Author: Reuters
Publication: Independent Online
Date: December 15, 2003
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=126&art_id=qw107147178375B226&set_id=1
China released a wanted list of
Muslim separatist groups and individuals on Monday, accusing them of acts
of terror and appealing to foreign governments to ban the groups and track
down and hand over the wanted individuals.
One day after the United States
announced the capture of toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, China's ministry
of public security fingered four groups in the restive north-west and 11
ethnic Uighur suspects, all of whom remain at large.
"They have planned, organised and
carried out a series of violent terrorist activities such as bombings,
assassinations, arsons, poisonings and attacks," Zhao Yongchen, deputy
chief of the ministry's anti-terror bureau, said in a statement.
He appealed to other governments
to ban the groups, prohibit them from receiving support or asylum and freeze
their accounts; and to prosecute and investigate the wanted individuals
and hand them over to China.
China, which threw its weight behind
American President George Bush's war on terror and won US support for an
earlier crackdown on one of the four groups, opposed the Iraq invasion.
But as a permanent member of the
Security Council, it is likely to be an influential voice and one Washington
will be keen to keep onside in the debate on happenings in Iraq in the
aftermath of Saddam's capture.
Many Turkic-speaking Uighurs want
to establish an independent state in the Xinjiang region, which they would
call East Turkestan.
China has blamed pro-independence
activists for a string of bombings and riots since the 1980s in Xinjiang,
which borders the former Soviet Central Asian republics and Pakistan and
Afghanistan, as well as in other parts of the country.
But Uighur and human rights activists
abroad have angrily denounced the "terrorist" tag and accuse Beijing of
using the global war on terror to legitimise a tightened clampdown and
single out groups unfairly.
Many Western diplomats and scholars
also doubt there is a unified Uighur independence movement. They say most
Uighurs are struggling against cultural and economic inequities and, living
with heavy police and military presence, lack the coordination to execute
sustained violence.
One of the groups police named on
Monday was the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim), which Washington
added to its terrorist list in 2002 at Beijing's bidding.
China says Etim members trained
at bases run by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan and,
with Taliban backing, returned to Xinjiang to plot violence. Police said
Hasam Mahsum, a key figure in Etim, was among the 11 wanted.
The other three organisations were
the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organisation, the World Uighur Youth Congress
and the Eastern Turkistan Information Centre.
Many of the cases the public security
ministry documented on its website took place in the late 1990s.
In one of the more recent incidents,
police said Etim hatched a plot in March to blow up train tracks linking
Xinjiang to the neighbouring province of Gansu, but gave no further details.