The Chinese Saga of Olympic Shame Continues.... -- Beijing's ‘war on
terror' hides brutal crackdown on Muslims

From The Sunday Times

July 22, 2007

Beijing's ‘war on terror' hides brutal crackdown on Muslims

Michael Sheridan, Kashgar, China

THE CHINESE executioners came for Ismail Semed before 9am. They led him
out of his cell as the sun climbed over the Tien Shan mountains in the
land he called East Turkestan.

The day before, he had seen his wife, Buhejer, his son, 7, and his
daughter, 6, for the last time. After three years in prison and 15
months of uncertainty since a secret trial, they had 10 minutes to say
farewell.

Semed was 37, a Muslim and a political activist. He was not guilty of
murder nor any act of violence.

Three Chinese judges sentenced him to death for “attempting to split the
motherland” and possession of firearms and explosives. He said he was
tortured into a confession. Two men whose evidence was used against him
were already dead, having been executed in 1999.
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* Scenes from a troubled China

In his final moments with his family - his parents, brother and sister
were also there, all crying - he quietly accepted his fate.

“I did my best to prove I was innocent. I am so sorry that I leave you
with two children. Please take care of them and let them get a good
education,” he told his wife.

The end seems to have been quick. A group of prisoners were executed at
the jail that morning, February 8, Chinese officials confirmed, and
economy was the order of the day.

They gave Semed's body back to his family at a dusty cemetery where
devout Muslims are laid to rest with no tombstones to mark their graves.

Buhejer described it to a reporter who called from Washington on behalf
of Radio Free Asia, about the only source of regular news on this
forbidding place. “I saw only one bullet hole,” she said, “in his heart.”

The dead man was one of 9m Uighur Muslims in China's far west, a Turkic
people whose quest for national identity is one of history's lost causes.

The dying embers of their struggle flamed into protests, shootings and
bombings in the 1990s, all concealed from the world until September 11,
2001, when China discovered the usefulness of the “war on terror”.

Today China is waging a propaganda and security battle to guarantee its
control over Xinjiang, its name for the vast province rich in minerals
and strategic supplies of oil and gas which are vital to the expanding
Chinese economy.

China claims that Al-Qaeda has trained more than 1,000 members of the
East Turkestan Islamic Movement, classified as a terrorist group by
America and the United Nations.

The group took its name from the short-lived Republic of East Turkestan
that was declared in Xinjiang after the second world war, then crushed
by the communist revolution of 1949.

China has persuaded Pakistan and Kazakhstan to hand over captured
militants for interrogation, secret trials and execution, a policy that
may have fuelled the fundamentalist rage now gripping Pakistan.

Semed, alleged to be a political thinker behind the group, was caught
while studying in Rawal-pindi in 2003 and was sent back.

Next month 1,600 Chinese troops will join exercises with Russia and the
former Soviet Central Asian republics to cooperate against Islamic
extremists.

Chinese security services have also created a pervasive apparatus of
informers and deployed new units of black-clad antiterrorist police to
patrol around mosques and markets in the cities of Xinjiang.

But the iron-fisted security policy has made more enemies than friends.
Extensive travel and interviews in Xinjiang this month unveiled a
society segregated by religion and ethnicity, divided by reciprocal
distrust, living in separate sections of tightly policed cities.

The same human rights abuses that exist across China - forced labour for
peasants, children trafficked to slave as beggars, girls lured into
sweatshops - deepen political tensions here and turn young men to violence.

Two western intelligence officers said the Chinese consistently
exaggerated Uighur terrorist links with Al-Qaeda to exploit any
opportunity to strike at their home-grown opponents. Chinese information
was unreliable and no western intelligence service had handed back
Muslim citizens to China, they said.

One of the officers said the real concern was that Chinese repression
was creating recruits for terrorism.

In recent weeks has come proof that 58 years of Chinese military
occupation have crushed significant opposition but failed to win
loyalty. Officials have confiscated the passports of thousands of
Muslims in a crackdown to break the growing influence of militant Islam.

Police ordered the Muslims to hand in their passports and told them that
the documents would be returned only for travel approved by the authorities.

The aim is to stop Chinese Muslims slipping away to join militants in
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The decision has inflamed resentment among Muslims preparing to go to
Mecca for the annual hajj in December. “Bin Laden, hao [good],” said one
angry Muslim, who had been deprived of his passport. “Saddam, hao.
Arafat, hao.”

The memory of state violence exercises a powerful deterrent, however.
Flying into the border city of Yining, the Chinese airliner descends
over dun-coloured mountains into a bountiful valley rich in orchards and
farms, home to a mixture of Uighurs, Kazakhs and Russians.

The ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Yining stick to their own districts.
It is the tenth anniversary of a time when blood ran in the streets here
and bitterness still runs deep.

“I was in the People's Armed Police when the rebellion broke out in
'97,” said a burly Chinese driver, who proceeded to give a vivid and
satisfied account of this barely known massacre.

“For a while we lost control,” he said. “The insurgents got into an
armoury, killed our men and seized the weapons. There was chaos. We
brought in the army - they changed into police uniforms - and then we
got even. The central government ordered us to crush them without any
hesitation. Believe me, we did.

“We lost a few people but we killed - I don't know exactly - thousands
of them. These people know our strength. We taught them a good hard lesson.”

Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman and politician now in exile, says
she saw a horrific police video of the “good hard lesson” when she went
to Yining in 1997 to investigate. It showed unarmed adolescent boys and
girls shot dead on camera, their bodies tossed into trucks. A mother and
her group of children, aged five or six, crumpled under a volley of
bullets. The taped slaughter went on and on, with excited commands and
shouts of glee from the Chinese on the soundtrack. Perhaps one of them
was the driver.

A subdued hush has now descended on the city. The cold looks from
Muslims when a Chinese walked into a shaded cafe near the main mosque
told their own story. He left sharply.

Today the clash of civilisations resounds loudest in Kashgar, 2,400
miles west of Beijing, a crossroads of religions, commerce and culture.
In January, only 48 miles to the southwest, “antiterrorist” units raided
a training camp in the mountains where the old Silk Road winds into
Pakistan, and killed 18 men with the loss of one policeman.

The clash was hailed by the state media, which called it a blow to the
East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But Chinese residents said the
operation was bungled, allowing militants to escape.

“They made a mess of it and those people are still out there. We know
they have many smuggled weapons,” said a retired military officer, “so
now our side is distributing arms to trained men in the bingtuan.”

He was referring to the gigantic army-controlled companies that built up
Chinese economic activity in Xinjiang and still dominate its business.

“All cars travelling south from Kashgar must have an armed escort along
a section of the road through the desert,” said a local tour operator.

China has invested billions of yuan to modernise Kashgar, renovating the
square in front of its principal mosque and building new hotels to
accommodate backpackers and upmarket western tourists. It has also
imported thousands of ethnic Han Chinese to populate new apartments, a
pattern of mass immigration used across Xinjiang.

They dwell in effective segregation from the Muslims, who keep to their
old quarters of mud-brick houses, mosques and reeking alleys where
freshly killed sheep hang up for sale.

The communist party does its best to achieve integration through
politics. According to the Kashgar Daily, 84%% of local members are Uighurs.

“Good relations are only on the surface,” said a Chinese businesswoman.
“They're not real.”

Loud-mouthed Chinese tourists strut around the precincts of the great Id
Kah mosque, reclaimed only at prayer times by the Uighur men who sit
outside and stare at them sullenly.

In 1949 the Uighurs were 90%% of the population of Xinjiang. Today they
account for less than half.

“It is the classic colonialist model,” said Nicholas Bequelin of Human
Rights Watch, author of a critical report on Xinjiang.

In Urumqi, the industrialised capital city of Xinjiang, there was
evidence that repression had united Uighurs with rival Muslim sects. A
red banner hung from the eaves of a 100-year-old mosque, whose lines
recalled a classical Chinese temple and whose congregation were members
of the Hui, a Muslim minority from central China. “All pilgrimages to
Mecca must be organised by the National Islamic Organisation under the
law,” it read.

“They have taken all our passports too,” said an elder at the mosque.

“We Muslims must follow the party and the government to make our prayers
in a stable setting and under a correct policy,” the imam warned his
flock at Friday prayers.

Chinese intelligence woke up late to the fact that Hui Muslims were
being financed by extremists from the Middle East.

Their clerics, influenced by Saudi Arabia's purist Salafi doctrine,
often fulminated against Israel and the West.

“The Hui are much more radical than the Uighurs,” said Bequelin. Such
radicalisation is fuelled by injustices endured by many Chinese but all
the more potent when suffered by an angry minority.

South of Kashgar, an almost medieval system of forced labour, known as
the hasha, continues to exist on plantations, where local Muslims are
ordered to pick almonds and fruit for sale to the thriving markets of China.

The government denied it, but several people in Kashgar said their
relatives were engaged in such unpaid work, and a fruit wholesaler in
Urumqi admitted that it still went on.

The practice dates from the era of Khans and slave traders and was
supposedly abolished after “liberation” by the Chinese communist party.

Then there is outright child slavery, exposed last month in a brave
report by the Hong Kong magazine Phoenix Weekly. More than 4,000 Uighur
children have been kidnapped and turned into beggars or thieves by “big
brother” Fagin figures, an estimate confirmed by the provincial welfare
office.

The gangmasters, usually Uighurs themselves, set daily targets of up to
?50 for stealing or begging, on pain of beatings. The children are sent
to richer parts of China, the girls subjected to sexual harassment and
the boys tempted into drug addiction to make them easier to manipulate.

Almost as bad is the plight of hundreds of Muslim girls conscripted from
desert villages and sent for “work experience” in factory sweatshops.
Last March Chinese officials went into the dirt-poor villages around
Yarkand, south of Kashgar, to collect more than 200 girls as young as 15
for a work programme.

The girls found themselves labouring long hours in a factory more than
1,000 miles from home on the east coast of China. Their promised wages
of ?33 a month went unpaid.

Several girls escaped and made their way back to Xinjiang. Chinese
officials then threatened their relatives with punishment.

The other families fear that their daughters will drift from factories
into prostitution, a frequent refuge for the penniless migrant female in
China.

In a traditional Muslim society that fears shame and values dignity,
such a fate can be seen as worse than death. It is a powerful incentive
for the militants.

All over Xinjiang, China can point to growing prosperity, cleaner water,
new schools, paved roads, modern hospitals, efficient airports,
cybercom-merce and huge energy plants.

The price, say Uighurs, is the slow extinction of their identity. Their
children take compulsory Chinese lessons. Teaching in Uighur is banned
at the main university. Their fabled literature, poetry and music are
fading under the assault of karaoke culture. Their history is rewritten.

For western tourists, who come to Xinjiang to roam the ruins of the Silk
Road, the Chinese have erected a new museum in Urumqi. It portrays the
final Chinese conquest of this harsh territory, first claimed by the Han
emperors in the era before Christ.

The slick exhibits equate its 9m Uighurs with the 4,900 Tartars, 11,100
Russians and 14,500 Uzbek inhabitants.

“All cooperate as one family under the glorious nationality policy of
the party,” an inscription in Chinese characters proclaims.

To the family of Ismail Semed, however, it stands for grief, not glory.

Additional reporting: Sara Hashash

Bloody history of Xinjiang

Xinjiang province is crossed by the centuries-old Silk Road trade route
once travelled by Marco Polo

1949 Conquered by Chinese communists

1990s Shootings and bombings against Chinese targets

1997 Massacre of Muslims in border town uprising

2001 China joins war on terror, extradites and executes militants

2007 Crackdown continues to sustain oil and gas, building boom and gold rush

Population About 20m ― 45%% Uighur Muslims, 40%% Han Chinese. As many as
45 other minority nationalities, including Kazakhs and Mongols,
officially recognised

Brits have the least credential to critisize Chinese communists over
human rights. only 100 years ago, British army invaded China to force
Opium trade to dope Chinese in order to "balabce the trade deficit". The
british army killed thousands of Tibetan People during their invasion
into Tibet from India.
I don't understand why they are this shameless? Can you tell me?
Xingjiang was part of China long before England had Scotland, what do
you mean by saying "1949 Conquered by Chinese communists "?
Read some history before you speak.

Yin yang, Beijing, China

Some of the issues raised in this article, repression and abuse of
power, have not changed for centuries, going back to the dynasties and
this also applies to the Han ren intolerance for ethnic minorities,
notwithstanding the fact that the province being reported on is one of
five "Autonomous" regions. These factors are not directly the result of
the government system since the revolution but more ingrained in the
history and culture of China. That being said, since the revolution,
religion has not been condoned by the state so all of the foregoing,
combined with the fact that policy is set by Beijing but enforcement and
interpretation are done locally, is going to result in the potential for
over extending one's remit.

As for all these "passport" holders, I would be inclined to believe that
it's their houkou card that's being pulled.

C Lee, Shanghai, PRC

Interesting to note that the Hui are identified as being more radical
than the Uighurs as they are far more widespread within China than the
Uighurs. The article says they are from central China, but they
concentrate largely in Ningxia province - a dusty northern province
through which runs the Yellow River. They can also be found in large
numbers in Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang, but they are found in large
numbers all over China, with large communities in Beijing and even
Shanghai and almost any other large city; many cities have their 'Huizu
Qu' or 'Hui Minority area', which can be picked out by the number of
mosques and the aroma of lamb kebabs. Jinan has one and so does Hangzhou
as do other towns.
They differ from the Uighur in that the Uighurs are of Turkic extraction
and are physically Central Asian in appearance (sometimes blue-eyed),
while the Hui are descendants of Silk Road traders that intermarried
with Chinese so they far more closely resemble the Han Chinese.

Donald Smith, London, UK

Stories like these are prevalent in many parts of China. These are
stories that have been documented in China for many, many years now. It
seems like that the Western world is willing to let economic incentives
dictates their policies on China. Why is George Bush forcing democracies
in Middles East and not in China? Especially since China regularly
violates it own citizens human rights. A government that was a result of
the struggles of their citizens. I alway believed that we should block
China's admission into the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and other international
trade and non-trade organization. We should not support governments that
violate their own citizens freedom. China should not be allowed to host
or participate in any international games. It is sad that China is given
the chance to host the next summer olympics. Olympics started in
democratic city-states of Greece and to have China host the next summer
olympics goes against all the values of games.

Naleen Lal, Union City, California

I am saddened of course by the harsh & murderous treatment of the people
Muslims, of X1njiang. But this is China. What else can one epect?
THe tragic fact is that no one in the West would dare to intervene.
After all this is china ,getting away with murder & torture on a daily
basis.
But I am glad & appreciative that your paper brought into the open.

Rashelle N, lake forest, U.S.A. Il

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