Publication: China Brief Volume: 9 Issue: 16
August 5, 2009 03:51 PM Age: 15 days
Category: China Brief, Home Page, Foreign Policy, Domestic/Social, China and the Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, Middle East, Turkey, Featured
By: Chris Zambelis
The outbreak of ethno-sectarian unrest in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XAR) between members of the local Uighur community, an ethnic Turkic population that is predominantly Sunni Muslim, and ethnic Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group, has largely subsided on the surface. The hostilities began on July 5 during a public demonstration by Uighur college students and others in the provincial capital of Urumqi to protest the deaths of two Uighur factory workers in a brawl in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. The demonstration eventually spiraled into a riot against local Han Chinese citizens (See "The Xinjiang Crisis: A Test for Beijing's Carrot-and-Stick Strategy," China Brief, July 23). Approximately 200 Han Chinese and Uighurs have been killed and over 1000 injured. Thousands of rioters from both sides have also reportedly been detained. Most estimates of damage to public and private property hover around $15 million (Xinhua News Agency, July 8).
Given the extent of the violence, the residual domestic impact of the riots on ethno-sectarian relations and stability in Xinjiang is cause for serious concern in Beijing. Also, because of global media coverage of the hostilities, Beijing is wary about once again becoming the target of scrutiny by international human rights groups and major powers over its treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and political dissidents. The widespread comparisons of the crisis in Xinjiang with the uprisings in Tibet in 2008 and Tiananmen Square in 1989 in media and activist circles, for instance, are not sitting well in Beijing (ISN Security Watch, July 23). In addition, because of the political sensitivities surrounding China’s treatment of its Muslim community, China is also worried that the recent crisis will tarnish its reputation in the Middle East and the greater Islamic world.
Views from the Muslim World
In light of the recent events in Xinjiang, observers of China’s increasingly expanding and multifaceted relationship with the Middle East and the greater Islamic world are asking whether the crisis in Xinjiang will affect how key Muslim countries view China. In spite of scenes of unrest and a heightened awareness of the Uighur predicament, the official reaction of most Muslim countries to the crisis, particularly that of Arab countries in the Middle East with a vital stake in maintaining friendly relations with China, has been muted (al-Jazeera [Doha], July 7). Similarly, despite being home to sizeable ethnic Uighur communities of their own that maintain close links to their kin in Xinjiang, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, along with Pakistan and Afghanistan, have followed suit by keeping silent. The fact that the Uighur predicament is largely overlooked internationally outside of narrow activist circles has also contributed to the overall silence regarding the recent hostilities, making it easier for governments to avoid the issue. Unlike the plight of the Palestinians, who live under Israeli military occupation—an issue that resonates deeply across the Middle East and the greater Islamic world as well as in human rights circles—the Uighurs are generally ignored (The Associated Press, July 14; al-Jazeera, July 7). In fact, the extent to which key Muslim countries, including Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, tried to distance themselves from any association with the Uighur cause in China is striking. A July 12 statement by Indonesian Ambassador to China H.E. Sudrajat illustrates this trend: "What happened in Xinjiang is China’s internal affair. We respect China’s sovereignty over the region and will never meddle in the problem." He also provided insight into at least one of the reason’s underlying Jakarta’s position: “The two countries have agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty and refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs" (Kompas [Jakarta], July 13) [1].
In contrast, the official reactions of major Muslim countries following the controversial publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed in a negative light in European newspapers in 2005 prompted an outpour of condemnations by key Muslim leaders and religious figures. The storm over the publication of the cartoons also provoked a series of diplomatic crises, economic and cultural boycotts, and public demonstrations in autocratic countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan where mass expressions of any form of organized dissent are typically suppressed by authorities. Remarkably, only Turkey and Iran have issued strong rebukes over China’s handling of the recent crisis and its treatment of the Uighur community (Financial Times [London], July 14; Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 15; Tehran Times, July 15).
The official silence from major players in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world reflects the importance of China as a key regional and global actor. In spite of Beijing’s record of repressing its own Muslim community, perceptions of China tend to be highly positive on both the state and popular levels among Muslims in the Middle East and beyond [2]. Spurred on initially by its drive to secure sources of energy and new markets for its goods, China has made tremendous political, economic and cultural inroads in the Middle East in recent years. For many Muslim countries, China is a crucial source for investment and a reliable customer for oil and gas and other natural resources. In spite of their close ties to the United States, autocratic regimes in the Middle East, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also look toward China for diplomatic cover and to serve as a check on what they often see as Washington’s overbearing influence in regional affairs [3]. Similarly, Cairo and Riyadh, among other autocratic regimes in the region, see strong ties to Beijing as a way to offset widespread domestic opposition to their relations with Washington and to counter the popular perception among Arab and Muslim publics that they exist to further U.S. (and Israeli) imperial interests [4]. This support is crucial considering the widespread popular opposition to U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. In addition to the value they assign to strong trade relations with Beijing, Muslim countries such as Indonesia with a history of ethno-sectarian strife also look to China for support in repelling criticism from the United States and international institutions and activists regarding their approach to dealing with politically sensitive domestic issues such as minority rights. In this regard, Jakarta’s support for Beijing during the Xinjiang crisis is logical (Kompas [Jakarta], July 13).
Moreover, predominantly Muslim countries in Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan with significant Uighur populations of their own and a history of ethnic and sectarian tensions see the crisis in Xinjiang as a serious threat to their own domestic stability. Kazakhstan, for instance, is home to at least 300,000 ethnic Uighurs, representing the largest ethnic Uighur community outside of China. Kyrgyzstan is home to another 60,000 ethnic Uighurs while approximately 6,000 ethnic Uighurs live in Tajikistan (The Associated Press, July 14). Cultural and economic ties between Chinese Uighurs and their ethnic kin in neighboring countries help maintain a strong sense of Uighur identity. The trade volume of Xinjiang with neighboring countries topped $14 billion dollars in 2008, helping make Urumqi the most prosperous city in the region (Xinhua News Agency, July 15). In addition to prioritizing their growing economic and diplomatic relations with China, the Central Asian republics fear that their own Uighur citizens may one day follow in the footsteps of their kin in China and agitate for more rights. Evidence of widespread outrage among the Uighur diaspora in Central Asia is a case in point. While refraining from mobilizing public protests out of fear of provoking the ruling regimes into a violence crackdown, ethnic Uighur groups in Central Asia have issued letters to international bodies such as the United Nations (U.N.) condemning China’s actions (The Associated Press, July 14). Prominent Uighur activists have also gone so far as to single out the Central Asian republics for actively colluding with China to suppress Uighur identity and culture in the region (al-Jazeera, July 7). Like their counterparts in the Arab Middle East and other major Muslim countries such as Indonesia, the Central Asian republics are firm in their support for China amid the crisis.
A strong rebuke by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a July 10 press conference, where he labeled China’s actions in Xinjiang a “near genocide,” broke the official silence among key Muslim countries regarding the events in Xinjiang (See "Ankara's Reaction to Xinjiang Crisis Raises Bilateral Tension," Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 15). In spite of burgeoning Sino-Turkish trade ties, Turkish Industry Minister Nihat Ergun went as far as to call for a boycott of Chinese products in a sign of solidarity with the Uighurs, although he later retreated from that position. Ankara also threatened to raise the issue of Xinjiang at the United Nations (Financial Times, July 14). Turkey’s reaction to the crisis is rooted in a complex set of factors. In addition to sharing the Islamic faith, Turkey shares ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties with the Uighurs. Turkey’s reaction to the crisis was also prompted by the de facto leadership role it assumed among ethnic Turkic peoples in the Caucasus and Central Asia after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In this regard, Turkey sees itself as a sort of guardian of Turkic rights. Unlike in other countries, where Uighurs and their supporters have been banned from staging public demonstrations, members of the Uighur diaspora and other supporters have staged a number of protests in Turkey in front of Chinese diplomatic missions (Today’s Zaman [Istanbul] July 26; Christian Science Monitor, July 14; The Associated Press, July 14). The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), an Islamist-oriented party, in Turkish politics also shaped Ankara’s approach to its dealings with issues affecting Muslims outside of its borders, prompting a more activist approach to the crisis in Xinjiang by Ankara. Turkey also probably sees the crisis in Xinjiang as an opportunity to showcase its growing international profile. The tensions stemming from the Xinjiang crisis in Sino-Turkish relations may go as far as to impact Beijing’s efforts to sell Ankara its HQ-9 high-altitude air defense system and further cooperation in the defense sector between China and Turkey. China’s HQ-9 system is currently competing with systems offered by both the United States and Russia (Defense News, July 20).
While Turkey’s reaction to the crisis in Xinjiang may be at least partially explained by cultural, historical and geopolitical reasons, many observers were surprised when Iran’s clerical establishment issued its own condemnation of China’s actions. On July 14, Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani called for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and other international institutions to intervene on behalf of the Uighurs. He also added: “We just thought that only the bullying West violates Muslims’ rights and deprive them of their basic rights but reports from China indicate that in that part of the world the unprotected Muslims are being mercilessly suppressed by yesterday’s communist China and today’s capitalist China” (Tehran Times, July 15). Other prominent Iranian clerics made similar comments (Press TV [Tehran], July 13).
Significantly, official criticism of China out of Iran has been coming from the clerical establishment. Nevertheless, the timing of the criticism, given the ongoing post-election turmoil, is also curious, since China has refrained from criticizing Tehran’s suppression of opposition elements. In contrast, statements from diplomatic and elected officials about the crisis in Xinjiang have tended to be more measured. While expressing concern for the plight of Muslims in China and calling for peace and calm during a July 12 telephone conversation with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, for instance, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki also added that the meddling of “Western governments” was to blame for the crisis (Press TV, July 12). Iranian government officials also had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticism from influential clerics who accuse the state of failing to do enough for the Uighurs. Among other things, a number of senior clerics have suggested that the Iranian state is operating a doubled-standard in its approach to the crisis in Xinjiang and relations with China compared to its actions related to Palestine and other issues important to Muslims (Press TV, July 27).
The apparent disconnect between certain key members of the clerical establishment and the state appears to represent a major dilemma for Tehran. Both Iran and China maintain close diplomatic, economic and military ties. Moreover, as Iran continues to face increasing pressure from the United States and Israel regarding its nuclear program, it likely sees China as a deterrent to any potential U.S. or Israeli military action due to Beijing’s major stake in Iranian energy resources. The decision by key clerics to speak out against China may represent an effort on their part to reach out to Muslims across the globe by showcasing Iran’s credentials as an advocate for Muslim rights during a period where the Islamic Republic appears to be under siege from hostile forces operating within and outside of its borders. The official stance of the political establishment, however, while keen on showcasing Iran’s religious credentials, also likely calculates the importance of maintaining strong Sino-Iranian ties during this crucial period in the Islamic Republic’s history. Going out of its way to lambast China over the crisis in Xinjiang is not in Iran’s interest.
Continue reading: The Jamestown Foundation Xinjiang
Showing posts with label Central Asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Central Asia. Show all posts
Friday, 21 August 2009
Sunday, 9 August 2009
At home on the silk road
The city of Yiwu in China, a magnet for thousands of Muslim traders from the Middle East, has become an economic and cultural bridge between the Asian economic giant and the Arab world. David Eimer reports.
Two thousand years ago, China was linked to the Arab world by the camel caravans that carried silk and spices from the ancient city of Xi’an along the fabled Silk Road. Now, their modern-day equivalents are the lorries loaded with shipping containers that line the road out of Yiwu. Last year, more than 500,000 shipping containers left this city in south-east China for the nearby port of Ningbo. And with 20 per cent of them bound for Dubai alone, the majority end their journey in the Middle East and its surrounding countries.
Since 2001, Yiwu has emerged as the centre of a new Silk Road that is binding the economies of China and the Arab world ever closer. The presence of the world’s biggest market for small commodities has combined with the shift in the Muslim world’s relationship with the US and Europe post 9/11, to make Yiwu as well-known a name to Middle Eastern traders as Xi’an once was.
“Yiwu is famous among business people,” says Awar Agreeb. Originally from Aden in Yemen, Agreeb first came to China in 2001 to study and now works as a translator and fixer for Arab traders visiting Yiwu. “My customers are from all over the Middle East and North Africa: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco. I think Yiwu is popular with Arabs because the prices are low and so they can make a profit.”
With an estimated 200,000 Arab traders passing through Yiwu each year, along with many others from Pakistan, India, central Asia and Africa, parts of the city have become synonymous with both Arabs and Muslims. In the Shang Mao Qu district, Egyptian and Iraqi restaurants with menus in Arabic sit alongside those run by Chinese Muslims. The nearby cafes bustle at night, with people smoking shishas, drinking mint tea and playing backgammon, while Al-Jazeera plays in the background. “It reminds me of Aqaba,” says one visiting Jordanian.
On Fridays, the streets outside Yiwu’s main mosque further reinforce the impression that it has one foot in the Middle East. Men from the Gulf states wearing pristine dishdashas join Pakistanis dressed in shalwar kemeez and North Africans in jeans to eat kebabs and flatbread before prayers. “When I first came to Yiwu in 2002, there were only about 200 foreigners who came to the mosque. Now, we get around 4,000 on Fridays. Most are Arabs, but we get a lot from Pakistan and Afghanistan, too,” says Mohammed Abdullah, the Chinese imam at the mosque.
While the mosques are packed on Fridays, it is commerce that brings most people to Yiwu, and its commercial hub is the Futian Market. Stretching for almost four kilometres and housing 62,000 stalls selling 1.7 million types of goods, Futian is like a giant supermarket for small commodities. Everything from clothes and cosmetics, to electrical appliances, along with the batteries and plugs needed to power them, and jewellery, toys and watches are available here at bargain prices.
Unlike the markets in other commercial hubs in China, such as Guangzhou in the south, Futian doesn’t specialise in a single product. Instead, it’s possible to find any conceivable commodity in its cavernous corridors spread between several buildings in the city. It’s that convenience that has made it a byword for traders from the Arab region. “Futian has everything under one roof and all the factories from around China have agents in the market,” says Foad Farajyan, an Iranian who buys air-conditioning units in Futian to sell in Iran and Iraq.
Although some traders hire translators, most rely on sign language to communicate and calculators to bargain. Profit margins seem small, until you take into account that business in Futian is done in bulk. “I can buy a watch here for 25 yuan (Dh13.5) and I’ll sell it in Cairo for 27 yuan. But I’ll fill up half a shipping container with watches and use the other half for jewellery,” says Mahamoud Adil, 32, an Egyptian on his seventh trip to Yiwu.
Located in Zhejiang Province, a four-hour drive south of Shanghai and a small city by Chinese standards, with a population of two million, Yiwu makes an unlikely boomtown. Before 2001, it was little known in China, let alone the Middle East. But then the September 11 attacks happened, and three months later to the day, China joined the World Trade Organisation.
The effects of the two events were immense. China threw open its doors to traders from anywhere on the planet, just as the US and Europe were slamming theirs shut to people from the Muslim world. “After September 11, a lot of Arabs who invested in Europe and the USA realised that they would have to choose different countries to invest in. So they started to look at Asia and especially China,” says Ye Ping, a Chinese Muslim who formerly published a newspaper in Yiwu for the Muslim community.
With visas for the US and Europe much harder to attain and China’s factories going into overdrive churning out low-cost goods, China quickly became the number-one option for Muslim businessmen. “Where else can I do business? America?” says Khalil Ali, a trader from Baghdad who has been coming to Yiwu for four years. “You can get a visa for China in a day.”
That ease of access has resulted in a profound change in the way Arabs and Muslims regard China. “I think the relationship between the Arab world and China is much better now than the relationship between the Middle East and Europe and the US,” says Foad Farajyan. “In Europe, people think Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis are terrorists. Here, no one cares about that. The Chinese just think about business. They don’t care about politics or nationality. I’ve never had a discussion with a Chinese person about politics.”
China is keen to put trade above ideology when it comes to the Middle East, not least because it is so oil-thirsty. Exports to the 22 countries of the Arab League reached US$62billion (Dh228bn) last year, a huge jump from 2001’s total of $7billion. Dubai alone imported $2billion worth of goods from Yiwu in 2008, almost a third of Yiwu’s GDP of $7.2billion, according to figures from the local government. By 2010, Beijing hopes exports to the Middle East will reach $100billion.
In reviving its commercial links with the Arab world, China has a historical advantage over other nations too. Although the heyday of the Silk Road was well over a 1,000 years ago, the trade routes that stretched across India and Central Asia to the Middle East date back 3,000 years. And they carried more than just mere goods. Cultural and religious ideas crossed the borders too; some of China’s estimated 40 million Muslims are descended from the Arab traders who travelled the Silk Road.
For Ye Ping, Yiwu is now fulfilling the same function that the camel caravans once did. “Yiwu is helping reconnect China with the Middle East. The city has become an economic and cultural bridge between China and the Arab world. When I went to Iran for the first time, around per cent of the products I saw were made in China. That made me feel very proud,” she says.
Yiwu’s local government facilitates that trade by making it easier for foreigners to get residents’ visas and to register companies than it is in other Chinese cities. Equally important is the willingness of the Chinese to give credit. “The first time the customer buys he pays upfront, but the second time they don’t have to. From then on, we do everything on trust. I don’t even ask to see a passport,” says Zhu Shun, whose family runs a shop in Futian Market selling plugs made in factories in nearby Hangzhou and Wenzhou.
Increasing numbers of Arabs are now choosing to move to Yiwu permanently. No precise figures are available, but several thousand live here, running trading and cargo companies, or restaurants. Most cite the welcoming attitude of the locals and the stable nature of Chinese society, as well as the lack of prejudice towards Muslims, as the reasons to make Yiwu home.
“I’ve been here for four years and I’ve decided not to go back to Iraq. The life here is safe and the people are peaceful,” says Aram Qader from Sulaimanya in Northern Iraq. “Now, I plan to marry a Chinese woman.”
Two thousand years ago, China was linked to the Arab world by the camel caravans that carried silk and spices from the ancient city of Xi’an along the fabled Silk Road. Now, their modern-day equivalents are the lorries loaded with shipping containers that line the road out of Yiwu. Last year, more than 500,000 shipping containers left this city in south-east China for the nearby port of Ningbo. And with 20 per cent of them bound for Dubai alone, the majority end their journey in the Middle East and its surrounding countries.
Since 2001, Yiwu has emerged as the centre of a new Silk Road that is binding the economies of China and the Arab world ever closer. The presence of the world’s biggest market for small commodities has combined with the shift in the Muslim world’s relationship with the US and Europe post 9/11, to make Yiwu as well-known a name to Middle Eastern traders as Xi’an once was.
“Yiwu is famous among business people,” says Awar Agreeb. Originally from Aden in Yemen, Agreeb first came to China in 2001 to study and now works as a translator and fixer for Arab traders visiting Yiwu. “My customers are from all over the Middle East and North Africa: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco. I think Yiwu is popular with Arabs because the prices are low and so they can make a profit.”
With an estimated 200,000 Arab traders passing through Yiwu each year, along with many others from Pakistan, India, central Asia and Africa, parts of the city have become synonymous with both Arabs and Muslims. In the Shang Mao Qu district, Egyptian and Iraqi restaurants with menus in Arabic sit alongside those run by Chinese Muslims. The nearby cafes bustle at night, with people smoking shishas, drinking mint tea and playing backgammon, while Al-Jazeera plays in the background. “It reminds me of Aqaba,” says one visiting Jordanian.
On Fridays, the streets outside Yiwu’s main mosque further reinforce the impression that it has one foot in the Middle East. Men from the Gulf states wearing pristine dishdashas join Pakistanis dressed in shalwar kemeez and North Africans in jeans to eat kebabs and flatbread before prayers. “When I first came to Yiwu in 2002, there were only about 200 foreigners who came to the mosque. Now, we get around 4,000 on Fridays. Most are Arabs, but we get a lot from Pakistan and Afghanistan, too,” says Mohammed Abdullah, the Chinese imam at the mosque.
While the mosques are packed on Fridays, it is commerce that brings most people to Yiwu, and its commercial hub is the Futian Market. Stretching for almost four kilometres and housing 62,000 stalls selling 1.7 million types of goods, Futian is like a giant supermarket for small commodities. Everything from clothes and cosmetics, to electrical appliances, along with the batteries and plugs needed to power them, and jewellery, toys and watches are available here at bargain prices.
Unlike the markets in other commercial hubs in China, such as Guangzhou in the south, Futian doesn’t specialise in a single product. Instead, it’s possible to find any conceivable commodity in its cavernous corridors spread between several buildings in the city. It’s that convenience that has made it a byword for traders from the Arab region. “Futian has everything under one roof and all the factories from around China have agents in the market,” says Foad Farajyan, an Iranian who buys air-conditioning units in Futian to sell in Iran and Iraq.
Although some traders hire translators, most rely on sign language to communicate and calculators to bargain. Profit margins seem small, until you take into account that business in Futian is done in bulk. “I can buy a watch here for 25 yuan (Dh13.5) and I’ll sell it in Cairo for 27 yuan. But I’ll fill up half a shipping container with watches and use the other half for jewellery,” says Mahamoud Adil, 32, an Egyptian on his seventh trip to Yiwu.
Located in Zhejiang Province, a four-hour drive south of Shanghai and a small city by Chinese standards, with a population of two million, Yiwu makes an unlikely boomtown. Before 2001, it was little known in China, let alone the Middle East. But then the September 11 attacks happened, and three months later to the day, China joined the World Trade Organisation.
The effects of the two events were immense. China threw open its doors to traders from anywhere on the planet, just as the US and Europe were slamming theirs shut to people from the Muslim world. “After September 11, a lot of Arabs who invested in Europe and the USA realised that they would have to choose different countries to invest in. So they started to look at Asia and especially China,” says Ye Ping, a Chinese Muslim who formerly published a newspaper in Yiwu for the Muslim community.
With visas for the US and Europe much harder to attain and China’s factories going into overdrive churning out low-cost goods, China quickly became the number-one option for Muslim businessmen. “Where else can I do business? America?” says Khalil Ali, a trader from Baghdad who has been coming to Yiwu for four years. “You can get a visa for China in a day.”
That ease of access has resulted in a profound change in the way Arabs and Muslims regard China. “I think the relationship between the Arab world and China is much better now than the relationship between the Middle East and Europe and the US,” says Foad Farajyan. “In Europe, people think Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis are terrorists. Here, no one cares about that. The Chinese just think about business. They don’t care about politics or nationality. I’ve never had a discussion with a Chinese person about politics.”
China is keen to put trade above ideology when it comes to the Middle East, not least because it is so oil-thirsty. Exports to the 22 countries of the Arab League reached US$62billion (Dh228bn) last year, a huge jump from 2001’s total of $7billion. Dubai alone imported $2billion worth of goods from Yiwu in 2008, almost a third of Yiwu’s GDP of $7.2billion, according to figures from the local government. By 2010, Beijing hopes exports to the Middle East will reach $100billion.
In reviving its commercial links with the Arab world, China has a historical advantage over other nations too. Although the heyday of the Silk Road was well over a 1,000 years ago, the trade routes that stretched across India and Central Asia to the Middle East date back 3,000 years. And they carried more than just mere goods. Cultural and religious ideas crossed the borders too; some of China’s estimated 40 million Muslims are descended from the Arab traders who travelled the Silk Road.
For Ye Ping, Yiwu is now fulfilling the same function that the camel caravans once did. “Yiwu is helping reconnect China with the Middle East. The city has become an economic and cultural bridge between China and the Arab world. When I went to Iran for the first time, around per cent of the products I saw were made in China. That made me feel very proud,” she says.
Yiwu’s local government facilitates that trade by making it easier for foreigners to get residents’ visas and to register companies than it is in other Chinese cities. Equally important is the willingness of the Chinese to give credit. “The first time the customer buys he pays upfront, but the second time they don’t have to. From then on, we do everything on trust. I don’t even ask to see a passport,” says Zhu Shun, whose family runs a shop in Futian Market selling plugs made in factories in nearby Hangzhou and Wenzhou.
Increasing numbers of Arabs are now choosing to move to Yiwu permanently. No precise figures are available, but several thousand live here, running trading and cargo companies, or restaurants. Most cite the welcoming attitude of the locals and the stable nature of Chinese society, as well as the lack of prejudice towards Muslims, as the reasons to make Yiwu home.
“I’ve been here for four years and I’ve decided not to go back to Iraq. The life here is safe and the people are peaceful,” says Aram Qader from Sulaimanya in Northern Iraq. “Now, I plan to marry a Chinese woman.”
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Muslims and the West Desperately Seeking Occidentalists
If relations between the West and the Muslim world are to be improved, writes Maulana Waris Mazhari, Muslims must make a serious attempt not only to study both the positive and the negative aspects of Western thought, civilisation and history, but also to learn from them
Maulana Waris Mazhari: "In many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness" | The issue of strained relations between Muslims and the West is a long-standing one, and it has taken a new turn since the attacks of 9/11. In recent years, much has been written on the subject by both Muslim and Western scholars. Following the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations in the late 1990s, a large number of Western scholars concluded that reconciliation between Muslims and the West is impossible and that a clash between them is inevitable.
Influential Western think-tanks have aggressively pursued this line of thinking, as have extremist religious and political forces, particularly Christian evangelicals and Zionist organisations across Europe and America. In this context, the crucial question arises as to how the situation can be changed, as indeed it must. Do Muslims have any proper strategy or programme in this regard? My answer is firmly in the negative.
Superficial knowledge of the West
Despite the massive anti-Western movements and sentiments that have characterised much of the Muslim world over the last one hundred and fifty years, the fact remains that Muslim intellectuals, particularly the ulema, have only a very superficial understanding and knowledge of the West. In actual fact, there has been no serious attempt on the part of Muslim scholars to properly study and evaluate Western thought, civilization and history.
Today, our religious scholars have the same sort of stereotypical views about the West as the West had about Muslims and Islam several centuries ago at the time of the Crusades. Our religious scholars believe, and this is what they tell their followers, that the West simply stands for drunkenness, sexual license, immorality and all other sorts of wanton desires and pleasures.
Because of this approach we have not been able to learn from the good things that the West has to offer, not even about aspects of the Muslim scientific heritage that the West adopted from us and then built on.
Instead, in many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness. This mentality developed during the colonial period, and it should have been done away with the end of the European colonial empires. However, instead of that happening, it has been greatly reinforced and strengthened, and has now become so deeply rooted that Muslim reformers find it virtually impossible to combat.
Critical, dispassionate study of the West necessary
Scores of institutions for the study of Islam and Muslim culture and history have been established in the West, and several Western universities have special departments dedicated to these fields. They have produced a massive amount of literature. In contrast, there are probably not even two or three scholarly institutions in the Muslim world devoted to the study of the West using modern scholarly methods.
Universities in Muslim countries should have set up departments of Western studies, and there should have been private- and government-funded institutions for the study of the West, but, unfortunately, none exist. We desperately need such institutions to study Western history and culture in a critical yet dispassionate way, so that Muslims can understand not only the limitations or drawbacks of contemporary Western civilisation, but also its virtues, which they could adopt.
Muslim double standards
Today, most Muslims have a double-standard approach to the West. On the one hand, many of them are vociferously opposed to the West and insist that Muslims should stay away from Western culture as far as possible. At the same time, many of them fervently desire to migrate to the West!
I have been twice to America, where I met several Muslims who brand America as "the Great Satan" but still continue to live there for the economic benefits and opportunities that America provides them. They show-off their American passports or, if they do not as yet have them, are impatiently awaiting the day when they will be granted American citizenship. Why, one must ask, these double-standards? If these Muslims are so anti-America, why don’t they leave the country and return to what they consider dar ul-Islam, "the abode of Islam", where many of them came from?
I believe that there are numerous aspects of Western culture and society that reflect the virtues that characterised the early history of Islam. In contrast, in many Muslim countries, groups that want to serve the cause of Islam are under severe restrictions. It is unfortunate that virtually the whole focus of Muslim groups in the West is on seeking to get recognition for Muslim cultural identity, often to the point of excess.
Take, for instance, the case of women’s dress. Hijab (modest dress) is adequate, yet some Muslims in the West make a big hue and cry, demanding that the naqab (face-veil) be allowed. Some go even further, unmindful of the fact that this might lead to a further escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment in society. Some extremist self-styled Islamic groups in the West, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, even raise the simplistic idea of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the West, completely forgetting that the liberty to do so is not even available in the so-called dar ul-Islam.
The real conflict between Muslims and the West today is in the realm of ideas. Militarily, Muslims were defeated by the West two centuries ago, and, far from seriously hoping to overwhelm the West with military force, Muslim countries are thoroughly dependent on the West for military aid. In order to defend themselves effectively, Muslims must first understand the West, and for this we need Occidentalists, counterparts of the West’s Orientalists.
However, unlike the classical Orientalist approach to the Orient, these scholars should not be blindly critical of the West, but should, in an objective fashion, examine both its drawbacks and its virtues. Most Orientalists, as Edward Said so brilliantly pointed out in his magnum opus, Orientalism, did not adopt such a balanced approach, and actually served as tools of Western imperialism. The Muslim world, on the other hand, needs Occidentalists who evaluate the West objectively.
Islamophobia in the West
Some time ago, I met a Muslim professor who teaches at an American university. I asked him about the future of Muslims in America. He seemed very pessimistic and even said that Western countries might one day ask their Muslim citizens to leave. Personally, I do not think that this would be easy. Muslim and Western countries are too inter-dependent for that to happen.
This is why it is vital that they work seriously to counter the present climate of hatred and mistrust between Muslims and the West. Unfortunately, the simplistic approach and egotism of some Muslim groups in the West and the propaganda of some Christian and Jewish religious and semi-religious forces are giving a tremendous boost to Islamophobic sentiments across the West.
The practice of the Prophet Muhammad was to seek to create normal or settled conditions by accepting the terms and conditions set by his opponents in order to do away with the climate of hatred and conflict. This is what Muslims must seek to do, without compromising on the necessities of their faith.
Muslims must also desist from viewing the West and Western culture in stark, Manichaean terms. They must seek to learn from the good things that the West has to offer while abstaining from its draw-backs, for everything that is good, no matter what its source, is of value to the whole human community.
Maulana Waris Mazhari
Maulana Waris Mazhari: "In many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness" | The issue of strained relations between Muslims and the West is a long-standing one, and it has taken a new turn since the attacks of 9/11. In recent years, much has been written on the subject by both Muslim and Western scholars. Following the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations in the late 1990s, a large number of Western scholars concluded that reconciliation between Muslims and the West is impossible and that a clash between them is inevitable.
Influential Western think-tanks have aggressively pursued this line of thinking, as have extremist religious and political forces, particularly Christian evangelicals and Zionist organisations across Europe and America. In this context, the crucial question arises as to how the situation can be changed, as indeed it must. Do Muslims have any proper strategy or programme in this regard? My answer is firmly in the negative.
Superficial knowledge of the West
Despite the massive anti-Western movements and sentiments that have characterised much of the Muslim world over the last one hundred and fifty years, the fact remains that Muslim intellectuals, particularly the ulema, have only a very superficial understanding and knowledge of the West. In actual fact, there has been no serious attempt on the part of Muslim scholars to properly study and evaluate Western thought, civilization and history.
Today, our religious scholars have the same sort of stereotypical views about the West as the West had about Muslims and Islam several centuries ago at the time of the Crusades. Our religious scholars believe, and this is what they tell their followers, that the West simply stands for drunkenness, sexual license, immorality and all other sorts of wanton desires and pleasures.
Because of this approach we have not been able to learn from the good things that the West has to offer, not even about aspects of the Muslim scientific heritage that the West adopted from us and then built on.
Instead, in many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness. This mentality developed during the colonial period, and it should have been done away with the end of the European colonial empires. However, instead of that happening, it has been greatly reinforced and strengthened, and has now become so deeply rooted that Muslim reformers find it virtually impossible to combat.
Critical, dispassionate study of the West necessary
Scores of institutions for the study of Islam and Muslim culture and history have been established in the West, and several Western universities have special departments dedicated to these fields. They have produced a massive amount of literature. In contrast, there are probably not even two or three scholarly institutions in the Muslim world devoted to the study of the West using modern scholarly methods.
Universities in Muslim countries should have set up departments of Western studies, and there should have been private- and government-funded institutions for the study of the West, but, unfortunately, none exist. We desperately need such institutions to study Western history and culture in a critical yet dispassionate way, so that Muslims can understand not only the limitations or drawbacks of contemporary Western civilisation, but also its virtues, which they could adopt.
Muslim double standards
Today, most Muslims have a double-standard approach to the West. On the one hand, many of them are vociferously opposed to the West and insist that Muslims should stay away from Western culture as far as possible. At the same time, many of them fervently desire to migrate to the West!
I have been twice to America, where I met several Muslims who brand America as "the Great Satan" but still continue to live there for the economic benefits and opportunities that America provides them. They show-off their American passports or, if they do not as yet have them, are impatiently awaiting the day when they will be granted American citizenship. Why, one must ask, these double-standards? If these Muslims are so anti-America, why don’t they leave the country and return to what they consider dar ul-Islam, "the abode of Islam", where many of them came from?
I believe that there are numerous aspects of Western culture and society that reflect the virtues that characterised the early history of Islam. In contrast, in many Muslim countries, groups that want to serve the cause of Islam are under severe restrictions. It is unfortunate that virtually the whole focus of Muslim groups in the West is on seeking to get recognition for Muslim cultural identity, often to the point of excess.
Take, for instance, the case of women’s dress. Hijab (modest dress) is adequate, yet some Muslims in the West make a big hue and cry, demanding that the naqab (face-veil) be allowed. Some go even further, unmindful of the fact that this might lead to a further escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment in society. Some extremist self-styled Islamic groups in the West, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, even raise the simplistic idea of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the West, completely forgetting that the liberty to do so is not even available in the so-called dar ul-Islam.
The real conflict between Muslims and the West today is in the realm of ideas. Militarily, Muslims were defeated by the West two centuries ago, and, far from seriously hoping to overwhelm the West with military force, Muslim countries are thoroughly dependent on the West for military aid. In order to defend themselves effectively, Muslims must first understand the West, and for this we need Occidentalists, counterparts of the West’s Orientalists.
However, unlike the classical Orientalist approach to the Orient, these scholars should not be blindly critical of the West, but should, in an objective fashion, examine both its drawbacks and its virtues. Most Orientalists, as Edward Said so brilliantly pointed out in his magnum opus, Orientalism, did not adopt such a balanced approach, and actually served as tools of Western imperialism. The Muslim world, on the other hand, needs Occidentalists who evaluate the West objectively.
Islamophobia in the West
Some time ago, I met a Muslim professor who teaches at an American university. I asked him about the future of Muslims in America. He seemed very pessimistic and even said that Western countries might one day ask their Muslim citizens to leave. Personally, I do not think that this would be easy. Muslim and Western countries are too inter-dependent for that to happen.
This is why it is vital that they work seriously to counter the present climate of hatred and mistrust between Muslims and the West. Unfortunately, the simplistic approach and egotism of some Muslim groups in the West and the propaganda of some Christian and Jewish religious and semi-religious forces are giving a tremendous boost to Islamophobic sentiments across the West.
The practice of the Prophet Muhammad was to seek to create normal or settled conditions by accepting the terms and conditions set by his opponents in order to do away with the climate of hatred and conflict. This is what Muslims must seek to do, without compromising on the necessities of their faith.
Muslims must also desist from viewing the West and Western culture in stark, Manichaean terms. They must seek to learn from the good things that the West has to offer while abstaining from its draw-backs, for everything that is good, no matter what its source, is of value to the whole human community.
Maulana Waris Mazhari
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Only older men allowed in mosques
HOTAN, CHINA // It is Friday afternoon and the scene in front of the Jama mosque in the old city of Hotan, once a trading point for jade along the historic Silk Road, is much as it has been for centuries, save for the few cars and motorcycles fighting for space with the donkey carts laden with produce and travellers.
The street is lined with pedlars selling myriad goods: live poultry and rabbits, lamb’s head, donkey and camel meat, and Muslim hats, known in Uighur as doppa.
A stream of men, many with long wispy beards, push through the narrow door of the mosque, taking off their shoes and donning white hats before beginning their prayers.
But something does not seem right. The worshippers are all older men. Children, university students, women and government employees are all curiously missing, prohibited from entering the mosque in the Muslim majority province of Xinjiang in north-west China, where the government fears separatist tendencies among the Uighur majority, a Turkic ethnic group that bridles at Chinese control of the area.
Observers say that the Chinese government is carrying out nothing less than a systematic cultural destruction. The fear in Xinjiang is so strong that not one of the local people quoted in this story would agree to use their names.
“There’s an ever-increasing degree of invasiveness in people’s daily lives,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, and an expert on the province. “What the Chinese government is trying to do is remake the social fabric of Xinjiang.”
He said there is a huge pressure regarding anything that involves cultural identity, which he says the government views as a political threat. “Culture is the battlefront of national security for the country,” Mr Bequelin said. “They are destroying the whole cultural heritage.”
“Beijing perceives Uighurs as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state, and it views Islam as feeding Uighur ethnic identity,” said Nury Turkel, former president of the Uighur American Association, and a lawyer in Washington. “The Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB] officials in East Turkestan believe they won’t be able to dilute Uighur culture unless religion is wiped out entirely.”
Like many other Uighurs who do not recognise Chinese control, Mr Turkel refers to the area as East Turkestan.
Uighurs say state interference is pervasive. Imams are selected by the government and are closely monitored. In addition, religious schools and books on Islam are controlled or banned.
Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plain-clothes police watch who comes and goes. In recent weeks, seven Muslim schools have been shut down, according to an announcement last week by the World Uighur Congress, which is based in Germany.
There is also interference in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, when strict fasting is observed. Mr Bequelin said officials of the RAB were ordered to reduce the influence of Ramadan.
The government attempts to restrict fasting during this period, trying to ferret out which government officials are observing the practice by seeing which homes have lights on in the very early morning hours, when families are preparing their morning meal before fasting begins at dawn.
Uighurs claim that local officials force restaurants to remain open during the fasting period. State units organise lunches for government employees, and in some areas, say students in Hotan, universities provide free lunches for students, hoping to encourage them to break the fast.
A list of 23 prohibited religious practices pertaining to Uighur Muslims was posted on local government websites in the region last year. Such activities as having an imam say a particular prayer at a wedding, mourning ceremonies, and people praying together outdoors were banned. Each of more than a dozen mosques visited had large posters containing the State Council’s Religious Affairs Regulations, which lay out government control of religion in China.
Uighurs are only allowed to participate in the haj under the strict auspices of the Chinese government. Quotas limit the number of Uighurs allowed to travel there and the few who can go pay exorbitant fees. Throughout the old part of Kashgar, an admonition has been stencilled on the walls of houses in both Arabic script and Chinese: “Unauthorised religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
More seriously, Mr Turkel said, the government has seized virtually every Uighur person’s passport to prevent people from travelling abroad.
“Passports have been systematically confiscated,” he said. “Getting a passport is almost impossible for a Uighur individual. The world needs to know about this.”
“Everyone’s passports have been taken away,” confirms a student standing in the large square in front of the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, nervously looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is listening. “You can get a passport to go abroad to study, but it’s very difficult, unless your family has a lot of money or government connections.”
Mr Turkel said the Chinese see religion as a “stumbling block to the full assimilation of the Uighurs into China proper,” adding that the travel restrictions are another way of controlling Islam.
“They want Uighurs to be less religious, less spiritual,” he said. “For the Chinese government, having a group of Uighurs who have been outside China would result in more exposure of the human abuses against the Uighurs.”
He adds that the Chinese do not want Muslims to have a real sense of Islam. “They want Uighurs to continue believing the Chinese government trained imams’ teaching and preaching of Islam,” he said. “They want to impose the Chinese version of Islamic beliefs.”
A graduate student in Hotan who has researched education said that in 2012 the teaching of the Uighur language will officially be halted in Xinjiang schools.
There has also been pressure on students and government employees not to grow beards, a common practice among Muslim men.
“During the National People’s Congress in March, Chinese TV showed minorities entering the Great Hall of the People wearing all sorts of minority costumes,” a high school teacher said behind the closed doors of a small electronics shop in Hotan. “But here we can’t even wear a Muslim hat.”
Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority, was incorporated into China in 1884, during the Qing dynasty, although it enjoyed several short periods of independence before being brought back into the Chinese empire in 1949, when the Communists came to power.
Since then, the Chinese government has encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Han from overpopulated coastal cities to Xinjiang. The immigration programme has resulted in a demographic shift in the province of 18 million: what was once 90 per cent Uighur is now more than 40 per cent Han. In 1949, the Han made up just six per cent of the total. And the proportion is expected to grow even larger when the rail line between Urumqi, the capital, reaches Hotan next year.
“A lot of people are worried about this,” the education researcher said. “With the arrival of the railway, a lot more Chinese will come here. The majority of the people are strongly against this.”
Uighurs also denounced the forced transfer of young women to eastern China to work in factories, arguing it is an attempt to reduce the Uighur population and break the tradition of women serving as the propagators of Islam among children.
Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, which has sent secret investigators to interview the women, says “hundreds of thousands” of children have been sent into “slave labour”. “They’re locked up, can’t call their parents and can’t leave,” he said. “And if they do flee, their parents will be severely punished.”
The graduate student expressed indignation that teenage girls from his village were being sent away to work in factories as the government was encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang. In many large hotels and government agencies, the staff is predominantly – if not completely – Han.
“Why are they sending so many of our women away and then bringing in Chinese here to work?” he asked while sitting in a Hotan restaurant.
Perhaps most disappointing to Uighurs in Xinjiang is that the Muslim world has remained silent.
“Muslim countries aren’t doing anything to show concern about how the Chinese government is abusing the faith of nine million Muslims,” said Mehmet Tohti, the vice president of the World Uighur Congress. “Not one has said anything on behalf of the oppressed Uighur Muslims in China,” he said. “All the countries that could have said something are politically leveraged by Beijing. Speaking up for the Uighurs is too costly for them economically and politically.”
Mr Bequelin said that even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, whose website says its goal is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world”, has remained silent. “The Uighur issue is a forgotten issue for most Muslim countries,” he said.
The street is lined with pedlars selling myriad goods: live poultry and rabbits, lamb’s head, donkey and camel meat, and Muslim hats, known in Uighur as doppa.
A stream of men, many with long wispy beards, push through the narrow door of the mosque, taking off their shoes and donning white hats before beginning their prayers.
But something does not seem right. The worshippers are all older men. Children, university students, women and government employees are all curiously missing, prohibited from entering the mosque in the Muslim majority province of Xinjiang in north-west China, where the government fears separatist tendencies among the Uighur majority, a Turkic ethnic group that bridles at Chinese control of the area.
Observers say that the Chinese government is carrying out nothing less than a systematic cultural destruction. The fear in Xinjiang is so strong that not one of the local people quoted in this story would agree to use their names.
“There’s an ever-increasing degree of invasiveness in people’s daily lives,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, and an expert on the province. “What the Chinese government is trying to do is remake the social fabric of Xinjiang.”
He said there is a huge pressure regarding anything that involves cultural identity, which he says the government views as a political threat. “Culture is the battlefront of national security for the country,” Mr Bequelin said. “They are destroying the whole cultural heritage.”
“Beijing perceives Uighurs as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state, and it views Islam as feeding Uighur ethnic identity,” said Nury Turkel, former president of the Uighur American Association, and a lawyer in Washington. “The Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB] officials in East Turkestan believe they won’t be able to dilute Uighur culture unless religion is wiped out entirely.”
Like many other Uighurs who do not recognise Chinese control, Mr Turkel refers to the area as East Turkestan.
Uighurs say state interference is pervasive. Imams are selected by the government and are closely monitored. In addition, religious schools and books on Islam are controlled or banned.
Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plain-clothes police watch who comes and goes. In recent weeks, seven Muslim schools have been shut down, according to an announcement last week by the World Uighur Congress, which is based in Germany.
There is also interference in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, when strict fasting is observed. Mr Bequelin said officials of the RAB were ordered to reduce the influence of Ramadan.
The government attempts to restrict fasting during this period, trying to ferret out which government officials are observing the practice by seeing which homes have lights on in the very early morning hours, when families are preparing their morning meal before fasting begins at dawn.
Uighurs claim that local officials force restaurants to remain open during the fasting period. State units organise lunches for government employees, and in some areas, say students in Hotan, universities provide free lunches for students, hoping to encourage them to break the fast.
A list of 23 prohibited religious practices pertaining to Uighur Muslims was posted on local government websites in the region last year. Such activities as having an imam say a particular prayer at a wedding, mourning ceremonies, and people praying together outdoors were banned. Each of more than a dozen mosques visited had large posters containing the State Council’s Religious Affairs Regulations, which lay out government control of religion in China.
Uighurs are only allowed to participate in the haj under the strict auspices of the Chinese government. Quotas limit the number of Uighurs allowed to travel there and the few who can go pay exorbitant fees. Throughout the old part of Kashgar, an admonition has been stencilled on the walls of houses in both Arabic script and Chinese: “Unauthorised religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
More seriously, Mr Turkel said, the government has seized virtually every Uighur person’s passport to prevent people from travelling abroad.
“Passports have been systematically confiscated,” he said. “Getting a passport is almost impossible for a Uighur individual. The world needs to know about this.”
“Everyone’s passports have been taken away,” confirms a student standing in the large square in front of the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, nervously looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is listening. “You can get a passport to go abroad to study, but it’s very difficult, unless your family has a lot of money or government connections.”
Mr Turkel said the Chinese see religion as a “stumbling block to the full assimilation of the Uighurs into China proper,” adding that the travel restrictions are another way of controlling Islam.
“They want Uighurs to be less religious, less spiritual,” he said. “For the Chinese government, having a group of Uighurs who have been outside China would result in more exposure of the human abuses against the Uighurs.”
He adds that the Chinese do not want Muslims to have a real sense of Islam. “They want Uighurs to continue believing the Chinese government trained imams’ teaching and preaching of Islam,” he said. “They want to impose the Chinese version of Islamic beliefs.”
A graduate student in Hotan who has researched education said that in 2012 the teaching of the Uighur language will officially be halted in Xinjiang schools.
There has also been pressure on students and government employees not to grow beards, a common practice among Muslim men.
“During the National People’s Congress in March, Chinese TV showed minorities entering the Great Hall of the People wearing all sorts of minority costumes,” a high school teacher said behind the closed doors of a small electronics shop in Hotan. “But here we can’t even wear a Muslim hat.”
Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority, was incorporated into China in 1884, during the Qing dynasty, although it enjoyed several short periods of independence before being brought back into the Chinese empire in 1949, when the Communists came to power.
Since then, the Chinese government has encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Han from overpopulated coastal cities to Xinjiang. The immigration programme has resulted in a demographic shift in the province of 18 million: what was once 90 per cent Uighur is now more than 40 per cent Han. In 1949, the Han made up just six per cent of the total. And the proportion is expected to grow even larger when the rail line between Urumqi, the capital, reaches Hotan next year.
“A lot of people are worried about this,” the education researcher said. “With the arrival of the railway, a lot more Chinese will come here. The majority of the people are strongly against this.”
Uighurs also denounced the forced transfer of young women to eastern China to work in factories, arguing it is an attempt to reduce the Uighur population and break the tradition of women serving as the propagators of Islam among children.
Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, which has sent secret investigators to interview the women, says “hundreds of thousands” of children have been sent into “slave labour”. “They’re locked up, can’t call their parents and can’t leave,” he said. “And if they do flee, their parents will be severely punished.”
The graduate student expressed indignation that teenage girls from his village were being sent away to work in factories as the government was encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang. In many large hotels and government agencies, the staff is predominantly – if not completely – Han.
“Why are they sending so many of our women away and then bringing in Chinese here to work?” he asked while sitting in a Hotan restaurant.
Perhaps most disappointing to Uighurs in Xinjiang is that the Muslim world has remained silent.
“Muslim countries aren’t doing anything to show concern about how the Chinese government is abusing the faith of nine million Muslims,” said Mehmet Tohti, the vice president of the World Uighur Congress. “Not one has said anything on behalf of the oppressed Uighur Muslims in China,” he said. “All the countries that could have said something are politically leveraged by Beijing. Speaking up for the Uighurs is too costly for them economically and politically.”
Mr Bequelin said that even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, whose website says its goal is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world”, has remained silent. “The Uighur issue is a forgotten issue for most Muslim countries,” he said.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
Central Asia by rail
Leaning out of the train door as the final whistle blew, I watched my husband, Tristram, grab the newspaper-wrapped package from the village girl on the platform and drop some coins into her outstretched hand. “Rachmet (thank you)!” he exclaimed in such obvious delight that she looked up at me with her dark brown eyes and laughed. The train gathered speed, and soon she was left far behind, a small head-scarved figure standing in the middle of the central Asian steppe.
On board, my husband’s purchase was swiftly appraised by the band of men who had poked at and murmured over everything he had paid for since leaving Moscow, from a bag of ruddy apples to some woolly Kazakh socks. “Nye dorogoy (inexpensive),” they announced approvingly, and so we stumbled back together to the six-bunk berths where we had been sleeping, reading, sitting and watching the Eurasian continent sweep by for the past three days.
Everything – from seats to sandwiches – is considered common property on the train to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, and I alone of our Kazakh, Moldovan, Kyrgyz, Russian and Uzbek fellow travellers was not in the least bit interested in sharing his lunch. The men crowded round as Tristram unfolded the layers of cheaply-printed Cyrillic script, and the strong odour of farmyards filled the carriage.
Since we boarded the train in London at the start of our 10-day journey – see map at right – to Kashgar in western China, Tristram had been talking non-stop about kaze, the Kazakhs’ pungent national dish of horse tripe stuffed with horsemeat. But I had tasted more than enough train and platform food already on this journey; between Frankfurt and Moscow we had lived on fat-flecked soup served up by a man who smelt of beer marinade; and the last thing I did before leaving Moscow was walk to Red Square and buy myself a picnic of black bread, salami and cheese from the plush GUM department store opposite the Kremlin. To the travel-weary, the food hall of GUM is a cornucopian array of local and international delicacies, from pickled cherries to Parma ham; and I parted gladly with my roubles.
Tristram, however, was thrilled by the rustic railway diet of horse and sheep offal. He loved the clammy, sweet, sour-cream-stuffed buckwheat pancakes hawked by the old ladies who shuffled up and down the train. He smacked his lips with joy as he told me of the broiled sheep’s head that some Kyrgyz labourers had shared with him on a previous journey (though he lamented the cultural taboo on eating the eyes). And here he was now, slicing up convenient medallions of kaze with his penknife, and handing them out encased in hunks of spicy unleavened nan.
By now we were on the second leg of our train journey. The first stage had taken us from London through Belgium, Germany, Poland and Belarus to Moscow. On the Frankfurt-Moscow train, all our fellow passengers had been Russians, happy to be returning home. Taking the train, they said, pointing to their huge suitcases and boxes of European goods, was cheaper and easier than flying. “Granitsa! (the border)” shouted a cheery Russian returnee called Vladimir, as the train drew up at Belarus customs.
Belarus, of course, is now an independent country, but for Vladimir it was part of the Soviet Union of his childhood, and thus represented home. As if to confirm this, the train was shunted into a siding and jacked up 6ft into the air so that oil-blackened mechanics could disconnect every wheel-set and replace them. In the 19th century, when the tsar’s engineers began the long process of connecting his dominion together by railway, they chose a broader gauge than that used in Europe (which hindered the invading Nazi army during the second world war). A similar process happens at the eastern end of this vast former empire, as the railway line passes from Kazakhstan into China.
The Frankfurt train reached Moscow in the morning and we spent a day wandering through a city slushy with snow. The train to Almaty left that night. At first, it passed through the forest that stretches eastwards from Poland in an enormous frozen swath; but this soon gave way to the awesome infinite expanse of the steppe. Everybody onboard was waiting for the moment when we would cross the Volga River, a waterway as large as a sea and as significant to Russians as the Channel is to the English. It wound across the vast landscape, shining in the evening light, its banks dotted with fishing-boats and skiffs.
On the third day we reached the green rolling hills of Kazakhstan, where children on donkeys raced their spindly beasts alongside the train. Snow-capped mountains appeared to the south, shimmering their testimony to the approach of the South-Asian tectonic plate.
By the time we arrived in Almaty, on the fourth morning, we had travelled further east than south. Having remained at a similar latitude, it was continuities rather than differences in landscape and livelihoods that seemed most striking. Millennia-old herds of cattle, sheep and horses roam the Eurasian landmass from the western tip of the British Isles to the eastern seaboard of China. Wheat, rice and barley extend over an essentially continuous belt of cultivated land. Willow trees pollarded for fuel line Kazakh homesteads, just as they do in rural England. There is nothing like the train to Almaty for driving this biogeographical lesson home.
After we journeyed on to Urumqi in north-west China, however, everything changed. The plains gave way to desert, and from Urumqi we dipped south into the heart of Xinjiang, a nomadic land of yurts and camels. This was far more foreign – whatever Vladimir said – than the transition from Poland to Belarus.
More dramatic still, on a personal level at least, was the change in the quality of the transport. Stepping from rusting Soviet rolling stock into a luxury 21st-century Chinese two-storey mega-train was bliss: clean, comfortable, the restaurant car boasting a menu of 30 freshly-made local dishes. We arrived in the Silk Road city of Kashgar, the cultural centre for Xinjiang’s Uighur Muslims, happy and refreshed. Tristram, of course, fell upon the fried chicken-feet and “creamy” yellow sheep’s lung.
On the train you see the world go by before your eyes, and understand how cultures connect and polities intersect. You glimpse something of the immense historical era that was Soviet Communism. You spend days in the company of people unlike yourself, from villages and towns you will never see.
In Kashgar, we met some cyclists who had just completed the same journey as us – by bicycle.
“And I thought our journey was epic,” I told them, humbled by their feat.
“We saw a Frenchman in Kazakhstan,” they replied. “He was walking.”
TOP TIPS FOR A TREK BY TRAIN
All aboard for the long haul
The train journey from London to Kashgar can be done in nine nights: two from London to Moscow, four from Moscow to Almaty in Kazakhstan, two from Almaty to Urumqi in north- west China, and one from Urumqi to Kashgar. It is better to take a day or two’s rest in Almaty; you could also linger for a night in Moscow, but train timings mean that in any case you arrive in the morning and leave at night, giving you 12 hours to explore the city, buy a picnic for the onward journey, and visit the banya (public baths).
Russian winters – which last until late March – are cold. But from April onwards it can be warm onboard, and, unless you are in first class, the conductor might not let you open windows. There are no showers anywhere on the train, and wet-wipes are a convenient substitute for washing in the basin. There is, however, a samovar in every carriage providing endless free hot water, so pack tea, coffee and some cups.
For the more adventurous, the journey to Kashgar is a day or two quicker if you take the Bishkek train from Moscow to Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz people are nearly universally friendly, the landscape stunning, and this route bypasses Urumqi altogether. But it is less straightforward: from Bishkek to the Chinese border you will have to take a series of unreliable buses, taxis (or even hitch-hike) on frightful roads with potholes as big as houses.
Agencies such as Real Russia and Way to Russia can book the entire journey from London to Urumqi, though it is cheaper to book yourself on the Eurostar to Brussels, and buy a ticket on the Deutsch Bahn to Frankfurt or Cologne (via the website) and from there to Moscow.
Frankfurt to Moscow by first class is £255, Moscow to Almaty is £280.
Agencies can also arrange all your visas for you, which will save a lot of time and queuing. Apply for visas well in advance as fast-track applications can be expensive. An invaluable guide to routes, timetables and visas is www.seat61.com.
Bookings for the Urumqi- Kashgar train journey can be made by the helpful Uighur travel agent Abdul Wahab, abdultour@yahoo.com. If you are planning to travel from Kashgar on to Pakistan and India, remember that the China-Pakistan border at the Kunjerab Pass is closed from October till May. Alternatively, it is only two days by train to Beijing from Urumqi.
Wherever you go on this route, people will be friendlier if you wear smart clothes. Men should shave before trying to book hotel rooms in Almaty and Kashgar – especially after 10 days on the train.
Alice Albinia is author of ‘Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River’
Friday, 5 December 2008
The making of a terrorist
In a dingy room in a large but poorly lit compound just across Lahore’s River Ravi, a man who claims to be a fighter and organiser for Lashkar-i-Taiba, the proscribed terror organisation now widely believed to have been behind last week’s siege of Mumbai, holds court.
As he speaks, running his fingers thoughtfully through his bushy beard, a handful of youths, aged from 15 to 20, sit in raptured awe at his feet, hanging on his every word.
If intelligence agencies from India to the US are correct, two years ago one of these suggestible young men could easily have been Ajmal Ameer Kasab, the sole surviving and captured member of the team that last weekend left at least 160 dead at the end of an unprecedented three-day assault on India’s business capital.
“We’re still well organised and active,” says the man, who has agreed to speak to The National on condition of anonymity.
“We have a huge strength – somewhere in the thousands – and are mainly concentrated in Fata (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), Wana, and South and North Waziristan.”
What he says chimes with the profile of the organisation produced by the US government’s Overseas Security Advisory Council. Lashkar-i-Taiba, it says, “is one of the three largest and best trained groups fighting in Kashmir against India … It has several thousand members.” Most, it says, “are Pakistanis from madrassas across Pakistan or Afghan veterans of the Afghan wars”. The organisation relies on “donations from the Pakistani community in the Gulf and United Kingdom, Islamic NGOs and Pakistani and Kashmiri business people”.
Wearing tracksuit bottoms and a faded brown sweater, the anonymous fighter has led the way up three flights of stairs to a doorway covered by a threadbare curtain. Inside the room beyond is a wooden cupboard, a bed and two chairs. The walls are blank and the space is lit by a solitary lamp. His voice is soft, gentle even, but as he speaks he stands uncomfortably against the wall, avoiding eye contact.
Lashkar-i-Taiba, he says, has a huge camp in the Mansehra district of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, which borders Kashmir.
This week, although spokesmen for the group have denied it, evidence has mounted that Kasab may well have been a product of the organisation’s highly organised political and military indoctrination and training programme.
Still avoiding eye contact, the unnamed “organiser” freely admits that only recently he has delivered two young recruits to Mansehra for training.
According to the US Department of State, Lashkar-i-Taiba, the “Army of the Pure”, was born in the late 1980s or early ’90s as the militant wing of Markaz Dawa ul-Irshad, “a Pakistan-based Islamic fundamentalist mission organisation and charity”, established to oppose the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Some sources say the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, was behind its formation.
On Dec 26 2001, just months after the September 11 attacks on the United States, Lashkar-i-Taiba was one of two Pakistan-based groups designated as foreign terrorist organisations by Colin Powell, the then US secretary of state.
“These groups, which claim to be supporting the people of Kashmir, have conducted numerous terrorist attacks in India and Pakistan,” he said.
Lashkar-i-Taiba and other groups “seek to assault democracy, undermine peace and stability in South Asia, and destroy relations between India and Pakistan”.
Over the past week, a steady drip of information has been leaked from the interrogation of Kasab by the Indian authorities. What is emerging is the story of a young man from a poor rural background seduced and recruited to violent action by promises of a combination of spiritual and material riches.
According to one former member of Lashkar-i-Taiba, who spoke to The National by telephone in Lahore on condition of anonymity, many but not all of the organisation’s recruits were school drop-outs. The 27-year-old said he had joined the group about four years ago, but became disillusioned and left within months.
“We were a group of 16,” he said. “Most of them were drop-outs but we also had some highly educated young men. I had finished my BCom [Bachelor of Commerce]. Some of them had done master’s.”
According to reports in the Indian press, Kasab, 21, possibly speaking under the influence of the “truth serum” sodium pentothal, has told his interrogators that he was among 24 young men recruited by Lashkar-i-Taiba.
“There were 24 of us who took one-year training in camps … at Mansehra and Muzzarafabad in Punjab province of Pakistan,” he is reported to have said. He named a former soldier, known to the recruits as “Chacha”, or uncle, as one of the men who had put them through “very hard physical training”, divided into seven phases and including distance running, swimming and weapons training.
In a series of camps around Pakistan, he learnt how to shoot, handle explosives and take hostages. According to a senior police officer, he emerged “physically tough, ment-ally tough”.
With the training complete, said Kasab, “10 of us were later hand-picked for the Mumbai operation” and sent to the city, reconnoitring targets, including the Taj and Oberoi hotels. His trainers used Google Earth and video footage to acquaint him with his targets.
Separating fact from propaganda in the murky soup of misinformation that swirls between Pakistan and India is not easy, but according to leaked details of Kasab’s interrogation, at one point he and the other recruits were visited by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, a former university lecturer who is believed to head Lashkar-i-Taiba, and given a motivational speech.
Kasab, a Pakistan national, is said to have been born in or just outside the village of Faridkot, in the south of the province of Punjab.
The village is small and unremarkable; it has a population of about 2,000, intermittent water supplies and no gas connections. Children run around barefoot and the solitary school for boys functions only up to the eighth grade, for 14-year-olds. The lush potato fields and dusty mud enclaves house a single mosque but nothing even remotely resembling a madrassa or religious organisation.
Kasab has reportedly told Indian police that his childhood was blighted by poverty and hunger; his father, according to some reports a casual labourer, fed him and his four siblings by selling snacks from a cart at the village’s shabby market, which today houses little more than a grocery store and a tyre shop.
Kasab went to the school but, like many of Faridkot’s youth, he dropped out in the fourth grade. In 2005 he followed an older brother to Lahore, where both worked as day labourers. It was there, according to Indian police, that he was recruited by Lashkar-i-Taiba, “preying on a combination of his religious sentiments and his poverty”.
Ghulam Abaas Bhatti, a businessman who lives in the UAE and is a supporter of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, said yesterday that poverty was at the core of militant recruitment in the region.
“Many young boys who are stricken by poverty are hired by some groups into such activities,” he said, condemning the Mumbai attack.
“They are often told they can never earn so much in a lifetime and also that everyone has to die someday.”
But many in the Pakistani expatriate community in the UAE are reluctant to accept that anyone from the village of Faridkot or the surrounding region could have been involved in Mumbai.
“My home is just 60km from the place we are talking about,” said Akram Farooqi, president of the UAE branch of the PPP.
“The moral values in such villages are much higher than in towns and it is unimaginable for us to believe that terrorists are coming out of such places.”
However, one Dubai taxi driver from near Faridkot, in the district of Multan, said: “I am aware of such attempts to brainwash people. Like many others, I ignored such attempts and left the villages to lead a good life here.”
Another rejected the claims that Pakistanis were behind the attack, but added: “However, I can say that people adopting such ideology are driven by unemployment and frustration. I left my village and came here for a job and making money. Similarly they too found a way to make money.”
According to leaked details of his questioning, Kasab claims his father, named as Amir, sold him to Lashkar-i-Taiba for 150,000 Indian rupees (Dh7,000) and introduced him to “Chacha”. If he was “martyred”, his family would receive more money.
Improbably for a community where everyone knows everyone else, reporters – and security personnel – who have visited Faridkot have been unable to find any trace of the family.
But this comes as no surprise to the unnamed bearded fighter in Lahore: “All those who join these organisations are given Arabic names like Abu Hunza,” he says.
“Sometimes to make them less conspicuous they’re given non-Arabic but purely Muslim names. Additionally, it’s normal practice in these organisations to change the names of their fighters every six to eight months.”
Recruited two years ago, at the age of 18 or 19, Kasab’s training is said to have started last December. He named some of his tutors, appearing to add credibility to his story; Indian authorities who have leaked the names say some of them were retired members of the Pakistan military.
The training gave Kasab “a sense of purpose for the first time in his life”, according to his interrogators. “He was led to believe he was doing something holy,” Rakesh Maria, the joint commissioner of Mumbai police, told the media.
Although Lashkar-i-Taiba, which was banned in Pakistan in 2002, has denied involvement with the Mumbai attack, in the US Department of State’s most recent assessment it “and its leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, continue to spread ideology advocating terrorism, as well as virulent rhetoric condemning the United States, India, Israel and other perceived enemies”.
On Thursday, details emerged of the treatment of the six Jewish hostages who had been taken during the Mumbai attack. “The victims were strangled,” Mr Maria was reported as saying. “There were injuries on the bodies that were not from firing.”
Most of Lashkar-i-Taiba’s members, says the department’s 2008 report on world terror, “are Pakistanis from madrassas across Pakistan or Afghan and/or veterans of the Afghan wars”.
Whether or not the group has links with al Qa’eda, the US says that in March 2002 Abu Zubaydah, one of al Qa’eda’s senior members, was captured at what it says was an Lashkar-i-Taiba safe house in Faisalabad in Punjab.
Whoever recruited Kasab, and whatever his motivation, he stepped on to the world stage a week ago; a baby-faced killer, wearing trainers and cargo pants and toting a rucksack packed with ammunition, he was captured by CCTV as he and another gunman walked through Mumbai’s main train station, firing indiscriminately.
According to his interrogators, after arriving off Mumbai by boat from Karachi, the 10 attackers came ashore in rubber dinghies and split into two-man teams. Primed with amphetamines, they were told to “kill until the last breath”. Kasab and his partner, named as Ismail Khan, took a taxi to the train station, where they murdered more than 50 people with guns and grenades. They left a bomb in the taxi, which later killed the driver and his passenger.
Finally cornered by police, Kasab was shot in both arms and came close to being beaten to death by an angry crowd before being taken into custody. He was the only survivor among the attackers.
It remains to be seen whether Kasab will be granted his apparent wish for martyrdom; India’s death penalty is rarely carried out. In 2004, Mohammed Afzal was sentenced to hang for his part in the 2001 attack on India’s parliament which, like the Mumbai assault, was supposedly also carried out by Lashkar-i-Taiba gunmen, who killed 12. He remains on death row.
As he speaks, running his fingers thoughtfully through his bushy beard, a handful of youths, aged from 15 to 20, sit in raptured awe at his feet, hanging on his every word.
If intelligence agencies from India to the US are correct, two years ago one of these suggestible young men could easily have been Ajmal Ameer Kasab, the sole surviving and captured member of the team that last weekend left at least 160 dead at the end of an unprecedented three-day assault on India’s business capital.
“We’re still well organised and active,” says the man, who has agreed to speak to The National on condition of anonymity.
“We have a huge strength – somewhere in the thousands – and are mainly concentrated in Fata (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), Wana, and South and North Waziristan.”
What he says chimes with the profile of the organisation produced by the US government’s Overseas Security Advisory Council. Lashkar-i-Taiba, it says, “is one of the three largest and best trained groups fighting in Kashmir against India … It has several thousand members.” Most, it says, “are Pakistanis from madrassas across Pakistan or Afghan veterans of the Afghan wars”. The organisation relies on “donations from the Pakistani community in the Gulf and United Kingdom, Islamic NGOs and Pakistani and Kashmiri business people”.
Wearing tracksuit bottoms and a faded brown sweater, the anonymous fighter has led the way up three flights of stairs to a doorway covered by a threadbare curtain. Inside the room beyond is a wooden cupboard, a bed and two chairs. The walls are blank and the space is lit by a solitary lamp. His voice is soft, gentle even, but as he speaks he stands uncomfortably against the wall, avoiding eye contact.
Lashkar-i-Taiba, he says, has a huge camp in the Mansehra district of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, which borders Kashmir.
This week, although spokesmen for the group have denied it, evidence has mounted that Kasab may well have been a product of the organisation’s highly organised political and military indoctrination and training programme.
Still avoiding eye contact, the unnamed “organiser” freely admits that only recently he has delivered two young recruits to Mansehra for training.
According to the US Department of State, Lashkar-i-Taiba, the “Army of the Pure”, was born in the late 1980s or early ’90s as the militant wing of Markaz Dawa ul-Irshad, “a Pakistan-based Islamic fundamentalist mission organisation and charity”, established to oppose the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Some sources say the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, was behind its formation.
On Dec 26 2001, just months after the September 11 attacks on the United States, Lashkar-i-Taiba was one of two Pakistan-based groups designated as foreign terrorist organisations by Colin Powell, the then US secretary of state.
“These groups, which claim to be supporting the people of Kashmir, have conducted numerous terrorist attacks in India and Pakistan,” he said.
Lashkar-i-Taiba and other groups “seek to assault democracy, undermine peace and stability in South Asia, and destroy relations between India and Pakistan”.
Over the past week, a steady drip of information has been leaked from the interrogation of Kasab by the Indian authorities. What is emerging is the story of a young man from a poor rural background seduced and recruited to violent action by promises of a combination of spiritual and material riches.
According to one former member of Lashkar-i-Taiba, who spoke to The National by telephone in Lahore on condition of anonymity, many but not all of the organisation’s recruits were school drop-outs. The 27-year-old said he had joined the group about four years ago, but became disillusioned and left within months.
“We were a group of 16,” he said. “Most of them were drop-outs but we also had some highly educated young men. I had finished my BCom [Bachelor of Commerce]. Some of them had done master’s.”
According to reports in the Indian press, Kasab, 21, possibly speaking under the influence of the “truth serum” sodium pentothal, has told his interrogators that he was among 24 young men recruited by Lashkar-i-Taiba.
“There were 24 of us who took one-year training in camps … at Mansehra and Muzzarafabad in Punjab province of Pakistan,” he is reported to have said. He named a former soldier, known to the recruits as “Chacha”, or uncle, as one of the men who had put them through “very hard physical training”, divided into seven phases and including distance running, swimming and weapons training.
In a series of camps around Pakistan, he learnt how to shoot, handle explosives and take hostages. According to a senior police officer, he emerged “physically tough, ment-ally tough”.
With the training complete, said Kasab, “10 of us were later hand-picked for the Mumbai operation” and sent to the city, reconnoitring targets, including the Taj and Oberoi hotels. His trainers used Google Earth and video footage to acquaint him with his targets.
Separating fact from propaganda in the murky soup of misinformation that swirls between Pakistan and India is not easy, but according to leaked details of Kasab’s interrogation, at one point he and the other recruits were visited by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, a former university lecturer who is believed to head Lashkar-i-Taiba, and given a motivational speech.
Kasab, a Pakistan national, is said to have been born in or just outside the village of Faridkot, in the south of the province of Punjab.
The village is small and unremarkable; it has a population of about 2,000, intermittent water supplies and no gas connections. Children run around barefoot and the solitary school for boys functions only up to the eighth grade, for 14-year-olds. The lush potato fields and dusty mud enclaves house a single mosque but nothing even remotely resembling a madrassa or religious organisation.
Kasab has reportedly told Indian police that his childhood was blighted by poverty and hunger; his father, according to some reports a casual labourer, fed him and his four siblings by selling snacks from a cart at the village’s shabby market, which today houses little more than a grocery store and a tyre shop.
Kasab went to the school but, like many of Faridkot’s youth, he dropped out in the fourth grade. In 2005 he followed an older brother to Lahore, where both worked as day labourers. It was there, according to Indian police, that he was recruited by Lashkar-i-Taiba, “preying on a combination of his religious sentiments and his poverty”.
Ghulam Abaas Bhatti, a businessman who lives in the UAE and is a supporter of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, said yesterday that poverty was at the core of militant recruitment in the region.
“Many young boys who are stricken by poverty are hired by some groups into such activities,” he said, condemning the Mumbai attack.
“They are often told they can never earn so much in a lifetime and also that everyone has to die someday.”
But many in the Pakistani expatriate community in the UAE are reluctant to accept that anyone from the village of Faridkot or the surrounding region could have been involved in Mumbai.
“My home is just 60km from the place we are talking about,” said Akram Farooqi, president of the UAE branch of the PPP.
“The moral values in such villages are much higher than in towns and it is unimaginable for us to believe that terrorists are coming out of such places.”
However, one Dubai taxi driver from near Faridkot, in the district of Multan, said: “I am aware of such attempts to brainwash people. Like many others, I ignored such attempts and left the villages to lead a good life here.”
Another rejected the claims that Pakistanis were behind the attack, but added: “However, I can say that people adopting such ideology are driven by unemployment and frustration. I left my village and came here for a job and making money. Similarly they too found a way to make money.”
According to leaked details of his questioning, Kasab claims his father, named as Amir, sold him to Lashkar-i-Taiba for 150,000 Indian rupees (Dh7,000) and introduced him to “Chacha”. If he was “martyred”, his family would receive more money.
Improbably for a community where everyone knows everyone else, reporters – and security personnel – who have visited Faridkot have been unable to find any trace of the family.
But this comes as no surprise to the unnamed bearded fighter in Lahore: “All those who join these organisations are given Arabic names like Abu Hunza,” he says.
“Sometimes to make them less conspicuous they’re given non-Arabic but purely Muslim names. Additionally, it’s normal practice in these organisations to change the names of their fighters every six to eight months.”
Recruited two years ago, at the age of 18 or 19, Kasab’s training is said to have started last December. He named some of his tutors, appearing to add credibility to his story; Indian authorities who have leaked the names say some of them were retired members of the Pakistan military.
The training gave Kasab “a sense of purpose for the first time in his life”, according to his interrogators. “He was led to believe he was doing something holy,” Rakesh Maria, the joint commissioner of Mumbai police, told the media.
Although Lashkar-i-Taiba, which was banned in Pakistan in 2002, has denied involvement with the Mumbai attack, in the US Department of State’s most recent assessment it “and its leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, continue to spread ideology advocating terrorism, as well as virulent rhetoric condemning the United States, India, Israel and other perceived enemies”.
On Thursday, details emerged of the treatment of the six Jewish hostages who had been taken during the Mumbai attack. “The victims were strangled,” Mr Maria was reported as saying. “There were injuries on the bodies that were not from firing.”
Most of Lashkar-i-Taiba’s members, says the department’s 2008 report on world terror, “are Pakistanis from madrassas across Pakistan or Afghan and/or veterans of the Afghan wars”.
Whether or not the group has links with al Qa’eda, the US says that in March 2002 Abu Zubaydah, one of al Qa’eda’s senior members, was captured at what it says was an Lashkar-i-Taiba safe house in Faisalabad in Punjab.
Whoever recruited Kasab, and whatever his motivation, he stepped on to the world stage a week ago; a baby-faced killer, wearing trainers and cargo pants and toting a rucksack packed with ammunition, he was captured by CCTV as he and another gunman walked through Mumbai’s main train station, firing indiscriminately.
According to his interrogators, after arriving off Mumbai by boat from Karachi, the 10 attackers came ashore in rubber dinghies and split into two-man teams. Primed with amphetamines, they were told to “kill until the last breath”. Kasab and his partner, named as Ismail Khan, took a taxi to the train station, where they murdered more than 50 people with guns and grenades. They left a bomb in the taxi, which later killed the driver and his passenger.
Finally cornered by police, Kasab was shot in both arms and came close to being beaten to death by an angry crowd before being taken into custody. He was the only survivor among the attackers.
It remains to be seen whether Kasab will be granted his apparent wish for martyrdom; India’s death penalty is rarely carried out. In 2004, Mohammed Afzal was sentenced to hang for his part in the 2001 attack on India’s parliament which, like the Mumbai assault, was supposedly also carried out by Lashkar-i-Taiba gunmen, who killed 12. He remains on death row.
Sunday, 19 October 2008
New Web Resource for Central Asia
WEB RESOURCE- NewsLab Russia - For Students & Scholars of Post-Communist Russia
Further information about NewsLab Russia, including registration
instructions and a link to the archive itself, are available at
www.creeca.wisc.edu/newslabeurasia.
The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at UW Madison has
launched an exciting new resource for students and scholars of
postcommunist Russia: NewsLab Russia, an online digital archive of
Russian television news. Part of NewsLab Eurasia, a broader effort to
archive the news in post-Soviet states, NewsLab Russia utilizes new
technology to make Russian news broadcasts available for analysis and
classroom use. In its first year of operation, NewsLab Russia
archived the main evening news broadcast on Russia's three national
television networks (NTV, Channel One, and Rossiya) during a period
that encompassed the 2007 Duma elections, the nomination of Dmitri
Medvedev to succeed Vladimir Putin as president, and the 2008 Russian
presidential election. Support for this initial round of archiving
was provided by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian
Studies at UT Austin.
NewsLab Russia draws on the resources of the University of Wisconsin
NewsLab, a project initiated by Wisconsin political scientist Ken
Goldstein to study local U.S. news. Content from Russia is "captured"
from satellite feed and stored on servers in Madison, where
Russian-speaking undergraduates "clip" the news, dividing broadcasts
into segments and attaching category labels to each segment. Through
an online searchable archive, anyone with an Internet connection who
is willing to abide by basic terms of use has access to broadcasts
from all three stations. Thus, for example, a teacher of Russian
might search for a news segment on Russian-Ukrainian relations for
instructional use, or a scholar might analyze all reports on Ukraine
over a one-year period.
Further information about NewsLab Russia, including registration
instructions and a link to the archive itself, are available at
www.creeca.wisc.edu/newslabeurasia.
Ted Gerber, Director, CREECA, and Professor of Sociology, UW Madison
Jennifer Tishler, Associate Director, CREECA
Scott Gehlbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, UW Madison
Further information about NewsLab Russia, including registration
instructions and a link to the archive itself, are available at
www.creeca.wisc.edu/newslabeurasia.
The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at UW Madison has
launched an exciting new resource for students and scholars of
postcommunist Russia: NewsLab Russia, an online digital archive of
Russian television news. Part of NewsLab Eurasia, a broader effort to
archive the news in post-Soviet states, NewsLab Russia utilizes new
technology to make Russian news broadcasts available for analysis and
classroom use. In its first year of operation, NewsLab Russia
archived the main evening news broadcast on Russia's three national
television networks (NTV, Channel One, and Rossiya) during a period
that encompassed the 2007 Duma elections, the nomination of Dmitri
Medvedev to succeed Vladimir Putin as president, and the 2008 Russian
presidential election. Support for this initial round of archiving
was provided by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian
Studies at UT Austin.
NewsLab Russia draws on the resources of the University of Wisconsin
NewsLab, a project initiated by Wisconsin political scientist Ken
Goldstein to study local U.S. news. Content from Russia is "captured"
from satellite feed and stored on servers in Madison, where
Russian-speaking undergraduates "clip" the news, dividing broadcasts
into segments and attaching category labels to each segment. Through
an online searchable archive, anyone with an Internet connection who
is willing to abide by basic terms of use has access to broadcasts
from all three stations. Thus, for example, a teacher of Russian
might search for a news segment on Russian-Ukrainian relations for
instructional use, or a scholar might analyze all reports on Ukraine
over a one-year period.
Further information about NewsLab Russia, including registration
instructions and a link to the archive itself, are available at
www.creeca.wisc.edu/newslabeurasia.
Ted Gerber, Director, CREECA, and Professor of Sociology, UW Madison
Jennifer Tishler, Associate Director, CREECA
Scott Gehlbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, UW Madison
Monday, 15 September 2008
Does 'Islamic Democracy' Exist?
For 1,300 years Muslims have been engaged in a search for a form of government that is right for them. There are parliaments and sometimes even political opposition groups in many Muslim countries, but as a general rule political decisions are based on agreements reached between tribal groups and families.
If democracy has ever had friends in the Arab-speaking countries it has been among the monarchs of Kuwait. In 1752, when the age of enlightened absolutism was just dawning in Europe, a man by the name of Sabah bin Jaber became the emir of a Bedouin population known as the al-Utoob.
It was not murder, revolution, or warfare that brought him to power. He got elected. His descendants, the Al Sabah, continue to rule Kuwait to this day and have preserved a noteworthy weakness for letting their people vote.
The country elected its first legislative assembly in 1938. After independence in 1961 it elected a constitutional council. Following their liberation from Iraqi occupation in 1991 the Kuwaitis elected a new national assembly. Two years ago women were for the first time granted the right to vote. The members of the national assembly are sometimes not in office for very long. Not for reasons of incompetence mind you. More often than not it is because the executive government sees them as being too competent: The national assembly in Kuwait has sole responsibility for passing legislation. It determines how much the emir is paid. And it has the right to question and dismiss ministers, a privilege it makes extensive use of.
Kuwait is the most democratic country in the Arab world.
On May 17 this year, the emir called an election, made necessary by the fact that he dissolved the national assembly in March, following a political blockade that had gone on for months. A lively election campaign ensued. Voting districts were redrawn to make it more difficult for closely interrelated tribal leaders to influence voting behavior or engage in electoral fraud. There was detailed television and newspaper coverage of the candidates who ran for office, including 27 women, something still inconceivable in neighboring Saudi Arabia, from whose desert regions the Bedouin forbears of today's Kuwaitis once came. In the judgement of international observers the election was free and fair and went off without any hitches.
But who won? As in most of the elections that have been held in recent years between Cairo and Riyadh, the Palestinian terroritories and Bahrain, it was Islamists who carried the day -- in this case Salafists, particularly radical advocates of political Islam in the Gulf region. They include men such as Hassan Jowhar, a representative of the national assembly who noted with satisfaction at the opening session that nine members of his group walked out one door because two woman ministers walked in another door without wearing headscarves. "Some of us have our reservations," he said. "The government must accept this."
Kuwaiti women cast their votes for the parliamentary elections in May.
Kuwaiti women cast their votes for the parliamentary elections in May.
Nathan Brown, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, predicts that the new national assembly is "likely to be more confrontational than the outgoing one. The result will be a deepening political deadlock between the government and the parliament in the Gulf's most democratic political order. ... Kuwait's long-simmering and nonviolent political crisis has long been overshadowed by more dramatic and bloody conflicts. But the threat to one of the region's most dramatic experiments is real."
For decades Kuwait was the most attractive of the Gulf states, a destination for bankers and engineers as well as guest workers from Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Kuwait has lost ground politically and economically and there are not a few who take the view that democracy has been a major factor in this.
Businessman Yassin al-Shammari, 57, is one of those who sees it this way. He drives past the national assembly in Kuwait City with a look of contempt on his face, his reaction to one of the most beautiful parliamentary buildings in the world, built in the 1970s by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who also designed the Sydney Opera House. "A place for jibber jabber," al-Shammari growls. Like many of his countrymen, he looks with envy to Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi, where sheikhs rule who don't have to worry about parliaments or a political opposition.
Note: Visit Der Spiegel for 7 part series on Islam and Democracy in the Middle East: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,573604,00.html
If democracy has ever had friends in the Arab-speaking countries it has been among the monarchs of Kuwait. In 1752, when the age of enlightened absolutism was just dawning in Europe, a man by the name of Sabah bin Jaber became the emir of a Bedouin population known as the al-Utoob.
It was not murder, revolution, or warfare that brought him to power. He got elected. His descendants, the Al Sabah, continue to rule Kuwait to this day and have preserved a noteworthy weakness for letting their people vote.
The country elected its first legislative assembly in 1938. After independence in 1961 it elected a constitutional council. Following their liberation from Iraqi occupation in 1991 the Kuwaitis elected a new national assembly. Two years ago women were for the first time granted the right to vote. The members of the national assembly are sometimes not in office for very long. Not for reasons of incompetence mind you. More often than not it is because the executive government sees them as being too competent: The national assembly in Kuwait has sole responsibility for passing legislation. It determines how much the emir is paid. And it has the right to question and dismiss ministers, a privilege it makes extensive use of.
Kuwait is the most democratic country in the Arab world.
On May 17 this year, the emir called an election, made necessary by the fact that he dissolved the national assembly in March, following a political blockade that had gone on for months. A lively election campaign ensued. Voting districts were redrawn to make it more difficult for closely interrelated tribal leaders to influence voting behavior or engage in electoral fraud. There was detailed television and newspaper coverage of the candidates who ran for office, including 27 women, something still inconceivable in neighboring Saudi Arabia, from whose desert regions the Bedouin forbears of today's Kuwaitis once came. In the judgement of international observers the election was free and fair and went off without any hitches.
But who won? As in most of the elections that have been held in recent years between Cairo and Riyadh, the Palestinian terroritories and Bahrain, it was Islamists who carried the day -- in this case Salafists, particularly radical advocates of political Islam in the Gulf region. They include men such as Hassan Jowhar, a representative of the national assembly who noted with satisfaction at the opening session that nine members of his group walked out one door because two woman ministers walked in another door without wearing headscarves. "Some of us have our reservations," he said. "The government must accept this."
Kuwaiti women cast their votes for the parliamentary elections in May.
Kuwaiti women cast their votes for the parliamentary elections in May.
Nathan Brown, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, predicts that the new national assembly is "likely to be more confrontational than the outgoing one. The result will be a deepening political deadlock between the government and the parliament in the Gulf's most democratic political order. ... Kuwait's long-simmering and nonviolent political crisis has long been overshadowed by more dramatic and bloody conflicts. But the threat to one of the region's most dramatic experiments is real."
For decades Kuwait was the most attractive of the Gulf states, a destination for bankers and engineers as well as guest workers from Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Kuwait has lost ground politically and economically and there are not a few who take the view that democracy has been a major factor in this.
Businessman Yassin al-Shammari, 57, is one of those who sees it this way. He drives past the national assembly in Kuwait City with a look of contempt on his face, his reaction to one of the most beautiful parliamentary buildings in the world, built in the 1970s by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who also designed the Sydney Opera House. "A place for jibber jabber," al-Shammari growls. Like many of his countrymen, he looks with envy to Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi, where sheikhs rule who don't have to worry about parliaments or a political opposition.
Note: Visit Der Spiegel for 7 part series on Islam and Democracy in the Middle East: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,573604,00.html
Turkish, Armenian Presidents Express Hope After Historic Meeting In Yerevan
Turkish President Abdullah Gul has met with his Armenian counterpart as part of a historic visit to Yerevan that could mark the start of a new phase in diplomatic relations between the traditionally bitter neighbors.
Gul was invited by Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian to watch an international football match between their national teams, with an extended closed-door session before the two leaders headed across town for the World Cup qualifier.
The Turkish team went on to win the match, 2-0.
Two deeply felt issues have long separated Armenians and Turks. The first are the mass killings of ethnic Armenians around World War I, which Armenia and some other countries call genocide; anyone referring to them that way in Turkey faces criminal prosecution. The other issue is Armenia's support of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, where Ankara accuses Armenia of occupying part of the territory of one of Turkey's closest allies. Armenia says it is helping its ethnic kinsmen defend themselves.
The visit offered the rarest of opportunities for a review of bilateral ties, something that made it more than a symbolic gesture. The two states do not have diplomatic relations.
Gul is the first Turkish head of state to visit Armenia since it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Reuters quoted Gul aboard the plane en route to Armenia as praising Sarkisian for his "brave" decision to invite him to the game. Gul was booed and hissed by fans when he entered the stadium for the evening match.
Gaining Momentum?
The initiative has virtually assured a second landmark event, since at the end of their private meeting, Gul invited Sarkisian to the next match between their national teams in Turkey.
Speaking at a joint press conference after the talks, Gul said, "I hope that this visit will create the possibility to improve bilateral relations."
Sarkisian declared that there is now the "political will to decide the questions between our countries, so that these problems are not passed on to the next generation."
Speaking ahead of his eagerly anticipated arrival in Yerevan, Gul had said he hoped the match would help lift the barriers dividing two people "who share a common history and will contribute to regional friendship and peace."
RFE/RL Armenian Service correspondent Ruzanna Stepanian said hundreds of supporters of the Armenian Revolution Federation party -- a member of the governing coalition -- greeted Gul's motorcade from Yerevan airport with placards reading "No to genocide" and "Accept the truth." The party continued its protest with a candlelight vigil near the stadium where the two teams square off, at a memorial to the Armenian victims of the mass killings early last century.
A major opposition alliance headed by ex-President Levon Ter-Petrossian endorsed Sarkisian's initiative and chided the Armenian Revolution Federation party's protest as "illogical," given its participation in the government. Ter-Petrossian's bloc postponed a major political rally it had planned for September 5, citing the historic nature of the Turkish visit.
Fans of Turkey's national team at Yerevan stadium for a practice before the big game
The "Turkish Daily News" quoted diplomatic sources as saying the agenda of the meeting between Gul and Sarkisian would include bilateral relations and Ankara's proposal to set up a joint committee of historians to study the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Wider Goals
Analysts say Yerevan's hope is that a thaw would lead to a permanent reopening of the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed for 15 years.
Ankara's interest in a detente is seen as part of a larger Turkish strategy of stabilizing relations with its bordering states, including Greece, Syria, Iraq, and now Armenia.
"My president's visit to Yerevan...is going to be an important step to open doors for dialogue with Armenia," Foreign Minister Ali Babacan told Reuters.
The overture came quickly on the heels of Russia's cross-border military operations to back separatists in Georgia and Moscow's subsequent recognition of their independence, a situation that Babacan has described as "alarming."
Babacan said the war between Russia and Georgia dislodged a series of frozen conflicts in the Caucasus, raising risks of further instability but also creating opportunities for new diplomatic efforts to resolve them.
"The current circumstances, we believe, are conducive for such a bold step [as the bilateral visit]," Babacan said in an interview late on September 5 in Avignon, France, where he was attending a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Babacan said the fighting in neighboring Georgia "showed we need to come up with a fresh approach to resolution of conflict in the Caucasus."
The minister rejected Turkish opposition criticism of the rapprochement with Armenia, saying it was time for "more open views."
RFE/RL Armenian Service correspondent Emil Danielyan said full-page advertisements placed by four local companies in many Armenian newspapers on September 6 welcomed the Turkish leader to their country and urged the "honorable Mr. President Abdullah Gul" to keep hopes of a diplomatic thaw alive after the football match-up by "play[ing] beyond 90 minutes."
Gul was invited by Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian to watch an international football match between their national teams, with an extended closed-door session before the two leaders headed across town for the World Cup qualifier.
The Turkish team went on to win the match, 2-0.
Two deeply felt issues have long separated Armenians and Turks. The first are the mass killings of ethnic Armenians around World War I, which Armenia and some other countries call genocide; anyone referring to them that way in Turkey faces criminal prosecution. The other issue is Armenia's support of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, where Ankara accuses Armenia of occupying part of the territory of one of Turkey's closest allies. Armenia says it is helping its ethnic kinsmen defend themselves.
The visit offered the rarest of opportunities for a review of bilateral ties, something that made it more than a symbolic gesture. The two states do not have diplomatic relations.
Gul is the first Turkish head of state to visit Armenia since it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Reuters quoted Gul aboard the plane en route to Armenia as praising Sarkisian for his "brave" decision to invite him to the game. Gul was booed and hissed by fans when he entered the stadium for the evening match.
Gaining Momentum?
The initiative has virtually assured a second landmark event, since at the end of their private meeting, Gul invited Sarkisian to the next match between their national teams in Turkey.
Speaking at a joint press conference after the talks, Gul said, "I hope that this visit will create the possibility to improve bilateral relations."
Sarkisian declared that there is now the "political will to decide the questions between our countries, so that these problems are not passed on to the next generation."
Speaking ahead of his eagerly anticipated arrival in Yerevan, Gul had said he hoped the match would help lift the barriers dividing two people "who share a common history and will contribute to regional friendship and peace."
RFE/RL Armenian Service correspondent Ruzanna Stepanian said hundreds of supporters of the Armenian Revolution Federation party -- a member of the governing coalition -- greeted Gul's motorcade from Yerevan airport with placards reading "No to genocide" and "Accept the truth." The party continued its protest with a candlelight vigil near the stadium where the two teams square off, at a memorial to the Armenian victims of the mass killings early last century.
A major opposition alliance headed by ex-President Levon Ter-Petrossian endorsed Sarkisian's initiative and chided the Armenian Revolution Federation party's protest as "illogical," given its participation in the government. Ter-Petrossian's bloc postponed a major political rally it had planned for September 5, citing the historic nature of the Turkish visit.
Fans of Turkey's national team at Yerevan stadium for a practice before the big game
The "Turkish Daily News" quoted diplomatic sources as saying the agenda of the meeting between Gul and Sarkisian would include bilateral relations and Ankara's proposal to set up a joint committee of historians to study the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Wider Goals
Analysts say Yerevan's hope is that a thaw would lead to a permanent reopening of the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed for 15 years.
Ankara's interest in a detente is seen as part of a larger Turkish strategy of stabilizing relations with its bordering states, including Greece, Syria, Iraq, and now Armenia.
"My president's visit to Yerevan...is going to be an important step to open doors for dialogue with Armenia," Foreign Minister Ali Babacan told Reuters.
The overture came quickly on the heels of Russia's cross-border military operations to back separatists in Georgia and Moscow's subsequent recognition of their independence, a situation that Babacan has described as "alarming."
Babacan said the war between Russia and Georgia dislodged a series of frozen conflicts in the Caucasus, raising risks of further instability but also creating opportunities for new diplomatic efforts to resolve them.
"The current circumstances, we believe, are conducive for such a bold step [as the bilateral visit]," Babacan said in an interview late on September 5 in Avignon, France, where he was attending a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Babacan said the fighting in neighboring Georgia "showed we need to come up with a fresh approach to resolution of conflict in the Caucasus."
The minister rejected Turkish opposition criticism of the rapprochement with Armenia, saying it was time for "more open views."
RFE/RL Armenian Service correspondent Emil Danielyan said full-page advertisements placed by four local companies in many Armenian newspapers on September 6 welcomed the Turkish leader to their country and urged the "honorable Mr. President Abdullah Gul" to keep hopes of a diplomatic thaw alive after the football match-up by "play[ing] beyond 90 minutes."
Democracy and Islam in Modern State
28 February 2008
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Social Research Center at the
American University of Central Asia Roundtable: Democracy and Islam in Modern State: How Are They Juxtaposed?
In recent years, religious revival in Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan in particular has been viewed as one of the main ways of spiritual and moral development in society. On the one hand,such religious boom has become possible due to democratic changes which provided freedom of faith to the public. On the other hand, it was stipulated by growing nihilism, not uncommon among nations in transition, marked by the renunciation of previous ideals, fostering new values and rejection of collectivist morals in favor of regional individualism.
Islam as a system of values has already gained significance, having filled the appropriate spiritual and moral niche in the post-Soviet Muslim societies of Central Asia. Furthermore, the sustainability of democratization and internal social stability have been increasingly determined by the relations between political Islam and secular state, as well as the degree to which they are settled. In this context, discussing the role of Islam within the integrated Central Asian region, juxtaposition of Islam and democracy and their harmonization is of great importance.
These and other relevant issues were discussed profusely at the roundtable on Democracy and Islam in Modern State: How Are They Juxtaposed? The meeting was organized by the Social Research
Center at the American University – Central Asia and attended by journalists, historians, political scientists, analysts, religious leaders and the academia from Kyrgyzstan.
According to Kadyr Malikov, PhD in Political Science and Islam Studies from the Madrid University, the relations between political Islam and secular state should be analyzed in light of the quest for common values in Islam and democracy and methods of their harmonization, as well as the secular-Islamic compromise reached in other countries (the Tajik experience was brought to light). Such measures may be effective in avoiding the collision of basic values of both ideologies. Notably, the participants agreed that Islam, first of all, sets a positive tone and its tenets in no way run counter to democracy and its institutions. In particular, it was mentioned that the legal system of Islam supports a number of fundamental principles pertaining to democracy and traditional Islam, including:
• the rule of law;
• freedom of faith, right to life, health, and private property;
• right to personal privacy;
• significance of public opinion and institutions for the public administration system and its regulatory mechanisms;
• elective nature of authorities which has been in place since the days of Islamic caliphate; and
• consultative nature of the executive branch of power.
When comparing the values of Islam and democracy, we should bear in mind that democracy is an ever-developing political system which varies from country to country depending on the historical context (e.g. previous political regimes) or types of democracy (liberal, sovereign, etc). Whereas, Islam is a consistent and static system of ideas, a structured and firm worldview. Similar to the absolute truth, its fundamental precepts remain intact under any social and political system, as well as in any ethnic or cultural environment, with Muslims following and adapting to them. However, this doesn’t mean that Islam should be perceived as unyielding dogma obstructing democratic development. For instance, in the Qur’an and Sunnah, the major Divine Scriptures on which Islam is based, there is great potential for intra-denominational democracy development and a religious community functioning under any social system, including democracy. There are plenty of practical examples proving the compatibility of Islam and democracy, such as European countries, United States, Canada, Malaysia, and Turkey. However, there are contradictions between those willing to become secular Muslims and those relying on religion too much. This also accounts for the three movements within Islam, which are moderate, radical, and loyal Muslims.
The impact of Islam in various Central Asian states is assessed differently. Some of the roundtable participants said that, despite the history behind Islam in Kyrgyzstan and the activities of various international religious organizations, quite disputable is the assumption that the Kyrgyz are vehemently committed to Islam. By virtue of mentality, traditional Islam for the Kyrgyz is, rather, a ritual practice and a historical and cultural factor. In their attempt to elucidate the
prospects of Islam development in Kyrgyzstan, some experts and scholars pointed out to the fact that, in light of their protracted isolation from Islam, the Kyrgyz people became most affected by it. Furthermore, the public does not view Islam as a tradition, which is the case in neighboring countries, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Rather, Islam is perceived as an ideology. This may lead to the intensification of Islamic revival and its stronger political and social influence in the country.
The participants also spoke about the idea of sovereign democracy, wherein the ethnic, cultural, and religious context is given careful consideration.
What we have seen at the global scale demonstrates that in those countries where religious institutions have been traditionally essential for social life and Islamic social and political process is used as political leverage, a clash of interests is generated between the two different political and ideological systems, secularism and Islam. Today, the Muslim states of Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, experience a trend toward social desecularization and politicization of religion. Therefore, the development of moderate Islam is threatened by the following factors:
1) distortion of its doctrine by various destructive forces from outside (first of all, the threat is posed by such radical religious movements as Hizb ut-Tahrir, Ahmadiyya, Wahhabiyah, etc);
2) conservative nature of clergymen and their inability to respond to contemporary challenges,e.g. religious extremism;
3) biased coverage of Islam in the media, which portray it as a threat; paucity of credible information about Islam;
4) authoritarian model of relations between the state and Islam; and
5) lack of effective preventive measures in combating religious extremism.
In this context, finding ways of bringing Islam and democracy into harmony is essential for humankind to adopt a new system of values based, first and foremost, on peace instead of opposition, social reforms, and cultures, and solidarity in lieu of competition and social injustice.
During the discussion, the participants came to agree that the most relevant issue was to find a new format of public policy regarding Islam, and ways in which both ideological systems could co-exist.
Firmly rooted in the public consciousness, obstacles related to notions and terms in understanding secularism and religiosity are hard to overcome. According to the participants, in order to ensure harmonious co-existence of secularity and Islam in a democratic society, the following measures need to be taken:
- recognizing religion as a key factor of the state resource in the national state building;
- legalization of moderate religious organizations;
- increasing the level of education among the clergy;
- establishing an informational and analytical basis and raising the Islamic intellectual elite as an alternative to clerical approaches;
- need for nationalizing the religious resource; and
- building its own harmonization model taking into account the national peculiarities and specific features of Kyrgyzstan, which could be characterized as an authoritarian-liberal model. Such a model would imply the development of political and legal mechanisms regulating the coexistence of secular and religious systems within one political and legal system. In other words, it would regulate the format of relations between the state and religion, implying the separation of religious organizations from public institutions, rather than total isolation of religion from the state.
Fortunately, the modern world community stresses the need for a dialog more often, striving to pay attention to single cases, wherein peace and accord become possible through compromises and concessions. The Tajik experience of constructing a special secular state model is one example of how to do it. What makes it unique is setting up all necessary political and legal frameworks to legalize the activities of political Islam and to ensure the participation of the religious party in politics. While gaining the right to act legally, Islamic political groups undergo constructive adaptation to the norms and requirements of the applicable law, as well as socialization and integration in the country’s social and political life, which strongly affects their essence and activities.
During the discussion, all participants came to concur that it is important to foster dialog between secular and religious communities. This approach will help shape the national ideology based on fundamental principles along the national lines. The state should view the rebirth of Islam as a factor contributing to the country’s stable development and perceive Islamic culture as an integral part of social life. This model also envisages a new vision of the place and role of Islam
in social life by the state, or attracting and employing the Islamic resource in state building. This seems to be the only way to solve the aforementioned problems. Although the degree of their relevance varies in different countries of the region, these issues remain and shouldn’t be neglected.
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Social Research Center at the
American University of Central Asia Roundtable: Democracy and Islam in Modern State: How Are They Juxtaposed?
In recent years, religious revival in Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan in particular has been viewed as one of the main ways of spiritual and moral development in society. On the one hand,such religious boom has become possible due to democratic changes which provided freedom of faith to the public. On the other hand, it was stipulated by growing nihilism, not uncommon among nations in transition, marked by the renunciation of previous ideals, fostering new values and rejection of collectivist morals in favor of regional individualism.
Islam as a system of values has already gained significance, having filled the appropriate spiritual and moral niche in the post-Soviet Muslim societies of Central Asia. Furthermore, the sustainability of democratization and internal social stability have been increasingly determined by the relations between political Islam and secular state, as well as the degree to which they are settled. In this context, discussing the role of Islam within the integrated Central Asian region, juxtaposition of Islam and democracy and their harmonization is of great importance.
These and other relevant issues were discussed profusely at the roundtable on Democracy and Islam in Modern State: How Are They Juxtaposed? The meeting was organized by the Social Research
Center at the American University – Central Asia and attended by journalists, historians, political scientists, analysts, religious leaders and the academia from Kyrgyzstan.
According to Kadyr Malikov, PhD in Political Science and Islam Studies from the Madrid University, the relations between political Islam and secular state should be analyzed in light of the quest for common values in Islam and democracy and methods of their harmonization, as well as the secular-Islamic compromise reached in other countries (the Tajik experience was brought to light). Such measures may be effective in avoiding the collision of basic values of both ideologies. Notably, the participants agreed that Islam, first of all, sets a positive tone and its tenets in no way run counter to democracy and its institutions. In particular, it was mentioned that the legal system of Islam supports a number of fundamental principles pertaining to democracy and traditional Islam, including:
• the rule of law;
• freedom of faith, right to life, health, and private property;
• right to personal privacy;
• significance of public opinion and institutions for the public administration system and its regulatory mechanisms;
• elective nature of authorities which has been in place since the days of Islamic caliphate; and
• consultative nature of the executive branch of power.
When comparing the values of Islam and democracy, we should bear in mind that democracy is an ever-developing political system which varies from country to country depending on the historical context (e.g. previous political regimes) or types of democracy (liberal, sovereign, etc). Whereas, Islam is a consistent and static system of ideas, a structured and firm worldview. Similar to the absolute truth, its fundamental precepts remain intact under any social and political system, as well as in any ethnic or cultural environment, with Muslims following and adapting to them. However, this doesn’t mean that Islam should be perceived as unyielding dogma obstructing democratic development. For instance, in the Qur’an and Sunnah, the major Divine Scriptures on which Islam is based, there is great potential for intra-denominational democracy development and a religious community functioning under any social system, including democracy. There are plenty of practical examples proving the compatibility of Islam and democracy, such as European countries, United States, Canada, Malaysia, and Turkey. However, there are contradictions between those willing to become secular Muslims and those relying on religion too much. This also accounts for the three movements within Islam, which are moderate, radical, and loyal Muslims.
The impact of Islam in various Central Asian states is assessed differently. Some of the roundtable participants said that, despite the history behind Islam in Kyrgyzstan and the activities of various international religious organizations, quite disputable is the assumption that the Kyrgyz are vehemently committed to Islam. By virtue of mentality, traditional Islam for the Kyrgyz is, rather, a ritual practice and a historical and cultural factor. In their attempt to elucidate the
prospects of Islam development in Kyrgyzstan, some experts and scholars pointed out to the fact that, in light of their protracted isolation from Islam, the Kyrgyz people became most affected by it. Furthermore, the public does not view Islam as a tradition, which is the case in neighboring countries, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Rather, Islam is perceived as an ideology. This may lead to the intensification of Islamic revival and its stronger political and social influence in the country.
The participants also spoke about the idea of sovereign democracy, wherein the ethnic, cultural, and religious context is given careful consideration.
What we have seen at the global scale demonstrates that in those countries where religious institutions have been traditionally essential for social life and Islamic social and political process is used as political leverage, a clash of interests is generated between the two different political and ideological systems, secularism and Islam. Today, the Muslim states of Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, experience a trend toward social desecularization and politicization of religion. Therefore, the development of moderate Islam is threatened by the following factors:
1) distortion of its doctrine by various destructive forces from outside (first of all, the threat is posed by such radical religious movements as Hizb ut-Tahrir, Ahmadiyya, Wahhabiyah, etc);
2) conservative nature of clergymen and their inability to respond to contemporary challenges,e.g. religious extremism;
3) biased coverage of Islam in the media, which portray it as a threat; paucity of credible information about Islam;
4) authoritarian model of relations between the state and Islam; and
5) lack of effective preventive measures in combating religious extremism.
In this context, finding ways of bringing Islam and democracy into harmony is essential for humankind to adopt a new system of values based, first and foremost, on peace instead of opposition, social reforms, and cultures, and solidarity in lieu of competition and social injustice.
During the discussion, the participants came to agree that the most relevant issue was to find a new format of public policy regarding Islam, and ways in which both ideological systems could co-exist.
Firmly rooted in the public consciousness, obstacles related to notions and terms in understanding secularism and religiosity are hard to overcome. According to the participants, in order to ensure harmonious co-existence of secularity and Islam in a democratic society, the following measures need to be taken:
- recognizing religion as a key factor of the state resource in the national state building;
- legalization of moderate religious organizations;
- increasing the level of education among the clergy;
- establishing an informational and analytical basis and raising the Islamic intellectual elite as an alternative to clerical approaches;
- need for nationalizing the religious resource; and
- building its own harmonization model taking into account the national peculiarities and specific features of Kyrgyzstan, which could be characterized as an authoritarian-liberal model. Such a model would imply the development of political and legal mechanisms regulating the coexistence of secular and religious systems within one political and legal system. In other words, it would regulate the format of relations between the state and religion, implying the separation of religious organizations from public institutions, rather than total isolation of religion from the state.
Fortunately, the modern world community stresses the need for a dialog more often, striving to pay attention to single cases, wherein peace and accord become possible through compromises and concessions. The Tajik experience of constructing a special secular state model is one example of how to do it. What makes it unique is setting up all necessary political and legal frameworks to legalize the activities of political Islam and to ensure the participation of the religious party in politics. While gaining the right to act legally, Islamic political groups undergo constructive adaptation to the norms and requirements of the applicable law, as well as socialization and integration in the country’s social and political life, which strongly affects their essence and activities.
During the discussion, all participants came to concur that it is important to foster dialog between secular and religious communities. This approach will help shape the national ideology based on fundamental principles along the national lines. The state should view the rebirth of Islam as a factor contributing to the country’s stable development and perceive Islamic culture as an integral part of social life. This model also envisages a new vision of the place and role of Islam
in social life by the state, or attracting and employing the Islamic resource in state building. This seems to be the only way to solve the aforementioned problems. Although the degree of their relevance varies in different countries of the region, these issues remain and shouldn’t be neglected.
Saturday, 6 September 2008
From Cairo to Capadoccia, the muezzin has moved me
I am a non-Muslim who wakes before sunrise for the predawn call to prayer. You might think the call wakes me, but this is not so.
Like clockwork each morning, I open my eyes to the palest gloaming, two to five minutes before the muezzin starts his recitation, as if in anticipation.
I might say my cat wakes me, which would be closer to reality. She certainly would if I failed to wake on my own. But in truth, I believe that she, with her fine-tuned circadian sense, simply knows the exact time I will be available for a few quiet cuddling moments. So the cat and I together listen to the muezzein’s cry, and one of us at least is captivated.
This is not the first time a haunting call from a minaret has captured my attention and briefly laid claim to my spirit.
In Istanbul, surveying the tiered city and sun-flecked Bosphorus from a rooftop, the midmorning call seemed as achingly beautiful as the landscape. One afternoon in Cairo the muezzin’s clarion pierced the din of massed humanity, suspending it in momentary stillness.
Most magically in Capadoccia, as I rested by a trail above a canyon filled with fairy-tale rock formations, the evening call commenced from a distant mosque, then from a second and a third, echoing in canonical harmony that surrounded me and swept up my senses.
I would have thought the reverberations unending, but they faded as the low autumn sun bathed the canyon in amber glory.
But this predawn fascination is new for me, and special to Abu Dhabi. In other lands, I have woken with the sun or later, even in the depth of northern winter when the sun rises late. Planned day-trips to the mountains for skiing required a whole series of preset alarms to rouse me from my slumber.
Here in Abu Dhabi, however, I wake in near darkness, awaiting the muezzein’s voice. Soon it begins, clear and sure, gaining in authority and articulation as the call progresses. His words trap my senses in translucent honey, every tonal embellishment a delectable flavour, and I feel my heart growing lighter and starting to soar.
Not only does the voice possess extravagant beauty and purity of tone, but it is also matched by lungs of awesome power whose owner has superb breath-control.
Frequently, since coming here, I have wondered why the call to prayer sounds somehow more polished and satisfying to my ear than it sometimes has in other Muslim countries I have visited. Part of it may be that the Arabic language flows better, with more intrinsic music, when voiced by those for whom it is a native tongue. But the rest comes down to the voice, this particular voice that reaches me each morning in the predawn stillness.
The lady tour guide at Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque may have solved the mystery for me. In the UAE, she said, the call to prayer disseminated from the nation’s mosques is transmitted live from the Royal Palace. Knowing the Royal Family’s proclivity for quality, I feel I may be listening to an Arab Pavarotti. Little wonder he grabs my attention!
This still leaves me with unanswered questions: Is my heart moved by a fleeting encounter with the divine, or by a talented human’s brilliant rendition of a timeless masterpiece? Does it matter? Could they be one and the same?
I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced many such delightful surprises: the irresistible polyphonic shifts and soaring melodic lines of a Palestrina motet have left me breathless; the unbridled joy of a swinging gospel choir in the American deep south has swept me off my feet; I have sat for hours absorbed in the ethereal simplicity of a few raked grooves drawn in white gravel around black rocks in the garden of a Japanese shrine; I have lingered gratefully in the spacious alabaster calm of the courtyard of Al Azhar mosque, a world apart from the ceaseless throb of the teeming Cairo streets.
Contemplating such mysteries could take a lifetime. But for the moment, as the voice completes its final flawless flourish before dissipating into the night’s remains, I simply sigh and turn over. The cat, ensconced on my pillow, her warm belly brushing the crown of my head, extends a paw and rumbles her appreciation.
Then we both settle thankfully for two more hours of blessed, untroubled sleep.
tcarlisle@thenational.ae
Like clockwork each morning, I open my eyes to the palest gloaming, two to five minutes before the muezzin starts his recitation, as if in anticipation.
I might say my cat wakes me, which would be closer to reality. She certainly would if I failed to wake on my own. But in truth, I believe that she, with her fine-tuned circadian sense, simply knows the exact time I will be available for a few quiet cuddling moments. So the cat and I together listen to the muezzein’s cry, and one of us at least is captivated.
This is not the first time a haunting call from a minaret has captured my attention and briefly laid claim to my spirit.
In Istanbul, surveying the tiered city and sun-flecked Bosphorus from a rooftop, the midmorning call seemed as achingly beautiful as the landscape. One afternoon in Cairo the muezzin’s clarion pierced the din of massed humanity, suspending it in momentary stillness.
Most magically in Capadoccia, as I rested by a trail above a canyon filled with fairy-tale rock formations, the evening call commenced from a distant mosque, then from a second and a third, echoing in canonical harmony that surrounded me and swept up my senses.
I would have thought the reverberations unending, but they faded as the low autumn sun bathed the canyon in amber glory.
But this predawn fascination is new for me, and special to Abu Dhabi. In other lands, I have woken with the sun or later, even in the depth of northern winter when the sun rises late. Planned day-trips to the mountains for skiing required a whole series of preset alarms to rouse me from my slumber.
Here in Abu Dhabi, however, I wake in near darkness, awaiting the muezzein’s voice. Soon it begins, clear and sure, gaining in authority and articulation as the call progresses. His words trap my senses in translucent honey, every tonal embellishment a delectable flavour, and I feel my heart growing lighter and starting to soar.
Not only does the voice possess extravagant beauty and purity of tone, but it is also matched by lungs of awesome power whose owner has superb breath-control.
Frequently, since coming here, I have wondered why the call to prayer sounds somehow more polished and satisfying to my ear than it sometimes has in other Muslim countries I have visited. Part of it may be that the Arabic language flows better, with more intrinsic music, when voiced by those for whom it is a native tongue. But the rest comes down to the voice, this particular voice that reaches me each morning in the predawn stillness.
The lady tour guide at Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque may have solved the mystery for me. In the UAE, she said, the call to prayer disseminated from the nation’s mosques is transmitted live from the Royal Palace. Knowing the Royal Family’s proclivity for quality, I feel I may be listening to an Arab Pavarotti. Little wonder he grabs my attention!
This still leaves me with unanswered questions: Is my heart moved by a fleeting encounter with the divine, or by a talented human’s brilliant rendition of a timeless masterpiece? Does it matter? Could they be one and the same?
I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced many such delightful surprises: the irresistible polyphonic shifts and soaring melodic lines of a Palestrina motet have left me breathless; the unbridled joy of a swinging gospel choir in the American deep south has swept me off my feet; I have sat for hours absorbed in the ethereal simplicity of a few raked grooves drawn in white gravel around black rocks in the garden of a Japanese shrine; I have lingered gratefully in the spacious alabaster calm of the courtyard of Al Azhar mosque, a world apart from the ceaseless throb of the teeming Cairo streets.
Contemplating such mysteries could take a lifetime. But for the moment, as the voice completes its final flawless flourish before dissipating into the night’s remains, I simply sigh and turn over. The cat, ensconced on my pillow, her warm belly brushing the crown of my head, extends a paw and rumbles her appreciation.
Then we both settle thankfully for two more hours of blessed, untroubled sleep.
tcarlisle@thenational.ae
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Uighurs and China's Xinjiang Region
Introduction
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a territory in western China, accounts for one-sixth of China's land and is home to about 20 million people from thirteen major ethnic groups. The largest of these groups is the Uighurs [PRON: WEE-gurs], a predominantly Muslim community with ties to Central Asia. Some Uighurs call China's presence in Xinjiang a form of imperialism, and they stepped up calls for independence—sometimes violently—in the 1990s through separatist groups like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The Chinese government has reacted by promoting the migration of China's ethnic majority, the Han, to Xinjiang. Beijing has also strengthened economic ties with the area and tried to cut off potential sources of separatist support from neighboring states that are linguistically and ethnically linked with the Uighurs.
Intermittent Independence
Since the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, Xinjiang has enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy. Turkic rebels in Xinjiang declared independence in October 1933 and created the Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (also known as the Republic of Uighuristan or the First East Turkistan Republic). The following year, the Republic of China reabsorbed the region. In 1944, factions within Xinjiang again declared independence, this time under the auspices of the Soviet Union, and created the Second East Turkistan Republic. But in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang became classified as an "autonomous region" of the People's Republic of China.
Some Uighurs, nostalgic for Xinjiang's intermittent periods of independence, call for the recreation of a Uighur state. "The Central Asian Uighurs know a great deal about the two East Turkestan periods of sovereign rule, and they reflect on that quite frequently," says Dru C. Gladney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College. Many of these Uighurs say China colonized the area in 1949. But in its first white paper on Xinjiang, the Chinese government said Xinjiang had been an "inseparable part of the unitary multi-ethnic Chinese nation" since the Western Han Dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC to 24 AD.
Economic Development
Xinjiang's wealth hinges on its vast mineral and oil deposits. In the early 1990s, Beijing decided to spur Xinjiang's growth by giving it special economic zones, subsidizing local cotton farmers, and overhauling its tax system. In August 1991, the Xinjiang government launched the Tarim Basin Project (World Bank) to increase agricultural output. During this period, Beijing invested in the region's infrastructure, building massive projects like the Tarim Desert Highway and a rail link to western Xinjiang. In an article for The China Quarterly, Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch says these projects were designed to literally "bind Xinjiang more closely to the rest of the PRC."
Since 1954, China has also used the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) to build agricultural settlements in China's western periphery. Locally known as the Bingtuan, the XPCC is charged with cultivating and guarding the Chinese frontier. To achieve this mission, the corps has its own security organs, including an armed police force and militia. Over the past fifty years, the XPCC has attracted a steady stream of migrant workers to Xinjiang.
Beijing continues to develop Xinjiang in campaigns called "Open up the West" and "Go West." Experts like Gladney say these programs have made the region relatively prosperous. "If you look at the general per capita income of Xinjiang as a region," he says, "it's higher than all of China's except for the southeast coast." But others note that Xinjiang's wealth is concentrated in its oil-rich centers, and international development bodies like the Asian Development Bank say that there are high levels of inequality (PDF) in the area. The Chinese government has launched a series of programs to alleviate poverty in Xinjiang, and in March 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao emphasized harmonious development of the region in a government report.
Han Migration
Growing job opportunities in Xinjiang have lured a steady stream of migrant workers to the region, many of whom are ethnically Han. The Chinese government does not count the number of workers that travel to Xinjiang, but experts say the local Han population has risen from approximately 5 percent in the 1940s to approximately 40 percent today. These migrants work in a variety of industries, both low tech and high tech, and have transformed Xinjiang's landscape. In June 2008, the BBC produced a photo report called Life in Urumqi, which said Xinjiang's capital had recently witnessed "the arrival of shopping centres, tower blocks, department stores and highways."
Many of these Uighurs say China colonized the area in 1949. But in its first white paper on Xinjiang, the Chinese government said Xinjiang had been an "inseparable part of the unitary multi-ethnic Chinese nation" since the Western Han Dynasty.
In its 2007 annual report to the U.S. Congress, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China said the Chinese government "provides incentives for migration to the region from elsewhere in China, in the name of recruiting talent and promoting stability" (PDF). Since imperial times, the Chinese government has tried to settle Han on the outskirts of China to integrate the Chinese periphery. But the Communist Party says its policies in Xinjiang are designed to promote economic development, not demographic change. Xinjiang's influx of migrants has fueled Uighur discontent as Han and Uighurs compete over limited jobs and natural resources.
Ethnic Tension
The Chinese government says Xinjiang is home to thirteen major ethnic groups. The largest of these groups is the Uighurs, who comprise 45 percent of Xinjiang's population, according to a 2003 census. Like many of these groups, the Uighurs are predominantly Muslim and have cultural ties to Central Asia.
As Han migrants pour into Xinjiang, many Uighurs resent the strain they place on limited resources like land and water. "Uighurs feel like this is their homeland, that these resources should be more devoted to them," says Gladney. In 2006, Human Rights in China said population growth in Xinjiang had transformed the local environment, leading to "reduced human access to clean water (PDF) and fertile soil for drinking, irrigation and agriculture."
Ethnic tension is fanned by economic disparity: the Han tend to be wealthier than the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Some experts say the wage gap is the result of discriminatory hiring practices. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China reports that in 2006, the XPCC reserved approximately 800 of 840 civil servant job openings for Han. Local officials say they would like to hire Uighurs, but have trouble finding qualified candidates. "One common problem of the western region is that the education and cultural level of the people here is quite low," said Wang Lequan, Xinjiang's Communist Party secretary, in an interview with the BBC. Gladney says Han applicants tend to have better professional networks because they are more often "influential, children of elite Party members and government leaders."
According to Bequelin, Uighurs are also upset by what they consider Chinese attempts to "refashion their cultural and religious identity." In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Rebiyah Kadeer, a prominent exiled Uighur, condemns China for its "fierce repression of religious expression," and "its intolerance for any expression of discontent." Beijing officials respond to these accusations by saying they respect China's ethnic minorities, and have improved the quality of life for Uighurs by raising economic, public health, and education levels in Xinjiang.
Terrorism and Counterterrorism
During the 1990s, separatist groups in Xinjiang began frequent attacks against the Chinese government. The most famous of these groups was the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). China, the United States, and the UN Security Council have all labeled ETIM a terrorist organization, and Chinese officials have said the group has ties to al-Qaeda. Concern about Uighur terrorism flared in August 2008—just days before the Beijing Olympics—when two men attacked a military police unit (NYT) in Xinjiang, killing sixteen. The attack came one week after a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party took credit for a slew of terrorist attacks (Xinhua), including two bus explosions in Yunnan province.
The Han population there has risen from approximately 5 percent in the 1940s to approximately 40 percent today.
The Chinese government has taken steps to combat both separatists and terrorists in its western province. According to the U.S. State Department, Chinese authorities raided an alleged ETIM camp in January 2007, killing eighteen and arresting seventeen. China also monitors religious activity in the region to keep religious leaders from spreading separatist views. Since September 11, 2001, China has raised international awareness of Uighur-related terrorism and linked its actions to the Bush administration's so-called war on terror.
But many experts say China is exaggerating the danger posed by Uighur terrorists. China has accused the Uighurs of plotting thousands of attacks, but Andrew J. Nathan, a China expert at Columbia University, says, "You have to be very suspicious of those numbers." Gladney notes that many of the "terrorist incidents" that China attributes to ETIM are actually "spontaneous and rather disorganized" forms of civil unrest. Most experts say ETIM has no effective ties to al-Qaeda, and Bequelin goes so far as to say, "ETIM is probably defunct by now, as far as we know." In a 2008 report, Amnesty International accused Chinese officials of using the war on terror to justify "harsh repression of ethnic Uighurs." But in Xinhua, a state-run newspaper, Chinese rights organizations refuted the Amnesty report, saying it was designed to slander China under the pretense of human rights.
Experts disagree on the efficacy of China's counterterrorism measures. Some, including Bequelin, say China's anti-separatist campaign actually provokes more resentment, which can lead to more terrorism. But other Western outlets say China's counterterrorism measures have been relatively successful. A review of U.S. State Department documents shows a decrease in Uighur-related terrorism since the end of the 1990s.
Tough Neighborhood
Xinjiang shares a border with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Because of the Uighurs' cultural ties to its neighbors, China has been concerned that Central Asian states may back a separatist movement in Xinjiang. According to Nathan, these fears are fueled by the fact that the Soviet Union successfully backed a Uighur separatist movement in the 1940s. To keep Central Asian states from fomenting trouble in Xinjiang, China has cultivated close diplomatic ties with its neighbors, most notably through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. According to Bequelin, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was created "to ensure the support of Central Asian states," and to "prevent any emergence of linkages between Uighur communities in these countries and Xinjiang."
"People aren't threatening to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony for the Uighurs,"
–Adam Segal, CFR Senior Fellow
Many experts believe China's diplomatic efforts have been successful. Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says China's neighbors "are now fighting their own Muslim fundamentalist groups," which makes them more sympathetic to China's plight. According to the U.S. State Department, Uzbekistan extradited a Canadian citizen of Uighur ethnicity to China in August 2006, where he was convicted for alleged involvement in ETIM activities. Nathan says cases like these are evidence that China's neighbors are cooperating with China's anti-secessionist policies. In contrast, the United States refused to hand over five Uighurs who had been captured by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2001, despite Chinese calls to do so. After their release from Guantanamo Bay in May 2006, the Uighurs were instead transferred to Albania.
None of China's neighbors have expressed official support for the Uighurs, but the region's porous borders still worry Chinese officials. In the 1980s and 1990s, many Uighurs traveled into Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they were exposed to Islamic extremism. "Some enrolled in madrassas, some enrolled with [the anti-Taliban opposition force] the Northern Alliance, some enrolled with the Taliban, some enrolled with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan," says Bequelin. Chinese officials worry that militants who slip in and out of Xinjiang can promote anti-state activity.
International Disinterest
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, protests in Tibet reaped international attention. But protests in Xinjiang (IHT) went relatively unnoticed. "People aren't threatening to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony for the Uighurs," says Segal. Because Tibet gets more global attention than Xinjiang, some reporters have referred to Xinjiang as "China's other Tibet" (al-Jazeera).
International interest in Xinjiang is muted for a variety of reasons. According to Nathan, the Uighur community lacks an effective leader. "For the Uighurs, their most prominent spokesperson is Rebiya Kadeer in Washington, who really doesn't have the infrastructure and the Nobel Prize that the Dalai Lama has," he says. Bequelin adds that the Chinese government has effectively branded Uighur separatists as terrorists, which has reduced international sympathy for their mission. Amidst international apathy, most experts say the human rights situation in Xinjiang is likely to get worse before it gets better. "There's no international pressure to change policy in Xinjiang right now," says Segal. "So why would China make any changes?"
Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a territory in western China, accounts for one-sixth of China's land and is home to about 20 million people from thirteen major ethnic groups. The largest of these groups is the Uighurs [PRON: WEE-gurs], a predominantly Muslim community with ties to Central Asia. Some Uighurs call China's presence in Xinjiang a form of imperialism, and they stepped up calls for independence—sometimes violently—in the 1990s through separatist groups like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The Chinese government has reacted by promoting the migration of China's ethnic majority, the Han, to Xinjiang. Beijing has also strengthened economic ties with the area and tried to cut off potential sources of separatist support from neighboring states that are linguistically and ethnically linked with the Uighurs.
Intermittent Independence
Since the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, Xinjiang has enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy. Turkic rebels in Xinjiang declared independence in October 1933 and created the Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (also known as the Republic of Uighuristan or the First East Turkistan Republic). The following year, the Republic of China reabsorbed the region. In 1944, factions within Xinjiang again declared independence, this time under the auspices of the Soviet Union, and created the Second East Turkistan Republic. But in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang became classified as an "autonomous region" of the People's Republic of China.
Some Uighurs, nostalgic for Xinjiang's intermittent periods of independence, call for the recreation of a Uighur state. "The Central Asian Uighurs know a great deal about the two East Turkestan periods of sovereign rule, and they reflect on that quite frequently," says Dru C. Gladney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College. Many of these Uighurs say China colonized the area in 1949. But in its first white paper on Xinjiang, the Chinese government said Xinjiang had been an "inseparable part of the unitary multi-ethnic Chinese nation" since the Western Han Dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC to 24 AD.
Economic Development
Xinjiang's wealth hinges on its vast mineral and oil deposits. In the early 1990s, Beijing decided to spur Xinjiang's growth by giving it special economic zones, subsidizing local cotton farmers, and overhauling its tax system. In August 1991, the Xinjiang government launched the Tarim Basin Project (World Bank) to increase agricultural output. During this period, Beijing invested in the region's infrastructure, building massive projects like the Tarim Desert Highway and a rail link to western Xinjiang. In an article for The China Quarterly, Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch says these projects were designed to literally "bind Xinjiang more closely to the rest of the PRC."
Since 1954, China has also used the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) to build agricultural settlements in China's western periphery. Locally known as the Bingtuan, the XPCC is charged with cultivating and guarding the Chinese frontier. To achieve this mission, the corps has its own security organs, including an armed police force and militia. Over the past fifty years, the XPCC has attracted a steady stream of migrant workers to Xinjiang.
Beijing continues to develop Xinjiang in campaigns called "Open up the West" and "Go West." Experts like Gladney say these programs have made the region relatively prosperous. "If you look at the general per capita income of Xinjiang as a region," he says, "it's higher than all of China's except for the southeast coast." But others note that Xinjiang's wealth is concentrated in its oil-rich centers, and international development bodies like the Asian Development Bank say that there are high levels of inequality (PDF) in the area. The Chinese government has launched a series of programs to alleviate poverty in Xinjiang, and in March 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao emphasized harmonious development of the region in a government report.
Han Migration
Growing job opportunities in Xinjiang have lured a steady stream of migrant workers to the region, many of whom are ethnically Han. The Chinese government does not count the number of workers that travel to Xinjiang, but experts say the local Han population has risen from approximately 5 percent in the 1940s to approximately 40 percent today. These migrants work in a variety of industries, both low tech and high tech, and have transformed Xinjiang's landscape. In June 2008, the BBC produced a photo report called Life in Urumqi, which said Xinjiang's capital had recently witnessed "the arrival of shopping centres, tower blocks, department stores and highways."
Many of these Uighurs say China colonized the area in 1949. But in its first white paper on Xinjiang, the Chinese government said Xinjiang had been an "inseparable part of the unitary multi-ethnic Chinese nation" since the Western Han Dynasty.
In its 2007 annual report to the U.S. Congress, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China said the Chinese government "provides incentives for migration to the region from elsewhere in China, in the name of recruiting talent and promoting stability" (PDF). Since imperial times, the Chinese government has tried to settle Han on the outskirts of China to integrate the Chinese periphery. But the Communist Party says its policies in Xinjiang are designed to promote economic development, not demographic change. Xinjiang's influx of migrants has fueled Uighur discontent as Han and Uighurs compete over limited jobs and natural resources.
Ethnic Tension
The Chinese government says Xinjiang is home to thirteen major ethnic groups. The largest of these groups is the Uighurs, who comprise 45 percent of Xinjiang's population, according to a 2003 census. Like many of these groups, the Uighurs are predominantly Muslim and have cultural ties to Central Asia.
As Han migrants pour into Xinjiang, many Uighurs resent the strain they place on limited resources like land and water. "Uighurs feel like this is their homeland, that these resources should be more devoted to them," says Gladney. In 2006, Human Rights in China said population growth in Xinjiang had transformed the local environment, leading to "reduced human access to clean water (PDF) and fertile soil for drinking, irrigation and agriculture."
Ethnic tension is fanned by economic disparity: the Han tend to be wealthier than the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Some experts say the wage gap is the result of discriminatory hiring practices. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China reports that in 2006, the XPCC reserved approximately 800 of 840 civil servant job openings for Han. Local officials say they would like to hire Uighurs, but have trouble finding qualified candidates. "One common problem of the western region is that the education and cultural level of the people here is quite low," said Wang Lequan, Xinjiang's Communist Party secretary, in an interview with the BBC. Gladney says Han applicants tend to have better professional networks because they are more often "influential, children of elite Party members and government leaders."
According to Bequelin, Uighurs are also upset by what they consider Chinese attempts to "refashion their cultural and religious identity." In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Rebiyah Kadeer, a prominent exiled Uighur, condemns China for its "fierce repression of religious expression," and "its intolerance for any expression of discontent." Beijing officials respond to these accusations by saying they respect China's ethnic minorities, and have improved the quality of life for Uighurs by raising economic, public health, and education levels in Xinjiang.
Terrorism and Counterterrorism
During the 1990s, separatist groups in Xinjiang began frequent attacks against the Chinese government. The most famous of these groups was the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). China, the United States, and the UN Security Council have all labeled ETIM a terrorist organization, and Chinese officials have said the group has ties to al-Qaeda. Concern about Uighur terrorism flared in August 2008—just days before the Beijing Olympics—when two men attacked a military police unit (NYT) in Xinjiang, killing sixteen. The attack came one week after a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party took credit for a slew of terrorist attacks (Xinhua), including two bus explosions in Yunnan province.
The Han population there has risen from approximately 5 percent in the 1940s to approximately 40 percent today.
The Chinese government has taken steps to combat both separatists and terrorists in its western province. According to the U.S. State Department, Chinese authorities raided an alleged ETIM camp in January 2007, killing eighteen and arresting seventeen. China also monitors religious activity in the region to keep religious leaders from spreading separatist views. Since September 11, 2001, China has raised international awareness of Uighur-related terrorism and linked its actions to the Bush administration's so-called war on terror.
But many experts say China is exaggerating the danger posed by Uighur terrorists. China has accused the Uighurs of plotting thousands of attacks, but Andrew J. Nathan, a China expert at Columbia University, says, "You have to be very suspicious of those numbers." Gladney notes that many of the "terrorist incidents" that China attributes to ETIM are actually "spontaneous and rather disorganized" forms of civil unrest. Most experts say ETIM has no effective ties to al-Qaeda, and Bequelin goes so far as to say, "ETIM is probably defunct by now, as far as we know." In a 2008 report, Amnesty International accused Chinese officials of using the war on terror to justify "harsh repression of ethnic Uighurs." But in Xinhua, a state-run newspaper, Chinese rights organizations refuted the Amnesty report, saying it was designed to slander China under the pretense of human rights.
Experts disagree on the efficacy of China's counterterrorism measures. Some, including Bequelin, say China's anti-separatist campaign actually provokes more resentment, which can lead to more terrorism. But other Western outlets say China's counterterrorism measures have been relatively successful. A review of U.S. State Department documents shows a decrease in Uighur-related terrorism since the end of the 1990s.
Tough Neighborhood
Xinjiang shares a border with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Because of the Uighurs' cultural ties to its neighbors, China has been concerned that Central Asian states may back a separatist movement in Xinjiang. According to Nathan, these fears are fueled by the fact that the Soviet Union successfully backed a Uighur separatist movement in the 1940s. To keep Central Asian states from fomenting trouble in Xinjiang, China has cultivated close diplomatic ties with its neighbors, most notably through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. According to Bequelin, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was created "to ensure the support of Central Asian states," and to "prevent any emergence of linkages between Uighur communities in these countries and Xinjiang."
"People aren't threatening to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony for the Uighurs,"
–Adam Segal, CFR Senior Fellow
Many experts believe China's diplomatic efforts have been successful. Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says China's neighbors "are now fighting their own Muslim fundamentalist groups," which makes them more sympathetic to China's plight. According to the U.S. State Department, Uzbekistan extradited a Canadian citizen of Uighur ethnicity to China in August 2006, where he was convicted for alleged involvement in ETIM activities. Nathan says cases like these are evidence that China's neighbors are cooperating with China's anti-secessionist policies. In contrast, the United States refused to hand over five Uighurs who had been captured by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2001, despite Chinese calls to do so. After their release from Guantanamo Bay in May 2006, the Uighurs were instead transferred to Albania.
None of China's neighbors have expressed official support for the Uighurs, but the region's porous borders still worry Chinese officials. In the 1980s and 1990s, many Uighurs traveled into Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they were exposed to Islamic extremism. "Some enrolled in madrassas, some enrolled with [the anti-Taliban opposition force] the Northern Alliance, some enrolled with the Taliban, some enrolled with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan," says Bequelin. Chinese officials worry that militants who slip in and out of Xinjiang can promote anti-state activity.
International Disinterest
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, protests in Tibet reaped international attention. But protests in Xinjiang (IHT) went relatively unnoticed. "People aren't threatening to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony for the Uighurs," says Segal. Because Tibet gets more global attention than Xinjiang, some reporters have referred to Xinjiang as "China's other Tibet" (al-Jazeera).
International interest in Xinjiang is muted for a variety of reasons. According to Nathan, the Uighur community lacks an effective leader. "For the Uighurs, their most prominent spokesperson is Rebiya Kadeer in Washington, who really doesn't have the infrastructure and the Nobel Prize that the Dalai Lama has," he says. Bequelin adds that the Chinese government has effectively branded Uighur separatists as terrorists, which has reduced international sympathy for their mission. Amidst international apathy, most experts say the human rights situation in Xinjiang is likely to get worse before it gets better. "There's no international pressure to change policy in Xinjiang right now," says Segal. "So why would China make any changes?"
Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.
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