Xinjiang Province: News & Discussions
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Ethnic violence in Western China targets Uighurs
The government says ethnic violence that has killed dozens is terrorism. Uighurs claim government oppression.
July 27, 2014Uighurs (WEE-gurs) wait at a bus stop in old Kashgar in the Xinjiang province of western China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
By Simon Denyer September 19
SHACHE COUNTY, China – The month of Ramadan should have been a time of fasting, charity and prayer in China’s Muslim west. But here, in many of the towns and villages of southern Xinjiang, it was a time of fear, repression, and violence.
China’s campaign against separatism and terrorism in its mainly Muslim west has now become an all-out war on conservative Islam, residents here say.
Throughout Ramadan,police intensified a campaign of house-to-house searches, looking for books or clothing that betray “conservative” religious belief among the region’s ethnic Uighurs: women wearing veils were widely detained, and many young men arrested on the slightest pretext, residents say. Students and civil servants were forced to eat instead of fasting, and work or attend classes instead of attending Friday prayers.
The religious repression has bred resentment, and, at times, deadly protests. Reports have emerged of police firing on angry crowds in recent weeks in the towns of Elishku, and Alaqagha; since then, Chinese authorities have imposed a complete blackout on reporting from both locations, even more intense than that already in place across most of Xinjiang.
VIEW GRAPHIC
Chinese police have cracked down on the wearing of beards and veils, in observance of Ramadan, in Muslim-majority Xinjiang province.
A Washington Post team was turned away at the one of several checkpoints around Elishku, as army trucks rumbled past, and was subsequently detained for several hours by informers, police and Communist Party officials for reporting from villages in the surrounding district of Shache county; the following day, the team was again detained in Alaqagha in Kuqa county, and ultimately deported from the region from the nearest airport.
Across Shache county, the Internet has been cut, and text messaging services disabled, while foreigners have been barred. But in snatched conversations, in person and on the telephone, with the few people in the region brave enough to talk, a picture of constant harassment across Xinjiang emerges.
“The police are everywhere,” said one Uighur resident. Another said it was like “living in prison.” Another said his identity card had been checked so many times, “the magnetic strip is not working any more.”
On July 18, hundreds of people gathered outside a government building in the town of Alaqagha, angry about the arrest of two dozen girls and women who had refused to remove their headscarves, according to a report on Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Protesters threw stones, bottles and bricks at the building; the police opened fire, killing at least two people, and wounding several more.
Then, on July 28, the last day of Ramadan, a protest in Elishku was met with an even more violent response, RFA reported. Hundreds of Uighurs attacked a police station with knives, axes and sticks; again, the police opened fire, mowing down scores of people.
China's official Xinhua news agency said police killed 59 Uighur “terrorists"in the incident, although other reports suggest the death toll could have been significantly higher.
. The region has been in lockdown ever since, with police and SWAT teams arresting more than 200 people and drones scanning for suspects from the air.
Xinjiang is a land of deserts, oases and mountains, flanked by the Muslim lands of Central Asia. Its Uighur people are culturally more inclined towards Turkey than the rest of China.
China says foreign religious ideas — often propagated over the Internet— have corrupted the people of Xinjiang, promoting fundamentalist Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam and turning some of them towards terrorism in pursuit of separatist goals. It also blames a radical Islamist Uighur group — said to be based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas and to have links to al-Qaeda — for a recent upsurge in violence. In March, a gruesome knife attack at a train station in the city of Kunming left 33 people dead, while in May, a bomb attack on a street market in Urumqi killed 43 others.
In response, President Xi Jinping has vowed to catch the terrorists “with nets spreading from the earth to the sky,” and to chase them “like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them.’ ”
But the nets appear to be also catching many innocent people, residents complain. “You should arrest the bad guys,” said one Uighur professional in Urumqi, “not just anyone who looks suspicious.”
Some 200,000 Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to the countryside, ostensibly to listen to people’s concerns. Yet those officials, who often shelter behind compound walls fortified with alarms and barbed wire, appear to be more interested in ever-more intrusive surveillance of Uighur life, locals say.
In Shache, known in Uighur as Yarkand, an official document boasts of spending more than $2 million to establish a network of informers and surveillance cameras. House-to-house inspections, it says, will identify separatists, terrorists and religious extremists – including women who cover their faces with veils or burqas, and young men with long beards.
In the city of Kashgar, checkpoints enforce what the authorities call “Project Beauty” — beauty, in this case, being an exposed face. A large billboard close to the main mosque carries pictures of women wearing headscarves that pass muster, and those — covering the face or even just the neck — which are banned.
Anyone caught breaking the rules faces the daunting prospect of “regular and irregular inspections,” “educational lectures” and having party cadres assigned as “buddies” to prevent backsliding, the billboard announced. In the city of Karamay, women wearing veils and men with long beards have been banned from public buses.
Terrorism — in the sense of attacks on civilians — is a new phenomenon in Xinjiang, but the unrest here has a much longer history, with many Uighurs chafing under Chinese repression since the Communist Party takeover of the country in 1949, and resentful of the subsequent flood of immigrants from China’s majority Han community into the region.
What has changed is the growth in conservative Islam, and the increasing desperation of Uighurs determined to resist Chinese rule.
Until a decade or two ago, Xinjiang’s Uighurs wore their religion lightly, known more for their singing, dancing and drinking than their observation of the pieties of their faith. But in the past two decades a stricter form of the religion has slowly gained a foothold, as China opened up to the outside world.
While worship was allowed at officially sanctioned — and closely supervised — mosques, a network of underground mosques sprang up. Village elders returning from the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, brought back more conservative ideas; high levels of unemployment among Uighur youth, and widespread discrimination against them, left many searching for new ideas and new directions in life. The rise of Islam was, in part, a reaction against social inequality and modernity.
But Joanne Smith Finley of Britain’s Newcastle University, an expert on Uighur identities and Islam, says religion has become a “symbolic form of resistance” to Chinese rule in a region where other resistance is impossible.
When hopes for independence were cruelly dashed by mass executions and arrests in the city of Ghulja — or Yining in Chinese — in 1997, Uighurs had nowhere else to turn, she said.
“People lost faith in the dream of independence,” she said, “and started looking to Islam instead.”
Not every Uighur in Xinjiang is happy with the rising tide of conservatism: one academic lamented the dramatic decline in Uighur establishments serving alcohol in the city of Hotan, while insisting that many young girls wear veils only out of compulsion.
But China’s clumsy attempts to “liberate” Uighurs from the oppression of conservative Islam are only driving more people into the hands of the fundamentalists, experts say.
“If the government continues to exaggerate extremism in this way, and take inappropriate measures to fix it, it will only force people towards extremism” a prominent Uighur scholar, Ilham Tohti, wrote, before being jailed in January on a charge of inciting separatism.
Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.
China's war on terror becomes all-out attack on Islam in Xinjiang - The Washington Post
Ethnic violence in Western China targets Uighurs
The government says ethnic violence that has killed dozens is terrorism. Uighurs claim government oppression.
July 27, 2014Uighurs (WEE-gurs) wait at a bus stop in old Kashgar in the Xinjiang province of western China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
By Simon Denyer September 19
SHACHE COUNTY, China – The month of Ramadan should have been a time of fasting, charity and prayer in China’s Muslim west. But here, in many of the towns and villages of southern Xinjiang, it was a time of fear, repression, and violence.
China’s campaign against separatism and terrorism in its mainly Muslim west has now become an all-out war on conservative Islam, residents here say.
Throughout Ramadan,police intensified a campaign of house-to-house searches, looking for books or clothing that betray “conservative” religious belief among the region’s ethnic Uighurs: women wearing veils were widely detained, and many young men arrested on the slightest pretext, residents say. Students and civil servants were forced to eat instead of fasting, and work or attend classes instead of attending Friday prayers.
The religious repression has bred resentment, and, at times, deadly protests. Reports have emerged of police firing on angry crowds in recent weeks in the towns of Elishku, and Alaqagha; since then, Chinese authorities have imposed a complete blackout on reporting from both locations, even more intense than that already in place across most of Xinjiang.
VIEW GRAPHIC Chinese police have cracked down on the wearing of beards and veils, in observance of Ramadan, in Muslim-majority Xinjiang province.
A Washington Post team was turned away at the one of several checkpoints around Elishku, as army trucks rumbled past, and was subsequently detained for several hours by informers, police and Communist Party officials for reporting from villages in the surrounding district of Shache county; the following day, the team was again detained in Alaqagha in Kuqa county, and ultimately deported from the region from the nearest airport.
Across Shache county, the Internet has been cut, and text messaging services disabled, while foreigners have been barred. But in snatched conversations, in person and on the telephone, with the few people in the region brave enough to talk, a picture of constant harassment across Xinjiang emerges.
“The police are everywhere,” said one Uighur resident. Another said it was like “living in prison.” Another said his identity card had been checked so many times, “the magnetic strip is not working any more.”
On July 18, hundreds of people gathered outside a government building in the town of Alaqagha, angry about the arrest of two dozen girls and women who had refused to remove their headscarves, according to a report on Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Protesters threw stones, bottles and bricks at the building; the police opened fire, killing at least two people, and wounding several more.
Then, on July 28, the last day of Ramadan, a protest in Elishku was met with an even more violent response, RFA reported. Hundreds of Uighurs attacked a police station with knives, axes and sticks; again, the police opened fire, mowing down scores of people.
China's official Xinhua news agency said police killed 59 Uighur “terrorists"in the incident, although other reports suggest the death toll could have been significantly higher.
. The region has been in lockdown ever since, with police and SWAT teams arresting more than 200 people and drones scanning for suspects from the air.
Xinjiang is a land of deserts, oases and mountains, flanked by the Muslim lands of Central Asia. Its Uighur people are culturally more inclined towards Turkey than the rest of China.
China says foreign religious ideas — often propagated over the Internet— have corrupted the people of Xinjiang, promoting fundamentalist Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam and turning some of them towards terrorism in pursuit of separatist goals. It also blames a radical Islamist Uighur group — said to be based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas and to have links to al-Qaeda — for a recent upsurge in violence. In March, a gruesome knife attack at a train station in the city of Kunming left 33 people dead, while in May, a bomb attack on a street market in Urumqi killed 43 others.
In response, President Xi Jinping has vowed to catch the terrorists “with nets spreading from the earth to the sky,” and to chase them “like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them.’ ”
But the nets appear to be also catching many innocent people, residents complain. “You should arrest the bad guys,” said one Uighur professional in Urumqi, “not just anyone who looks suspicious.”
Some 200,000 Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to the countryside, ostensibly to listen to people’s concerns. Yet those officials, who often shelter behind compound walls fortified with alarms and barbed wire, appear to be more interested in ever-more intrusive surveillance of Uighur life, locals say.
In Shache, known in Uighur as Yarkand, an official document boasts of spending more than $2 million to establish a network of informers and surveillance cameras. House-to-house inspections, it says, will identify separatists, terrorists and religious extremists – including women who cover their faces with veils or burqas, and young men with long beards.
In the city of Kashgar, checkpoints enforce what the authorities call “Project Beauty” — beauty, in this case, being an exposed face. A large billboard close to the main mosque carries pictures of women wearing headscarves that pass muster, and those — covering the face or even just the neck — which are banned.
Anyone caught breaking the rules faces the daunting prospect of “regular and irregular inspections,” “educational lectures” and having party cadres assigned as “buddies” to prevent backsliding, the billboard announced. In the city of Karamay, women wearing veils and men with long beards have been banned from public buses.
Terrorism — in the sense of attacks on civilians — is a new phenomenon in Xinjiang, but the unrest here has a much longer history, with many Uighurs chafing under Chinese repression since the Communist Party takeover of the country in 1949, and resentful of the subsequent flood of immigrants from China’s majority Han community into the region.
What has changed is the growth in conservative Islam, and the increasing desperation of Uighurs determined to resist Chinese rule.
Until a decade or two ago, Xinjiang’s Uighurs wore their religion lightly, known more for their singing, dancing and drinking than their observation of the pieties of their faith. But in the past two decades a stricter form of the religion has slowly gained a foothold, as China opened up to the outside world.
While worship was allowed at officially sanctioned — and closely supervised — mosques, a network of underground mosques sprang up. Village elders returning from the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, brought back more conservative ideas; high levels of unemployment among Uighur youth, and widespread discrimination against them, left many searching for new ideas and new directions in life. The rise of Islam was, in part, a reaction against social inequality and modernity.
But Joanne Smith Finley of Britain’s Newcastle University, an expert on Uighur identities and Islam, says religion has become a “symbolic form of resistance” to Chinese rule in a region where other resistance is impossible.
When hopes for independence were cruelly dashed by mass executions and arrests in the city of Ghulja — or Yining in Chinese — in 1997, Uighurs had nowhere else to turn, she said.
“People lost faith in the dream of independence,” she said, “and started looking to Islam instead.”
Not every Uighur in Xinjiang is happy with the rising tide of conservatism: one academic lamented the dramatic decline in Uighur establishments serving alcohol in the city of Hotan, while insisting that many young girls wear veils only out of compulsion.
But China’s clumsy attempts to “liberate” Uighurs from the oppression of conservative Islam are only driving more people into the hands of the fundamentalists, experts say.
“If the government continues to exaggerate extremism in this way, and take inappropriate measures to fix it, it will only force people towards extremism” a prominent Uighur scholar, Ilham Tohti, wrote, before being jailed in January on a charge of inciting separatism.
Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.
China's war on terror becomes all-out attack on Islam in Xinjiang - The Washington Post
Jf Thunder
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again, they can all be culprits?
should i be responsible for what my ancestors did?
dlclong
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to some members:
what the"a War on Islam."？
who tell U china hate Muslim？! Uyghur？
why china need hate Muslim？whatis the benefit ？
China have ten Muslim nation, in addition to the uighurs,the other nine don't have a problem, no one said the oppressed! On the contrary, some Uighur separatists, use of Islam, is a disgrace for other Chinese Muslim nation
what the"a War on Islam."？
who tell U china hate Muslim？! Uyghur？
why china need hate Muslim？whatis the benefit ？
China have ten Muslim nation, in addition to the uighurs,the other nine don't have a problem, no one said the oppressed! On the contrary, some Uighur separatists, use of Islam, is a disgrace for other Chinese Muslim nation
kolinsky
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Islam, why we hate Islam? We have traded for more than 10 centries, and suddenly someone tell me we hate Islam. Where is this stupid idea comes from? Last war against Islam was more than 1000 years ago.
If some cawboy want to persuade us to invade Iraq, just forget it, impossible. Did USA ask our opinions before they invaded Iraq 2003? If not, the ISIS is a pure USA shit, they should clean their own shit themselves.
If some cawboy want to persuade us to invade Iraq, just forget it, impossible. Did USA ask our opinions before they invaded Iraq 2003? If not, the ISIS is a pure USA shit, they should clean their own shit themselves.
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Why not. In fact i m in favour of letting persecuted muslims be allowed to migrate to the 57 muslim countries. I am not a nationalist. But PAK ,turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan r in the better position geographically to help uighurs i.e negotiate with china for their migration. BD should allow all Rohingyas in and we can also afford that Insha'Allah. But u see Muslims countries r ruled by scums and add to that a portion of the pop. of these countries are European indoctrinated secular nationalist who would come up with all sorts of nonsense to oppose such moves.
What else is western propaganda?
Chinese r ruled by a totalitarian communist party that just switched to mataliarestic capitalism for survival. It was always anti-religion and judging by the history of communism and its lunatic proponents , news coming out of xinjiang is hardly surprising. BS is when a comminity is not even allowed to practice their religion in the safety of their home. That's real BS. And prosperity in china means shit to muslims when u don't even allow people to be in peace in their private lives. Committing suicide in mass for failing exams and Gov enforced infanticide to preserve 1 child policy speaks volumes of the kind of barbaric society the middle kingdom has become.
How would allowing muslims to observe their religious duties in private life, threaten chinese hold over xinjiang?
cnleio
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These AKs must be Type56 rifles made in China, sold to America by Norinco.
China can find out who did that, and send PLA attack UAVs out.
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kolinsky
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I donot think majrity of terrorists are muslims. Muslims are ill treated by the western. To bomb people by bombers are not eliganter than bomb people by IEDs. More than 1 million people are killed in Iraq in a civilized way, USA is the motherland of terrorists.
If terrorist is defined as attack civilian for the purpose of politic. The biggest terrorist is Bush and Obama.
KingMamba
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Sounds like an infestation to me.
The Huskar
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If you want to see infestation,look at Bangladesh.
We are not infesting.We are displacing
AgentOrange
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Why not. In fact i m in favour of letting persecuted muslims be allowed to migrate to the 57 muslim countries. I am not a nationalist. But PAK ,turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan r in the better position geographically to help uighurs i.e negotiate with china for their migration. BD should allow all Rohingyas in and we can also afford that Insha'Allah. But u see Muslims countries r ruled by scums and add to that a portion of the pop. of these countries are European indoctrinated secular nationalist who would come up with all sorts of nonsense to oppose such moves.
What else is western propaganda?
And prosperity in china means shit to muslims when u don't even allow people to be in peace in their private lives. Committing suicide in mass for failing exams and Gov enforced infanticide to preserve 1 child policy speaks volumes of the kind of barbaric society the middle kingdom has become.
How would allowing muslims to observe their religious duties in private life, threaten chinese hold over xinjiang?
And muslim suicide attacks mean shit to the Chinese because there are more Han than Uighurs by far and the innocent Uighurs will be the ones who suffer the collateral damage. Terrorists and their supporters don't deserve peace if they attack innocent civilians. If you're so concerned about oppressed muslims, then stand against the extremist elements in your midst that are forcing a worldwide tightening of security.
Rather than complain about China defending itself, why don't you ask where all the moderate muslim voices are? Rebiya Kadeer never condemns acts of terrorism and instead expresses skepticism about innocent Chinese deaths if they're caused by her darling Uighur terrorist buddies. Instead of whining about Chinese government re-actions to bombings, machete attacks, etc why don't you whine about the hypocrisy that both she and you display? But you won't and the silence is deafening.
TaiShang
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Document clarifies China's law on terror
China published a judicial explanation on the application of criminal law in relation to terrorism on the Ministry of Public Security's website yesterday.
It said cases should be strictly based on facts, without discrimination and under the principle of tempering justice with mercy.
The document urged authorities to differentiate normal religious activities from religious extremism and to protect freedom of religion.
It detailed how charges of "organizing, leading and participating in terrorist organizations," "inciting secession" and "funding terrorism" should be applied.
Aside from bombing, killing, hijacking and arson, those found to have started terrorist organizations or training camps, recruited new members, or indoctrinated others with religious extremism for terror purposes would be charged with "organizing, leading and participating terrorist organizations."
Those who take part in a terrorist organization, receive terrorist training and plot border crossings for terrorism will be charged with "participating in terrorist organizations."
Publishing and distributing books, audio and video products and other materials containing religious extremism and terror content will come under the term "inciting secession."
This would also apply to disseminating religious extremism via websites, e-mail and instant messaging applications, through mobile phones, electronic reading devices or other storage media.
People knowingly funding terrorism or providing terrorists with vehicles, weapons or other equipment will be found face "funding terrorism" charges.
The document also said that insults such as "religious traitor" and "heretic" could lead to a conviction for "provoking disorder" and the making and showing of banners and other material of religious extremism would be made a criminal offense.
China published a judicial explanation on the application of criminal law in relation to terrorism on the Ministry of Public Security's website yesterday.
It said cases should be strictly based on facts, without discrimination and under the principle of tempering justice with mercy.
The document urged authorities to differentiate normal religious activities from religious extremism and to protect freedom of religion.
It detailed how charges of "organizing, leading and participating in terrorist organizations," "inciting secession" and "funding terrorism" should be applied.
Aside from bombing, killing, hijacking and arson, those found to have started terrorist organizations or training camps, recruited new members, or indoctrinated others with religious extremism for terror purposes would be charged with "organizing, leading and participating terrorist organizations."
Those who take part in a terrorist organization, receive terrorist training and plot border crossings for terrorism will be charged with "participating in terrorist organizations."
Publishing and distributing books, audio and video products and other materials containing religious extremism and terror content will come under the term "inciting secession."
This would also apply to disseminating religious extremism via websites, e-mail and instant messaging applications, through mobile phones, electronic reading devices or other storage media.
People knowingly funding terrorism or providing terrorists with vehicles, weapons or other equipment will be found face "funding terrorism" charges.
The document also said that insults such as "religious traitor" and "heretic" could lead to a conviction for "provoking disorder" and the making and showing of banners and other material of religious extremism would be made a criminal offense.
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