Hell, No, Uighurs Won't Go
DERBYSHIRE, JOHN
Hell, No, Uighurs Won't Go China's suppression of Eastern Turkestan won't succeed without a fight. BY JOHN DERBYSHIRE WHEN WE THINK of China's problems with its minorities, we tend to think of...
...in addition, there is the focusing presence of the Dalai Lama and the simple fact that Tibet has always had a long border with the free world, across which thousands of refugees have been able to escape...
...By far the largest group is the Uighurs...
...Current attitudes among the Uighurs can be gauged from the fact that their main expatriate organization, the Istanbul-based Eastern Turkestan National Center, is headed not by a monk but by an ex-general in the Turkish army, Reza Bekin...
...night, however, it is not Tibet they are worrying about, but Eastern Turkestan...
...All this is of course a deliberate policy by the Beijing government, as is revealed by occasional lapses into frankness in the Chinese press...
...The national symbol of the Uighur is a wolf...
...Xinjiang"—which means "New Territory"—is the Chinese name for Eastern Turkestan...
...For 40 years His Holiness has been pleading with Beijing to let his people have some real autonomy...
...The result of these approaches has been a complete victory for Chinese imperialism and the near extinction of Tibetan culture in its homeland...
...Alptekin died in 1995 at age 94, and the irenic approach died with him...
...Having no significant border with anyone else, refugees from Eastern Turkestan once had nowhere to go but the USSR...
...a sixth is Turkic...
...It is an abomination to the Uighurs, who say, "It may be 'New Territory' to the Chinese, but it's been our homeland since the beginning of time...
...Even so, the ETNC is regarded as insufferably tame by yet more militant Uighur groups...
...A quarter is Tibetan...
...When unrest among the "national minorities" keeps China's leaders awake at John Derbyshire is a critic and novelist living in Huntington, New York...
...This population policy is augmented by parallel strategies for cultural annihilation that will be familiar to followers of Tibetan affairs: forced abortions, religious persecution, outlawing of local languages, suppression of any truthful discussion of the region's history, and so on...
...But of all these territories, it is Eastern Turkestan that is most populous, most productive, strategically most important, and most fractious...
...They are rapidly being swamped by incoming Chinese, most recently by more than 100,000 peasants resettled from west-central China as part of the Three Gorges Dam project...
...He kept the mindset of a diplomat and in a famous incident in 1981 played host to a delegation from the Chinese embassy in Ankara...
...The Chinese routinely report intercepting arms shipments coming into Eastern Turkestan— something they have not had to worry about in Tibet since the CIA operations of the early 1960s...
...Officially there are 8 million Uighurs...
...His name was Isa Yusuf Alptekin...
...First there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of the Central Asian republics, which are close in language, religion, and culture to the Uighurs...
...a tenth is Mongolian...
...Second has been the coming into existence of a Uighur diaspora...
...Following that meeting, Alptekin issued a list of 31 requests to the Chinese government, covering religious freedoms, economic equality between Uighurs and Han Chinese, and truth in population statistics...
...Chinese dissident journalist Cao Chang-ching, who published a long and illuminating report on Eastern Turkestan in the October 11 Taipei Times, unearthed one group calling themselves "The Home of Eastern Turkestan Youth" who claimed 2,000 members and told him that "the Chinese only understand force...
...This is not idle boasting...
...Realizing where a liberal policy toward their subject peoples was leading them, they quickly reverted to despotic norms...
...Occupying the westernmost part of China, Eastern Turkestan is home to several million non-Chinese people speaking Turkic languages and practicing Islam...
...He has made it plain that he will settle for much less than full independence and has used his immense authority with Tibetans to discourage anti-Chinese violence...
...the three bomb explosions of February 1997 in Urumqi, Eastern Turkestan's capital, were only the best-reported of a large number of violent incidents in the region—including, most recently, a well-equipped attack on a Chinese missile base...
...The Uighurs have drawn the appropriate lesson...
...This is not a people that will go quietly into the long night of Chinese imperial domination...
...It is not Buddhist monks that China faces in its western colony but Turks, cousins of those fearless war-riors—the Huns, the Seljuks, the Ottomans—who terrorized Europe and the Middle East for twelve hundred years...
...BY JOHN DERBYSHIRE WHEN WE THINK of China's problems with its minorities, we tend to think of Tibet...
...At one time, the Uighurs had their own Dalai Lama...
...There is a general feeling that progress on the Karakoram Highway, intended to link China with Pakistan, is being held up by Chinese foot-dragging, probably because they fear too-easy communications between the Uighurs and their ethnic kin in Central Asia...
...it is still not widely understood in the West that Mao Zedong's greatest achievement was the re-creation of most of the old Manchu Empire...
...Less than half the territory of the People's Republic is ethnically Chinese...
...Precise numbers are hard to state because Chinese statistics on minority populations are deeply unreliable...
...Now they can be found in many places, though the greatest concentration is still in Turkey...
...They also refer to themselves as "the Hamas of Eastern Turkestan" and brandish slogans like "Every one of us is a bomb...
...Born in Eastern Turkestan, Alptekin served in the government of the short-lived Eastern Turkestan Republic in the 1940s and fled to Turkey when the republic was crushed in a joint operation by Mao and Stalin...
...Da Gong Bao, Beijing's mouthpiece newspaper in Hong Kong, reported on June 2 that official policy was "to adjust the proportions of the populations of different ethnic groups in Xinjiang...
...The Chinese never responded...
...Three factors have turned the Eastern Turkestan issue into a major headache for China's imperialists...
...The spectacle of a picturesque and eccentric culture (the Tibetan official who met the 1904 Younghus-band expedition bore the title "Grand Metaphysician") being stomped into the dust by a brutish and amoral despotism naturally arouses our sympathy...
...there may in fact be more than 13 million...
...Third has been the utter failure of the Dalai Lama's calm and reasonable approach to Chinese leaders...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 12
