"There is a lot of pressure on us," "My children cannot come in mosques until they are eighteen,"
A East Turkestani woman worshiping in front gate of a mosque
On the Warning!:Prohibited to enter Masjid for party members,workers ,retires ,under 18 ages,women, prohibited to enter Mosques!!!
"There is a lot of pressure on us," "My children cannot come in mosques until they are eighteen,"
Uighurs are against Chinese censorship such as the banning of children being taught religion in an attempt to eradicate their traditional beliefs
By Emnma Graham-Harrison KASHGAR, China (Reuters) - Shards of blue glass, mangled power cables and gaping holes where three trees used to thrive frame the entrance to Huang Guomin's shop and provide stark evidence of China's worst terror attack in over a decade. But after militants Monday killed 16 policemen with homemade explosives and knives outside his door in the remote city of Kashgar, the liquor seller is more frustrated than fearful. "I'm not scared but I've had no power for two days, and this is bad for business," said Huang, who opened the business 18 months ago. "There are fewer people around, and no one wants to buy drinks. They just come to stare and ask questions." Huang dismissed the risk of another attack, like many of the ethnic Han Chinese living in this remote Silk Road city, and said he feels safe, even though the men who launched the attack may also have dreamt of driving him out. Both attackers were Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority that dominates Kashgar and surrounding countryside. Xinjiang's 8 million Uighurs make up a little less than half of the region's population, with most of the rest Han Chinese. Many Uighurs resent Chinese controls on religion and the expanding Han presence in the region, which is rich in energy and minerals. Some support separatist groups seeking an independent "East Turkestan" homeland. The Communist Party chief of Kashgar, Shi Dagang, suggested Tuesday the attackers were linked to one of these groups.
But although the carnage less than a week before the Olympic Games focused global attention on ethnic tensions in China's far West, most Han Chinese interviewed by Reuters described it as an anomaly rather than a warning. "China is so big that of course things like this are going to happen from time to time," said Shanghai native Gu Zhen, visiting the city's ancient Idgah mosque with his son. "I'm not worried about being in this area," he added. DEVELOPMENT VS RELIGION Han and Uighur are sometimes neighbors but they have largely segregated lives, with cultural and language barriers cemented by mistrust. The government calls the area a model of racial harmony. "All ethnic groups live friendly together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland," reads an English-language sign in the mosque courtyard. Officials have focused on economic development as both justification for one-party rule from Beijing and proof of widespread support. "One ordinary citizen told me, 'The party is good to us. We farm for free, we don't have to pay school fees for our children, we have subsidies for renovating our houses....Where else can you live such a good life?'," Kashgar city government's Shi told a news conference about the attacks. But many Uighurs feel left out of the area's economic boom and even those who have benefited often have different priorities from their officially atheist neighbors.
"There is a lot of pressure on us," said one Uighur with a sigh. "My children cannot come in mosques until they are eighteen," he added. He asked not to be named talking about the sensitive topic.
Uighur challenge to Chinese hegemony
By Quentin Peel
The ancient city of Kashgar, commercial crossroads of the medieval Silk Road and home to the world's largest and most exotic Sunday market, seems an unlikely site for a terrorist atrocity. The western-most city in China, cut off from the rest of the country by the sand dunes of the Taklamakan desert, could scarcely be further from the politics and propaganda of the Olympics in Beijing. It is a Uighur city, whose inhabitants speak a Turkic language and are overwhelmingly Muslim. Yet this is where the Chinese say that two suspected terrorists - a taxi-driver and a vegetable-seller, according to police reports - rammed a garbage truck into a column of border police on Monday morning, then threw home-made grenades and attacked them with knives, leaving 16 dead and as many wounded. Many questions remain about the attack. Chinese officials blame a terrorist group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, supposedly campaigning for independence of the Xinjiang province, home to China's Uighur minority. ETIM is said to have links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But in the city itself, few Uighurs seem to recognise the name. By the time any independent journalists arrived at the scene, a few hours after the attack, it had been cleaned up, leaving only a couple of missing trees beside the avenue where the truck was said to have crashed. It hardly looked like the scene of a mass killing. Yet behind its atmosphere of provincial lethargy, there is tension in Kashgar. Today the ancient character of the city is becoming overlaid with the bright modern brashness of China, as assertive Han Chinese businessmen open bright chrome- and glass-fronted stores in new shopping malls, selling mobile phones and cheap western-style clothes, leaving their Uighur rivals to sell meat and vegetables, carpets and spices in the old bazaars. Most Uighur residents seem resigned to their role as a second-class ethnic minority on the fringes of the mighty Chinese empire. But there is a more outspoken younger generation that blames a deliberate policy by Beijing to settle the region with Han Chinese and gradually undermine Uighur culture. "We suffer more than the Tibetans but we have no organisation and no leaders," said one Uighur teacher, who was only prepared to speak anonymously. "We have no Dalai Lama to tell the world about us." Heavy investment in new roads, rail links and energy supplies had brought an influx of Chinese migrant workers, he said. Teaching of the Koran in Arabic was strenuously discouraged in schools. The authorities are threatening to demolish the old town at the heart of Kashgar - a maze of ancient streets that are home to at least 100,000 people - on the grounds that it cannot withstand earthquakes. Kashgar residents claim the Chinese government has deported thousands of Uighurs from Beijing to protect the Olympics and ordered all members of the minority carrying passports to surrender them to local police stations. Outside the city, there is ample evidence of the Chinese authorities worrying about security. Police road blocks halt traffic to inspect both documents and passengers. Such measures have been reinforced since the Monday attack. On this occasion, the Chinese authorities are determined that they will decide on the facts.
China: how desperation destroyed ideas of harmony on the New Frontier
Until dawn on Monday, when the peace of the city of Kashgar was broken by explosions, it would have been easy to believe in the Chinese Government’s version of the happy land of Xinjiang. The name means New Frontier, a vast area of desert and mountains remote even to most Chinese, with all the trappings of an archetypal mysterious East.
Camels still trudge through the desert along the old Silk Route and white jade is bought and sold in bazaars beneath the minarets of tiled mosques. Forty-seven races live in Xinjiang — foremost among them the Uighurs, a people who look more like Afghans than ethnic Chinese. Every one of them, according to officials, is a loyal and patriotic citizen of the People’s Republic.
“Chinese policies have won the support of all the ethnic peoples,” Shi Dagang, a senior Communist Party official in Kashgar, said yesterday. “The people fully support the Government and the leadership of the Communist Party.”
The events of the previous morning, and the experience of talking to people in Xinjiang, suggested that this was far from the truth.
It was not the ferocity of the attack that was so ominous for the Government so much as its desperation. Two Uighur men killed 16 Chinese policemen and injured 16 others with a crashed lorry, homemade bombs and knives. They expected to die; they left wills full of talk of holy war. Although they were taken alive it does not make it any less of a suicide attack: as the murderers of policemen they can expect a swift trial and execution. “There are so many people, so many, who feel like those men did, and who have sympathy for their actions,” a young Uighur in Kashgar said. “Once the Uighurs used to be a strong people, but now we have no power even here in our own home.”
Ethnically, Uighurs are a Turkic race whose homeland is at the meeting point of Asia and Europe. The area now called Xinjiang was annexed by the Chinese Empire in the 19th century, although it achieved independence briefly in the late 1940s before the Communist victory in China in 1949.
Separatist sentiment has always been present but the censorship and political repression of the Chinese Government have prevented it from forming a large-scale organisation. Small groups operated in secret but began to make their presence felt in the 1990s after the liberation of the former Soviet republics and the increasing dominance of ethnic Chinese.
In 1949 the Han Chinese made up 6 per cent of the population of Xinjiang; today they represent 41 per cent in a population of 19 million, compared with 45 per cent Uighur.
“It is obvious that their main goal is assimilation of the Uighur people,” said one Uighur man who, like the other people interviewed, asked not to be identified. “They want to absorb us and our culture into China.”
China pays lip service to freedom of religion for Muslim Uighurs but only under its own terms. Imams must be licensed by the State. Public servants, including teachers, are barred from worshipping at mosques and no one under 18 is allowed to worship or to receive religious instruction. To many Uighurs this represents an attempt to snuff out their religion over several generations by ensuring that young people grow up fully secularised.
A series of attacks and demonstrations culminated in bus bombings in 1997 in the provincial capital, Urumqi, which, until Monday, was the biggest act of political violence in the province. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, China identified itself as a victim of international terrorism and Uighur separatists as a threat — Uighur Chinese were captured in Afghanistan and incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay.
Uighur restiveness has reached new heights in the extended build-up to the Olympics, however. The Chinese authorities have announced a number of arrests, including a raid on a training camp run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in January last year. This year 82 alleged terrorists were arrested, according to officials.
Human rights organisations insisted that the Chinese anti-terror campaign had blurred the lines between genuine men of violence and those who peacefully supported independence.
“The repressive aspects are driving people to take more radical action,” Nicholas Bequelin, of Human Rights Watch, said. “If publishing a book about independence makes you a ‘terrorist’, then why not put a bomb in a police station?”
Officials said that the weapons recovered by police at the scene of this week’s attack were similar to those found last year in raids on a training base of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The group is reportedly based along China’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan and linked to al-Qaida and to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group that originated in the Middle East in the 1950s.
"Unauthorized pilgrimages are illegal religious activity,"
"Why are people unhappy? Because power is in control of the Communist Party."
Kashgar is about as far as one can get from the Chinese capital of Beijing and still be in China. In fact, there is little to indicate one is still in China. Most of the people in this desert town are Uighurs, an Islamic minority group that has clashed again and again with rule of China's majority Han ethnicity. The land surround the city is brown and bare save for irrigated orchards and fruit fields. The white caps of the Pamirs loom in the distance. Women walk through the streets in headscarves, sometimes fully covered from the hot sun and blowing sand. Men wearing skull caps greet one another with handshakes and the phrase "As-Salamu 'Alaykum," Arabic for "Peace be upon you." The language of the Uighurs is closer to Turkish than Chinese, and the architecture — Islamic domes, decorative Arabic script, grape trellises — looks more to the oasis cities of Central Asia than to the east.
Kashgar is about as far as one can get from the Chinese capital of Beijing and still be in China. In fact, there is little to indicate one is still in China. Most of the people in this desert town are Uighurs, an Islamic minority group that has clashed again and again with rule of China's majority Han ethnicity. The land surround the city is brown and bare save for irrigated orchards and fruit fields. The white caps of the Pamirs loom in the distance. Women walk through the streets in headscarves, sometimes fully covered from the hot sun and blowing sand. Men wearing skull caps greet one another with handshakes and the phrase "As-Salamu 'Alaykum," Arabic for "Peace be upon you." The language of the Uighurs is closer to Turkish than Chinese, and the architecture — Islamic domes, decorative Arabic script, grape trellises — looks more to the oasis cities of Central Asia than to the east.
An old man sitting near a sign that said "Unauthorized pilgrimages are illegal religious activity," complained that the city's Han residents were given all the economic opportunities. "Do you think people are happy here? Do you see them smiling, dancing, singing? No, because they have no work," he said. He argued that the influx of Han settlers, and the authoritarian control of the Communist Party were the sources of Uighur anger. "Why are people unhappy? Because power is in control of the Communist Party."
