Author: B L Kak
Publication: The Daily Excelsior
Date: October 15, 2001
New Delhi: In a swift turn of events,
Pakistan's "great" ally, China, has warned that Islamabad will have to
face a different situation altogether if Pakistan-based fundamentalist
outfits were not immediately prevented from continuing their clandestine
support to the separatist movement in Sinkiang, the region in China's far
west.
Beijing is reported to have identified
these fundamentalist groups as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
and Jaish-e-Mohammed, all based in Pakistan, and Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda
led by the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.
China's warning to Pakistan has
been reported at a time when Chinese authorities ordered crackdown on the
Muslim separatist movement in the Sinkiang province. Sinkiang is dominated
by Uighur Muslims.
Reports from Shanghai and Beijing
said that the crackdown on Uighurs was just one piece of a major effort
to suppress potential unrest among the ethnic group, which posed the most
credible threat of any group to China's internal cohesion.
The Chinese Government has made
its most explicit call yet for international support to fight Muslim separatists
in Sinkiang region, saying that it possessed evidence of their ties with
terrorist groups outside China-in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere.
According to reports, bolstering China's fight against a small separatist
movement in the western region of Sinkiang province has been an implicit
goal of Beijing since the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
If China were ever to break apart
in the way that the Soviet Union did, Sinkiang would be the first to go.
China is a known critic of the United States. Why then has Beijing joined
Washington's developing alliance against Islamic terrorism? An answer to
this question is not far to seek.
China has joined the anti-terrorism
campaign in part because it is eager to win international support for its
own drive against Muslim separatists in the Sinkiang province. Uighur separatists
have long been viewed with sympathy in the West. Why are Uighur Muslims
arrayed against Beijing? They have, on numerous occasions so far, insisted
that economic and demographic policies of the Chinese Government are marginalising
8 million Uighurs and will eventually lead to their cultural annihilation.
The Uighurs speak a Turkic language
and have more cultural affinity with Central Asia than with the rest of
China. Foreign media reports in the past some days have brought to the
fore quite a few interesting details vis-à-vis China's crackdown
on Sinkiang Muslims.
Internal and exiled groups calling
for an independent or autonomous territory of 'East Turkistan' have occasionally
engaged in bombings or shot officials. The local press in Sinkiang frequently
reports the arrests or executions of violent separatists.
China is reported to have intensified
the surveillance and control of Uighurs out of fear that its support for
a war in Central Asia might ignite an uprising among the chronically restive
population. A report carried by New York Times the other day divulged that
at least seven Uighurs were executed for "disrupting social order" and
other vague crimes in the week leading up to the country's October 1 holiday
celebrating the Communist rise to power in 1949.
China has argued that Uighur separatists
are already getting help. According to the Institute of World Religions
in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Muslim separatists
in Sinkiang province have in the past received moral support and arms from
radical Islamic groups elsewhere in Central Asia and that some may have
received training from the Taliban.
The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance
is reported to have captured several Uighurs fighting along with Taliban
forces. Foreign intelligence assessment has confirmed that the immediate
losers are the majority of Uighurs in China who are increasingly unwelcome
outside their home, even as the ethnic Chinese presence in the Sinkiang
province grows.
