MSNBC and many other news outlets are hyping China’s latest “terror” raid of an “Al Qaeda-linked” group in Xinjiang province. The breathless beginning of the article states:
Chinese police raided an alleged terrorist camp in a western mountain region near the border with Pakistan, killing 18 suspects and arresting 17, a police official said Monday.
Of course, no one really knows where the raid took place, as the Chinese official refused to name the specific location, so the news reports will be forced to describe the location as “near the border with Pakistan”, which could be a bit like describing Philadelphia as “near Canada.”
Of course, while the story touches on some of the problems faced by Uyghurs in China, as well as the fact that the United States has detained Uyghurs captured in Afghanistan, the fact that the Uyghurs currently held in Guantanamo have been found innocent of any charges, and are currently being held because returning them to China would probably ensure their detainment, if not execution, despite their innocence. More below the fold.
Some background information:
Uyghurs face a situation similar to Tibetans. They are a Central Asian people who adhere to a religious faith, and were coopted into China’s national borders as a historical accident. The reason they don’t receive the attention in the West that Tibetans get is twofold:
- Uyghurs lack a photogenic and congenial representative like His Holiness the Dalai Lama
- Uyghurs are Muslim, which carries a much greater stigma in the minds of the West than Buddhism.
Xinjiang province, where Uyghurs live, has been flooded with Han Chinese immigrants, exacerbating already-steep tensions:
Both long-standing and recent policies by leaders in Beijing and Ürümci have combined to deepen discontent among Uyghurs, and the official refusal to allow open expression of dissatisfaction in the region has only increased that discontent. Invariably harsh responses to demonstrations have left the field of overt political action to the violent and desperate while failing to address the concerns of the majority. The multifaceted repression of religion–including the closure of mosques, supervision and dismissal of clerics, and the prevention of religious practice by the young–has made Islam in Xinjiang more rather than less political in the Reform era.
As usual, the complex story behind the Uyghurs of Xinjiang has been turned into a he-said, she-said story. The truth is that the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) was declared a terrorist group by the United States simply to get China on-board with the American invasion of Iraq.
The lawyers [of American-detained Uyghurs] allege in the court documents that their clients’ detention was one of several demands the Chinese government solicited in mid-2002 as the United States was seeking global support for toppling Saddam Hussein.
U.S. officials labeled the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) — a group that includes Uighur separatists who want their own nation in western China — a terrorist organization in August 2002 after diplomatic discussions with China about Iraq, the lawyers allege.
“In the crisis atmosphere of the time, the interests of a few dozen refugees paled beside the urgency of the Administration’s war plans,” the lawsuit said. “The Iraq deal sealed the fate of the seven petitioners here. More than four years have passed. Long-discarded pawns in a diplomatic match between superpowers, petitioners today remain illegally imprisoned at Guantanamo.”
Is this an apologist diary for a group that is, in all likelihood, responsible for bus-bombings in Beijing? Of course not. However, for the media to portray these events as simple as China killing off a few dozen Al Qaeda soldiers on the Pakistani border is irresponsible. And that is how the headline reads. For those who will defend the fact that the story includes, several paragraphs in, other information on Uyghurs, I ask you: how many Americans do you think will read this story and decide to learn more about Uyghurs?
Also posted at daily kos.
