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| East Asia | |
| China issues ’terrorist’ list | |
| 2003-12-15 | |
| China has issued its first "terrorist" wanted list, blaming four Muslim separatist groups and 11 individuals for a string of bombings and assassinations and calling for international assistance to track them down. The groups are accused of trying to create an independent Islamic state called "East Turkestan" in the northwest Xinjiang region, which is populated by Turkic-speaking Uighur Muslims. "East Turkestan forces inside and outside China have long plotted and executed a series of bombings, assassinations, arsons, poisoning attacks and other activities in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China," said Zhao Yongshen, an official with the Ministry of Public Security. We’ve heard about the occasional "boom". But Uighur and human rights activists abroad have rejected the "terrorist" tag and accuse Beijing of waging a campaign of politically motivated repression against ethnic and religious minority groups. "China wants to have the Uighur movement silenced by any means," said Enver Can, president of a Munich-based group called the East Turkestan National Congress. True According to Beijing, the named groups carried out their attacks "to achieve their goal of undermining national unity". China appealed to other governments to ban the groups, prohibit them from receiving support or asylum and freeze their accounts; and to prosecute and investigate the wanted individuals and hand them over to China. But Enver Can denounced the issuing of the list and the appeal for foreign support as a "misuse" of the global war on terror. He had seen nothing that could be connected with terrorism in his dealings with two of the four groups on the list and he doubted if the other two actually existed at all, he told BBC News Online. The World Uighur Youth Congress and the East Turkestan Information Centre were, like his own group, simply NGOs based in Germany whose main function was to provide information, he said. Or act as a political front, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. The two other groups on China’s list are the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organization (ETLO). Any group that has "Islamic" in it’s title is suspect to me. Chinese authorities have blamed ETIM for many of the 200 or more attacks reported in Xinjiang since 1990 and have banned the group for more than a decade. Beijing accuses ETIM of having links to the Taleban in neighbouring Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, but has produced no supporting evidence. I’m sure they do, have links, that is. After Chinese lobbying, the group was also banned last year by the US and the United Nations, despite criticism from diplomats who described it as defunct. The UN?
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| Posted by:Steve |
| #6 There must be something they want in Turkistan. 1M troops is quite and occupation force. Natural gas and oil. East Turkistan is also where the Chinese test their NBC (or WMD) arsenal. 1 million troops is nothing - excluding the land annexed to other provinces, East Turkistan is almost 4 times the size of Iraq. East Turkistan's population is about 11 million, many of whom are unemployed because of systematic Chinese discrimination, and the Chinese policy of moving in Chinese settlers at the expense of the locals (just as in Tibet). The several millenia-old Chinese expedient of setting up penal colonies in newly-conquered lands has also been used to change the demographics of this colony. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2003-12-15 11:52:00 PM |
| #5 I guess I would call them partisans. I know there is uranium that the Chinese want in Tibet. There must be something they want in Turkistan. 1M troops is quite and occupation force. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-12-15 7:43:05 PM |
| #4 Zhang Fei, do all these bombings actually happen and if so are the targets civilian? The Uighurs are doing IRA-style bombings with few civilian casualties. They're also attacking security personnel (reputedly 1 million Chinese troops of all kinds in East Turkistan). It looks like they're trying to send a message to the Chinese government. The Chinese government generally retaliates by arresting and executing male family members. College students are not allowed to practise the faith on pain of expulsion. An Uighur businesswoman was sentenced to 10 years in prison for advocating Uighur autonomy. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2003-12-15 6:05:54 PM |
| #3 Zhang Fei, do all these bombings actually happen and if so are the targets civilian? Remember several years ago when some Iraqis attempted to assasinate Uday. I wouldn't call Udayicide an act of terrorism. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-12-15 11:36:01 AM |
| #2 Surprised they didn't take another shot at the Dalai Lama while at it. They like him about as much as the others. For the same reason. |
| Posted by: Glenn (not Reynolds) 2003-12-15 11:33:00 AM |
| #1 Some of these are legitimate nationalist resistance movements we should support, not help quash. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2003-12-15 10:46:59 AM |