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| Drennan 15 (Justine Drennan, fellow at Foreign Policy, 2-10-2015, "Is China Making Its Own Terrorism Problem Worse?," Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/09/is-china-making-its-own-terrorism-problem-worse-uighurs-islamic-state/) NV
When an SUV crashed through a crowd at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in late 2013, killing two bystanders and injuring 40, it didn’t take Chinese officials long to name culprits. The attackers, they said, had been members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority, with “links to many international extremist terrorist groups.” Police said they found a flag bearing jihadi emblems in the crashed vehicle and blamed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, a group named after the independent state China says some Uighurs want to establish in the far-western region of Xinjiang. After the attack, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called ETIM “China’s most direct and realistic security threat.” Beijing has long characterized cases of Uighur violence as organized acts of terrorism and accused individual attackers of having ties to international jihadi groups. Back in 2001, China released a document claiming that “Eastern Turkistan” terrorists had received training from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and then “fought in combats in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Uzbekistan, or returned to Xinjiang for terrorist and violent activities.” Since then, China has frequently blamed ETIM for violence in Xinjiang and elsewhere. But scholars, human rights groups, and Uighur advocates argue that China is systematically exaggerating the threat Uighurs pose to justify its repressive policies in Xinjiang. The region’s onetime-majority Uighur population of roughly 10 million, which is ethnically Turkic, has been marginalized for decades by ethnic Han Chinese migrants that Beijing has encouraged to move there in the hope that they’d help integrate the restive region into China. The repression has been getting worse. Since the region’s bloody ethnic clashes in 2009, the government has increased regulations on Muslim practices, restricting veils and beards and strictly enforcing rules that prohibit many from fasting during Ramadan or visiting mosques. Heightened security operations have led in some cases to imprisonment, executions, and suspected torture. Government materials about how to spot extremists (hint: they tend to look like Uighurs) elide religiosity with terrorism. Now, with the rise of the Islamic State, China has again ramped up its claims about Uighurs waging international jihad. Chinese government-run Global Times asserted in December that about 300 Chinese “extremists” were fighting alongside ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and in January that another 300 had traveled to Malaysia en route to joining the group. The reports suggested that many were “terrorists from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.” On Thursday, Global Times said ISIS had executed one of these Uighur recruits in September and two in December when they tried to flee its control, attributing the information to an anonymous Kurdish official. Many experts dismiss Global Times’s numbers. “I assume there are Uighurs joining ISIS, but I also assume the numbers are quite small in comparison to other groups throughout the world,” said Sean Roberts, a George Washington University professor who studies the minority group. “We’re probably talking about 20 to 30 people max.” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong-Kong-based senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, called Chinese media’s figure of 300 “implausibly high.” It’s likely that the rise of the Islamic State has given a few disenfranchised young Uighurs a cause to fight and potentially die for. Still, experts say any increase in Uighur extremism is largely due to the fact that the very policies China says are meant to combat terrorism have actually made the threat worse. Chinese reports about hundreds of Uighurs fighting with the Islamic State are likely “intended to make the Uighurs look as if they’re a threat, an Islamist terrorist organization,” said Dru Gladney, an anthropologist who studies ethnic identities in China. Several international media outlets havere peated the numbers from Chinese media. But China’s inflated claims are ultimately counterproductive, Gladney said. “They create more fear and marginalization, which exacerbates the problem.” China isn’t wholly inventing the threat. Propaganda material from a group China links to ETIM that calls itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) suggests there are at least 30 to 40 Uighur jihadis in Syria and Iraq, according to Washington Institute for Near East Policy fellow Aaron Zelin, who runs the website Jihadology.net. TIP has an increasingly active online presence thatincludes footage of young children firing guns in mountain valleys. In recent years, it has also claimed responsibility for attacks like the Tiananmen Square SUV incident via videos in which its purported leader, Abdullah Mansour, has called for more attacks. But many researchers doubt TIP’s claims, as its accounts of attacks often contradict facts on the ground that don’t seem to indicate the sophistication of internationally organized terrorist operations. The general consensus, according to Georgetown professor James Millward, is that radicalized Uighur expats, who mostly seem to be based in Pakistan rather than Iraq and Syria, haven’t provided any operational support for recent violence in China, but rather just propaganda. And any who are fighting with Middle Eastern jihadi groups don’t seem to be rising very high in their ranks, said Raffaello Pantucci, an analyst at London’s Royal United Services Institute. China, however, has been quick to label moderate Uighurs who speak out as radicals. Last year a Xinjiang court sentenced Uighur professor Ilham Tohti to life in prison on charges of “separatism,” for running a website that discussed Uighur experiences in the region. The United States condemned Tohti’s sentence, with Secretary of State John Kerry warning that silencing moderate voices “can only make tensions worse.” Indeed, acts of apparent Uighur terrorism within China have risen sharply over the past couple years. An attack last March by eight knife-wielding men and women at a train station in Yunnan province’s city of Kunming left 29 dead and at least 130 wounded. In April, people armed with knives and explosives killed three and injured 79 at the railway station in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. The next month, attackers crashed two cars into shoppers at an Urumqi market and set off explosives, killing 31 and injuring more than 90. The Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, the leading advocacy organization for the minority (which uses an alternate spelling of the group’s name), condemns violence but says China uses the threat of terrorism to stifle peaceful dissent as well. Alim Seytoff, the Washington spokesman for the group, told Foreign Policy by email that he didn’t know whether any Uighurs had joined ISIS, but if they had, “they by no means represent the vast majority of peace-loving Uyghur people, just as those who joined ISIS from the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Europe by no means represent the freedom-loving peoples of America, Great Britain, Australia and Europe.” In order to deflect criticism of its Xinjiang policies, China is “conflating the Uyghur people’s legitimate demands for human rights, religious freedom, and democracy with international Islamic terrorism,” he said. Gladney, the anthropologist, said any Uighurs with ties to ISIS were more likely driven by resentment of China than by aims of global jihad. They may want militant training to fight China and even to establish a Uighur state, he said, but they’re less interested in creating a global caliphate. Analysts also note that those who do desire a global caliphate seem to have little more than a passing interest in Uighurs’ relatively parochial aspirations, despite some tokengestures, such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s reference to Chinese violations of Muslim rights last July, and exaggerated claims about such abuses made last fall by an al Qaeda-run magazine. Download 357.18 Kb. Share with your friends:
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