Qur’an is acceptable, where religious gatherings may be held, and what may be said at such gatherings. Recently introduced regulations forbid local government employees and young men under the age of eightern from praying in the mosque, ban teachers from wearing beards and students from bringing the Qur’an to university. In June, a court in the region sentenced five Muslim imams to seven years’ imprisonment for illegally organising Hajj pilgrimages to Makkah. The imams were also charged with illegally providing copies of the Qur’an at a recent sentencing rally in Xayar County, near Aksu City.
Uighurs are - almost without exception - the only ethnic group in China to be routinely executed for political offences. Since September 2001, China has used the US-led “war on terror” as an excuse to oppress Uighurs with impunity, persecuting many who have peacefully protested their treatment. Uighurs have been jailed for reading newspapers sympathetic to the cause of independence. Others have been detained merely for listening to Radio Free Asia, an English-language station funded by the US. Even the most peaceful Uighur activists, if they practise Islam in a way that the authorities deem inappropriate, risk arrest and torture. China regularly dubs Uighur historians, poets and writers “intellectual terrorists” and sends them to jail. In June 2003 Abdulghani Memetemin, a teacher and journalist, was sentenced to nine years in jail for “providing state secrets for an organisation outside the country”. What he had actually done was help the East Turkestan Information Centre, an NGO based in Germany and run by exiled Uighurs, with its work by sending it news reports and transcripts of speeches by Chinese officials. In 2005 Nurmemet Yasin, a young intellectual, was sentenced to a decade in prison for writing an allegory comparing the Uighurs’ predicament with that of a pigeon in a cage.
Amnesty
International has documented that, since 2001, “tens of thousands of people are
reported to have been detained for investigation in the region, and hundreds,
possibly thousands, have been charged or sentenced under the Criminal Law; many
Uighurs are believed to have been sentenced to death and executed for alleged
“separatist” or “terrorist” offences.” AI has further reported that once
imprisoned, detainees are subjected to types of torture from cigarette-burns on
the skin to submersion in water or raw sewage. Prisoners have had toenails
extracted by pliers, been attacked by dogs and burned with electric batons, even
cattle prods. One terrifying account is the story of a prisoner who had horse
hair inserted into the tip of his penis. Throughout this brutality, the victim
was forced to wear a metal helmet on his head because a previous inmate had been
so traumatised by his treatment in the prison that he had beaten his own head
against a radiator in an attempt to take his life. 
In the
run up to the Olympic Games, China has increased its persecution of the Uighurs
to unprecedented levels. China has justified this crackdown in the name of
national security to counter the “threat” of Uighur Muslim militants eager to
exploit the Olympics for their own political agenda. Chinese officials have
announced that they have recently foiled numerous planned attacks by Uighur
Muslims, including plots to kidnap athletes and bring down commercial airliners.