E-mail: letters@dailytimes.com.pk
June 27, 2006

Dear Sir:

The Pakistani authorities should be extremely wary about the credibility of warnings issued by the Chinese government regarding alleged plots by Uyghurs to kidnap Chinese diplomats and consular officers in Pakistan.

China’s claims that forces within East Turkistan have connections with al Qaeda are tenuous at best. Chinese authorities have not produced substantial evidence backing up these claims. Beijing has engaged in an aggressive campaign since September 11 to portray all Uyghur Muslims as militants and terrorists, in an attempt to justify its continuing repression over the Uyghur population and consolidate its control over East Turkistan (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.) Chinese authorities have invoked the international “war on terror as a pretext to pursue their long-standing policies of suppressing any form of opposition to Chinese administration, and in an attempt to elicit international support for these policies.

Chinese authorities have previously taken similar actions to “warn foreigners of the threat of attacks on them by al Qaeda-linked Uyghur groups. For instance, last year, as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom visited East Turkistan, Chinese officials announced that ‘elements of al Qaeda were targeting the Commission itself during its visit. However, as was later stated by the Commission’s chairman, enquiries by U.S. embassy staff in Beijing determined that these claims were totally false and an apparent attempt to intimidate the visiting members of the Commission.

While the Uyghur American Association is not in a position to assess the accuracy of the latest warnings delivered to Pakistan by the Chinese authorities, we would like to point out various inconsistencies in their recurring arguments. China’s own reporting on the nature and extent of violence in East Turkistan has often been exaggerated and contradictory. For example, a document issued by China’s State Council Information Office in 2002 presents an image of the situation in East Turkistan that is largely inconsistent with Beijing’s position prior to September 11. The document portrays a wide variety of separatist groups in East Turkistan as being closely connected and unified as part of a pan-Islamic network, when in fact these groups are highly fractionalized and diverse.

As the group Human Rights Watch has stated, the document has a highly charged ideological tone and contains numerous inconsistencies. It also lacks any independent intelligence to support its conclusions. In particular, according to Human Rights Watch, there are problems in the document’s treatment of events in the 1990s. For instance, while its preface claims that terrorist acts killed 162 (and injured 440) over the past decade, the document itself enumerates only 57 deaths. Most of these people died in small-scale incidents with only one or two victims.

Prior to September 11, China publicized an opinion on East Turkistan that painted a picture of the opposition as small in number and doomed to fail. Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan, together with Abdulahat Abdurishit, said at a trade fair in Urumqi on September 2, 2001, that the situation in Xinjiang was “better than ever in history. While mentioning separatism, they stressed that “society is stable and people are living and working in peace and contentment.

These types of statements appear distinctly inconsistent with China’s post-9/11 assertions regarding Uyghur separatism, and they appear to strongly suggest that China modifies its portrayal of Uyghur separatist forces, and of Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan in general, according to its political aspirations.

According to Amnesty International, the recent Chinese crackdown on the ‘three evil forces’ of ‘separatist, terrorist and religious extremists’ in East Turkistan has resulted in serious and widespread human rights violations directed against the region’s Uyghur Muslim community, prompting many Uyghurs to flee the country.

The most recent U.S. State Department human rights country report on China described a dismal human rights situation for the Uyghur people in East Turkistan, including the “executions of Uyghurs whom authorities accused of separatism but which some observers claimed were politically motivated. Because authorities failed to distinguish carefully between peaceful activities supporting independence, “illegal religious activities, and violent terrorism, the report stated, it was difficult to determine whether raids, detentions, arrests, or judicial punishments were targeted at those peacefully seeking political goals, those seeking worship, or those engaged in violence.

China has been putting pressure on neighboring countries, and particularly members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), to forcibly return Uyghur Muslims suspected of “separatist activities, including asylum-seekers and refugees. In this light, Pakistan’s current “observer status with the SCO, as well as the 2003 remarks of President Musharraf that he would not allow anyone to use Pakistani territory to “carry out anti-China activities , are worrying indeed. Will Pakistan, like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and other nations, begin persecuting innocent Uyghur Muslims, or sending them back to East Turkistan, in order to please China? For the sake of human rights, we hope not.

Alim A. Seytoff
General Secretary,
Uyghur American Association