Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: G M on July 09, 2008, 08:11:48 AM
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http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/jun/20/us-nuke-spotters-sent-to-china-before-games/
U.S. nuke spotters sent to China before games
Secret team acts on attack fears
Bill Gertz
Friday, June 20, 2008
EXCLUSIVE:
The Bush administration has dispatched a secret team of nuclear specialists to China in response to Chinese concerns that terrorists may attempt to set off a radiological bomb during the Beijing Summer Olympics, The Washington Times has learned.
The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) was sent on Chinese intelligence indicating that any attack likely would involve a radiological device - a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material to enhance its effect - said Bush administration officials familiar with the security efforts.
The NEST deployment was disclosed as China announced this week that it is conducting a citywide drill in Beijing to test responses for a radiological bomb attack. It could not be learned whether the NEST unit will participate in the drill.
The deployment to China is unusual. NEST units usually deploy to areas in the United States and use highly classified equipment and techniques.
The team is part of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration and was ordered to Beijing as part of U.S.-China security cooperation, the Bush administration officials said.
Asked about the dispatch of the nuclear detection team, an Energy Department spokesman declined to comment, noting that NEST deployments are not announced.
Other officials familiar with the NEST said the team is made up of nuclear weapons scientists and technicians, many from Energy Department nuclear laboratories, who will provide specialized technical expertise in Beijing before the Aug. 8-24 games.
Team members will be outfitted with special nuclear detection gear and will operate in secret, the officials said.
A fact sheet from the Energy Department states that the NEST deals "with the technical aspects of nuclear or radiological terrorism."
The groups conduct search operations. If radiation is detected, they will perform an identification of nuclear materials, diagnostics and assessments of nuclear devices and bomb dismantling.
"Response teams vary in size from a five-person technical advisory team to a tailored deployment of dozens searchers and scientists who can locate and then conduct or support technical operations on a suspected nuclear device," the fact sheet states.
The exact size of the NEST being sent to Beijing could not be learned, but the officials said it will include about 10 people.
The teams use compact nuclear detection gear hidden in briefcases, knapsacks or portable coolers. They travel in vans searching for radiation sources, often at night to avoid public scrutiny.
Under the Atomic Energy Act, the State Department is the lead federal agency for deploying the team, which will work with FBI agents in Beijing.
Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said the danger of nuclear terrorism is growing and the NEST teams are limited in dealing with the threat.
"We are entering a brave new world where nuclear energy for peaceful purposes literally is providing the fuel for terror," Mr. Sokolski said. "Against this new security sore, NEST teams should be seen as a Band-Aid."
The International Atomic Energy Agency stated in a staff report May 23 that the agency and China are working behind the scenes to "bolster the country's security and minimize threats."
"We have been working with the Chinese authorities over the last 18 months to add a radiological dimension to their existing security plans so that security for the Olympics is as comprehensive as possible," Anita Nilsson, director of the IAEA's Office of Nuclear Security, was quoted as saying in the report.
The IAEA is working to integrate planning for a radiological attack into existing security efforts for police, intelligence agencies and bomb squads. The IAEA is working with Chinese authorities on radiation detection, physical protection and emergency response.
"To guard and look after the Games and its visitors - as the Chinese are doing - is a responsible way of acting," Ms. Nilsson said.
The agency said no specific radiological terrorist-threat information was issued.
The Beijing city government announced Tuesday that it will conduct its first exercise to test responses to a nuclear attack in preparation for the Olympics.
The drill will involve several Chinese agencies including police, fire and environmental responders, Chinese government official Shan Qingsheng told the state-run Xinhua news agency.
The drill will simulate the effects of a radiological bomb set off inside the Olympic stadium.
The dispatch of the nuclear team to China has raised concerns among some counterintelligence officials because of the past compromise of nuclear weapons secrets to China.
The CIA determined that China obtained through espionage details of every deployed nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal, and the FBI has failed to identify the source despite investigating for more than a decade.
Computer hard drives from a NEST laptop computer that contained nuclear weapons secrets used to disarm weapons disappeared from a Los Alamos National Laboratory vault in May 2000.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, countering nuclear terrorism was made a high priority for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, based on intelligence reports that al Qaeda planned to assemble and use a radiological bomb in an attack in the United States.
In 2002, the FBI and NEST conducted joint monitoring of Muslim sites in Washington and five other cities looking for signs of a nuclear material, according to U.S. News & World Report.
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http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/etim-pr.cfm
In the Spotlight:
East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)
Dec. 9, 2002 Standard Version
The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is a separatist Muslim group operating in China's western Xinjiang province. ETIM is the most militant of the various groups in the Xinjiang region that demand separation from China and the creation of an independent state called East Turkestan. China has long viewed the ETIM and similar groups as a threat to its territorial integrity, and after the attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001, executed a harsh crackdown on the region by increasing its military presence, detaining suspected members, and limiting religious rights. Chinese authorities blame separatist groups, including ETIM, for more than 200 terrorist attacks since 1990, resulting in 162 deaths and more than 440 injuries.
While China has portrayed its battle with ETIM as part of a worldwide struggle against international terrorism, the group's global reach and links to al Qaeda are disputed. In August 2002, the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush froze the group's U.S. assets, and, the following month, the United Nations added ETIM to its "list of terrorists and terrorist supporters associated with Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network." Besides Xinjiang, ETIM cells are said to be operating in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. U.S. officials claim that the group has a "close financial relationship" with al Qaeda, based on information they received from militants currently detained at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A January 2002 Chinese government study found that ETIM members crossed into Afghanistan, where they received training from al Qaeda members, and returned back to Xinjiang to foment terrorist activity. According to the report, ETIM has received money, weapons and support from al Qaeda.
At the same time, critics claim the U.S. decision to recognize ETIM as a terrorist group was a political move, designed to appease China during UN Security Council negotiations over a resolution on Iraq. Human rights groups have accused China of repressing Xinjiang's native Uighur population, the region's Turkic-speaking ethnic majority who practice a moderate form of Sufi Islam. Until recently, the United States had accused China of using the war against terrorism as an excuse to clamp down on political dissent in the region, and castigated the Chinese military for human rights violations against Uighur nationalists. ETIM leader Hahsan Mahsum has denied any connections between al Qaeda and his group.
East Turkestan maintained a measure of independence until the early 1950s, when Mao's victorious rebel armies turned to the peripheries and began securing Chinese borders, capturing Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan. It is the country's largest province, estimated to have approximately 40 million residents, as well as large deposits of oil, gas and uranium. The native Uighurs resisted Chinese occupation until the 1960s, but failed to win support from neighboring Muslim states because of their fractured tribal nature. Since the mid-1980s, however, an active pan-Islamic movement has attempted to cement the opposing groups together, a move that Chinese officials see as a tremendous potential threat.
China has pursued political support for its actions in Xinjiang for several years now. In 1999, Algeria and Saudi Arabia issued statements in support of Chinese territorial integrity after a visit by Chinese president Jiang Zemin, a move that was seen by some as condoning Chinese oppression of Uighurs. China maintains strict supervision over the region, encouraging "moderate Islam" under the leadership of "national imams", who are government-employed officials. As in Tibet, Chinese resettlement policies have resulted in a sharp rise of Han Chinese among the population. The number of Chinese residents has increased from 200,000 to 6 million over the past 30 years. Other counterterrorist measures include the transfer of large reinforcements to the border area in order to prevent the smuggling of weapons and people from neighboring countries, and harsh punishment of people suspected of involvement with the group. Human rights activists claim that during 1997 and the later part of 1996, some 1,000 Uighurs were executed and more than 10,000 were incarcerated for political reasons.
While Uighur dissatisfaction over Chinese rule has been a constant thorn in China's side over the past several decades, until recently, protests were limited to riots and demonstrations. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of several Muslim Soviet republics bordering Xinjiang, as well as the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East, have contributed to a rise in terrorist activity in the region. Five Uighurs were killed in riots near Kashgar in April 1990, and the region was put under martial law for several months. In February 1992, six people were killed in a powerful bus explosion in Urumqi, and three months later 22 people were killed in riots in Baaren. The various East Turkestan liberation groups showed signs of consolidation when, in September 1994, the five largest Uighur organizations - the East Turkestan Islamic Party, the East Turkestan People's Party, the Eastern Turkestan Gray Wolf Party, the Eastern Turkestan Independence Organization, and the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Front - met secretly in Gulja to discuss coordinating their activities. In 1995, the province saw sabotage of railroad tracks and oil fields, resulting in extensive damage. The following year, approximately 5,000 Uighurs were arrested after a series of attacks on Chinese interests.
Despite the government crackdown, the separatists' violent attacks have not abated. In March 1997, a bus explosion killed two people and injured 30 on the heels of several bus explosions that took place in Urumqi, the region's capital. An Uighur spokesman, in exile in Turkey, claimed responsibility for the attack, and announced that more Uighurs living in Kazakhstan were prepared to execute additional attacks. Attacks in the form of arsons, explosions, assassinations and kidnappings continued throughout 1998. In 1999, the Chinese government arrested hundreds of activists from dozens of various separatist organizations, a period that saw a significant decline in ETIM's activity. Since then, there have been several armed clashes between the Uighurs and Chinese security forces. In June 2000, a group of Uighurs ambushed a Chinese delegation to Xinjiang, killing one representative and seriously injuring two others.
Although ETIM has traditionally focused on Chinese targets, it may have plans to also attack American interests. In May 2002, two of its members were accused of planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, and were subsequently deported from Kyrgyzstan to China.
Sources
Amer Taheri, 'East Turkestan as a Chinese Colony,' The International Taklamakan Human Rights Association (ITHRA)
Council on Foreign Relations - ' Terrorism Questions & Answers: East Turkestan Islamic Movement'
'Beijing enlists Arab help to fight Islamic movement in east Turkestan,' Muslimedia International, Nov. 16-30, 1999
Boaz Ganor, 'Xinjiang: Profile of a Restless Province,' The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism
By Seva Gunitskiy
CDI Research Assistant
vgunitskiy@cdi.org
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Special Dispatch Series - No. 1947
June 3, 2008 No. 1947
"The Islamic Party of Turkestan" [i.e. Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Chinese Turkestan] Posts Its Platform on an Islamist Forum
"The Islamic Party of Turkestan" is a jihadist group operating in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (also known as Chinese Turkestan or Uyghuristan), a region in northwestern China inhabited mostly by Muslims.
On May 21, 2008, the Islamist forum Al-Ikhlas (hosted by Piradius.net in Malaysia) posted the party's platform, as issued by its media department. The document sets out the party's goals and beliefs.
The following are excerpts from the platform document:
"We are a group that promotes jihad for the sake of Allah... Its members, [united in] monotheism, devoutness, piety, and jihad for the sake of Allah, aim to liberate Muslim East Turkestan from the apostate Communist Chinese occupation... and impose shari'a [law] in [this region]. By cooperating with the Muslim mujahideen throughout the Islamic world [we aim to] restore the Islamic Caliphate and impose shari'a throughout the world."
"Our Goals Are:
"To train the Muslim Turkestani youth to wage jihad..."
"To prepare the Muslim Turkestani masses [for jihad] and to bring them back to the right path [i.e. to the Salafi creed]..."
"To cooperate with all the groups waging jihad for the sake of Allah throughout the world, in order to repel the attacks of the apostates... and drive the Crusaders, Zionists and apostates from our Islamic world..."
"Principles:
"We believe that, like most Muslim countries, East Turkestan is under the direct and indirect occupation of apostates... and is governed by secular and democratic constitutions and laws...
"We believe that if Muslim countries are under direct or indirect occupation... waging jihad against those who rule them and subject them to apostate laws becomes a mandatory [duty].
"We believe that, since the apostate attacker has invaded our lands, jihad in the path of Allah has become a personal duty incumbent upon every Muslim in Turkestan..."
"We deem it necessary to impose shari'a in East Turkestan and in all [other] Muslim countries after they are liberated from the imperialists and apostates...
"We believe that any presence of the apostate Chinese occupiers - be it military, governmental, political or economic - is a legitimate target for jihad... This statement is a declaration of war upon them, and they must therefore leave East Turkestan immediately."
"We consider the presence of Chinese immigrants in Muslim East Turkestan illegitimate. They represent the most tangible form of Chinese occupation... They must leave Turkestan and return to their places of origin. This statement is [our] first and last warning [to them]...
"We reject... all symbols of Jahili [i.e. non-Islamic] nationalism, as well as the deviant [ideology of] democracy in all its forms, and [declare] our opposition to them...
"We are an independent, organized Islamic group, under the command of an Emir and a leadership... in accordance with the Islamic principles of shura [consultation]."
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP194708
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April 11, 2008
Xinjiang Province - The Islamic Jihad Battlefront in China
By Janet Levy
When the 2008 Summer Olympic Games were awarded to Beijing seven years ago, hope arose that China's new-found status as a modern, world power and position in the world media spotlight would prompt increased tolerance and democracy nationwide. Clearly, that optimism has been dashed by the turmoil in Tibet.
Stellar economic performance and reforms, viewed sanguinely by the West as a sure route to liberalization, have occurred in China devoid of political reform. China's use of brutal force and massive arrests against Tibetan protestors bear witness to this lack of progress. Indeed, China today stands revealed as one of the worst perpetrators of human rights violations and religious repression in the world.
Among those singled out for similar harshness and violence is a portion of China's 30-million-strong Muslim community: the Islamic jihadists of the northwestern province of Xinjiang and surrounding areas. With Tibet in mind, the West may be tempted to view this decades-long unrest in Central Asia as yet another example of Chinese aggression and expansionism against a beleaguered population seeking independence. Yet, such a view is shortsighted and dangerous. For, in truth, the Islamic Jihadists of China's Xinjiang are linked to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. Their terrorist methods and ideology are of a piece with the larger Islamic Jihadist goal to overthrow existing governments and install a religious theocracy. They, in fact, represent the Chinese battlefront of the worldwide Islamic Jihad.
China's Muslim Population
Inaccessibility to China's far flung regions and the exclusion of questions about religion in the last three national censuses make it difficult to obtain accurate figures about the Chinese Muslim population. But it is estimated at around 30 million, the second largest religious group in China after Buddhists. About 20 million are Hui, concentrated mostly in northwestern China. Another 8.5 million are Uyghurs who reside in Xinjiang province.
The Hui, culturally similar to the majority Han Chinese, follow Islamic dietary laws and some customs of Muslim dress but have engaged in only limited jihadist activity. Evidence exists of uprisings in two Hui villages, as well as some protest activity against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. However, discrimination and economic deprivation against the Uyghurs and their push for a separate state have made for more extensive and organized jihadist activities by the militant, Uyghur Muslims throughout Central Asia. The nature of this activity -- the extent to which it is an uprising for a separatist state or supports a pan-Islamist agenda -- is difficult to assess given Communist China's history of repression of religious groups, rampant human rights abuses and lack of a free press, but some conclusions can be made.
The Uyghurs
The desire for an independent Uyghur state is a fairly recent development, dating from the 1930's, but the Uyghurs themselves are a historically nomadic people of Turkic Indo-European origin who can be traced back to the 700s.
The province in which they live, Xinjiang, is large and sparsely populated, representing one-sixth of China's total land mass. It borders Tibet, Russia, Kazakstan, Kyryzstan, Tajikstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Indian state of Kashmir. Xinjiang is rich in oil, gas and mineral deposits. It also has numerous military installations and, until 1996, nuclear testing facilities, giving it significant and strategic military importance to China.
The Uyghurs have a separate language, culture, religion and identity from the dominant Han, who are deemed the "true," ethnic Chinese. Uyghurs hold a multiplicity of identities, including Muslim, Uyghur, Turk or Chinese and have historically been opposed to Han or majority Chinese rule. The Uyghurs in Xinjiang maintain an informal ethnic apartheid. They view the Chinese as inferior occupiers, equate Confucianism and Buddhism with idolatry, and frequent their own stores and restaurants. An estimated 23,000 mosques exist in the region, with many small neighborhood facilities, some financed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
According to Igor Rotar, a Central Asia correspondent for The Jamestown Foundation, Uyghurs "tend to be more zealous Muslims than their Central Asian neighbors. The majority of local, married women wear burqas, which is quite rare in Central Asia, and middle-aged men prefer to have beards."[1] Rotar says a Uyghur Muslim in Xinjiang explained to him that "In the Quran it is written that a Muslim should not live under the authority of infidels, and that is why we will never reconcile with the Chinese occupation." China's restrictive policy on family size is also a point of contention in this community.
In direct contrast to this view, visiting Associated Press reporter, William Foreman, recently observed, "Most Uighurs practice a moderate form of Islam. The men wear ornate skullcaps, or "doppi," while most women favor head scarves but rarely cover their faces. Many can be seen dressed in tight skirts or stylish hip-hugging designer jeans and high heels."[2]
As a non-Han people, Uyghurs have been viewed by the Chinese as inferior and portrayed as untrustworthy, shiftless, warring troublemakers. They have been discriminated against in employment and are victims of economic deprivation in an underdeveloped area. Drug use, particularly opium and hashish, is rampant and has added to the hopelessness and poverty. A high incidence of AIDS due to heroin injection appears to have attracted little government intervention to combat the problem.
The Push for Uyghur Independence
In the 1930s, Uyghur separatists proposed a constitution for a Uyghur republic that referenced Islam and shariah law but focused primarily on economic development and political freedom. The occupation of northern Xinjiang in 1949 by China's military, the People's Liberation Army, was viewed as a hopeful sign because China's leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, pledged an end to "Great Han chauvinism." In reality, Chinese Communists valued Xinjiang, not for egalitarian reasons, but as a strategic and natural, resource-rich asset. Meanwhile, the Han-dominated, Communist Party asserted a unified, Chinese identity and sought to eliminate the distinct Uyghur culture and history.
During the Cold War, the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, surrounded by the Chinese and the USSR, had limited options for self-determination. In the 1980s when restrictions eased in China against ethnic minorities and religious practices, the Uyghurs spoke out about discrimination and injustice. They reasserted their demands for a homeland, which continue to this day. An active Uyghur exile community in Central Asia, estimated at 400,000, has sought to draw attention to the plight of the Uyghurs and their quest for a separate state.
The Uyghur-Jihadist Link
Motivated by legitimate desires for independence, militant Turkic Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang have, since the 1970's, engaged in terrorist activities. These include killing police and military officers, robbing banks, rioting and bombing. The Uyghurs in Xinjiang, members of the 400,000-strong Uyghurs in the diaspora and other Islamist groups in Central Asia have become part of a pan-Islamic movement that developed since the mid-1980's and includes terrorist activity that intensified after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Islamists in Xinjiang have reportedly received financial support and training from the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and the Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan.
The potential for the Islamization of the region and the ability of Islamists to capitalize on the existing conflict between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government is a real concern to the Communist government.
The strongest militant Islamist groups in the region include the East Turkistan Liberation Organization (ETLO), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), allegedly linked to Al Qaeda. The IMU renamed itself the Islamic Party of Turkistan and publicly declared that it seeks to create an Islamic state across Central Asia and expand its recruitment efforts throughout the region. For traditional Uyghur separatists, these groups represent a source of wealthy supporters who offer funding, weapons support and terrorist training. They also help buttress and reinforce the global Islamist movement into China. For example, in 1989, Al Qaeda set up a base in China with links to the ETIM and the IMU.
Xinjiang's porous border with Kazakhstan, Tajikstan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan facilitates the conducting of terrorist training just outside of China, as well as the movement of weapons, explosives and terrorist operatives. It also enables the indoctrination of Muslims in extremist ideology out of the reach of China.
China reports that the ETIM has ties to Central Asia Uyghur Hezbollah in Kazakstan and that 1,000 Uyghurs were trained by Al Qaeda. They maintain that 600 of them escaped to Pakistan, 300 were caught by U.S. forces on the battlefield in Afghanistan and 110 returned to China and were caught. At the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan, U.S. forces did, in fact, report that 15 Uyghurs were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
According to B. Raman, former head of the Counterterrorism Division of India's external intelligence agency, the Uyghurs have been approached by the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a political party whose goal is to unite all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state. The Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan and in other parts of Central Asia, has sought to use the Uyghurs to set up sleeper cells in Xinjiang.
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Home-Grown Uyghur Terrorism
However, it would be inaccurate to characterize the Uyghurs as completely influenced by outside jihadists, for, their own history is rife with violence in the name of Islam. The first major uprising of Uyghur Muslims took place in Northwestern China in 1990 with a series of protests. As a result, China deployed troops and began to conduct military exercises in the region.
In 1996, following the first meeting of the countries that would later form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), China began clamping down on the Uyghur Muslims. In an effort toward political stabilization, the Chinese implemented measures to improve the economy of the area and built roads, rails and pipelines connecting Xinjiang with Central Asia. But an unanticipated result of this economic expansion was the establishment of alliances in border states for Islamic terrorist training and the smuggling of drugs, arms and people.
In 1997, Uyghur Islamists were responsible for several bombings, including a bus bombing in Beijing. Although an Uyghur terrorist group claimed responsibility for the Beijing bombing, Chinese media covered up this fact as they did with many other terrorist attacks prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.
China's Position on Terrorism - Pre & Post 9/11
This attitude began to change just prior to 9/11, when Taliban fighters from Afghanistan began incursions into Xinjiang. The activities prompted formation in June of 2001 of the China-initiated, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO was designed to combat Islamism by setting up a terrorist monitoring center, promoting economic development throughout the region and establishing Chinese and Russian hegemony over the area.
At its first meeting, it reached an agreement calling for cooperation to prevent terrorism and insurgency, mutual identification of terrorists and terrorist organizations, suppression of terrorist activities and extradition of terrorists. Member states also agreed to create rapid deployment forces, conduct joint military exercises, investigate sources of terrorist financing and exchange information on illicit WMD manufacturing, purchase, storage and movement.
This represented a huge step forward because, up to 9/11, the Chinese government was not open about the existence and extent of jihadist activities within its country. Chinese authorities viewed acts of terrorism as a police, law-and-order issue rather than a global jihadist effort and believe that disseminating public reports on crime spreads the activity and increases unrest.
After 9/11, China changed its position to show that it, too, was a victim of the Islamist jihad. The government admitted the proliferation of terrorist activities over the previous decade, listing explosions, assassinations, poisonings, rioting and vehicle fires. At the time, they claimed to have uncovered links between Uyghur Muslim groups and Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban and Hizb ut-Tahrir.
At a press conference in Pakistan in 2002, Chinese government officials publicized the arrest of a high-level Uyghur terrorist by Pakistani authorities. The Chinese also requested that the United States repatriate 300 Uyghurs captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, who were alleged fighters for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
In 2003, China signed an extradition treaty with Pakistan to remand terrorists from the ETIM and the ETLO, whom they believed were affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and who had received training and funding from Osama Bin Laden. The Chinese government pressured Pakistan, known for its alliance with the Taliban and its promulgation of jihadist ideology, to turn over known Uyghur militants who had escaped to Pakistan. This appeal has not produced significant results.
Recent Uyghur Violence
Jihadist violence has continued to escalate over the last few years. In 2004, Uyghurs trained by the IMU were suspected of involvement in an explosion in Balochistan, Pakistan, in which three Chinese engineers were killed. The following year during the Eid-al-Adha religious celebrations, two explosions from suicide bombings near the Kazakstan border in Xinjiang killed 13 people and injured 18.
In January of 2007, the Chinese raided an ETIM terrorist training camp close to the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders. The raid, in which 18 terrorist suspects died, yielded a large explosives and weapons cache. Also seized was a 32-minute video urging Uyghur Muslims to make use of key public events as a platform to publicize their grievances worldwide. It contained references to a "World Islamic Resistance Book" and the establishment of China as a jihad zone, plus included an impressive display of weapons and explosives and a demonstration of vehicle bombings.
On March 7, 2008, two men believed to be Pakistanis and a Uyghur woman who was trained by a Pakistan-based terrorist group attempted to sabotage a China Southern Airlines flight from Xinjiang to Beijing. The woman, who traveled first class, carried flammable liquids onto the aircraft that but failed to ignite them in the plane lavatory. All three terrorists involved carried Pakistani passports.
Chinese Counter-terrorist Measures
To curtail incidents like those cited above of a potentially burgeoning Islamist threat, the Chinese government maintains strict supervision over Xinjiang and has dealt harshly with terrorist activity. China has successfully altered the demography of the region by repopulating it with Han Chinese, now the majority. To curb the influence of Islam, the government engages in surveillance of mosques, restricts the participation of youth and women in mosque activities, monitors the content of services and curtails participation in the Haj. Muslim clerics or imams who serve in the region must complete their training at a state-controlled seminary and teach "moderate" Islam under the leadership of the state.
A heavy police presence around the mosques and the military exists at the border to prevent smuggling of people and weapons. Police routinely cordon off areas in which terrorist incidents or rioting occurs and remove and imprison the agitators before they reopen the area.
Potential Threats to U.S. Security
The Xinjiang-inspired violence is not restricted, however, to attacks just against the Chinese. In May of 2002, a planned attack by the ETIM on the U.S. Embassy in neighboring Kyrgyzstan was thwarted. At the time, Pakistani authorities found blueprints indicating the location of the embassy, the American military base and a synagogue.
In view of the strategic military and economic importance of Central Asia, the need to protect its interests in the region and pressure from the Chinese, the United States agreed to classify some local groups, like the ETIM, as terrorist organizations and freeze their American assets. Of course, geopolitical concerns over maintaining good, Sino-U.S. relations played a major part in the State Department's classification. The United States wants to ensure continued U.S. military presence in Central Asia in the midst of China's growing economic and political power in the region and any Chinese attempts to check U.S. influence in the region.
Politics is also playing a larger role as the Olympics draw closer and the international spotlight focuses on China's oppression of Tibetans, Falun Gong and other repressed groups. While some may be prone to view the Uyghur Muslims through the prism of China's historical crackdown on religious groups and ethnic minorities, the record of historical, jihadist terrorist activity, listed above, would argue against it.
Despite the Unites States' own grievances with China, serious questions should be raised to better understand the global jihad, its role in China and our fight in the war against Islamic terrorism.
We should ask: how much of the Uyghur separatist struggle has been co-opted by the Islamists and is being used to breed fellow travelers for the jihadist agenda? Who are victims -- the Uyghurs, China or both? Is it realistic for China to fear Islamic extremism, territorial expansion and the spread of insurgency to other aggrieved groups? Is China using the excuse of terrorism as an excuse for a crackdown on the Muslim Uyghurs or is China a victim of the extensive network of Islamic terrorist groups in Xinjiang and Central Asia? Have the Islamists joined forces with Uyghur separatists to capitalize on the struggle in Tibet? Is the West failing to differentiate between radical Islam and legitimate human rights grievances? Is China's "Strike Hard" policy serving to radicalize the Uyghurs and causing them to find common cause with the Islamists? Finally, how can the United States assist China in the mutual fight against global Islamic terrorism and, at the same time, successfully address issues of religious repression and civil rights?
As China faces world scrutiny and the threat of disruptions and boycotts against the upcoming Olympics for its ruthless civil rights violations, we should be mindful of the growing Islamization of the Xinjiang province under the Uyghur conflict. Clearly, jihadist groups are active in the region and have coordinated terrorist actions, recruitment, training and financing. They are dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic state in Central Asia, related to the worldwide Islamic jihad.
As has been evident in other parts of the world, Islamists deftly graft their agenda onto regional political struggles to form unholy alliances and advance their pan-Islamist agenda. We should not be deceived by our zeal to focus on human rights abuses in China or focus entirely on Tibet and the separatists. Instead, this important component of unrest in Central Asia needs its own specific analysis, political action and focused response.
[1] Rotar, Igor, "The Growing Problem of Uighur Separatism", China Brief, Volume 4, Issue 8, The Jamestown Foundation, April 15, 2004, http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=395&issue_id=2935&article_id=236612
[2] Foreman, William, "China Faces Muslim Resentment in West," Yahoo News, April 9, 2008, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080409/ap_on_re_as/china_resentful_muslims
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/xinjiang_province_the_islamic.html at July 09, 2008 - 11:36:14 AM EDT
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Special Dispatch Series - No. 1791
December 21, 2007 No. 1791
Leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan: ‘Allah Willing, America Will Soon Be Annihilated… We Will Reach America… The Eyes of the Nation of Muhammad are set on Washington, London, Moscow, Paris, Delhi, Beijing'
Following are excerpts from a speech by Muhammad Taher Al-Farouq, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which was posted on December 3, 2007 at http://ek-is.org, a website hosted in Tampa, FL, and owned by NOC4 Hosts Inc.
To view the clip, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1636.htm.
Muhammad Taher Al-Farouq: "I would like to congratulate the nation of Muhammad, and especially the mujahideen. In this holy month of Ramadhan, we ask them that, as part of their resistance to the enemies of God, His Prophet, the enemies of the Koran, Islam, and the Muslims, they increase their martyrdom and jihad operations, and fight the sworn enemies of Islam - the Jews, the Christians, and the hypocrites - and carry out the best jihad operations.
[...]
"The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is part of the nation of Muhammad, and it is known by this name to friends and foes alike. The enemies of Islam know this movement by this name. This movement is connected to the Islamic Emirate we had in Afghanistan, under the leadership of the Emir of the Believers, Mullah Muhammad Omar.
[...]
"Our goal is to implement Islamic law, the law of the Koran, in God's kingdom. In other words, this kingdom, which belongs to God, should be ruled by the laws of God alone.
[...]
"Today, the enemies of Islam object to this goal, just like they did during the time of Muhammad, but let me announce to the believers, to the nation of Muhammad, that in the very near future, thanks to the sacrifices made by the nation of Muhammad, we will regain our glory of past times.
[...]
"As long as there are infidels and enemies of God in His kingdom, this movement will continue its jihad. Today, the nation of Muhammad has everything but an Islamic caliphate. We have clerics, mujahideen, and fedayeen, but not a caliphate. One of the most important goals of the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan is to establish an Islamic caliphate at any price.
[...]
"We take pride in the brothers in all the countries of Islam - in Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Palestine, Chechnya, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Africa, and Asia, and in all the countries of the world. We take pride in their jihad to elevate the word of Allah. We have good relations with them. As I've said, their joy is our joy, and their sorrow is our sorrow. We all constitute one body. We all have a common goal against the infidels. When mujahideen are taken by the enemy - whether the Americans or other infidels - to Guantanamo or other prisons, it does not ask them to which nation or community they belong. It treats them all the same way, and tortures all of them the same way."
[...]
Interviewer: "Which countries help you?"
[...]
Al-Farouq: "The countries that supported and helped God's Messenger help us.
[...]
"The money in the infidel banks is the daily bread of the mujahideen. The convoys come from Pakistan, through Torkhan or Karachi, are the daily bread of the mujahideen. The money in the banks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere is the daily bread of the mujahideen. The governments that use this money against the Muslims and Islam acquire bombs and airplanes with it, in order to bomb the Muslims. Therefore, this money is the [legitimate] booty of the Muslims.
[...]
"I always tell the mujahideen that if they want to get money, they should beat the infidels and take their money. You must hit them on the head and take their money. You should rob their banks and take the money. You should take their people prisoner, just like the Prophet did. Don't think this is a sin, because the Prophet Muhammad himself exchanged prisoners for ransom. There's nothing wrong with collecting money in exchange for prisoners.
[...]
"Allah willing, America will soon be annihilated, just like the USSR was annihilated. We are convinced of this.
[...]
"The people who made our nation proud by carrying out the 9/11 martyrdom operations in Washington and New York were the 19 best people of our nation. All the martyrs in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere should be seen as role models.
[...]
"Allah willing, we will reach America. The men of this nation will reach America. The goal of this campaign is not only Kabul, Kandahar, or Baghdad. The eyes of the nation of Muhammad are set on Washington, London, Moscow, Paris, Delhi, Beijing, and other countries. This is our goal and, Allah willing, we will get there."
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http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD179107
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China training for Games 'attack'
The UN's nuclear watchdog says it is training Chinese security officials to deal with a possible radiological attack during the Olympics Games.
Nuclear experts have staged simulated exercises with Chinese officials, although the watchdog said it was unaware of any specific threat.
Drills included what to do if a so-called "dirty bomb" was smuggled into an Olympic venue in Beijing.
The games are due to be held in the Chinese capital from 8-24 August.
"The awareness after the 9/11 attacks [was] that there are basically no limits for what can be done," said Anita Nilsson, of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Office of Nuclear Security.
"In this case it is better to be proactive, to review the practices and to put them up to standard and to implement them," she said.
IAEA and Chinese officials have carried out a series of simulated exercises in Beijing, including how to respond to the discovery of a suspected "dirty bomb" in a restaurant.
A "dirty bomb" is a weapon designed to contaminate the local environment by disbursing radioactive material.
Peter Colgan, one of Dr Nilsson's deputies, said the exercises had gone "very well".
Dr Nilsson warned that the same threats would exist for the London Olympics in 2012.
"There is a major shift in threat perception over the last five to 10 years. And we have to take that into account and to do accordingly, whether it is Olympic games in Beijing or London. These measures must be implemented."
Organisers of the 2012 games say "work is progressing to ensure a safe and secure" event.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7412254.stm
Published: 2008/05/23 13:52:49 GMT
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http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23521751-5005521,00.html
Olympic terror plot 'nightmare'
By staff writers
April 11, 2008 06:17am
AUSTRALIA'S hottest Olympic gold medal prospect Libby Trickett has labelled a plot to kidnap athletes and journalists at the Beijing Olympics "every competitor's worst nightmare".
China says it has cracked a terrorist group plotting to kidnap foreigners during the Beijing Olympics and another that planned to carry out attacks with toxic materials.
"The violent terrorist group plotted to kidnap foreign journalists, tourists, and athletes during the Beijing Olympics and, by creating an international impact, achieve the goal of wrecking the Beijing Olympics," Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping said of the kidnap plot.
But critics are sceptical, saying Beijing is inflating the terror threat to justify a crackdown on dissent ahead of the Olympics.
Athlete's reaction
Trickett – a hot chance to win six gold medals in Beijing – told The Courier-Mail the threat was even more real because of the bloody legacy of the 1972 Munich Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists.
She said it was a relief to know Chinese authorities had foiled the plot in question.
"It's a credit to them (the Chinese Government) that they were aware that these things can happen and they were looking for signs of dangers – that's a huge comfort," she said.
"Obviously that's very scary news, but the Chinese Government and the governments of all other nations will be taking those threats very seriously.
"I won't say concerns won't cross my mind at some point – because to be honest they already have.
"But you can't live your life based on threats and being worried about what might happen – because it may or may not happen."
But for Karen Seebohm, the Brisbane mother of the Australian swimming team's youngest member – 100m backstroke gold medal contender 15-year-old Emily – the news was horrifying.
"Holy hell, that's frightening. The fact that she's very young makes it even more of a worry," she said.
"That would be very worrying for any mother to have to deal with that sort of thing – it doesn't matter how old they are I would think."
The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) said today that its athletes had no reason to worry about the alleged terrorist threats.
AOC vice president Ron Harvey said security was sufficient and was being constantly reviewed.
"From day one, planning for Beijing has taken into account some of these security aspects and we've been working very hard with the Australian embassy and the Australian Government officials in that area. We believe the Chinese security forces are doing a very good job and we've got faith in them."
Two more foiled plots
News of the kidnap plan follows the revelation by China of two other terror plots last month, but there has been skepticism over whether Beijing is inflating a terror threat to justify tighter control on dissent ahead of the Olympics.
Both plots were allegedly uncovered in the vast and remote Xinjiang region in northwest China, which borders Central Asia and has a strong Muslim population of Turkic-speaking ethnic Uighurs.
Wu said they were both orchestrated by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which is listed by the United Nations and the United States as a terrorist organisation.
The kidnapping plot, which involved 35 people, was cracked in late March and early April in several areas of Xinjiang including the regional capital Urumqi, according to Wu, whose comments were posted on the government's main website.
In the other case, police in January broke up a group whose leaders were "sent from abroad" by ETIM to stage attacks in Beijing and Shanghai with toxic materials and explosives, he said.
Targets were to include "hotels, government buildings, military bases and other establishments".
If discovered by police, the plotters were ordered to "perish together", according to Wu, who added some of its participants had been sent abroad for training, without giving specifics.
Police allegedly seized explosives and Islamic "Jihad" training materials in the raids on both groups.
Wu did not say why the government had waited to release the information.
Threats exaggerated?
China maintains it faces an imminent terror threat from ETIM.
However, some Xinjiang experts and exiled Uighurs have said China vastly inflates the threat to tighten its control over the restive and oil-rich region.
Many Uighurs say they have suffered widespread repression under nearly six decades of Chinese rule, and have chafed as Han Chinese flooded into their homeland and dramatically changed their way of life.
Xinjiang officials had said last month that police on January 27 smashed a terrorist group planning an attack on the Beijing Olympics and that a separate bid to blow up a Chinese airliner was foiled in March.
Chinese authorities have refused to publicise evidence relating to either incident, fuelling accusations from rights groups and exiles that the plots had been fabricated by Beijing.
China said two terrorists were killed and 15 captured in the January 27 raid in Urumqi, but residents in the area told an AFP journalist who went there last week they had no recollection of any violent clash.
After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, China pressured the United States - which sought Beijing's help in its so-called "war on terror" - to list ETIM as a terrorist group, Xinjiang experts say.
Critics say China has since abused that listing to justify crackdowns in the region.
- AFP, Courier Mail
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4304504.ece
From Times Online
July 9, 2008
Police shoot dead five members of 'Chinese al-Qaeda'
Jane Macartney in Beijing
With less than a month to go before the Olympics open in Beijing, Chinese police have shot dead five members of a Muslim ethnic minority they said were bent on waging holy war inspired by al-Qaeda and setting up an independent state.
Several dozen police entered a residential building hunting for three men believed to have attacked an ethnic Han Chinese woman in a city hairdressing salon in late May but opened fire after an officer was wounded as they tried to enter an apartment to make an arrest, it was reported.
One witness said he heard several dozen shots about three minutes after the police entered the building. He said he counted about 20 police vehicles entering the compound and saw plainclothes police wearing body armour and equipped with light firearms.
State media said when police raided the apartment where 15 ethnic Uighurs were hiding, several rushed out wielding knives, shouting “sacrifice for Allah”.
One officer said the police were forced to use teargas and to open fire, killing five on the spot and wounding two. The wounded were taken to hospital and the other nine people were captured. Witnesses said they saw four ambulances arrive in the compound within 20 minutes of the shooting.
Some 30 knives, the biggest measuring 50 centimetres long, were found in the apartment. There was no report that more serious weapons such as guns, grenades or explosives had been found.
The police officer said: “The suspects confessed they had all received training on the launching of a ’holy war.’ Their aim was to kill Han people, the most populous ethnic group in China whom they took as heretics, and found their own state.”
The incident in Urumqi, the regional capital of the far western Xinjiang region bordering Kazakhstan, was the deadliest encounter to be reported for years between Chinese security forces and suspected militants from the Uighur minority.
The Uighurs, who are engaged in a low-intensity insurgency to demand an independent state of East Turkestan in Xinjiang province, have been blamed for sporadic incidents of violence although no serious attacks have been reported in China for more than a decade.
Washington accuses one group of being linked with al-Qaeda.
China has repeatedly warned of a terrorist threat from Xinjiang and announced at least five separate raids this year in the region that have foiled attacks. In April, police said they crushed a group that was plotting to kidnap foreign journalists, tourists and athletes during the Olympics. In January, police in Urumqi said they broke up a group whose leaders were planning to stage attacks in Beijing and Shanghai with toxic materials and explosives.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, the top official responsible for the Olympics, said yesterday that security was the single most important factor for a successful games. “A safe Olympics is the most significant symbol of a successful Olympics in Beijing, and also the most important symbol to display the national image of China.”
In the latest sign of how determined China is to ensure a smooth Olympics, Beijing will from next week place hundreds of security staff at checkpoints on roads into the city with sniffer dogs and metal detectors.
China has been increasing anti-terror preparations and the top police official last year labelled terrorism as the biggest threat to the event. But this causes a dilemma for a Government eager to show the world that China is a stable nation where visitors can travel without fear of violence. The last known Uighur attack was in 1997 in Urumqi when bombs placed in buses killed nine and wounded seventy-four.
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Woof GM:
Fascinating thread you have started here. What do you see as its central theme?
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1. China must have seriously scary intel to ask for our help.
2. We must have made a interesting deal to risk putting NEST into the den of China's intelligence apparatus.
3. China's policy of supporting the global jihad to confound the US has now officially entered into the "blowback" stage, although I believe it well may have started quite a while ago, but has been hidden by the PRC.
4. This perfectly refutes the "It's all America's fault" leftists/Ronulans that try to explain the global jihad as the result of American foreign policy.
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So, would "China vs. its Jihadis" be a good title for this thread?
What I am trying to get at is that I wonder if the present title of the thread would lead someone interested in its actual contents to it?
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Well......yeah. I see your point. Most people see "NEST" and think "bird". :-D
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3220173,prtpage-1.cms
Terror threat to Games: China shuts mosques
11 Jul 2008, 0101 hrs IST, Saibal Dasgupta,TNN
BEIJING: Chinese authorities have replaced top police and security officials in the Muslim dominated Xinjiang province, which is the hotbed of separatism and political violence. They have also closed down 41 "illegal" places of worship.
These places of worship were used as training ground for conducting a "holy war", Chen Zhuangwei Chen, the police chief of Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province, said. Xinjiang, which borders central Asia and Pakistan, has been the scene of a pro-independence movement by a section of the eight million Uighurs living there for a long time.
The authorities also announced they have detained 82 "suspected terrorists" in the past six months in view of fears that they might disrupt the Olympic Games. They belong to five groups that "allegedly plotted sabotage against the Beijing Olympics", the official Xinhua news agency quoted the police chief in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, as saying.
The government has annouced the replacement of army and security officials in the ranks of three deputy core commanders, political commissars and the head of the Communist Party organisation department in the army. The replacement suggests that the central government has been unhappy about the inability of local officials to put down the surging separatist movement in the province.
The new head of the organisation department is Liu Xiang Song, the government announced. One of the three new core commanders is Hanabati Sabukhaya, an officer from the Kazak race. Xinjiang borders Kazakisthan and several other countries including Pakistan and Russia. "From now, all police officers must act urgently, get involved once more in Olympic security, to make sure large and small incidents alike do not happen," Chen was quoted by official media as saying.
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GM:
I've taken the liberty of renaming the thread "China vs. Islam"
Or if you have another preference, please go ahead and change it again.
Yip!
Marc
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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/olympics/2008-07/21/content_6861817.htm
Terror groups still pose a 'threat' to Games
China Daily
Updated: 2008-07-21 06:44
Police arrest "terrorists" during the "Taishan Mountain 2008" drills in Jinan, East China's Shandong province in this June 30, 2008 file photo. [Xinhua]
The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) poses a real threat to the Beijing Olympics because investigations show it has been plotting terror attacks on venues, a senior security official has said.
"It's not imaginary. We have been focusing on the ETIM and it has been labeled a terrorist group not only by our country, but also the international community," Ma Zhenchuan, director of the security command of the Beijing Games, said.
Ma Zhenchuan
"Intelligence reports show the group has been planning to carry out terrorist attacks during the Games," Ma told China Central Television (CCTV) over the weekend, stressing that his command had already worked out detailed counter-terrorism plans.
Police in Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region said last week that they had busted 12 wings of transnational terrorist groups, including the ETIM and the Hizb-e-Tahrir, this year.
Earlier this month, the public security bureau in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, held a press conference to announce that five "terrorist groups" that were hatching plots to attack Games venues had been smashed and 82 people detained.
Police have destroyed 41 bases where Islamic militants used to get training, too, the bureau said.
Related readings:
Beijing airport to adopt special security checks
Olympic co-host city implements special airport security checks
Olympic co-host city implements special airport security checks
Three 'defence lines' set up to tighten Olympic security
Ma, however, warned that thwarting the ETIM does not mean safety because it is just a part of the terrorist threat to the Olympics.
"We have been cooperating with the security authorities of all participating countries" to thwart any plot to disrupt the Games.
Security and information officials of more than 80 countries have been collaborating with their Chinese counterparts to counter possible terrorist threats, the Beijing Daily has quoted an Olympic security official Kou Bo as saying.
Beijing has beefed up its security measures, including forming 40 anti-terrorism units with 188 members in the city alone.
The major tasks of the units will be to prevent terrorists from launching biological, chemical, nuclear or other radioactive attacks and bombings, Xinhua has reported. The units are on 24-hour duty from July 1.
The city has mobilized about 110,000 security guards plus more than 1 million residents and installed 300,000 cameras to help detect security threats, Ma said.
Armed policemen will patrol downtown and suburban Beijing to deter terrorists from launching any attack.
Security checks have also been tightened in all provinces, regions and other cities, as well as airports, train stations, bus depots and all entry and exit points.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/2310981/Beijing-Olympics-2008-Two-dead-in-China-bus-bombs-amid-terror-fears-ahead-of-Games.html
Beijing Olympics 2008: Two dead in China bus bombs amid terror fears ahead of Games
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 3:39PM BST 21/07/2008
At least two people have been killed by bus bombs in southern China, heightening fears over terrorism less than three weeks before the start of the Olympics.
Police gave no motive for the two rush-hour attacks in Kunming, a city of six million that is a popular base for tourists.
But they said they were clearly planned. "According to preliminary investigations, the explosions were cases of man-made, deliberate sabotage," a spokesman said.
A witness said that he saw a "thin, short man" get off one of the buses at a stop and run off down the street 20 seconds before it exploded.
The Chinese authorities have repeatedly warned of the threat to the Olympics from attacks, including home-grown ones.
They have singled out Uighurs, a Muslim group from the far western province of Xinjiang, and radical Tibetans as "splittists" and potential terrorists.
They claim one shadowy Uighur group, known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and accused of a number of attacks including bus bombings in the 1990s, is linked to al-Qaeda.
But small explosions set off by aggrieved local residents are also not unknown in Chinese cities.
Kunming is the capital of Yunnan province, which borders Tibet and Burma and where a violent riot about the price of rubber over the weekend was put down by police, who shot two people dead.
The first explosion yesterday around 7.05am local time on board a bus at a stop on People's Road West, one of Kunming's main thoroughfares.
One person was killed and another ten injured, according to local media. The bus was left with a gaping hole in its side, its windows shattered.
The second explosion happened on another bus on the same road about an hour later. Another person was killed and a further four injured.
According to some reports, there was a third explosion later in the morning, in which two people were killed and one injured, but this was discounted by local officials. There was also no confirmation of a report that another victim of the first bombing died on the way to hospital.
The first victim was named as Wang Dezhi, 30, who was with her husband going home to rejoin their daughter and celebrate her birthday. Her husband, Han Guangming, was also injured.
"My wife is gone, and I'm injured - I feel it is the end of the world," the state news agency quoted Mr Han as saying.
The second victim was Chen Shifei, 26, from the town of Lijiang, also in Yunnan.
Police sealed off the area, checking cars for potential culprits, according to local residents.
"We are all talking and guessing about the reason," a waitress at the nearby Garden Restaurant told The Daily Telegraph. "But people have no clue at all. The road where the buses exploded has been sealed off, for a distance of about 500 yards."
One witness, a warden at a nearby bicycle parking zone, said: "The explosion was only ten yards away from me. It was so loud I felt dizzy for a few seconds. Then I saw black smoke coming out of a bus.
"I worried that the bus would explode and ran back a little. About ten minutes later, police and ambulances came. Lots of people were carried out of the bus, dripping blood."
Yunnan is an ethnically diverse province, home to large numbers of both Tibetans and Muslims, and is a popular tourist destination for its spectacular scenery.
Kunming also has a growing population of resident foreigners, attracted to its sunny, moderate climate and a way of life considered more relaxed than elsewhere in China.
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http://68.178.224.54/udayavani/showstory.asp?news=0&contentid=554897&lang=1
Beijing transport on high alert as terror threat looms large
Beijing, July 23: In view of the "unsurpassed" terror threat to the Beijing Olympics to kick off next month, security of air, rail and long-distance bus transport have been put on high alert in the city.
China Civil Aviation Administration has announced that no plane would be allowed to take off or land at the Beijing International Airport from 7 pm to midnight on the opening day of the Olympic ceremony on August 8.
Domestic and foreign airlines had been notified about the move and flights would be rescheduled to minimize inconvenience to passengers, an Administration spokesman said.
Taking the security to a higher level, armed policemen with dogs began patrolling round the clock at the capitals four railway stations, including the yet-to-be-opened one in the southern district.
China says terror is the biggest threat to the Beijing Olympics and it is even "unsurpassed" in the Olympic history. A raft of measures is already in force but they were being reinforced in recent weeks.
At the Beijing West Railway Station, a major terminal, passengers were asked to taste liquids they were carrying or were being inspected with a special detector handset to
identify their contents.
"The detector will show if the liquid is alcohol or gasoline," a police officer in charge of the security check was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.
Security checks are carried out at the entrance to the subway station with every piece of baggage X-rayed and banned substances like banana oil and paint taken out.
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It's difficult to gauge the degree of threat China faces given the opaque nature of the PRC's gov't. Still, all the steps China is taking strikes me as being fueled by real concern rather than opportunistic moves to tighten it's control of dissidents within it's borders.
If the jihadis are successful in completing a mass casualty attack on the olympics, then I will feel as Churchill was to have felt, hearing about America's entry into WWII.
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If the jihadis are successful in completing a mass casualty attack on the olympics, then I will feel as Churchill was to have felt, hearing about America's entry into WWII.
I am confused (it happens often :-D ); I presume Churchill was euphoric, relieved, and exuberant when he heard that America had decided to enter WWII. And you are saying that if NEST/China is unsuccessful and a "mass casualty attack" happens killing ten of thousands of civilians you will have the same warm emotions as Churchill??? Anotherwords, you will be happy that 10's of thousands of innocent civilians died???
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Knowing that you now have a much improved chance of not being conquered is different than being happy innocents died.
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Knowing that you now have a much improved chance of not being conquered is different than being happy innocents died.
I am still confused :oops: So you are saying that that if tens of thousands of Chinese die due a "mass casualty attack" during the Olympics we have a "much improved chance of not being conquered"? By whom - the Chinese? And therefore such attack is therefore justifiable (not necessarily "happy") that 10's of thousands of innocents die???
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At the current time, western civilization isn't on the trajectory towards victory against the global jihad. If China were to suffer any serious attack during the olympics, it need not be a WMD attack to be serious, then the effect would be to bring China into a direct confrontation with the global jihad.
This would result in a loss of the use of China's banks for money laundering, the loss of access to China's military hardware and direct action from China's intelligence and military.
Long term, it may well result in the development of a true alliance between China and the west.
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I guess I am speechless; you actually try to justify your joy, elation and hope that 10's of thousands of innocent Chinese
("masses of brown people") will die in a mass casualty attack. An end is never justified by such horrific means. I presume your Asian wife isn't Chinese? No family attending the Olympics?
As for my "criticism of the military" I sincerely support the military, but please don't forget the military is not above the law. Guantanamo, Abu Graib, and killing innocent Iraq civilians and raping Japanese High School girls and Philippine girls (the U.S. troops in Japan seem to run amok) is wrong and the individual soldier(s) should be severely punished, not slapped on the wrist.
And somehow you seem to forget the civilians control the military; the military exists to serve and obey. Period. The people decide when the war is over (Vietnam) (Iraq) and the people tell the military what to do; not the other way around. The military doesn't get a vote nor does it make policy. Their duty is to simply obey civilan control or they should resign. Truman was right.
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"please don't forget the military is not above the law. Guantanamo, Abu Graib, and killing innocent Iraq civilians and raping Japanese High School girls and Philippine girls (the U.S. troops in Japan seem to run amok) is wrong and the individual soldier(s) should be severely punished, not slapped on the wrist."
Guantanamo? As reported in the Media Matters thread, the MSM often reports accusations as fact. Careful now.
Abu Graib? No one was killed and INTERNAL ARMY PROCEDURES ARE WHAT BROUGHT THE CASE TO LIGHT. IT WAS THE PENTAGON THAT INFORMED THE MEDIA.
Iraq? Given the kind of war that it has been, I for one am quite proud of the tremendous job our troops have done in minimizing the casualties of the innocent. There was an article the other day in the NY Times I think it was on the same subject in the context of Afg front of the war. Perhaps you can find it and have a better sense of this subject , , ,
Raping Japanese HS girls? I almost posted on this forum the other day an article that pointed out that our troops in Japan overall have an outstanding record of being law-abiding, but did not because I thought the point was so obvious as to not need being made , , , Why do you smear so many with the actions of one?
As for the Philippines, educated man that you obviously are I am sure you know that when we had bases there that they were surrounded with whore houses and that whore houses and soldiers are a surefire combination for trouble and that discerning the facts can often be highly problematic. I lack the experience :wink: to discuss the whole subject of prostitution and military bases meaningfully, and would hope that you do too :lol:
Jason, of course we civilians are in charge. That does not mean that when it comes to fighting or knowing WTF is going on in the field that we should not listen carefully to those who so selflessly (yes this is a dig at your comment the other day about what America is willing to give :wink: ) put their butts on the line. I'd rather hear Gen. Petraeus's take on Iraq than BO's.
If I may offer in closing-- be careful of MSM and assuming what it says is true and be careful of projecting one case on the many.
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quote author=JDN link=topic=1650.msg19534#msg19534 date=1216938636]
I guess I am speechless; you actually try to justify your joy, elation and hope that 10's of thousands of innocent Chinese
("masses of brown people") will die in a mass casualty attack. An end is never justified by such horrific means. I presume your Asian wife isn't Chinese? No family attending the Olympics?
**Are you this dense or just desperate to try to score some sort of ad hominem attack. Go back and really read the thread and try to see if you can grasp the concepts.**
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http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USPEK3763220080724
China says breaks up international terrorist cell
Thu Jul 24, 2008 9:23am EDT
BEIJING (Reuters) - Shanghai police have broken up an international terrorist group that had planned to attack an Olympic football preliminary match in the city, state news agency Xinhua said on Thursday.
"We have staged raids and cracked a group of terrorists," Xinhua quoted Cheng Jiulong, Shanghai Public Security Bureau deputy director and head of the Shanghai security office for the Olympics, as saying.
However, Cheng did not say when the terrorists were first discovered, how many suspects were detained or where they came from, said Xinhua.
"We have obtained information that international terrorist organizations would likely launch an attack against an Olympic venue in the city during the Games," Cheng said.
The report comes after state media said earlier in the day that Chinese paramilitary police swore to prevent terrorist attacks or "political incidents" from disrupting the Beijing Olympics in a show of force at the Games' main stadium.
"International terrorist forces are itching to strike with terror attacks against the Beijing Games, and hostile domestic forces' disruption and sabotage activities against the Games are steadily unfolding," the People's Armed Police News reported.
Chinese officials have said their main Games security worries focused on separatist militants seeking an independent Uighur homeland in the country's far west Xinjiang region and campaigners for an independent Tibet.
Human rights critics say China has grossly exaggerated the security threats from Uighurs and Tibetans to justify harsh control in those regions.
Shanghai police have been put on a "crisis" footing as part of a campaign to ensure public safety during Olympic football matches in the city next month, said Xinhua.
Shanghai will host 12 Olympic football matches during the Games and the stadium has been closed for security checks since July 20, with armed police conducting round-the-clock patrols, said the news agency.
Firefighters, engineers and medical staff would be deployed to the stadium to prevent bomb blasts and nuclear and biochemical attacks, it said.
(Reporting by Kirby Chien; Editing by David Fogarty)
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Marc, as I again review your "Rules of the Road" (well written) I sometimes question your comitment to "the mission here is to search for TRUTH." "If the facts prove us wrong, we change our minds." And, "if you are cross-current or even against the general currents of thinking around her, we incourage you to participate." And again, I raise my point about a discussion, not a cut and paste contest - rarely does GM comment, but he seems very quick with the cut and paste; but then so too is the average child.
Regarding your comments;
Guantanamo? You are an attorney, does it seem right to hold someone, on quasi American soil, for 4+ years without a fair hearing? I mean if they are guilty, I don't care if you string them up. But if they are innocent, let them go back to their families. How would you feel if one of your friends was mistakenly picked up and put in Guantanamo? Wrong place, wrong time; but did nothing wrong. And it has happened a lot! How many have really been found guilty of a crime after 4+ years. Very very few. We are the laughing stock of the world and when we talk about civil rights we seem hypocritical in my opinion. We are a democracy; time we acted like one.
Abu Gralb? No one was killed; that is true. Does that make it right??? Crimes were committed! Where is our sense of decency?
Iraq? 10's of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed as collateral damage. Not to mention soldiers found guilty but excused by their superior of criminal acts.
Raping Japanese HS girls. Actually GM did post that article. Did you read it? I bet in college you took statistics. Read carefully what the commander said, "American troops WHEN THE ARE OFF BASE commit one half the number of serious crimes than the general Japanese population does." Now mind you, the average soldier is probably "off base" a total of eight hours or less once a week. Yet in those few hours versus 24/7 they commit one half of the total crimes the Japanese population commits. Statistically, imagine if the soldiers were off base 24/7 how many crimes would be committed? Probably five+ times the rate of the general Japanese population! Simply put, American troops in Japan are not lawbiding; they have been running amok and that's the problem. Imagine if foreign troops visiting LA raped local girls... As for the Philippina girl reference, perhaps I was not clear. American servicemen also raped a Philippine girl in Japan. However, I do understand your point about the Philippines proper.
Perhaps you know, but I am not sure GM is happy with the civilians in charge. (PS My name is James, but Jason sounds fine too :-D ) As for the military commanders, I fully agree, their advice is sorely needed. And as for your "dig"; I think America truly is great and does give, but I question whether we entered this war only for alturistic reasons. If there was no oil in Iraq, would we have gone? Would we still be there? I don't think so. We had our own (money - oil) selfish interests at heart...
And I agree, simply because it is written, left or right, often the source is biased and therefore should be examined for truth.
As for GM, no this is not some sort of ad hominem (thank God I had four years of Latin in High School and still remember :-D ) attack. I did read the thread; I did grasp your "concept" and I kindly gave you at least two opportunities to change/retract your argument/words, yet you persisted and said a mass casualty attack is good; i.e. you would "feel like Churchill felt when America entered the war." I am sorry, but to be euphoric and relieved and wish that 10's of thousands of innocent civilians die to further your cause is barbaric and reprehensible. And no, I not dense, just moral. As for the comment about your wife; you mentioned that she is Asian; I just expressed hope she wasn't Chinese given your attitude.
Back to Marc; I guess if you want this "forum to serve as a tremendous resouce for people who want to read about a subject/theme" it should offer different perspectives on the question/subject, don't you think? And I think commentary
is important; yes it takes more time and thought, but anyone, even an eight year old can cut and paste ad nauseam.
To good discussions,
james
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James:
Not sure why you question the sincerity of my search for Truth. What facts or logic have proven me wrong?
If you want to discuss Guantanamo, may I suggest FIRST READING and then posting in the "Legal Issues created by the War with Islamic Fascism" thread?
Abu Graib: Where on earth do you get that I approve?!? :? What is the basis for questioning my decency?!? :? I simply pointed out that it was the Army's internal procedures that picked up on it and brought it to the light of day-- which seems relevant to me. Did you even know this? Do you ask yourself why you did not? What does the fact that you did not know tell you about the sources of info that you use?
Iraq and collateral damage: My point is that in a very difficult battle space we commit quite a bit of blood, sweat, and tears to there being as little collateral damage as possible-- yet you seem to be unaware of this and make "the perfect the enemy of the good". May I ask how often you get to have extended conversation with those who have served there about these things?
On the Japanese HS girl article: I see the point you are making and will have to reread the article in question. What thread is it in?
As for America going to war without an ulterior motive-- that would be the Clinton administration. :lol:
Concerning you and GM: Name calling such as "average child" and "eight year old" really are out of place here-- particularly when I took the time to explain to you how in the culture of this forum that the pasted article ofen IS the response. I'm thought I was clear and you seem like a bright fellow-- may I ask you to reread what I posted?
As for the go-round on whether GM would be happy at the death of thousands of innocents: IMHO perhaps GM could have been more lawyerly in how he expressed his point originally, but FWIW what communicates to me is that you are in something of a "gotcha" mode looking for something that to my eye is not really there-- perhaps this explains the testiness of GM's response? I'd like to suggest that the two of you take three deep breaths each and start fresh.
As for this:
"I guess if you want this "forum to serve as a tremendous resouce for people who want to read about a subject/theme" it should offer different perspectives on the question/subject, don't you think? And I think commentary
is important; yes it takes more time and thought, but anyone, even an eight year old can cut and paste ad nauseam."
Once again, the articles posted here can either BE the conversation and/or simply be a sharing of analysis and intel. IMHO the standards around here are-- no brag, just fact-- well above average. I have no problem realizing that there are people writing about these things who know more than me and think deeper about them than me, or who express what I want to say better than I do. I have no problem with using such articles as a form of communication.
In short sometimes we do comment directly-- for example in my unsuccessful comments to you-- and sometimes we paste. This is how we do it around here. I regret you don't care for it.
The Adventure continues,
Marc
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Shanghai police swoops thwart stadium terrorist plot
www.chinaview.cn 2008-07-25 08:25:16
Special report: 2008 Olympic Games
BEIJING, July 25 -- Shanghai police have halted a group of terrorists who planned to attack a football venue in the Olympic co-host city.
"We obtained information that international terrorist organizations were likely to launch an attack against an Olympics venue in the city during the Games," said Cheng Jiulong, Shanghai Public Security Bureau deputy director and head of the Shanghai security office for the Games.
Cheng said police staged raids and nabbed the terrorists. He would not provide further details such as when the terrorists were found, how many suspects were detained and their origins.
"According to information we have obtained, the Olympics venue, athletes' apartments and routes leading to the venue are considered safe," he said. "However, the threat of terrorism remains as some international terrorist organizations have threatened to launch attacks against the city.''
To prepare for the Olympic soccer events, police have left no stone unturned in the crackdown on security.
Shanghai Stadium has been closed for security checks since July 20, with both police and armed police conducting round-the-clock patrols.
Safety checks at key locations, such as Shanghai Stadium and the Xujiahui commercial center, would be intense, Cheng said.
He also said police would use special methods to prevent congestion at the entrances to Shanghai Stadium, which is expected to receive about 52,000 spectators for each match.
"Spectators with bags will be guided to special safety check points,'' he said. "This will improve the flow of people entering the stadium.''
Security personnel will work around the clock at the hotels where athletes will stay.
"Every team will be provided with a security liaison officer who will accompany the team while they are in the city and respond to their safety demands at any time,'' Cheng said.
In addition, railway police have stepped up security checks by requiring passengers to open drink bottles and take a sip - a surefire way to detect any dangerous liquids.
The beefed-up measures have already helped to stop some people from carrying flammable liquids, such as oil paint, on trains, according to the railway police authority. Passengers carrying dangerous goods on board will face criminal charges.
On Wednesday, city police announced rewards ranging from 10,000 yuan (US$1,464) to 500,000 yuan for information relating to serious crime.
(Source: Shanghai Daily)
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GM:
How much credence do you put in the statements of the Chinese govt?
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As i've said in another venue years ago, I strongly suspect China has had multiple jihadist terror attacks which it had covered up. I think the degree of international scrutiny and legitimate worries about terror attacks during the olympics has forced China to take a different approach now. In my opinion, they would not openly discuss the matter if they were confident they could keep it from view.
Is the Chinese state media going to approach the story with any degree of journalistic impartiality? No. The fact it's being discussed at all means it is a serious issue, no matter how it's spun. We can take that much away.
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GM:
How much credence do you put in the statements of the Chinese govt?
Marc, I do not question your sincerity of your your search for truth. But truth comes in all shapes
and sizes. And cut and paste articles need to be questioned; are they the "truth"?
As for Guantanamo, I prefer to read your posts in Libertarian Themes. I 100% agree with
the thoughts expressed. Your opening and subsequent article sum up my concerns.
As for Abu Graib, I did not say you approved, but you did emphasize and point out that
"no one died" rather than pointing out that their actions were wrong and that they should
be punished. Often, in commentary what isn't said is also important. It was wrong, however
to compare it to beheading; as you also pointed out that is absurd.
Collateral damage; it happens - too much. But you are right, war is not perfect and even
"smart bombs" don't always hit their target and/or intel is wrong. I was more referring specifically
to the few bad apples in a very large orchard that have been put on trial and "excused".
As for the crime in Japan - rape it is in the Obama Phenomena thread. GM posted a copy of the
article from the Japan Times (I had already read it) in response to one of my comments on the
last page.
As for America going to war without an ulterior motive, I don't quite get your joke (not defending
Clinton mind you, I'm just "dense" :oops: . Odd, but the Democrats (would you believe I am
a registered Republican and may well vote for MCain; I just don't like Bush) have "gone to war" their
share of the time. FDR, JFK, etc.
As for GM and I. I did reread your post. And I did reread your Rule #7. I guess it was my understanding
that to paste an article without commentary can be the response, but that should be the exception.
Rather, commentary (see Rule #7) should usually accompany it. My comment about children is that
truly they can cut and paste faster than I can, but often children don't think and analyze the problem,
nor often do they even question the article itself. That is why this forum is for adults or at least
thinking children.
As for the GM's being "happy at the death of thousands of innocents" to further his cause, I don't think
he was kidding. But if a military man or any government official expressed such an opinion they would be
unemployed and ostracized. Hoping for "masses of brown people" in "mass graves" (GM's words) is
not only not "lawyerly" it is simply unacceptable in my book. I think if he published the same on
www.chinaview.cn (his source for his recent post) the reaction might be more vocal and antagonistic
than on this forum.
I do agree, I think your standards are high, frankly in all matters, but in this Forum too of course.
But if one were to comb through the provided analysis and intel,
I think it would favor one side's opinion. My thought is that objective analysis is beneficial. Also, my thought
is that many articles posted are clearly questionable - they should not be accepted on face value. For example
GM's immediate post above that you even questioned. I am suppose to believe a Chinese article published
from a Chinese source/publication as "fact" without questioning the motive or truthfulness??? I don't think
simply cut and pasting such examples further enhance the search for the "truth" or our knowledge thereof.
However, it is your sandbox. You set the rules, and you set the tone.
james
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1. China's PLA and intelligence apparatus consider themselves at war with the US using the "unrestricted warfare" doctrine as first articulated by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. The PLA is building a military capable of defeating the US in a global confrontation.
http://www.terrorism.com/documents/TRC-Analysis/unrestricted.pdf
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2008/Jul/rickardJul08.asp
http://www.heritage.org/Research/MissileDefense/BG1303.cfm
2. China aligns it'self with many jihadist entities and thug nation-states, including it's support of the Sudanese gov't genocide in Dafur, and the brutal Myanmar/Burmese junta. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7493934.stm
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2003/jun/26/20030626-084600-7160r/
3. Chinese arms are equipping the Taliban in Afghanistan. http://www.washtimes.com/news/2007/jun/05/20070605-121517-7394r/
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080522/nation.htm#1
4. Were China to suffer a serious terrorist attack or attacks at the Olympics (mind you, I am in no position to prevent or mitigate any attacks) it may well result in a strategic realignment of China into an alliance with the US, especially given the unprecedented degree of cooperation between the US and China in securing the Olympics, thus potentially avoiding a future military conflict that otherwise may well develop in the future.
5. China's split with the jihadist terror entities and nation-states would impair their operational abilities, thus improving US national security.
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1. I supect our military plans for victory too.
2/3. Agreed. Note that we too sold to the pre-Taliban to bleed the Russians. The Chinese govt can be more ruthless in these things because it is a totalitarian state.
4/5. Again, because it is a totalitarian state, it can be more ruthless. Does it really need to fear the Chinese Muslims to the point of giving up the joy and "benefit" of helping world-wide Islamic Fascism bleed us?
FWIW I see the Chinese as having some very weak links in their chain:
1) its' banking system is a tremendous house of cards,
2) due to the one child policy, its demographics are quite unusual. The few will be supporting the many.
3) it has turned itself into a toxic dump with utterly unsustainable environmental policies
4) apparently there are tremendous social pressures
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1. I supect our military plans for victory too.
**Sure, but the US wishes to preserve the post WWII pax americana that has allowed for the economic growth and freedom that has developed in many asian nations. China's envisioned pax sinica would not be nearly so benign.**
2/3. Agreed. Note that we too sold to the pre-Taliban to bleed the Russians. The Chinese govt can be more ruthless in these things because it is a totalitarian state.
4/5. Again, because it is a totalitarian state, it can be more ruthless. Does it really need to fear the Chinese Muslims to the point of giving up the joy and "benefit" of helping world-wide Islamic Fascism bleed us?
**The threat from jihadist 5th generation warfare combined with WMD technology holds the potential for the destruction of the nation-state as a viable entity.**
FWIW I see the Chinese as having some very weak links in their chain:
1) its' banking system is a tremendous house of cards,
2) due to the one child policy, its demographics are quite unusual. The few will be supporting the many.
**It is specifically due to the demographic instability resulting from the one child policy that almost absolutely ensures that China will deliberately engage in a war or wars as a means to correct the gender imbalance. If this is the case, I'd rather have them pointed towards the 'stans rather than India or us.**
3) it has turned itself into a toxic dump with utterly unsustainable environmental policies
4) apparently there are tremendous social pressures
**Both 3 and 4 tend to support my conclusion stated above.**
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http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=06d65840-0997-482e-a84d-b09b61a7b0e5
No Country for Young Men
China's testosterone problem.
Mara Hvistendahl, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Mike Fiala/AP
At Tiananmen Square for National Day.
Over the last decade, they cropped up in cities throughout China, tucked into raucous markets or along forgotten side streets, their interiors smelling of musty canvas and crammed with bounty for aspiring young soldiers: illicit weapons shops with names like ARMY GOODS STORE and GUNCOOL. For a few thousand yuan--a few hundred dollars--assault rifle-like air guns await in dirty back rooms, along with fatigues, bulletproof vests, kneepads, long underwear, camouflage t-shirts, rucksacks, bandoliers, helmets, helmet sleeves, walkie-talkies, and two-liter CamelBaks. Once outfitted, China's militiamen organize into clubs--Guangzhou Fight Men, Shanghai Band of Brothers, Tianjin Seals--and storm remote lots or abandoned warehouses, shooting at each other with pellets, to stage what they call "war games." The term belies the seriousness participants assign the activity: The more established clubs have dedicated battlegrounds whose surrounding trees are nailed with DANGER signs.
In gun-happy America, this hobby might not rise above the level of eccentricity; but, in China, where most weapons are illegal, it requires a special degree of passion. Beijing periodically cracks down, and clubs sometimes disappear overnight. In a round-up last year, Beijing cops seized 3,400 guns and knives used in war games. Still, the government can't seem to quash the urge among Chinese twentysomethings to unleash a few rounds. The headline on a recent Shanghai Weekly article explains the games' appeal in unusually apt Chinglish: URBAN BATTLE: A VERY MAN ACTIVITY.
The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country's three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.
By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.
The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.
Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it's the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four--163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China's Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.
These numbers work fine on the playground, but, for China's many match- making services, they may prove troublesome. At the Good Luck Marriage Introduction Agency, in a town a few hours' drive west from Liangyungang, two whiteboards mounted on the wall advertise the age, height, and income of available singles. On the day I visit, founder Tao Hui, a fortysomething woman with a bouffant, is watching soap operas in her sweatpants. She hasn't felt the shortage yet, she says. On the whiteboards, a few dozen nameless men line up nicely to a few dozen nameless women. For now, many in the early wave of surplus men are marrying younger women.
"We'll see real problems in eight or ten years," Tao predicts. Her 17-year- old son, she assures me, has good prospects. But she already turns away a lot of single males from outlying villages with no money or education. "If they're ugly and can't find work, there's nothing I can do. No one wants them."
Preliminary returns from the first generation of population-controlled kids suggest how all those unwanted men might fill up their time. Over the past decade, as the boys hit adolescence, the country's youth crime rate more than doubled. In December, Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research Deputy Secretary General Liu Guiming told a Beijing seminar that today's teens were committing crimes "without specific motives, often without forethought."
The Chinese government--which, policy-making blunders aside, hardly wants a population of hopeless, volatile men under its rule--has been vainly trying to undo the damage. At a symposium on the policy last August, family-planning commission head Zhang Weiqing said the gender ratio harbors a "hidden threat to social stability." In February, officials publicly debated the timeline for phasing out stringent population planning targets, citing the gender ratio along with a rapidly aging population. "In the past, everyone thought we didn't have a problem," says Gu Baochang, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing. "Now they're starting to pay attention."
In the meantime, the government is adopting a softer tone in its propaganda. The red characters painted on village walls throughout the countryside have evolved from the 1980s slogan YOU BEAT IT OUT! YOU CAN MAKE IT FALL OUT! YOU CAN ABORT IT! BUT YOU CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO IT! Now they read: IMPLEMENT FAMILY PLANNING FOR THE GOOD OF ALL CITIZENS. And, recently, the government added BOYS AND GIRLS ARE BOTH TREASURES. In 2003, it unveiled the Care For Girls program, which gives stipends to parents of girls in some provinces.
But, as Chinese couples make more money, fertility is naturally declining-- meaning that today's bachelors will form an even larger proportion of China's future population than officials expect. Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine who's part of a group of scholars advocating phasing out the one-child policy, says the outlook is grim: "Each successive birth cohort is going to be smaller. When younger cohorts get smaller, you have fewer females. It's a double whammy."
Online, many Chinese are worried--about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others--presumably the boys themselves--meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: "Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history."
And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China's new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu's capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag. Men "are under too much pressure," Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. "They need a way to release it."
Mara Hvistendahl is a writer based in Shanghai.
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Into Africa
By Roger Kaplan
The Weekly Standard | Friday, July 25, 2008
Close on the heels of the latest sham election in Zimbabwe, the International Criminal Court announced last week that it is seeking the arrest of the president of Sudan on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. As Africa notches up more failures on the long road out of colonialism, a new pseudo-colonial power--China--is busily engaged in getting exactly what it wants out of the continent. The implications for the kind of political and economic evolution likely to unfold in Africa are significant.
Until about 20 years ago, China's interest in Africa consisted mainly of encouraging Marxist revolutionary factions. Lately, however, that interest has taken a decidedly economic turn. China is in the market for most of Africa's products and is selling its own there as well. Once a major oil exporter, China became a net importer of oil in 1993 and is now dependent on imports for half its oil and natural gas. To meet this need, it has diversified its sources, in particular making deals with most of Africa's oil-producing states.
Just in the past three years, Beijing has signed energy deals with Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, and Sudan. Its investment in Sudan's pipeline and refinery infrastructure, valued at between $3 billion and $5 billion, is mind-boggling in such a poor country, but it is not unusual for the energy industry. China bought a stake in a Nigerian offshore field two years ago for $2.5 billion and promised to invest the same amount in further exploration and development.
China has huge investments in Algeria, with whose government it is also cooperating on the development of nuclear energy, and Angola, which this spring overtook Nigeria as the continent's largest producer of oil.
Chinese investment in Africa took off exponentially in the early 1990s. So did China-Africa trade. According to the Nigerian economist Adama Gaye, trade between China and Africa reached the $10 billion mark in 2000 and is likely to reach $55 billion this year. If it reaches $100 billion in 2010, as Gaye thinks likely, it will surpass both American and French trade with Africa. The continent's other major trading partners are India (growing) and Britain (not growing).
Significantly, Nigeria's then-president Olusegun Obasanjo, once a U.S. favorite, said last year that this would be the Chinese century, and he encouraged Africans to stay with the leader. There is no question China's mix of authoritarianism and rapid economic development is tempting to states whose political and economic institutions are fragile and whose relations with the liberal West tend to be ambivalent.
Not that the United States has been absent from African affairs. On the contrary, the Bush administration has supported huge increases in African exports to the United States (through the tariff-ending Africa Growth Opportunity Act) and U.S. investments in Africa (through the State Department's Overseas Private Investment Corporation), as well as debt relief initiatives, development aid in agriculture, and programs to combat disease and keep children in school. The Bush administration has encouraged African development more seriously than any of its predecessors, and it has insisted that prosperity is more likely to endure if accompanied by the spread of the institutions that sustain free societies, rather than the authoritarian model China promotes.
Which will be the ascendant influence? Chinese consumer goods are becoming ubiquitous in Africa, as elsewhere. "Made in China" clothes, personal and commercial vehicles, and electronics are widely available, and Chinese fast-food is even catching on. High level trade and investment delegations on multi-country tours are almost banal, while the annual "China-Africa Forums" are becoming more important in terms of deal-making than the Francophonie summits that France sponsors. Chinese assistance includes the deployment of thousands of doctors to fight tropical and infectious diseases.
The Chinese contribute hospitals, schools, and roads--they are building the trans-Maghreb highway across Algeria, for example, on which travelers ride in Chinese-assembled buses. Although as recently as a few years back Peugeot was the dominant car in West Africa by far, Japan's Toyota and Korea's Hyundai, both assembled in China, and China's own Chery Automobile will soon overtake it.
Prestige follows power. "Confucian Centers" are promoting Chinese language study in 16 countries, while "Confucian Institutes" in partnership with local universities have been established for advanced study of language and management in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and South Africa. Scholarships are offered for university study in China. Chinese radio broadcasts in several languages compete with the popular programs of the Voice of America, the BBC, and RFI.
China's military role on the continent has grown in importance. Equipment and advisers have been sent to Congo (Kinshasa) and Angola, and there were reports in 2003 that firms fronting for the People's Liberation Army were smuggling weapons to Sierra Leone and Liberia during those small West African countries' catastrophic diamond wars, into which Ivory Coast, beset by its own north-south sectional and tribal problems, was drawn.
China's diplomatic support for the regime in Khartoum is well known as a result of Western efforts to broker peace among the many contending Sudanese clans and tribes. Lately Beijing, concerned to avoid criticism of its embrace of brutal regimes in the run-up to the Olympic Games, has pressured Sudan to cooperate with the deployment of a U.N.-African Union force to protect people in the war-torn Darfur province from tribal militias, some of which Khartoum has armed and supported.
It is worth keeping in mind, however, that civil wars have raged in Sudan practically without interruption since independence in 1956, and China, building its influence in the country, made no effort to stop them. Beijing's official position has been that the "situation in Sudan is an internal affair," as one Chinese foreign minister said. Although wars between the Arab north and the black south officially ended in 2005, the government of Omar al-Bashir is showing little inclination to respect the share-the-oil part of the U.S.-brokered peace agreement. Khartoum has spent some of its revenue from oil on Chinese arms, reinforced by Chinese military personnel.
Meanwhile, the violence in Darfur, which began with the revolt of Muslim tribes in the western province and led to brutal counterinsurgency campaigns, recently blew back into Khartoum. One of the many Darfuri armed groups sent a motorized column into Sudan's capital, where it was decimated--quite possibly with direct Chinese help. J. Peter Pham, a professor at James Madison University and a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who reported last year on the Chinese military association with Sudan, notes that when you provide a regime with $100 million worth of supersonic fighter jets, you must really intend for that regime to survive.
Darfur crisis watchers and activists are well aware that the people they are trying to protect in that disaster zone (a quarter of a million killed, two million displaced) are attacked from the air as well as on the ground. Meanwhile, a congressionally mandated report dated October 2006 had already put at anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 the number of Chinese soldiers in Sudan, lightly disguised as petroleum engineers and construction workers.
Sudan's complexities, however, are unlikely to becloud China's keen sense of its own interests. In the Horn of Africa, for example, Pham points out China has sold a billion dollars' worth of arms to both sides in one of the continent's many underreported conflicts, the one between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Beijing bet heavily on Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, but if or when the southerners go back to the hills to fight for their independence (and their oil), it may well be with arms supplied by China. Until then, Bashir's indictment by the International Criminal Court can only strengthen the Chinese hand to the degree it increases the president's diplomatic isolation.
Arms, too--specifically a shipment of three million AK-47 rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars--are at the center of the latest episode in the long and warm relationship between China and Zimbabwe. The shipment, on the An Yue Jiang last April, was by no means unusual, but dockworkers in Durban, South Africa, refused to unload it for the overland part of its journey.
The good relations between South Africa and Zimbabwe have been strained by the crazy rule of Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party, which has wrecked a once-flourishing economy, murdered opposition activists, shut down a vigorous independent press, and now is forcing tens of thousands of refugees across the border into Botswana and South Africa, leading to deadly riots. Under these conditions, sending arms right in the middle of a presidential election that the ruling clique was determined to brazen out (Mugabe openly stated he would not allow the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to come to power) strained even the old-comrade ties that have made South African president Thabo Mbeki reluctant to criticize Mugabe.
It is of course quite possible that the days of strongmen like Mugabe are numbered anyway. In the meantime, however, the An Yue Jiang's cargo reportedly arrived safe and sound in Harare, having transited through Mozambique. Will Chinese president Hu Jintao give some stern advice to Mugabe, as he did in June to the Sudanese vice president?
During violence in Kenya last winter sparked by flawed elections, China's People's Daily (the organ of the ruling party) editorialized that "Western-style democracy is not suited for Africa." However, passing through Washington last month, Kenya's prime minister, Raila Odinga, sharply criticized Mugabe and called free elections imperative in Zimbabwe.
If an American presidential candidate did the same--if, without injecting himself into Zimbabwe's or Sudan's or any other country's internal politics, Barack Obama or John McCain made it clear the United States dislikes the kinds of political regimes China promotes and enables--Africans would surely take note. Indeed, in a campaign year unlike any previous one, Americans themselves might notice.
Roger Kaplan is a writer in Washington.
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1. China's PLA and intelligence apparatus consider themselves at war with the US using the "unrestricted warfare" doctrine as first articulated by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. The PLA is building a military capable of defeating the US in a global confrontation.
http://www.terrorism.com/documents/TRC-Analysis/unrestricted.pdf
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2008/Jul/rickardJul08.asp
http://www.heritage.org/Research/MissileDefense/BG1303.cfm
2. China aligns it'self with many jihadist entities and thug nation-states, including it's support of the Sudanese gov't genocide in Dafur, and the brutal Myanmar/Burmese junta. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7493934.stm
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2003/jun/26/20030626-084600-7160r/
3. Chinese arms are equipping the Taliban in Afghanistan. http://www.washtimes.com/news/2007/jun/05/20070605-121517-7394r/
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080522/nation.htm#1
4. Were China to suffer a serious terrorist attack or attacks at the Olympics (mind you, I am in no position to prevent or mitigate any attacks) it may well result in a strategic realignment of China into an alliance with the US, especially given the unprecedented degree of cooperation between the US and China in securing the Olympics, thus potentially avoiding a future military conflict that otherwise may well develop in the future.
5. China's split with the jihadist terror entities and nation-states would impair their operational abilities, thus improving US national security.
GM; not that you need my accolades or want my kudos but your above piece is very well put together. Whether I agree or not (I do) your point is well made, succinct, with good references, a simple explanation and good personal analysis. Further cut and pastes ties in to you analysis therefore I understand yours/Marc's point that comment is not always necessary.
On a personal note, I apologize for my behavior. Sometimes I get a bit passionate, but that is no excuse.
best wishes,
james
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Very gracious. Forward! GM?
GM:
You make very good points, but as best as I can tell still do not reach my central doubt about your hypothesis-- can Islamic Fascism really become a big enough threat to internal Chinese control to the piont wherein it will suit Chinese govt purposes to cease and desist the activities you so well describe in order to ally with the US against Islamic Fascism? Just what is it that we can offer them?
I'm thinking the solution will include (in no particular order)
a) strengthening the dollar; higher interest rates, lower corporate tax rate
b) price stability, reducing govt meddling in the economy
c) allow the market to do its work in responding to higher energy prices
d) eliminating/reducing taxes on alternative forms of energy
f) drilling for oil
g) I know some like nuclear, but ever since the "experts" here in CA tried building a reactor on an earth quake fault I have a hard time trusting them
h) cultural sedition :-D
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Summary
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) — another name for China’s Islamic Party of East Turkistan militant group — has claimed responsibility for the July 21 bus bombings in Yunnan and several other incidents around the country. The group has also said militants are trained and deployed to attack critical targets in major Chinese cities during the Olympics. The claims of responsibility appear exaggerated, but the threat TIP poses cannot be ignored.
Analysis
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) — another name for the Islamic Party of East Turkistan (ETIM) — has issued a video claiming responsibility for the July 21 bus bombings in Yunnan as well as several other incidents across China in recent months. The spokesman for the TIP, who refers to himself as Commander Seyfullah, also warned that TIP militants were trained and deployed to hit at critical targets in central cities during the Olympics. While the claims of responsibility appear exaggerated, the potential threat to transportation infrastructure, particularly in cities other than Beijing, cannot be brushed aside.
Over the past year, TIP has expanded its presence on the Internet, issuing videos calling for a jihad by Uighurs from China’s western Xinjiang province and highlighting training exercises. One video showed the execution of at least three ethnic Chinese. In addition, TIP has profiled extensively both the history of the movement (which at times has been called ETIM — a name the Chinese use when talking about most militant actions in Xinjiang and a group the United States added to its list of foreign terrorist organizations) and the former leader of ETIM, Hasan Mahsum, who was killed in Pakistan in 2003.
Following Mahsum’s death, ETIM fractured, its members moving into hiding, primarily in Afghanistan. Since that time, a successor movement has been pulling together, linked to Uzbek and other foreign militants operating in the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. More recently, the TIP has begun issuing videos — some dedicated to Mahsum, others showing training operations — and, in an April video, the group began issuing warnings to China that they would attack the Olympics. This most recent video follows up on that, saying that China has effectively run out of time, and that the group’s leader, Abdul Haq, has ordered militants to begin striking in central China. Haq was one of the key members of the early ETIM group, working with Mahsum in Afghanistan in training Uighur militants in 2001.
China has long warned that ETIM posed a critical threat to the Olympics. The recent uptick in incidents in China — from the March airline incident to the recent bus fire in Shanghai and the double bus bombing in Yunnan — has raised concerns if not about a coordinated effort to target the Chinese state, at least about China’s transportation infrastructure.
ETIM has a history of transportation infrastructure attacks (as does the broader al Qaeda movement), and there have been quiet rumors from China — particularly in Shanghai — in recent months that suspicious Central and South Asians (including Kazakhs) were seen monitoring infrastructure in Chinese cities, the implication being that they were carrying out pre-operational surveillance for potential attacks. Chinese authorities have also reported that they found plans for attacks against Olympic athletes, tourists and various military and civilian infrastructure during raids of alleged ETIM camps in western China earlier this year.
The claims in the latest TIP video seem a bit exaggerated — a common tactic for militants seeking to increase attention and embellish their own image. There is some suspicion that the videos are part of a psychological operation, by either the Chinese government to further justify security sweeps or by foreign agents to raise additional fears in Beijing. Chinese authorities also recently said they had wrapped up a threat in Shanghai to the Olympics. However, the government has yet to offer an explanation for the bus attack in Shanghai (and a hoax bomb-call for a major market at around the same time), and the local government in Yunnan has already tripled the initial reward for information leading to the arrest of the culprits behind the bus bombings in Kunming. Yunnan borders Southeast Asia, and the mountain paths offer a relatively easy route for discreet entry into and out of China should the militants have come from outside.
While Seyfullah’s claims appear greater than reality, they cannot be entirely dismissed, nor can the potential for further transportation infrastructure attacks against China. As Stratfor has cautioned previously, attacks against buses, trains and even airlines are not unlikely, particularly outside of Beijing. Shanghai in particular has seen a lot of unusual activity in recent months that may be a signal that operations are being planned or scoped out in the city. While TIP/ETIM does not pose a strategic threat to the Chinese state, such transportation attacks are well within its scope of capabilities.
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Very gracious. Forward! GM?
GM:
You make very good points, but as best as I can tell still do not reach my central doubt about your hypothesis-- can Islamic Fascism really become a big enough threat to internal Chinese control to the piont wherein it will suit Chinese govt purposes to cease and desist the activities you so well describe in order to ally with the US against Islamic Fascism? Just what is it that we can offer them?
**If China and the US are working together to the degree that we have NEST there, and the first letter being "Nuclear" in the NEST acronym, then there is most likely good intel that has both governments very worried. Modern China has been described as "An ocean of gasoline just waiting for a spark". A nuclear detonation would certainly provide more than enough.
Imagine for a moment there was a nuclear weapon detonated in China. Even if not one victim was American, the impact would shake us and the rest of the world to a degree never seen before. Think of all the ships leaving Chinese ports daily with cargo containers headed for ports like Long Beach, CA. Keep in mind al qaeda's stealth navy and their M.O. of using cargo containers for human smuggling. Anyone think global trade wouldn't rapidly grind to a halt? Rather than 9/11 shutting down the airlines, this would crash the global trade infrastructure. China would very rapidly fracture and now we have to wonder which PLA neo-warlord has China's nukes under control. Does this spur N. Korea into a paniced invasion of the south or does the NorK state crumble, resulting in an epic humanitarian crisis along with China's chaos? What other problem cascade from this?
I know this much, our current housing/banking crisis would pale in comparison to the economic crisis that would stem from such a scenario.**
I'm thinking the solution will include (in no particular order)
a) strengthening the dollar; higher interest rates, lower corporate tax rate
b) price stability, reducing govt meddling in the economy
c) allow the market to do its work in responding to higher energy prices
d) eliminating/reducing taxes on alternative forms of energy
f) drilling for oil
g) I know some like nuclear, but ever since the "experts" here in CA tried building a reactor on an earth quake fault I have a hard time trusting them
h) cultural sedition :-D
**If you've seen the Christmas sales in Shanghai in December as Santa Claus stands on the sidewalk in front of McDonald's and Starbucks as Nike wearing teens clad in NBA team shirts walk by as they listen to Mandarin hip-hop on I-pods, well then we're doing well in that area.**
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The incident with the Qantas jet has me wondering about Ramzi Yousef's "Oplan Bojinka". Connected? I'll be waiting to see if this was metal fatigue or an IED.
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Plausible I suppose, but in that it has not been done here in the US or Europe, do you think the Chinese Muslim Fascists have the ability to go nuke? My sense of things is that they are at a lower level.
My sense of things is that playing up the Isalmo-fascist issue becomes a way for China to neutralize the usual US complaints and bleatings when they are their usual oppressive totalitarian selves.
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Plausible I suppose, but in that it has not been done here in the US or Europe, do you think the Chinese Muslim Fascists have the ability to go nuke? My sense of things is that they are at a lower level.
**Under most circumstances, I'd tend to agree. Bill Gertz disclosing NEST's presence strikes me as a huge story that seems to have slid under the radar and alters my assessment. Gertz has great sourcing from the nat'l security structure and I don't recall him ever being substantially wrong on a story like this. NEST couldn't be there without the approval from the highest levels of the USG and I can't see Washington willing to take this risk without very good reason. I very much doubt that ETIM has it's own nuclear capability. Still, western China borders the loose nuke center of the universe.**
My sense of things is that playing up the Isalmo-fascist issue becomes a way for China to neutralize the usual US complaints and bleatings when they are their usual oppressive totalitarian selves.
**True, China seized on "terrorism" as a cover for business as usual right after 9/11. The fact that China is openly discussing terror threats to the Olympics to the degree it is strikes me as significant. Admitting there is a serious threat harms China's "face" at a time when the whole world is watching. The whole motivation for hosting the Olympics is to present the "new China" and promote it's strength and modernity. Having to admit to a serious threat to internal security at this time makes the power structure in Beijing very unhappy. Again, something not done lightly.
One other aspect to keep in mind. AQ has a history of grafting it's global jihad onto muslim struggles that were originally non-religious, ethno-nationalistic in origin. I'd cite the "Alqaeda-ization" of the Chechen independence movement in the 90's. I'm willing to bet this is a factor in what is occurring with the ETIM today. Keep in mind that the terrorists that hit Beslan were majority Chechen, but included arabs recruited for the jihad operation.**
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/china/article4406836.ece
From The Sunday Times
July 27, 2008
Islamist bombers target Olympics
Michael Sheridan Far East Correspondent
A MILITANT Islamic group has threatened to attack the Beijing Olympics with suicide bombers and biological weapons and has claimed responsibility for a string of fatal bombings and explosions in China over recent weeks.
In a video released by IntelCenter, a terrorism monitoring group, a bearded man identified as “Commander Seyfullah” is seen reading a declaration of jihad against the Olympics and warns athletes and spectators, “especially Muslims”, to stay away.
It was issued by a group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic party. The group may be allied with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – designated a terrorist organisation by the US, China and several other countries – which seeks independence for the Muslim Uighur people of China’s far west province of Xinjiang, which Uighur separatists call East Turkestan.
“Commander Seyfullah” said the group was responsible for three bombs last week on buses in the city of Kunming, which killed two people, and for two bus bombings on May 21 in Shanghai, which killed three.
The group said it also bombed a plastics factory in southern China and claimed involvement in an attack on police in the city of Wenzhou using explosives on a tractor, both on July 17.
Some of these incidents had been attributed to criminals, local grievances or accidents.
IntelCenter said that in an earlier five-page communiqué the group had promised to unleash suicide bombers against the Olympics and told Muslims that the use of biological weapons would be religiously justified.
The Chinese authorities have mobilised more than 100,000 troops and police to guard the Olympics and have imposed draconian security restrictions in every city where events will take place.
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http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gs7lUkxBUCG_S2sfv-rSUJibzLtg
Chinese separatists' Olympics threat 'credible': US analyst
1 day ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — A Chinese Muslim separatist group's threats to launch attacks during the Beijing Olympics are credible, a US expert said Saturday, after the group claimed credit for several recent bus bombings in China.
Although Chinese officials earlier Saturday denied that the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) was behind the bus bombings in Shanghai, IntelCenter director Ben Venzke pointed to a TIP video showing how to make a truck bomb as evidence that the group has the capacity for serious attacks.
"At this point in time we believe that, based on the TIP's demonstrated ability to conduct bombings and the apparent opportunity TIP believes the Olympic Games presents in terms of targeting and striking a blow to China, that the threat is credible and should be taken seriously," Venzke said.
Venzke, whose company monitors extremist threats around the world for private clients, on Friday released a transcript of TIP's latest video claiming credit for a pair of bus blasts that killed two people Monday in Yunnan province, and a bus explosion in Shanghai in May that killed three.
Chinese officials quickly rejected the claim, denying that TIP, an ethnic Uighur group which seeks to break off part of China's heavily Muslim Xinjiang province into an independent East Turkestan homeland, had caused the explosions.
"We have noticed media reports about the claims, but so far no evidence has been found to indicate the explosions were connected with terrorists and their attacks, or with the Beijing Olympics," a Yunnan public security official was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.
"The (May 5) blast was indeed deliberate but had nothing to do with terrorist attacks," Cheng Jiulong, deputy head of Shanghai police, told Xinhua.
But Venzke says the threat is likely real.
"Questions remain as to exactly what the TIP capabilities are in the eight cities they have threatened and whether the group has the ability to conduct a sustained campaign during the Games or one or two large-scale attacks."
According to global intelligence analysts Stratfor, TIP is another name for the ethnic Uighur Islamic Party of East Turkestan (ETIM), a group labelled a terrorist organization by both the United States and China.
In the video released this week and dated July 23, TIP leader Commander Seyfullah warned China of more explosions to come.
"Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed," he continued.
"While Seyfullah's claims appear greater than reality, they cannot be entirely dismissed, nor can the potential for further transportation infrastructure attacks against China," Stratfor said in an analysis on its website.
TIP's video says the group is willing to use biological weapons in an attack, and Venzke said that specific threat cannot be discounted. But, he added, TIP so far lacks a "demonstrated capability" to use biological weapons.
IntelCenter said it had a video made by TIP showing how to wire a truck with a bomb and another showing a suicide bomber preparing for an attack.
Venzke also noted that senior Al-Qaeda figure Ayman al-Zawahiri has made reference several times to the Uighurs' fight for an East Turkestan homeland
"While not yet on the level of attention focused on places like Somalia, Sudan, Algeria and other major theaters, al-Zawahiri's references do firmly place the jihadi efforts in East Turkistan in the mix of important jihadi fronts," Venzke said.
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"In the video released this week and dated July 23, TIP leader Commander Seyfullah warned China of more explosions to come.
"Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed," he continued"
**Rather than a nuke, this makes me think of radiological dispersal devices (dirty bombs). Bioweapons seem much less likely, despite having been specifically mentioned by "Commander Seyfullah".
Question: Are the bombings in India part of an "Asian campaign" by al qaeda, having their losses in Iraq now entering global consciousness?**
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_re_as/china_olympic_threats&printer=1;_ylt=AjSQwSsKPrBa4_m4MVu_COv9xg8F
Beijing cites numerous Olympic threats
By CHARLES HUTZLER, Associated Press Writer
Mon Jul 28, 7:26 PM ET
Just over a week before the Beijing Olympics, a militant Islamic group's claims of responsibility for bombings in China have fueled unease about security. The government has assured its people and the Olympic community that heavy security will ensure a secure games.
But its clampdown has smothered a broad array of groups, many with grievances against the government but without a history of violence.
Among the potential troublemakers Chinese security specialists have identified are Tibetan separatists, who staged occasionally violent protests last spring; members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement and unemployed workers.
Stirring the latest concerns were videotaped threats purporting to be from an Islamic militant group. They surfaced last week in the name of the Turkistan Islamic Party — a group Chinese and Western terrorism experts say is an offshoot of a secessionist group from China's Central Asian frontier with ties to al-Qaida.
In it, hooded men stood in camouflage fatigues with Kalashnikovs and claimed responsibility for explosions in four cities in Western China in recent months, including two bus bombings last week in Kunming city that authorities said killed two people and injured 14.
One militant, identified by the Washington-based monitoring group IntelCenter as commander Seyfullah, warned athletes and spectators "particularly the Muslims" to stay away.
"Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed," he said.
Chinese police immediately played down the threat, saying the explosions in Chinese cities claimed by the group were not the work of terrorists.
Still Beijing is being emptied of political critics, underground Christian organizers and ordinary Chinese who come to the capital to protest local government injustices.
Plainclothes security agents surprised rights campaigner Hou Wenzhuo at a cafe on May 30, putting a hood over her head and holding her in an undisclosed detention center for 17 days.
Among their chief concerns during interrogations, she said, were plans for a "human rights torch relay" organized by an exiled Tiananmen Square democracy movement figure and whether Chinese at home might get involved.
"The government is worried that this 'human rights torch' will detract attention from China" and the Olympics, Hou said. "They didn't beat me, but there are different kinds of intimidation."
Officials in charge of security have denied they are rounding up peaceful critics and have defended their actions as necessary, given global terrorism's scope and the publicity attacking the Olympics would bring.
To squelch any threat, Chinese leaders are mobilizing an army of security many times greater than previous Olympics — 110,000 police, riot squads and special forces, augmented by more than 300,000 Olympic volunteers and neighborhood watch members.
"Through all kinds of efforts and by relying on the support and cooperation from the international society and the general public, we are confident we can deal with all the threats and risks and challenges," Liu Shaowu, director of security for the Beijing Olympics organizing committee, said last week.
President Hu Jintao told fellow communist leaders over the weekend that "the task of hosting a safe Olympic Games is as heavy as Mount Tai and everyone shares the responsibility."
The hyper-charged security, however, has put some Western governments on edge, caught between a desire to cooperate on terrorism threats and concern about aiding the policing of peaceful dissent. U.S. and other European governments complain they have offered information but that Chinese police give little in return.
"The Chinese definition of security threat is pretty broad, and in the context of the Olympics, it encompasses anyone who might seek to 'disrupt' the games," Drew Thompson, director of China studies at the Nixon Center in Washington, said in an e-mail.
For the communist regime, "it's not about terrorism. It's about security," said one Western diplomat, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "It's the current reason for expanding the entire scope of the police state."
Chinese and Western terrorism experts agree the threat from terrorist groups, particularly of the militant Islamic stripe, is real. Hardly a month has passed this year without the government reporting it had disrupted a terrorist plot. But with so much effort focused on Beijing, terrorists may be seeking more vulnerable targets.
"The chances of attacks on Olympic areas are very unlikely," said Rohan Gunaratna of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. "But there could be attacks elsewhere in the run-up to the Olympics to spoil the mood of celebration."
Li Wei, director of the Center for Counterterrorism Studies, which has ties to China's spy agency, said his center has pinpointed five distinct threats: international terrorist groups like al-Qaida, the domestic version fighting to end Chinese rule in far western Xinjiang province, Tibetan separatists, the Falun Gong spiritual movement and ordinary people with grievances against the government or society.
While Li said the Tibetans and Falun Gong are not known for violence, radicals in their midst might lash out. Followers of Falun Gong, a meditation practice suppressed nearly a decade ago after drawing millions of followers, might turn to self-immolation, poisonings and other retaliatory acts if ordered by their leader, believed in hiding in the U.S., he said.
Groups fighting to end Chinese rule in Xinjiang, or what some Muslims call East Turkistan, are singled out as the most likely threat. A rebellion by the indigenous Muslim Turkic people, the Uighurs, has simmered for decades, with some fighting in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan.
One group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, was based in Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion and is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States. After its leader was killed in 2003, members reorganized into similar groups, including the Turkistan Islamic Party, and received training from al-Qaida in Pakistan's tribal area abutting Afghanistan, said Gunaratna and other terrorism experts.
Gunaratna estimates this hard core numbers around 100. Aside from its recent videotaped threat, the Turkistan Islamic Party released a statement in April calling for biological weapons attacks against China and has posted an Internet video guide on assembling a truck bomb, the IntelCenter said.
Commander Seyfullah's claim to have carried out recent explosions has raised doubts about the group's reach.
Police, cited by Xinhua, said the bus explosion in Shanghai in which three people died was caused by an oil fire and the Wenzhou explosion by a debt-ridden gambler, while there's no evidence to connect the Kunming bus bombings to terrorism.
"Although the Turkistan Islamic Party claimed that they were responsible, I personally think that it's all bluff and bluster," said Li, the counterterrorism expert.
Those explosions, Li and others said, were most likely caused by "lone wolves" — disgruntled individuals and the hardest threat to guard against. Li pointed to the bombing in a park at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that killed one and injured 111 and was found to be the work of an anti-government extremist.
That "type leaves no clues but only a hot head," said Li.
___
Associated Press reporter Anna Johnson in Cairo contributed to this report.
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b]**So, what was the attack a distraction for?**[/b]
Attackers Kill 16 Police at Chinese Border Post
16 dead as attackers ram truck into jogging police, toss explosives near Chinese border post
By CHARLES HUTZLER
The Associated Press
BEIJING
Two men rammed a truck into a clutch of jogging policemen and tossed explosives, killing 16 officers Monday, state media said, in an attack in a restive province of western China just days before the Beijing Olympics, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
Though it happened on the far side of the country — near the Afghan-Pakistan border — the attack came as security forces were on alert for protests or any disruptions during the Games, which open Friday. It was among the deadliest and most brazen attacks in years in Xinjiang province, site of a sporadically violent rebellion by local Muslims against Chinese rule.
About 20 people upset at having been evicted from their homes staged a brief demonstration near Tiananmen Square, Beijing's heavily guarded political center. Uniformed police quickly surrounded the group until members of a neighborhood committee came and pulled the protesters away, scuffling with some.
In the Xinjiang attack, the two men drove a dump truck into the group of border patrol police officers as they passed the Yiquan Hotel during a routine 8 a.m. jog in the city of Kashgar, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
After the truck hit an electrical pole, the pair jumped out, ignited homemade explosives and "also hacked the policemen with knives," Xinhua said.
Fourteen died on the spot and two others en route to a hospital, and at least 16 officers were wounded, Xinhua said.
Police arrested the two attackers, one of whom was injured in the leg, the report said.
Authorities closed off streets, sealed the Nationalities Hospital, down the street from the explosion, and ordered people to stay inside, said a man answering phones at the hospital duty office.
Local government officials declined comment Monday. An officer in the district police department said an investigation was launched.
Kashgar, or Kashi in Chinese, is a tourist city that was once an oasis trading center on the Silk Road caravan routes and lies 80 miles from the border with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan. Its mountainous, remote environs have allegedly provided cover for terrorist training camps, one of which Chinese police raided early last year.
Chinese security forces have been on edge for months, citing a number of foiled plots by Muslim separatists and a series of bombings around China in the run-up to the Olympics. Last week, a senior military commander said radical Muslims who are fighting for what they call an independent East Turkistan in Xinjiang posed the single greatest threat to the games.
A spokesman for Beijing's Olympic organizing committee said he did not have enough information to comment on the bombings. But he said security arrangements were being increased around the Olympic venues.
"We've made preparations for all possible threats," the spokesman, Sun Weide, told reporters. "We believe, with the support of the government, with the help of the international community, we have the confidence and the ability to host a safe and secure Olympic Games."
A Chinese counterterrorism expert, Li Wei of the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, said the attack was likely the work of local sympathizers, rather than trained terrorists who sneaked across the border into China.
Xinhua said that Xinjiang's police department earlier received intelligence reports about possible terrorist attacks between Aug. 1 and 8 by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The movement is the name of a group that China and the U.S. say is a terrorist organization, but Chinese authorities often use the label for a broad number of violent separatist groups.
In Xinjiang, a local Turkic Muslim people, the Uighurs (WEE'-gurs), have chafed under Chinese rule, fully imposed after the communists took power nearly 60 years ago. Occasionally violent attacks in the 1990s brought an intense response from Beijing, which has stationed crack paramilitary units in the area and clamped down on unregistered mosques and religious schools that officials said were inciting militant action.
Uighurs have complained that the suppression has aggravated tensions in Xinjiang, making Uighurs feel even more threatened by an influx of Chinese and driving some to flee to Pakistan and other areas where they then have readier access to extremist ideologies.
One militant group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, pledged in a video that surfaced on the Internet last month to "target the most critical points related to the Olympics." The group is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, with some of its core members having received training from al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban, according to terrorism experts.
Terrorism analysts and Chinese authorities, however, have said that with more than 100,000 soldiers and police guarding Beijing and other Olympic co-host cities, terrorists were more likely to attack less-protected areas.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/2505151/Beijing-Olympics-safe-despite-jihad-threat.html
Beijing Olympics 'safe' despite jihad threat
The Chinese government has promised that Islamic terrorists would not disrupt the Olympic games despite threats of a jihad in the western city of Kashgar.
By Malcolm Moore in Kashgar
Last Updated: 5:23PM BST 05 Aug 2008
With the games due to begin on Friday, authorities in Kashgar said the terrorists behind a bombing in the city on Monday were trying to "turn 2008 into a year of mourning for China".
Two men drove a lorry into a troop of policemen on a morning jog outside the Yijin hotel, killing 16 and injuring another 16, two critically.
"These men were trying to perform a jihad," said Shi Dagang, the Communist party secretary in Kashgar. "We found papers on one of the suspects saying that their religious beliefs are more important than their lives, the prosperity of their families and even the well-being of their mothers."
He said two Islamic groups, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and the East Turkestan Liberation Organization, could have been behind the attack, since materials on the suspects matched items recovered from an ETIM training camp in January. The groups want an independent region for the Uighurs, the ethnic Muslims that makes up the bulk of the population in Kashgar.
"This was well-planned, at least one month in advance," Mr Shi said. "They knew when the policemen were doing their exercises." He also revealed that 18 foreign terrorists had been arrested so far this year.
During the attack on Monday, the men threw home-made grenades at the policemen before stabbing them with knives, he added.
"One of the men lost his arm in the explosion," he said. The other is already on trial. We recovered nine grenades, two long knives, two daggers and a gun."
The two men were named as Abdul Rahman, 28, and Kurbanyan Ahmet, 33, both from Kashgar. Mr Shi said one was a taxi driver, the other was a hawker.
He promised a "severe and continuous crackdown" against the terrorists, who had previously warned they would carry out one attack each month in the run-up to the games. Other incidents included unrest in two other cities in Xinjiang and an attempted bombing of a China Southern jet from Urumqi, the state capital, to Beijing.
Nevertheless, the organisers of the games sought to reassure the 10,000 athletes and hundreds of thousands of expected tourists that they should not worry about security. "We can guarantee a safe and peaceful Olympic Games," said Sun Weide, a spokesman for the organising committee.
Security across Xinjiang province has been stepped up, with 5,000 armed policemen in Urumqi patrolling buses. Three men were reportedly detained at Urumqi airport on Monday afternoon as they tried to board a flight for Beijing with traces of explosives on their hands.
Special wireless devices were used to check the ID cards of Chinese citizens to see if their data matched blacklisted suspects, according to Xinhua. In Kashgar, however, the police tried to play down the threat, leaving the city more or less operating as normal.
Meanwhile, two Japanese journalists were arrested and beaten while trying to report on the bombing on Monday night.
Masami Kawakita, a photographer with the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper, said he was near the gates of the police compound when he was surrounded by soldiers. "They picked me up by the arms and legs and carried me into the courtyard. They kicked me in the ribs and arms and one stood on my head with his boot," he said.
Mr Kawakita, together with a reporter for Nippon Television, was detained for two hours without water or being allowed to make a telephone call before being released. The Japanese government said it planned to "protest strongly" to China over the alleged detention.
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China and the Enduring Uighurs
August 6, 2008
By Rodger Baker
On Aug. 4, four days before the start of the Beijing Olympics, two ethnic Uighurs drove a stolen dump truck into a group of some 70 Chinese border police in the town of Kashi in Xinjiang, killing at least 16 of the officers. The attackers carried knives and home-made explosive devices and had also written manifestos in which they expressed their commitment to jihad in Xinjiang. The incident occurred just days after a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) claimed responsibility for a series of recent attacks and security incidents in China and warned of further attacks targeting the Olympics.
Chinese authorities linked the Aug. 4 attack to transnational jihadists, suggesting the involvement of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which Beijing has warned is the biggest terrorist threat to China and the Olympics. Despite the Chinese warnings and TIP claims and the intensified focus on the Uighurs because of the Aug. 4 attack, there is still much confusion over just who these Uighur or Turkistani militants are.
(Click map to enlarge)
The Uighurs, a predominately Muslim Turkic ethnic group largely centered in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, have their own culture, language and written script distinct from their Han Chinese counterparts. Uighur ethnic nationalists and Islamist separatists have risen several times to challenge Chinese control over Xinjiang, but the Uighur independence movement remains fractured and frequently at odds with itself. However, recent evolutions within the Islamist militant Uighur movement, including growing links with transnational jihadist groups in Central and Southwest Asia, may represent a renewed threat to security in China.
Origins in Xinjiang
Uighur nationalism traces its origins back to a broader Turkistan, stretching through much of modern day Xinjiang (so-called “East Turkistan”) and into Central Asia. East Turkistan was conquered by the Manchus in the mid-1700s and, after decades of struggle, the territory was annexed by China, which later renamed it Xinjiang, or “New Territories.” A modern nation-state calling itself East Turkistan arose in Xinjiang in the chaotic transition from imperial China to Communist China, lasting for two brief periods from 1933 to 1934 and from 1944 to 1949. Since that time, “East Turkistan” has been, more or less, an integral part of the People’s Republic of China.
The evolution of militant Uighur separatism — and particularly Islamist-based separatism — has been shaped over time by both domestic and foreign developments. In 1940, Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan (Islamic Party of Turkistan or Turkistan Islamic Movement ) emerged in Xinjiang, spearheading a series of unsuccessful uprisings from the 1940s through 1952, first against local warlords and later against the Communist Chinese.
In 1956, as the “Hundred Flowers” was blooming in China’s eastern cities, and intellectuals were (very briefly) allowed to air their complaints and suggestions for China’s political and social development, a new leadership emerged among the Uighur Islamist nationalists, changing the focus from “Turkistan” to the more specific “East Turkistan,” or Xinjiang. Following another failed uprising, the Islamist Uighur movement faded away for several decades, with only minor sparks flaring during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1979, as Deng Xiaoping was launching China’s economic opening and reform, there was a coinciding period of Islamic and ethnic revival in Xinjiang, reflecting the relative openness of China at the time. During this time, one of the original founders of Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan, Abdul Hakeem, was released from prison and set up underground religious schools. Among his pupils in the 1980s was Hasan Mahsum, who would go on to found ETIM.
The 1980s were a chaotic period in Xinjiang, with ethnic and religious revivalism, a growing student movement, and public opposition to China’s nuclear testing at Lop Nor. Uighur student protests were more a reflection of the growing student activism in China as a whole (culminating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident) than a resurgence of Uighur separatism, but they coincided with a general movement in Xinjiang to promote literacy and to refocus on religious and ethnic heritage. Amid this revival, several Uighur separatist or Islamist militant movements emerged.
A critical moment occurred in April 1990, when an offshoot of the Uighur Islamist militant movement was discovered plotting an uprising in Xinjiang. The April 5 so-called “Baren Incident” (named for the city where militants and their supporters faced off against Chinese security forces) led Beijing to launch dragnet operations in the region, arresting known, suspected or potential troublemakers — a pattern that would be repeated through the “Strike Hard” campaigns of the 1990s. Many of the Uighurs caught up in these security campaigns, including Mahsum, began to share, refine and shape their ideology in prisons, taking on more radical tendencies and creating networks of relations that could be called upon later. From 1995 to 1997, the struggle in Xinjiang reached its peak, with increasingly frequent attacks by militants in Xinjiang and equally intensified security countermeasures by Beijing.
It was also at this time that China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), enlisting Central Asian assistance in cracking down on Uighur militants, many of whom had fled China. In some ways this plan backfired, as it provided common cause between the Uighurs and Central Asian militants, and forced some Uighur Islamist militants further west, to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they would link up with the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), among others.
Among those leaving China was Mahsum, who tried to rally support from the Uighur diaspora in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey but was rebuffed. Mahsum and a small group of followers headed to Central Asia and ultimately Afghanistan, where he established ETIM as a direct successor to his former teacher’s Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan. By 1998, Kabul-based ETIM began recruiting and training Uighur militants while expanding ties with the emerging jihadist movement in the region, dropping the “East” from its name to reflect these deepening ties. Until the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ETIM focused on recruiting and training Uighur militants at a camp run by Mahsum and Abdul Haq, who is cited by TIP now as its spiritual leader.
With the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, ETIM was routed and its remnants fled to Central Asia and Pakistan. In January 2002, Mahsum tried to distance ETIM from al Qaeda in an attempt to avoid having the Uighur movement come under U.S. guns. It did not work. In September 2002, the United States declared ETIM a terrorist organization at the behest of China. A year later, ETIM experienced what seemed to be its last gasps, with a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation in South Waziristan in October 2003 killing Hasan Mahsum.
A Movement Reborn?
Following Mahsum’s death, a leaderless ETIM continued to interact with the Taliban and various Central Asian militants, particularly Uzbeks, and slowly reformed into a more coherent core in the Pakistan/Afghanistan frontier. In 2005, there were stirrings of this new Uighur Islamist militant group, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), which established a robust presence on the Internet, posting histories of the Uighur/Turkistan people in western China and Central Asia and inspirational videos featuring Mahsum. In 2006, a new video surfaced calling for jihad in Xinjiang, and later that year there were reports that remnants of ETIM had begun re-forming and moving back into far western Xinjiang.
It was also around this time that Beijing began raising the specter of ETIM targeting the Olympics — a move seen at the time as primarily an excuse for stricter security controls. In early January 2007, Beijing raided a camp of suspected ETIM militants near the Xinjiang border with Tajikistan, and a year later raided another suspected camp in Urumchi, uncovering a plot to carry out attacks during the Olympics. This was followed in March by a reported attempt by Uighur militants to down a Chinese airliner with gasoline smuggled aboard in soda cans.
Publicly, the Uighur militant issue was quickly swept aside by the Tibetan uprising in March, leaving nearly unnoticed an anti-government protest in Hotan and a series of counterterrorism raids by Chinese security forces in late March and early April that reportedly found evidence of more specific plots to attack Beijing and Shanghai during the Olympics.
In the midst of this security campaign, TIP released a video, not disseminated widely until late June, in which spokesman Commander Seyfullah laid out a list of grievances against Beijing and cited Abdul Haq as calling on Uighur Islamist militants to begin strikes against China. The video also complained that the “U.S.-led Western countries listed the Turkistan Islamic Party as one of the international terrorist organizations,” an apparent reference to the United States’ 2002 listing of the ETIM on the terrorist exclusion list.
In addition to linking the TIP to the ETIM, the April video also revealed some elements of the movement’s evolution since the death of Mahsum. Rather than the typical rhetoric of groups closely linked to the Wahabi ideology of al Qaeda, TIP listed its grievances against Beijing in an almost lawyer-like fashion, following more closely the pattern of Hizb al-Tahrir (HT), a movement active in Central Asia advocating nonviolent struggle against corrupt regimes and promoting the return of Islamic rule. Although HT officially renounces violence as a tool of political change, it has provided an abundance of zealous and impatient idealists who are often recruited by more active militant organizations.
The blending of the HT ideologies with the underlying principles of Turkistan independence reflects the melding of the Uighur Islamist militancy with wider Central Asian Islamist movements. Fractures in HT, emerging in 2005 and expanding thereafter, may also have contributed to the evolution of TIP’s ideology; breakaway elements of HT argued that the nonviolent methods espoused by HT were no longer effective.
What appears to be emerging is a Turkistan Islamist movement with links in Central Asia, stretching back to Afghanistan and Pakistan, blending Taliban training, transnational jihadist experiential learning, HT frameworks and recruiting, and Central Asian ties for support and shelter. This is a very different entity than China has faced in the past. If the TIP follows the examples set by the global jihadist movement, it will become an entity with a small core leadership based far from its primary field of operations guiding (ideologically but not necessarily operationally) a number of small grassroots militant cells.
The network will be diffuse, with cells operating relatively independently with minimal knowledge or communication among them and focused on localized goals based on their training, skills and commitment. This would make the TIP less of a strategic threat, since it would be unable to rally large numbers of fighters in a single or sustained operation, but it would also be more difficult to fight, since Beijing would be unable to use information from raiding one cell to find another.
This appears to be exactly what we are seeing now. The central TIP core uses the Internet and videos as psychological tools to trigger a reaction from Beijing and inspire militants without exposing itself to detection or capture. On July 25, TIP released a video claiming responsibility for a series of attacks in China, including bus bombings in Kunming, a bus fire in Shanghai and a tractor bombing in Wenzhou. While these claims were almost certainly exaggerated, the Aug. 4 attack in Xinjiang suddenly refocused attention on the TIP and its earlier threats.
Further complicating things for Beijing are the transnational linkages ETIM forged and TIP has maintained. The Turkistan movement includes not only China’s Uighurs but also crosses into Uzbekistan, parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and spreads back through Central Asia all the way to Turkey. These linkages may have been the focus of quiet security warnings beginning around March that Afghan, Middle Eastern and Central Asian migrants and tourists were spotted carrying out surveillance of schools, hotels and government buildings in Beijing and Shanghai — possibly part of an attack cycle.
The alleged activities seem to fit a pattern within the international jihadist movement of paying more attention to China. Islamists have considered China something less imperialistic, and thus less threatening, than the United States and European powers, but this began changing with the launch of the SCO, and the trend has been accelerating with China’s expanded involvement in Africa and Central Asia and its continued support for Pakistan’s government. China’s rising profile among Islamists has coincided with the rebirth of the Uighur Islamist militant movement just as Beijing embarks on one of its most significant security events: the Summer Olympics.
Whatever name it may go by today — be it Hizbul Islam Li-Turkistan, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement or the Turkistan Islamic Party — the Uighur Islamist militant movement remains a security threat to Beijing. And in its current incarnation, drawing on internationalist resources and experiences and sporting a more diffuse structure, the Uighur militancy may well be getting a second wind.
Tell Stratfor What You Think
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http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/A-US-Monitor-Says-Chinese-Islamic-Group-Posts-New-Video-Threatening-Beijing-Olympics/Article/200808115073304?lpos=World%2BNews_1&lid=ARTICLE_15073304_A%2BUS%2BMonitor%2BSays%2BChinese%2BIslamic%2BGroup%2BPosts%2BNew%2BVideo%2BThreatening%2BBeijing%2BOlympics
Olympic Terrorism Threat
8:41pm UK, Thursday August 07, 2008
An Islamic group has threatened attacks against the Olympics in China and urged Muslims to stay away from events there.
The threat, attributed to the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is contained in a new video which shows a burning Olympics logo and an explosion imposed over a venue to be used for the Beijing Games.
It claims the communist regime's alleged mistreatment of Muslims justifies holy war.
The TIP is an ethnic Uighur and Muslim organisation that is seeking to create an independent state in China's heavily Muslim Xinjiang province.
It is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, where security experts say it has received training from al Qaeda.
Earlier this week, a bomb attack in the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang killed 16 policemen.
The August 1 video, called "Call to the Global Muslim Nation", was picked up by two US terrorism monitoring firms - the SITE Intelligence Group and IntelCenter.
The tape said: "Do not stay on the same bus, on the same train, on the same plane, in the same buildings, or any place the Chinese are."
A speaker appeared on the video holding an AK-47 assault rifle and wearing a black turban and face cover.
He spoke in front of a black banner carrying the words in Arabic: "There is no God other than Allah, Mohammad is the messenger of God".
The speaker called on Muslims to offer support financially, physically, spiritually and verbally.
"China ... rejects Islam and forces Muslims into atheism by capturing and killing Islamic teachers and destroying Islamic schools," he argued.
In July, Chinese authorities denied claims by the group that it was behind a series of bombings ahead of the Olympics.
The TIP had previously released a video threatening the Games and claimed responsibility for deadly bus blasts in Shanghai and in Kunming, capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/08/print/china_discovers_al_qaeda_in_it.php
Counterterrorism Blog
China discovers al Qaeda in its backyard
By Walid Phares
In a video accusing China’s Communist Government of “mistreating Muslims” a Jihadi group threatened to attack the Summer Games in Beijin. A spokesman of the Turkistan Islamic Party accuses China of “forcing Muslims into atheism and destroying Islamic schools. The “Turkistan Islamic Party” is most likely based across the border in Pakistan, where sources affirm it received training from Al Qaeda.
Weeks ago the organization claimed responsibility for a bombings across the country. The latest video shows graphics of a burning Olympics logo and explosions. This week, attackers killed 16 police and wounded more than a dozen in the Xinjiang city of Kashgar using homemade bombs.
But according to AP reports few months ago, Chinese Police broke up a terror plot targeting the Beijing Olympics while a flight crew foiled attempt to crash a Chinese plane. Per Communist Party officials in the North Western province of Xinjiang, materials seized in a January 27 raid in the regional capital, Urumqi, suggested the plotters' planned "specifically to sabotage the staging of the Beijing Olympics." Earlier reports said police found guns, homemade bombs, training materials and "extremist religious ideological materials" during the January raid in Urumqi, in which two members of the gang were killed and 15 arrested. The immediate question becomes: Is China targeted by a Terror organization? And since the material found was characterized as “extremist religious ideological”, does that mean it is al Qaeda or one of its affiliate? The answer to these questions could change the face of geopolitics in Asia.
Interestingly the Associated Press runs to frame the Terrorists to a local ethnic conflict in one of China’s Western provinces. AP wrote: “Chinese forces have for years been battling a low-intensity separatist movement among Xinjiang's Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people who are culturally and ethnically distinct from China's Han majority.” The news agency has tried to set the agenda of the debate by scoring three points for the “radicals.” They are separatists, they are representative of a local ethnicity and they are Muslim. In addition the description of the struggle is informative: Chinese forces versus a Uighur movement. In a way a parallel to Kosovo, Chechnya and Kashmir with two projected effects. As framed by AP, the struggle of these “Terrorists” is indeed legitimate even though the means are violent. But is it the case?
Evidently the Chinese Communists are repressive against all other minorities and political dissidents. But as in Russia and India’s Wahabi cases, one would investigate if these particular Terrorists in China are local patriotic elements with liberal outlook. Not really. As under the Russians in Chechnya it looks like the Communists in China are battling another form of totalitarianism to come: Jihadism.
Chinese officials said the group had been trained by and was following the orders of a radical group based in Pakistan and Afghanistan called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM. The group has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United Nations and the United States. East Turkestan is another name for Xinjiang. So the “movement” is indeed Terrorist-identified by the international community. But other than its violent means, is that group linked to al Qaeda? There is a double answer to this question. First the group is indeed Jihadi Wahabi-Salafi as its long term objective is to separate a particular province from China but only to establish an Emirate, a prelude to join the world Caliphate. Hence ideologically it is part of the world web of internationalist Jihadis, who identify with Bin Laden’s school of thought. Second in many instances, al Qaeda produced material showing Chinese Jihadists training in their camps. In the chat rooms, the Salafi commentators often cite the presence of “brothers” from the Xinjiang. And let’s remind ourselves that upon the fall of Tora Bora in 2001, Chinese officials asked US military to extradite Chinese nationals who we part of the Taliban and al Qaeda networks in Afghanistan. So the bottom line is that the Bin Laden cohorts included Jihadis recruited from inside China’s Western province. As in Chechnya a local ethnic separatist claim exists but the struggle was hijacked by the Jihadi terror forces.
Hence as China is discovering al Qaeda in its own backyard, this begs powerful questions:
1. If these Jihadists will escalate their Terror against Chinese cities and installations -and the recent discoveries indicate this trend- will Beijing find itself in the same trench as Washington that is against al Qaeda and the Salafists?
2. And if that becomes the case, will China continue to pursue a policy of support to other Jihadist forces, including the Islamist regime in Khartoum?
3. If Communism and Jihadism clash again in the 21st century inside the Asian superpower, will its resources rich Western province becomes a new Afghanistan with Jihadists converging from central Asia and other parts f the world?
For now Chinese officials are downplaying the danger altogether and dismissing the threat: "Those in Xinjiang pursuing separatism and sabotage are an extremely small number,” said a pro Government Uighur leader. “They may be Uighurs, but they can't represent Uighurs. They are the scum of the Uighurs," regional communist official Bekri said. But that is what Russian officials always said about Chechnya and their Indian counterparts argued about Kashmir. Jihadism has demonstrated that its adherents can swiftly recruit and expand, especially if international Wahabis are generous and committed. Hence the answer to this critical new “Jihad” will come from as far as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia but also from the smaller principality of Qatar, where al Jazeera can transform a local separatist movement into an uprising in the name of the Umma.
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Dr Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad
By Walid Phares on August 7, 2008 10:47 PM
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Good piece GM.
I do find myself doubting some of what I understand to be your unerlying hypothesis. My current sense of things is that the Chinese govt will be the totalitarian assh*le that it is in dealing with its Islamo Fascists, and that this will affect nothing in their dealings with us.
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China needs us to buy their consumer goods to keep the Chinese people employed for internal stability. If the jihadists pull off an attack or attacks during the Olympics, they will harm China's collective "face". The Politburo doesn't care about dead/wounded Chinese citizens, unless there were red princes/princesses among the casualties, but the loss of face would be a causus belli for them.
To successfully engage an element of the global jihad requires a global, systemic strategy, not just targeting hajis in Xinjiang. To do so would require some reshaped alliances.
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"To successfully engage an element of the global jihad requires a global, systemic strategy, not just targeting hajis in Xinjiang."
Why?
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**China has to content with the same "virtual caliphate" that we do to address the jihad it faces from it's muslim population.**
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4868381.html
Strategically, the fact that the global jihad does not have one single master plan or one single mastermind in no way means that the enemy lacks clearly identifiable centers of gravity. At the risk of considerable simplification, the global jihad can be said to actually rest on five asymmetrical “pillars”: al-Saud, al-Azhar, al Qaeda, al-Jazeera — with the proverbial “fifth column” in the role of fifth pillar. In a nutshell: In the past thirty years, through clever manipulation of financial, educational, and informational levers, Saudi Arabia has used its soft power to alter the theo-political balance of power in the Muslim world and to turn itself into a virtual Caliphate, using Muslim IOs and NGOs as force multipliers. The concurrent transformation of the Cairo-based al-Azhar University during the same period is possibly the most overlooked element in the global jihad; more than just the oldest Muslim university, al-Azhar is the closest thing to an informal Supreme Court of the Muslim world, denying or granting legitimacy to a peace treaty with Israel (1965 and 1979 respectively) or calling for jihad against the American presence in Iraq (March 2003). In the past 30 years, the Saudi takeover of al-Azhar has so shifted the center of gravity of the Muslim political discourse that the rhetoric of al-Azhar today is indistinguishable from that of the Muslim Brotherhood, its former nemesis. Al Qaeda and Al-Jazeera, though more recent phenomena, have managed in less than two decades to become the recruiting, training, and advertising bases of the global jihad. Last but not least, the academic Fifth Column in the West, ever faithful to its historical role of “useful idiot” (Lenin), is increasingly providing both conceptual ammunition and academic immunity to crypto-jihadists, making Western campuses safe for intellectual terrorism.9
Taken together, these five pillars constitute something halfway between the “deep coalitions” theorized by contemporary Western strategists, and an informal command-and-control of global jihad. If only in a metaphorical sense, then, command-and-control warfare (C2W) offers the best template for a counter-jihad at the level of grand strategy. The identification of these five pillars as centers of gravity is meant to remind us that the destiny of 1.2 billion Muslims is today inordinately shaped by a few thousand Saudi princes, Egyptian clerics, and Gulf news editors, and that therefore the guiding principle of the war of ideas should be the principle of economy of force. Don’t say, for instance, “Islam needs its Martin Luther,” if only because his 95 theses ushered in a 150-year-long bloody insurgency within Christendom. Say instead, “The Saudi Caliphate needs to undertake its own Vatican II.”10
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I say this with complete sincerity GM-- that was very interesting.
I can see that I need to sharpen my question a bit. My hesitation with your analysis comes from not seeing the Chinese as seeing this as something for which they will particularly benefit from working with us. I can see them as looking to solve the problem as they do so many others (e.g. Tibet) -- by being the totalitarian pricks that they are and by dilution with Chinese population.
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Tibet is isolated, and mostly is filled with non-violent buddhists. All the "Free Tibet" bumper stickers in the world mean nothing to the PLA, People's Armed Police and Ministry for State Security crushing dissent in Lhasa.
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I'm thinking the Chinese will to be violent has something to do with it too , , , Anyway, my doubt of your hypothesis remains. Furthermore, I can see them using this to increase their totalitarian control-- which my libertarian self notes includes quite a few million cameras everywhere watching everything.
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In the late 90's, I thought with China would continue on it's path towards human rights as it's economy modernized. Instead it's become more totalitarian since Hu Juntao rose to power. Yes, China's power structure has demonstrated an incredible ruthlessness internally and externally since 1949 and can go "1989" anytime it feels threatened.
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Fatal blasts hit Chinese province
At least two people have been killed and several hurt after a series of blasts hit the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, state media has reported.
It said gunfire was also heard in the early hours in southern Kuqa county.
The attacks happened at offices belonging to the local government and security forces, a spokesman for the World Uighur Congress told the BBC.
Earlier this week, China said 16 policemen were killed in an attack by Islamist separatists in Xinjiang.
"There were several explosions in several places in Kuqa this morning," said a woman who was on duty at the Kuqa People's Hospital, quoted by the Associated Press news agency.
She said several people were in critical condition.
Olympics threat
World Uighur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit told the BBC that the Chinese government was responsible for the latest blasts because of what he called repressive policies in Xinjiang.
"In order to stop the East Turkestan situation getting worse, I urge the international community to exert pressure on China to immediately stop its systematic repressive government policies," he said.
Xinjiang is home to many Muslim Uighur people.
Kuqa county itself is almost exclusively populated by Uighurs.
Uighur separatists in Xinjiang have waged a low-level campaign against Chinese rule for decades.
The incident comes a day after the Olympic Games opened in Beijing, with a spectacular display of fireworks, music and dancing.
Human rights groups say Beijing is suppressing the rights of Uighurs.
Correspondents say China has spoken in the past of what it calls a terrorist threat from Muslim militants in Xinjiang, but it has provided little evidence to back up its claims.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7551954.stm
Published: 2008/08/10 01:49:03 GMT
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Here's one for you GM. Its the NY Times, so caveat lector:
KHOTAN, China — The grand mosque that draws thousands of Muslims each week in this oasis town has all the usual trappings of piety: dusty wool carpets on which to kneel in prayer, a row of turbans and skullcaps for men without headwear, a wall niche facing the holy city of Mecca in the Arabian desert.
But large signs posted by the front door list edicts that are more Communist Party decrees than Koranic doctrines. The imam’s sermon at Friday Prayer must run no longer than a half-hour, the rules say. Prayer in public areas outside the mosque is forbidden. Residents of Khotan are not allowed to worship at mosques outside of town. One rule on the wall says that government workers and nonreligious people may not be “forced” to attend services at the mosque — a generous wording of a law that prohibits government workers and Communist Party members from going at all.
“Of course this makes people angry,” said a teacher in the mosque courtyard, who would give only a partial name, Muhammad, for fear of government retribution. “Excitable people think the government is wrong in what it does. They say that government officials who are Muslims should also be allowed to pray.”
To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule. The edicts touch on every facet of a Muslim’s way of life. Official versions of the Koran are the only legal ones. Imams may not teach the Koran in private, and studying Arabic is allowed only at special government schools.
Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj — are also carefully controlled. Students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and the passports of Uighurs have been confiscated across Xinjiang to force them to join government-run hajj tours rather than travel illegally to Mecca on their own.
Government workers are not permitted to practice Islam, which means the slightest sign of devotion, a head scarf on a woman, for example, could lead to a firing.
The Chinese government, which is officially atheist, recognizes five religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism and Buddhism — and tightly regulates their administration and practice. Its oversight in Xinjiang, though, is especially vigilant because it worries about separatist activity in the region.
Some officials contend that insurgent groups in Xinjiang pose one of the biggest security threats to China, and the government says the “three forces” of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism threaten to destabilize the region. But outside scholars of Xinjiang and terrorism experts argue that heavy-handed tactics like the restrictions on Islam will only radicalize more Uighurs.
Many of the rules have been on the books for years, but some local governments in Xinjiang have publicly highlighted them in the past seven weeks by posting the laws on Web sites or hanging banners in towns.
Those moves coincided with Ramadan, which ran from September to early October, and came on the heels of a series of attacks in August that left at least 22 security officers and one civilian dead, according to official reports. The deadliest attack was a murky ambush in Kashgar that witnesses said involved men in police uniforms fighting each other.
The attacks were the biggest wave of violence in Xinjiang since the 1990s. In recent months, Wang Lequan, the long-serving party secretary of Xinjiang, and Nuer Baikeli, the chairman of the region, have given hard-line speeches indicating that a crackdown will soon begin.
Mr. Wang said the government was engaged in a “life or death” struggle in Xinjiang. Mr. Baikeli signaled that government control of religious activities would tighten, asserting that “the religious issue has been the barometer of stability in Xinjiang.”
Anti-China forces in the West and separatist forces are trying to carry out “illegal religious activities and agitate religious fever,” he said, and “the field of religion has become an increasingly important battlefield against enemies.”
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Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, accounting for 46 percent of the population of 19 million. Many say Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic group, discriminate against them based on the most obvious differences between the groups: language and religion.
Times Topics: UighursThe Uighurs began adopting Sunni Islam in the 10th century, although patterns of belief vary widely, and the religion has enjoyed a surge of popularity after the harshest decades of Communist rule. According to government statistics, there are 24,000 mosques and 29,000 religious leaders in Xinjiang. Muslim piety is especially strong in old Silk Road towns in the south like Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan.
Many Han Chinese see Islam as the root of social problems in Xinjiang.
“The Uighurs are lazy,” said a man who runs a construction business in Kashgar and would give only his last name, Zhao, because of the political delicacy of the topic. “It’s because of their religion,” he said. “They spend so much time praying. What are they praying for?”
The government restrictions are posted inside mosques and elsewhere across Xinjiang. In particular, officials take great pains to publicize the law prohibiting Muslims from arranging their own trips for the hajj. Signs painted on mud-brick walls in the winding alleyways of old Kashgar warn against making illegal pilgrimages. A red banner hanging on a large mosque in the Uighur area of Urumqi, the regional capital, says, “Implement the policy of organized and planned pilgrimage; individual pilgrimage is forbidden.”
As dozens of worshipers streamed into the mosque for prayer on a recent evening, one Uighur man pointed to the sign and shook his head. “We didn’t write that,” he said in broken Chinese. “They wrote that.” He turned his finger to a white neon sign above the building that simply said “mosque” in Arabic script. “We wrote that,” he said.
Like other Uighurs interviewed for this article, he agreed to speak on the condition that his name not be used for fear of retribution by the authorities.
The government gives various reasons for controlling the hajj. Officials say that the Saudi Arabian government is concerned about crowded conditions in Mecca that have led to fatal tramplings, and that Muslims who leave China on their own sometimes spend too much money on the pilgrimage. Critics say the government is trying to restrict the movements of Uighurs and prevent them from coming into contact with other Muslims, fearing that such exchanges could build a pan-Islamic identity in Xinjiang.
About two years ago, the government began confiscating the passports of Uighurs across the region, angering many people here. Now virtually no Uighurs have passports, though they can apply for them for short trips. The new restriction has made life especially difficult for businessmen who travel to neighboring countries.
To get a passport to go on an official hajj tour or a business trip, applicants must leave a deposit of nearly $6,000.
One man in Kashgar said the imam at his mosque, who like all official imams is paid by the government, had recently been urging congregants to go to Mecca only with legal tours.
That is not easy for many Uighurs. The cost of an official trip is the equivalent of $3,700, and hefty bribes usually raise the price. Once a person files an application, the authorities do a background check into the family. If the applicant has children, the children must be old enough to be financially self-sufficient, and the applicant is required to show that he or she has substantial savings in the bank. Officials say these conditions ensure that a hajj trip will not leave the family impoverished.
Rules posted last year on the Xinjiang government’s Web site say the applicant must be 50 to 70 years old, “love the country and obey the law.”
The number of applicants far outnumbers the slots available each year, and the wait is at least a year. But the government has been raising the cap. Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that from 2006 to 2007, more than 3,100 Muslims from Xinjiang went on the official hajj, up from 2,000 the previous year.
One young Uighur man in Kashgar said his parents were pushing their children to get married soon so they could prove the children were financially independent, thus allowing them to qualify to go on the hajj. “Their greatest wish is to go to Mecca once,” the man, who wished to be identified only as Abdullah, said over dinner.
But the family has to weigh another factor: the father, now retired, was once a government employee and a Communist Party member, so he might very well lose his pension if he went on the hajj, Abdullah said.
The rules on fasting during Ramadan are just as strict. Several local governments began posting the regulations on their Web sites last month. They vary by town and county but include requiring restaurants to stay open during daylight hours and mandating that women not wear veils and men shave their beards.
Enforcement can be haphazard. In Kashgar, many Uighur restaurants remained closed during the fasting hours. “The religion is too strong in Kashgar,” said one man. “There are rules, but people don’t follow them.”
One rule that officials in some towns seem especially intent on enforcing is the ban on students’ fasting. Supporters of this policy say students need to eat to study properly. The local university in Kashgar adheres to the policy. Starting last year, it tried to force students to eat during the day by prohibiting them from leaving campus in the evening to join their families in breaking the daily fast. Residents of Kashgar say the university locked the gates and put glass shards along the top of a campus wall.
After a few weeks, the school built a higher wall.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124685864855299373.html#printMode
ASIA NEWS JULY 6, 2009, 11:32 A.M. ET
Scores Reported Dead in China After Riots
By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH and JASON DEAN
SHANGHAI -- The official death toll in riots in China's northwestern Xinjiang region rose sharply Monday, with the government saying that 140 had been killed in what appears to be one of the deadliest episodes of unrest in China in decades.
Police said at least 828 other people were injured in violence that began Sunday in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. Witnesses said the conflicts pitted security forces against demonstrators, and members of the region's Turkic-speaking Uighur ethnic group against members of the country's Han Chinese majority. Many among the predominantly Muslim Uighurs have chafed at Chinese government rule.
The official tally of dead and injured increased Monday as more information came out of Urumqi through the state-run Xinhua news agency, although it appeared that most or all of the violence had ended by the early hours of Monday.
Xinhua quoted Liu Yaohua, a senior police official in Xinjiang, as saying that rioters had burned 261 vehicles, including 190 buses and two police cars, several of which were still ablaze as of Monday morning. Mr. Liu said the death toll of 140 "would still be climbing."
As evening fell in Urumqi Monday, witnesses said that paramilitary troops of the People's Armed Police, backed by armored personnel carriers, were patrolling largely calm city streets. Many businesses remained shuttered and gates of the city's central bazaar, which was the scene of unrest Sunday night, were closed.
Police said they were still searching for dozens of people suspected of fanning the violence. Several hundred people have already been arrested in connection with the riot, police said, and the government said it was bringing "ethnic officials" from nearby areas to help with interrogations.
Uighur activists said hundreds of Uighurs, many of them students, had gathered Sunday to protest racial discrimination and call for government action against the perpetrators of an attack last month on Uighur migrant workers at a toy factory in southern China. In that incident, a group of Han Chinese broke into a factory dormitory housing Uighur workers. State media reported that two people were killed. Uighur groups say the death toll may have been higher.
The protests appear to have spun out of control late Sunday, with clashes between protestors and police as well as ethnic violence around the city. Xinhua's report Monday said that 57 dead bodies had been "retrieved from Urumqi's streets and lanes," while the remaining fatalities were confirmed dead at hospitals.
An official in the nursing department of one of Urumqi's largest hospitals, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People's Hospital, said the hospital received 291 people injured in the unrest. Seventeen of them died, and more than 20 others were in critical condition on Monday night.
The official said that 233 of the injured were Han Chinese, 39 were Uighurs and the rest belonged to other ethnic minority groups. Seven of the injured had gunshot wounds, she said.
Uighurs have long complained about restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent in strategically important Xinjiang, which covers one-sixth of China's territory and is also an important oil-and-gas-producing region.
Many Uighurs resent what they see as economic and social discrimination by the majority Han Chinese, who have migrated to Xinjiang in growing numbers. Some Uighurs, seeking independence from China, have waged sporadic and at times violent campaigns against the government.
Pictures said to be of the Sunday's protests distributed by the Washington-based Uyghur American Association showed young Uighurs marching in Urumqi, in some cases carrying the Chinese flag. Pictures also showed phalanxes of helmeted police in riot gear, with shields and batons.
Demonstrators clashed with the police, witnesses said, and rioters smashed shops and attacked buses. "Most were young Uighurs. They were smashing everything on the street," said one Han Chinese man who works as a driver.
Another Han Chinese man, who owns a shop in the city's central bazaar, said he saw Uighurs "with big knives stabbing people" on the street. He said crowds of Hans and Uighurs were fleeing the violence. "They were targeting Han, mostly," he added. "We need to hide inside for a few more days."
The government blamed the unrest on a prominent exiled Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress, an activist group. Sunday's demonstration was "instigated and directed from abroad," according to a government statement cited by Xinhua.
Alim Seytoff, vice president of the Uyghur American Association, dismissed the government's claim, saying, "Every time something happens, they blame Ms. Kadeer." He added: "It's really the Chinese government's heavy-handed policies that create such protests and unrest."
Unrest in Xinjiang mounted last year, as some Uighurs sought to emulate widespread antigovernment demonstrations in Tibetan areas. There were several violent incidents around the time of last summer's Beijing Olympics, including an attack on a border-police unit that left 16 dead. Ten militants died after another attack with improvised explosives in a Xinjiang city on the first weekend of the Games.
Write to Gordon Fairclough at gordon.fairclough@wsj.com and Jason Dean at jason.dean@wsj.com
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gtOBNpRVLjLpYPH44fs87rt2kmPA
Al-Qaeda vows to hit China over Uighur unrest
By Polly Hui – 1 day ago
HONG KONG (AFP) — Al-Qaeda is threatening for the first time to attack Chinese interests overseas in retaliation for the deaths of Muslims in the restive region of Xinjiang, according to a risk analysis group.
The call for reprisals against China comes from the Algerian-based offshoot Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), according to a summary of its report sent to AFP by the international consultancy Stirling Assynt.
"Although AQIM appear to be the first arm of Al-Qaeda to officially state they will target Chinese interests, others are likely to follow," said the report, which was first divulged by the South China Morning Post Tuesday.
Osama bin Laden's network has not previously threatened China, but the Stirling report said a thirst for vengeance over Beijing's clampdown in Xinjiang was spreading over the global jihadist community.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese work in the Middle East and North Africa, including 50,000 in Algeria, estimated the group, which has offices in London and Hong Kong providing risk advice to corporate and official clients.
"This threat should be taken seriously," Stirling said, basing its information on people who it said had seen the AQIM instruction.
"There is an increasing amount of chatter ... among jihadists who claim they want to see action against China.
"Some of these individuals have been actively seeking information on China's interests in the Muslim world, which they could use for targeting purposes."
Stirling said the extremist group could well target Chinese projects in Yemen in a bid to topple the Beijing-friendly government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The intelligence firm also noted Al-Qaeda's killing of 24 Algerian security officers who were meant to be protection for Chinese engineers three weeks ago.
"On that occasion they did not attack the Chinese engineers because the target was the project on which they were working.
"Now, future attacks of this kind are likely to target security forces and Chinese engineers alike," the report said.
The most likely scenario would be that Al-Qaeda's central leadership would encourage their affiliates in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula to attack Chinese targets near at hand, it said.
Al-Qaeda centrally does "not want to open a new front with China," the analysis said.
"But equally their sense of Muslim solidarity compels them to help and/or to be seen to be helping. This is also a factor in helping the organisation regain support and funding from their global constituency."
Chinese authorities have said that riots in the Xinjiang city of Urumqi by Muslim Uighurs on July 5 left 184 people dead -- most of whom were Han, China's dominant ethnic group -- and more than 1,600 injured.
Uighur leaders accuse Chinese forces of opening fire on peaceful protests, in the latest unrest to rock the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.
Chinese authorities have previously blamed low-level attacks on Xinjiang's East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which Beijing, the United States and the United Nations list as a terrorist organisation.
China has also said that ETIM militants have received some training and funding from Al-Qaeda.
However, many experts have told AFP that they doubt the ETIM is a major threat in Xinjiang, and some lawmakers in the United States are pushing for the terrorist label to be lifted.
The US government meanwhile last month released four Uighurs from the Guantanamo Bay detention site, years after clearing them of any wrongdoing. Beijing's bid to have them extradited was denied and they are now in Bermuda.
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http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=3.0.3849585514
China: Al-Qaeda urges holy war to defend Muslims
Rome, 7 October (AKI) - A leading Al-Qaeda militant on Wednesday called on Muslims worldwide to defend Uighurs in China's restive northwestern region of Xinjiang. He told Uighurs to prepare for a holy war or Jihad and urged a "vast media campaign" to raise awareness of their fate at the hands of "oppressive" China.
In the video posted to jihadist websites, Abu Yahya al-Libi appeared to launch a frontal assault against China.
"This massacre is not being carried out by criminal Crusaders or evil Jews who have committed crimes against our nation," al-Libi stated.
"Today, a new massacre is being carried out by Buddhist nationalists and communists against the Muslim population in eastern Turkestan," said al-Libi.
Islamists call Xinjiang East Turkestan. Uighurs are Muslims native to Xinjiang province, and have cultural ties to Turkic peoples in Central Asia.
"There is no way to remove injustice and oppression without a true return to their (Uighurs) religion and ... serious preparation for Jihad in the path of God the Almighty and to carry weapons in the face of those (Chinese) invaders," he said.
"It is a duty for Muslims today to stand by their wounded and oppressed brothers in East Turkestan ... and support them with all they can," al-Libi added.
Al-Libi claims terrible crimes are being perpetrated in Xinjiang "which nobody can see," urging a media campaign to give these crimes the same visibility as those "carried out by westerners against Muslims."
He also accused China of using "satanic ways" to oppress Muslims in the province and replace them with other ethnicities while "looting their wealth and undermining their culture and religion."
"Tens of thousand of people have been silently killed to prevent a revolt. The communist Chinese government has tried to eliminate all links between eastern Turkestan and the Islamic nation by sending colonisers to constantly reduce the number of Muslims," he stated.
Another tactic China is using to exterminate Muslims is calling the province Xinjiang instead of eastern Turkestan, just as Palestine's name as been changed to Israel, al-Libi argued.
He described China's presence in Xinjiang as an "occupation" and claimed the colonisation of the province has made the Muslim population a minority.
"The Chinese have closed all the Islamic schools, forbidding the study of the Muslim religion. They have arrested and killed all the Muslim leaders," he said.
Xinjiang is also the province where China is carrying out the largest number of nuclear experiments, al-Libi alleged.
"Thousands of people have died from the radiation emitted by the many nuclear missiles that have been launched and the experiments carried out in the area," al-Libi concluded.
Uighurs make up 8 million people out of Xinjiang's population of 20 million. It covers one-sixth of the country and is relatively sparsely populated.
A total of 197 people were killed over several days of unrest in Xinjiang in July and rioting in the capital Urumqi. Most of those who died were from the Han Chinese majority.
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http://ca.news.yahoo.com/china-says-extremists-trained-abroad-behind-attack-west-034315503.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Monday that Islamic militants had mounted an attack that left 11 people dead in the restive western region of Xinjiang, which announced a crackdown on "illegal" religious activities at the start of the Muslim fasting month.
The attack in Kashgar city on Sunday afternoon was the latest violence to rattle the region where Muslim Uighurs have long resented the presence of Han Chinese and religious and political controls imposed by Beijing.
It came less than 24 hours after two small blasts hit the city, which is dominated by Uighurs.
"The malign intention behind this violent terror was to sabotage inter-ethnic unity and harm social stability, provoking ethnic hatred and creating ethnic conflict," the Kashgar government said on its website (http://www.xjks.gov.cn).
Captured suspects confessed that their ringleaders had earlier fled to Pakistan and joined the separatist "East Turkestan Islamic Movement," and received training in making firearms and explosives before infiltrating back into China, the Kashgar government said.
"The members of this group all adhere to extremist religious ideas and adamantly support Jihad," said the statement, referring to the Arabic term for struggle used by advocates of militant Islam to describe their cause.
Police shot dead five people and arrested four others after they stormed a restaurant, set in on fire after killing the owner and a waiter, and then ran onto the street and hacked to death four people, Xinhua news agency reported.
The Chinese-language Global Times newspaper said all the suspected attackers were Uighur.
For the ruling Communist Party, the bloodshed presents a tricky test of its control in Xinjiang, where Uighur and Han Chinese residents view each other with suspicion. (For more on the issues see.)
**You won't see any senior CCP members meeting with imams and speaking about how islam is a religion of peace. You will see an iron fist and bloodshed.
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I firmly believe that we need a government that is similar to China's!!!! I support you on this 100% GM!
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I firmly believe that we need a government that is similar to China's!!!! I support you on this 100% GM!
Funny enough, you can fight a war to win without changing your gov't.
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I firmly believe that we need a government that is similar to China's!!!! I support you on this 100% GM!
Funny enough, you can fight a war to win without changing your gov't.
Hmmmmm, really? Not according to your prior quote.
"You will see an iron fist and bloodshed."
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I firmly believe that we need a government that is similar to China's!!!! I support you on this 100% GM!
Funny enough, you can fight a war to win without changing your gov't.
Hmmmmm, really? Not according to your prior quote.
"You will see an iron fist and bloodshed."
That's what will happen. Do you doubt that?
How does that apply to us changing our gov't?
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Were you not posting the article because you are pleased with the manner in which the Chinese dealt with the Islamic militants? Do the US and Chinese have a similar governing ethos? Do the Chinese have the individual rights that Americans have?
If you were pleased, as you insinuate; since the US and China do not have a similar governing ethos; and because the Chinese do not have the rights that Americans have (as discussed in the governing document) then the US would have to adopt a similar government to that of China (or at least alter the government we do have in a similar vein) to fight Islamic militants in the same manner that the Chinese do.
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BD,
What form of govenment did we have in WWII? Do you know who Adm. "Bull" Halsey was?
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We had the kind of government that gave civilian trials to German sabateurs, GM. Is this what you are advocating?
And, yes I do. Are you aware of the difference between foreign and domestic affairs?
The article you posted was about the Chinese POLICE killing militants in CHINA. Why would you bring up a military officer? Are you now arguing that, like the Chinese, the war on terror is better dealt with by the police?
Like it or not, we still have the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendments.
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Over to you GM :-)
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"We had the kind of government that gave civilian trials to German sabateurs, GM. Is this what you are advocating?"
We did?
Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), is a Supreme Court of the United States case that upheld the jurisdiction of a United States military tribunal over the trial of several Operation Pastorius German saboteurs in the United States. Quirin has been cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.
It was argued July 29 and July 30, 1942 and decided July 31, 1942 with an extended opinion filed October 29, 1942.
This decision states:
“
…the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.
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"And, yes I do."
Are you horrified by his saying "Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."? I know, that was back when when winning a war was seen as a good thing.
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As I recall, the USSC is still a civilian court that holds trials. I am aware of the case, since I teach it. I am aware of the precedent. But CASE was before the civilian court.
He fought the war internationally. You still haven't addressed my point.
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As I recall, the USSC is still a civilian court that holds trials. I am aware of the case, since I teach it. I am aware of the precedent. But CASE was before the civilian court.
He fought the war internationally. You still haven't addressed my point.
So the military tribunal wasn't really a military tribunal because the USSC reviewed it?
Were those nazi saboteurs captured on US soil by civillian law enforcement?
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Conservatives have complained about the USSC review of military tribunals in the War on Terror, but not Quirin. Why? You like the outcome. That's it. But the USSC is a civilian court.
You still fail to tell me how Halsey's international actions compare to China's domestic ones, GM.
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Conservatives have complained about the USSC review of military tribunals in the War on Terror, but not Quirin. Why? You like the outcome. That's it. But the USSC is a civilian court.
The nazi saboteurs were tried by a military tribunal, which was upheld by the USSC, correct?
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle?currentPage=all
Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)
The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open. Two of bin Laden’s wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden’s fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside. He would almost certainly have been killed had they blown themselves up, but by blanketing them he would have absorbed some of the blast and potentially saved the two SEALs behind him. In the end, neither woman was wearing an explosive vest.
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”—“enemy killed in action.”
_______________________________________________________________
You want these SEALs charged with murder, right BD? If not, why not?
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GM, until you actually respond to your fallacious comparison of China's domestic actions vs. Halsey's international actions, I am done with this conversation.
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Over to you GM :-)
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GM, until you actually respond to your fallacious comparison of China's domestic actions vs. Halsey's international actions, I am done with this conversation.
Having painted yourself into a corner by claiming the nazi saboteurs tried by military tribunals were tried by civillian courts, I can imagine you are eager to abandon this thread.
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So you are wimping out?
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Hardly. Ad. Halsey expressed a mindset required to win, unencumbered by political correctness. To win, one must be willing to break your enemy's will to fight. You fight according to the way the war needs to be fought to win if you wish to win. That means adjusting to the realities at hand rather than trying to insist on Marquess of Queensberry Rules when surrounded by outlaw bikers who mean to stomp you into a bloody corpse. Adapt or die.
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So, you are advocating that domestically we do it like the Chinese do?
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I'm advocating that we stop being the bunch of weak, spineless Oprah-audience members this country has turned into. If you asked the average Han Chinese about the "root causes" of muslim violence in Xinjiang, they'd tell you they don't give a cao and they were glad the People's Armed Police was crushing them.
I'd be willing to bet a large amount of money that right now, there are lots of muslims in the custody of the Ministry of State Security going through things that make waterboarding seem like a walk on a spring day. Some of them won't ever been seen again.
Where is the UN? Where is the EU? Where are the protests? Flotillas?
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http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/271844/marilyn-monroe-doctrine-clifford-d-may#
July 14, 2011 12:00 A.M.
The Marilyn Monroe Doctrine
There was a time when those who targeted Americans paid a price. That was our policy — and our reputation.
In 1957, Marilyn Monroe starred in The Prince and the Showgirl. In the movie’s most memorable scene, Monroe (as Elsie Marina, an understudy in The Coconut Girl in 1911 London who is soon hobnobbing with the royals) overhears a telephone conversation (in German — but Elsie is from Milwaukee so she’s bilingual as well as gorgeous) about a plot against the Prince Regent of Carpathia, played by Laurence Olivier.
“It is most unfortunate that you should have heard that,” the dastardly Balkan plotter snarls. “It might prove exceedingly dangerous for you!”
“Dangerous?” scoffs Elsie. “Oh, don’t give me that. I’m an American citizen. Nobody can do anything to me!”
This ideal of an America that is strong, unafraid, and certainly doesn’t let its enemies get away with murder was not just a Hollywood conceit. The Prince and the Showgirl was made at London’s Pinehurst Studios. It was written by Terrence Rattigan, a distinguished dramatist, a graduate of Harrow and Oxford, who would be knighted by the Queen in 1971. Olivier, in addition to starring, produced and directed.
Fast forward to the 1980s. Journalist Peter Theroux is a guest at a small palace in Riyadh along with Saudi princes and wealthy businessmen from several Middle Eastern countries. After supper, they screen The Prince and the Showgirl, and, as recounted in Theroux’s marvelous travel memoir, Sandstorm: Days and Nights in Arabia, when Marilyn Monroe delivers the line quoted above, “every Arab in the room” shouts in unison: “Eiri fik, ya gahba!” (“F*** you, b****!”)
Fast forward to the present. Last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the Pentagon Press Association: “Iran is very directly supporting extremist Shiite groups which are killing our troops. There is no question they are shipping high-tech weapons in there . . . that are killing our people. And the forensics prove that. . . . And there’s no reason . . . for me to believe that they’re going to stop that as our numbers come down.”
Did I miss the uproar over this? Did the cable-news shows break away from the wall-to-wall Casey Anthony coverage to at least take note of the fact that a top American official has now confirmed what only a few analysts — e.g. Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — have long alleged: that Iran is not just threatening America — Iran is waging war against America and has been for decades? Iran sent its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, to slaughter U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983, collaborated with al-Qaeda to mass-murder Americans at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, facilitated attacks on the American troops who brought down Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and is now again targeting Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
Why didn’t George W. Bush, when he was president, make Iran pay a price for spilling American blood? Why isn’t Barack Obama doing so now? I’m guessing that advisers to both counseled against “widening” the conflict.
Elliott Abrams, who was an adviser to President Bush, and whose advice — I’m guessing again — often was not taken, blogged last week that
soon we will have a new Secretary of Defense and a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and one can only hope that we will also have a new policy: that neither Iran nor any other government can kill Americans with impunity. The least we owe servicemen and women who risk their lives for our country is the certainty that when we know a foreign government is trying to kill them, we will act to stop it. If we adopted such a policy, we would never again have to hear a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs reveal such a set of facts and suggest as an American response#…#well, nothing.
And, by the way, the response need not be boots on the ground in Iran. We could go much further than we have to cripple Iran’s economy. And imagine if, any time American servicemen in Iraq or Afghanistan were killed by an Iranian-manufactured rocket, roadside bomb, or explosively-formed projectile (designed to penetrate armor), one of the factories where those weapons were being produced was, without fanfare, reduced to rubble. America-haters would yell what was yelled at Marilyn Monroe/Elsie Marina. But they’d get the message that, as a matter of both principle and policy, Americans don’t let their enemies get away with killing them.
I can’t leave you without recalling how The Prince and the Showgirl ends. In what might be seen as a democracy-promotion effort, Elsie foils the plotters and persuades the prince — who, until he met her, had no patience for “nonsense about political freedom and democratic rights . . . When will these crazy Americans grow up?” — to return to Carpathia and hold a general election. Rattigan and Olivier leave the audience wondering: Will the prince and the showgirl marry? And will there be a Balkan Spring? Perhaps it’s time for a sequel.
—Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and political Islam.
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I'm advocating that we stop being the bunch of weak, spineless Oprah-audience members this country has turned into. If you asked the average Han Chinese about the "root causes" of muslim violence in Xinjiang, they'd tell you they don't give a cao and they were glad the People's Armed Police was crushing them.
I'd be willing to bet a large amount of money that right now, there are lots of muslims in the custody of the Ministry of State Security going through things that make waterboarding seem like a walk on a spring day. Some of them won't ever been seen again.
Where is the UN? Where is the EU? Where are the protests? Flotillas?
(: And no matter how much I agree with conservative economics, this is half of why I'll probably never vote for a Republican (the rest being gay rights and keeping conservative men out of women's pants).
Torture is wrong. Terrorists want us to resort to it and to hopefully use it on innocent Muslims, to radicalize them. God knows if someone from the state tortured an innocent family member of mine, they better kill me because I would lose my mind. To break the cycle of violence we need to live according to the law and demonstrate compassion.
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This doesn't really answer Guro's question, which is much the same as I have been asking you for a couple days. I want to know explicitly how you tie Halsey's actions (not single line quote) to China's domestic crackdown. I then want to know, explicitly, why you think China's domestic crackdown should be emulated in the United States. I then want to know, explicitly, how that domestic crackdown would not violate several constitutional amendments.
I'm advocating that we stop being the bunch of weak, spineless Oprah-audience members this country has turned into. If you asked the average Han Chinese about the "root causes" of muslim violence in Xinjiang, they'd tell you they don't give a cao and they were glad the People's Armed Police was crushing them.
I'd be willing to bet a large amount of money that right now, there are lots of muslims in the custody of the Ministry of State Security going through things that make waterboarding seem like a walk on a spring day. Some of them won't ever been seen again.
Where is the UN? Where is the EU? Where are the protests? Flotillas?
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please delete
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"To break the cycle of violence we need to live according to the law and demonstrate compassion."
Cycle of violence? I guess that explains why after burning most of the Japanese cities to the ground and nuking two, we're still at war with them, right?
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So, you are advocating that domestically we do it like the Chinese do?
No, my point was the intent and the aggression. No mealy-mouthed appeasement.
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"Torture is wrong. Terrorists want us to resort to it and to hopefully use it on innocent Muslims, to radicalize them. God knows if someone from the state tortured an innocent family member of mine, they better kill me because I would lose my mind. To break the cycle of violence we need to live according to the law and demonstrate compassion."
So, when the clean, anaseptic drone strikes result in collateral damage, meaning non-combatants within the blast radius suffer death and serious wounds, that's ok with you, right? Sure, the severed limbs won't grow back and the burns will be treated with the best medical care to be found in the tribal regions of Pakistan, but at least the jihadist the strike was targeted at wasn't waterboarded.....
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYeYlXfzGew[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYeYlXfzGew
No water, just Hellfire.
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"Sure, the severed limbs won't grow back and the burns will be treated with the best medical care to be found in the tribal regions of Pakistan, but at least the jihadist the strike was targeted at wasn't waterboarded....."
We should be careful with sleep deprivation too. Young jihadists need their rest, even in captivity.
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"keeping conservative men out of women's pants"
For another thread, but wouldn't it be the abortionist, not the anti abortion politician who is literally in the woman's 'pants', if I read that inference correctly. Relating it to China and Islam, China and Islam (and Dem politicians here) should at least can find common ground in their shared disrespect for females, as Asia approaches the 200 million mark for slaughtering more young girls than boys, more than the entire female population of the United States. Such caring about innocent women! http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700150378/Modern-gendercide.html
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"Torture is wrong. Terrorists want us to resort to it and to hopefully use it on innocent Muslims, to radicalize them. God knows if someone from the state tortured an innocent family member of mine, they better kill me because I would lose my mind. To break the cycle of violence we need to live according to the law and demonstrate compassion."
So, when the clean, anaseptic drone strikes result in collateral damage, meaning non-combatants within the blast radius suffer death and serious wounds, that's ok with you, right? Sure, the severed limbs won't grow back and the burns will be treated with the best medical care to be found in the tribal regions of Pakistan, but at least the jihadist the strike was targeted at wasn't waterboarded.....
Hopefully I didn't say it was ok with me in a previous post, because it isn't. I don't know what the solution there is, but the solution doesn't require the torture of captives.
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Say you're a goatherd in Pakistan when a Hellfire missile hits nearby and you get 2nd/3rd. degree burns over a good portion of your body. You linger for days before dying, was that torture, CW?
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Right, and I said as an american who's government does that to innocent people, I'm not ok with it. If I were the victim's family, I'd probably provide any help I could to people I thought would take revenge and encourage others to do so as well. "Look and see what they did to him."
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Too bad we can't use SpecOps teams to capture and interrogate the AQ/Talib, because of concerns about "torture".
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So we rely on those sterile missile strikes instead, after all, torture is wrong. Collateral damage is somehow different.
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So we rely on those sterile missile strikes instead, after all, torture is wrong. Collateral damage is somehow different.
I know, right? They shouldn't be doing either.
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Well, perhaps you can tell me of the wars won by hugs and sitting in a circle singing "Kumbaya".
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Well, perhaps you can tell me of the wars won by hugs and sitting in a circle singing "Kumbaya".
Maybe you can first tell me about the wars won where one country goes as far out of its way to bankrupt itself murdering and torturing people with little or no strike back ability, but who use every attack as a rallying cry to bring on more soldiers. All that they have to do to win is keep the idea alive until we stop fighting, not because we choose to, but because we are broken. That's where its going. It's ignorant. We are literally creating the enemy by being there, this said without paying any respect to the fact that they have GREAT reasons to hate us already.
I don't know what the solution is. Radicalizing them by torturing people and destroying riflemen in the middle of another country and burning up their families is probably not going to help us in the end.
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Little strikeback ability? Perhaps you've forgotten of an incident that happened almost 10 years ago. It involved some buildings,aircraft, about 3,000 People. Ring any bells?
We are not going broke from our wars, we are going broke from the so-called "entitlements".
So, are we still at war with the Japanese, or did that brutal warfare capped off with a couple of nukes work out?
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(https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=600x200&chf=bg,s,e8e8ff&chd=t:16,18,14,16,11,5,4,2,5&chl=Pensions%2016%|Health%20Care%2018%|Education%2014%|Defense%2016%|Welfare%2011%|Protection%205%|Transportation%204%|General%20Government%202%|Interest%205%&chtt=Total%20Spending%20for%20United%20States%20-%20FY%202011)
Well, by looking at this chart defense makes up 18%. That's pretty hefty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Looks like we could cut that in half and still defend ourselves pretty well if we weren't so busy torturing and bombing goat farmers.
I think it is nice that you think the US needs to nuke random Arab cities in response to a US backed (yeah, I went there) slaughter of our own civilians from 10 years ago, but its a bit excessive and not likely to produce the results you desire, other than radicalizing the 6 million Muslims living in the US. I guess we could put them in camps.
Conservative fear and hate is misplaced. We need to take some credit for why Arabs hate us and confront that directly. It wasn't randomly generated.
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Oh, you are a troofer? I guess the implosion of your credibility is an inside job. :roll:
So, please explain why the muslims hated us so that they were waging jihad on us in 1801?
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Oh, you are a troofer? I guess the implosion of your credibility is an inside job. :roll:
So, please explain why the muslims hated us so that they were waging jihad on us in 1801?
Couldn't tell you. I just skimmed and article on the history of Islamic warfare and couldn't find much about them attacking the "us" in 1801.
What's a troofer? Sounds nasty and insulting.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War
Look up the first Barbary War.
Pirate ships and crews from North Africa's Berber states of Morocco, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers (the Barbary Coast), the last three of these being nominally governed by the Ottoman Empire, were the scourge of the Mediterranean. Capturing merchant ships and enslaving or ransoming their crews provided the Muslim rulers of these nations with wealth and naval power. This had become enough of a problem that the Roman Catholic Trinitarian Order or Order of "Mathurins" had operated from France for centuries with the special mission of collecting and disbursing funds for the relief and ransom of prisoners of Mediterranean pirates.
The war stemmed from the Barbary pirates’ attacks upon American merchant shipping in an attempt to extort ransom for the lives of captured sailors, and ultimately tribute from the United States to avoid further attacks, much like their standard operating procedure with the various European states.[1] Before the Treaty of Paris, which granted America’s independence from Great Britain, American shipping was protected by France during the Revolutionary years under the Treaty of Alliance (1778–83). Although the treaty does not mention the Barbary States in name, it refers to common enemies between both the U.S. and France, which would include the Barbary States and pirates in general. As such, piracy against American shipping only began to occur after the end of the American Revolution, when the U.S. government lost its protection under the Treaty of Alliance.
*Snip*
In March 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with Tripoli's envoy, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (or Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). Jefferson and Adams inquired as to "the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury", to which Jefferson reported the ambassador's reply:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once. [12]
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"What's a troofer? Sounds nasty and insulting"
It is, they are the morons that think the US did 9/11. Is that you?
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So, are we still at war with Japan, or is that a conspiracy too?
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"What's a troofer? Sounds nasty and insulting"
It is, they are the morons that think the US did 9/11. Is that you?
(: I don't know what the truth is, but I think we had a hand in it.
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You have some evidence or did the voices in your head tell you that?
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As far as the Barbary war thing, I can't tell you. I don't doubt that European aspirations had something to do with it in a historical context, but I don't know what the truth is about it. If I was an Iranian, I might want to make war on the US just to kill Donald Rumsfeld though. (;
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You have some evidence or did the voices in your head tell you that?
I seriously doubt I'm going to make you believe what I believe about this. There is lots of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence; more than enough to convince me sense I don't think the people in power give a damn about the average person's well being.
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Uh huh. So no matter what America and west is always to blame. Nice how you don't know but that's your default assumption. Your leftist indoctrinators have done well.
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Uh huh. So no matter what America and west is always to blame. Nice how you don't know but that's your default assumption. Your leftist indoctrinators have done well.
Hey man, the model does a good job of predicting the future (: Don't knock it till you try it twice.
I'll be on later to read. I'm taking a break.
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You have some evidence or did the voices in your head tell you that?
I seriously doubt I'm going to make you believe what I believe about this. There is lots of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence; more than enough to convince me sense I don't think the people in power give a damn about the average person's well being.
Yeah, all those NYPD and Port Authority cops that lost friends and family don't know anything about investigation or evidence. Good thing you've put it all together for everyone.
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Uh huh. So no matter what America and west is always to blame. Nice how you don't know but that's your default assumption. Your leftist indoctrinators have done well.
Hey man, the model does a good job of predicting the future (: Don't knock it till you try it twice.
I'll be on later to read. I'm taking a break.
Oh, like how we are still at war with Japan. Great conceptual model.
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You have some evidence or did the voices in your head tell you that?
I seriously doubt I'm going to make you believe what I believe about this. There is lots of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence; more than enough to convince me sense I don't think the people in power give a damn about the average person's well being.
Yeah, all those NYPD and Port Authority cops that lost friends and family don't know anything about investigation or evidence. Good thing you've put it all together for everyone.
I'm a believer in the court of law and if the tools at the top got away with it, well then good job. They must get up really early in the morning. What I believe about it will affect who and what I vote for. For one, I LOVE voting for people that I think will reduce our military budget. I'm not screaming for Bush's head on a platter. I know it isn't going to be pinned on him.
edit - Alright, I'm really going now. Later.
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My point was that I don't like defining down concepts like torture. Water tricks in extreme, isolated situations, underwear photos gone bad, and sleep schedule changes are not comparable to gradual electrocutions or eyes gouged out. We are not morally equal to those who maximize the number of innocent casualties and kill themselves. And we did not plan or participate in the most gruesome attack ever against us - and keep it all a secret for 10 years. That doesn't make any sense.
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Are the Muslim militants in China internationally connected or supported?
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"Are the Muslim militants in China internationally connected or supported?"
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/etip.htm
Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement
Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP)
Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)
Allah Party [Hizbullah] of East Turkestan
East Turkistan National Revolution Association
The East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is a small Islamic extremist group based in China's western Xinjiang Province. The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement is also called the East Turkistan Islamic Party, Allah Party or the East Turkistan National Revolution Association. Chinese sources state that it is one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations among "East Turkistan" terrorist forces. ETIM is said to be linked to al-Qa'ida and the international mujahedin movement. In September 2002 the group was designated by the US Government under EO 13224 as a supporter of terrorist activity. E.O. 13224 targets terrorists and those providing financial, technological, or material support to terrorists or acts of terrorism by freezing the assets of designated persons and prohibiting transactions with them. On 12 September 2002 the United Nations has added to its list of terrorists and terrorist supporters associated with Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
The East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is the most militant of the ethnic Uighur separatist groups pursuing an independent "Eastern Turkistan". A US Government website states that this would be "an area that would include Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China" but this sounds more like a restored Caliphate than Eastern Turkistan.
But no group calling itself ETIM claimed responsibility for violent incidents in the 1990s. While many Uighur or East Turkistan groups have been reported for decades, the first apparent mention of ETIM was in 2000. A Russian press report in August 2000 claimed that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) had provided military and material assistance to ETIM in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. This Russian newspaper reported that Osama bin Laden had convened a meeting in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 1999 that included the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and ETIM at which he agreed to give them money.
The Chinese Government reported in 2002 that in February 1998, Hasan Mahsum, ringleader of the "East Turkistan Islamic Movement" abroad, sent "scores of terrorists" into China. They were reported to have established about a dozen training bases in Xinjiang and inland regions and trained more than 150 terrorists in 15 training classes. In addition, they were reported to have set up large numbers of training stations in scattered areas, each of them composed of three to five members, and some of them being also workshops for making weapons, ammunition and explosive devices. The Xinjiang police were said to have uncovered many of these underground training stations and workshops, and confiscated large numbers of antitank grenades, hand-grenades, detonators, guns and ammunition.
In 2002 one western journalist interviewed the ETIM leader, Hasan Mahsum, in Pakistan. Mahsum asserted that ETIM had not received assistance from Al Qaeda and had no intention of targeting American interests. On 02 October 2003, Pakistani soldiers killed ETIM leader Hassan Makhsum and others during raids on al-Qa'ida-associated compounds in South Waziristan in western Pakistan. Some observers have suggested that ETIM effectively ceased to exist after Mahsum was killed, since it was said that nothing was heard subsequently of the organization outside of Chinese government sources.
In December 2003, the leadership of of TIP (having changed its name from ETIP in 1999 to be inclusive of non-Uighur Turkic peoples) posted on the Internet an eulogy of Mahsum. The leadership of TIP announced that former Military Affairs Commander Abdul Haq, aka Maimaitiming Maimaiti, had taken over as the overall leader and commander of the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), a.k.a. the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). As TIP overall leader, Abdul Haq raised funds, recruited new members and further developed the terrorist organization. As of 2005, Haq was also a member of al Qaida's Shura Council.
The US Government reports that ETIM militants fought alongside al-Qa'ida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. US and Chinese Government information suggests ETIM is responsible for various terrorist acts inside and outside China. In May 2002, two ETIM members were deported to China from Kyrgyzstan for plotting to attack the US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan as well as other US interests abroad. ETIM has received training and financial assistance from al-Qa'ida.
The US Government reports that ETIM had a close financial relationship with al-Qaida and many of its members' received terrorist training in Afghanistan, financed by al-Qaida and the Taliban. A number of ETIM and ETIM-linked militants were captured in Afghanistan last fall fighting alongside al-Qaida and the Taliban. A July 2002 report from the Hong Kong press quoted captured militants as saying ETIM leaders still worked with Usama bin Laden.
ETIM is said to also have a history of cooperation with other militant Islamic organizations in Central Asia including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an al-Qaida linked organization previously designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, under President Bush's Executive Order 13224, and included in the United Nations' list of al-Qaida linked terrorists and supporters.
Although ETIM did not originally target U.S. nationals, by late 2002 the US Government reported that there was evidence indicating that ETIM members had been taking steps to plan attacks against U.S. interests and nationals abroad, including the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. On May 22, 2002, two suspected ETIM members were deported to China from Kyrgyzstan on the grounds that they were planning terrorist attacks. The Kyrgyz government stated that the two men were planning to target embassies in Bishkek as well as trade centers and public gathering places.
When China destroyed an Islamist camp in Xinjiang in January 2007, killing 18 suspected terrorists and capturing 17 others, a police spokeswoman said the training camp was run by ETIM.
Despite a series of violent incidents and threats leading up to the August 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Games were held successfully without terrorist incidents. Starting in June 2008, representatives of a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) posted videos on the Internet taking credit for violent incidents in China and threatening to strike the Olympic Games. TIP is said to be an another name for the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP), also known as the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Among the incidents TIP took credit for was a series of bus bombings in Kunming, Yunnan Province that killed two people in July 2008. In March, the Chinese government claimed that flight attendants foiled a plot to detonate a homemade explosive on a flight from Urumqi, Xinjiang to Beijing by subduing a female passenger. The Turkistan Islamic Party has begun publishing a journal, which is modeled on publications of othermore established Jihadist groups.
The US Government reports that it continued to receive information indicating that terrorist groups may be planning attacks, possibly against U.S. interests, in Uzbekistan and Central Asia in general. Supporters of terrorist groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, al-Qa'ida, the Islamic Jihad Union, and the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement are thought to be active in the region.
When the United States recognized ETIM as a terrorist group with ties to Al Qaeda in 2002, few scholars studying the Uyghur people had ever heard of this group. But recognizing ETIM as a terrorist group directly led to the imprisonment of twenty-two Uyghurs in the Guantanamo detention facilities for between five and seven years. The US Administration conceded in 2008 that all of the Uighur detainees were "no longer enemy combatants." But the United States would not send them to China, where they fear persecution, torture, and/or execution. Uighurs at Guantanamo testified that they were trained by none other than Abdul Haq, who was the one responsible for the camp.
On April 20, 2009 the U.S. Department of the Treasury targeted al Qaida's support network by designating Abdul Haq, the overall leader and commander of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP). This Treasury action followed a decision by the United Nations Security Council's 1267 Committee to place Haq on its list of persons associated with Usama bin Laden, al Qaida, or the Taliban and subject to sanctions by UN member states. "Abdul Haq commands a terror group that sought to sow violence and fracture international unity at the 2008 Olympic Games in China," said Stuart Levey, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. "Today, we stand together with the world in condemning this brutal terrorist and isolating him from the international financial system." Since late 2007, Abdul Haq sent terrorists to the Middle East to raise funds and buy explosive materials for terrorist attacks against Chinese targets outside China. In early January 2008, Haq directed ETIP's military commander to attack various Chinese cities, particularly focusing on the cities holding the Olympic Games. Under Haq, trained terrorists planned to sabotage the Olympic Games by conducting terrorist attacks within China before the Olympics began.
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My point was that I don't like defining down concepts like torture. Water tricks in extreme, isolated situations, underwear photos gone bad, and sleep schedule changes are not comparable to gradual electrocutions or eyes gouged out. We are not morally equal to those who maximize the number of innocent casualties and kill themselves. And we did not plan or participate in the most gruesome attack ever against us - and keep it all a secret for 10 years. That doesn't make any sense.
I don't think cruel and unusual punishment should be delivered to anyone, including supposed terrorists. I don't like it because the state will always be doing something worse than what's allowed to people they shouldn't be touching in the first place. First they will torture Arabs, next it will be us. I have no faith in the compassion, decency or wisdom of the people we give power and I think they need to be as tightly controlled as possible with as few avenues for harming innocents as possible.
As far as the attack on us not making sense, to each their own. I think it makes a lot of sense.
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So you were not condoning that type of action in the domestic US?
So, you are advocating that domestically we do it like the Chinese do?
No, my point was the intent and the aggression. No mealy-mouthed appeasement.
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So you were not condoning that type of action in the domestic US?
So, you are advocating that domestically we do it like the Chinese do?
No, my point was the intent and the aggression. No mealy-mouthed appeasement.
With the possible exception of a ticking time bomb scenario as described by Alan Dershowitz.
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Oh, and when we use rendition to 3rd nations for interrogation, as started under Clinton and continued to this day by Buraq (peace be upon him).
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http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/01/nation/na-rendition1
Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool
The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.
February 01, 2009|Greg Miller
The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.
But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.
Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street.
The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.
The European Parliament condemned renditions as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.
But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.
*See, torture is bad, unless the president has a -D next to his name.
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That clarification took too many days and too many questions. It's interesting you made this point with the article you did, and mentioned "outlaw biker gangs" in a prior "rebuttal" when you didn't mean domestic actions in the U.S.
So you were not condoning that type of action in the domestic US?
So, you are advocating that domestically we do it like the Chinese do?
No, my point was the intent and the aggression. No mealy-mouthed appeasement.
With the possible exception of a ticking time bomb scenario as described by Alan Dershowitz.
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That clarification took too many days and too many questions. It's interesting you made this point with the article you did, and mentioned "outlaw biker gangs" in a prior "rebuttal" when you didn't mean domestic actions in the U.S.
So you were not condoning that type of action in the domestic US?
So, you are advocating that domestically we do it like the Chinese do?
No, my point was the intent and the aggression. No mealy-mouthed appeasement.
With the possible exception of a ticking time bomb scenario as described by Alan Dershowitz.
No, as long as we outsource it, it's fine, right?
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"That clarification took too many days and too many questions. It's interesting you made this point with the article you did, and mentioned "outlaw biker gangs" in a prior "rebuttal" when you didn't mean domestic actions in the U.S."
I try to explain things in a manner that might make sense to someone who thinks that war is like a stickfighting contest where you are friends at the end of the day.
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So, are you calling for the prosecution of those SEALs that punched OBL's ticket, BD? If not, why not?
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"I try to explain things in a manner that might make sense to someone who thinks that war is like a stickfighting contest where you are friends at the end of the day."
Is that a fair description of the POVs that BD and I were bringing to the conversation to the conversation with you and why it took so many restatements of essentially the same question? C'mon, , , ,
Anyway, BD over to you on GMs question.
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Crafty,
I think the essential point is the aspect of civilizational confidence found in China and the lack thereof here best exemplified by someone who thinks we blew up the WTC. Wars are ultimately won or lost based on mindset. You can have the best military systems on the planet, but if you are too soft to pull the trigger, it's of no use.
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Put that way, we are in agreement but if I may, I think you need to appreciate that that you started out by giving the distinct impression that we should do things domestically the way the Chinese do. I trust we are in agreement that there is/was/can be an American Creed approach to civilizational confidence from which the Chinese model differs quite a bit-- yes?
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As I pointed out, there was once a time where Americans had civilizational confidence, of course that was before the marxists infiltrated academia and the media. Now we have a large number of self-hating loons that think America is evil, of course they'd never leave this country and still expect it's protections while they work to undercut the nation from within.
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China is a fine example, using your words, of "civilizational confidence." I wonder if Marxists have infiltrated academia and media in China? I hear it is a pretty free country.
Here [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ[/youtube]is a nice video of Times Square in the Marxist capital of the world... the United States. Oh, wait, it is the "civilizational confidence" China.
As I pointed out, there was once a time where Americans had civilizational confidence, of course that was before the marxists infiltrated academia and the media. Now we have a large number of self-hating loons that think America is evil, of course they'd never leave this country and still expect it's protections while they work to undercut the nation from within.
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BD,
In China, no one believes in communism, even party members, unlike the faculty lounges in the US. Funny enough, both China and western academics produce anti-american propaganda.
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A quick out, GM. I like your pithy statements.
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Thanks BD. :-D
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The CCP long ago abandoned communistic "worker's paradise" slogans. They instead play upon Chinese nationalism and the wrongs the middle kingdom has suffered and the theme of China returning to it's rightful place as the asian and eventually the world's superpower. From the lowest street sweeper to the highest ranks of the CCP, they are unashamedly trying to figure out how to get rich or richer.
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So, are you calling for the prosecution of those SEALs that punched OBL's ticket, BD? If not, why not?
I don't really understand the context of your question. SEALs were taking action internationally.
I also am not sure what led you to ask this question. I have no problem fighting to win a war, GM. I do have a problem with ignoring the rights of Americans, by Americans, on American soil. See the discussion of the BOR's I asked you about above. If you will recall, by questions about UBL's killing was not about the military personnel, it was about your favorite target, President Obama. The difference here is mostly that I respect the office enough to call him by his title, and not take liberty with his name.
Also, nearly everytime we've gone a few rounds, my issue has had to do with domestic agents (or the possibility of domestic action) taking liberties, that are spelled out in the Constitution, from the citizens of the United States.
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Would it be the same if the SEALs did a similar op in Mexico or Canada? What if the target was a US citizen like Anwar al-Awlaki? What if a group of jihadists had infiltrated into the US who were US citizens and were heavily armed and enroute to a mass casualty operation and a nearby SEAL team was available to intercept and engage? The US military can engage in military ops domestically, right?
No, these aren't easy questions, but they are real issues.
I'm pretty sure China would never invite a ETIM imam to lunch at a PLA headquarters, unless he were gagged, hooded and cuffed and lunch was served in a cell.
http://www.investigativeproject.org/blog/2010/10/awlaki-dined-at-the-pentagon-after-9-11
Awlaki Dined At the Pentagon After 9/11
by IPT News • Oct 20, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Despite connections to some of the hijackers and a record of radical sermons and speeches in the United States, fugitive al-Qaida terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki was a lunch guest at a Pentagon "Muslim outreach" event just months after the 9/11 attacks, according to documents obtained by Fox News.
A current Defense Department (DoD) employee told investigators that she helped arrange the meeting after watching Awlaki speak in Alexandria, Va.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a push by the Secretary of the Army "to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim," according to one document. Awlaki was also "considered to be an 'up and coming' member of the Muslim community."
After watching Awlaki's speech, the employee "recalls being impressed by this imam. He condemned Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks," according to the documents. And Awlaki was "harassed" by members of the audience and "suffered it well."
"After her vetting, Aulaqi [Awlaki] was invited to and attended a luncheon in the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of General Counsel."
The invitation came despite the fact that Awlaki "was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first week after the attacks because of his ties to…three hijackers – Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour," Fox News reported. The three hijackers were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
The Defense Department has failed to respond to Fox News' repeated requests for information on Awlaki's attendance at the luncheon. A former high-ranking FBI agent told Fox News that there was tremendous "arrogance" about the Pentagon's vetting process.
"They vetted people politically and showed indifference to security and intelligence advice of others," the agent said. It wasn't just the Pentagon. As we reported in July, Awlaki is shown in a PBS documentary leading Muslim staffers in prayer on Capitol Hill.
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http://www.cfr.org/china/nationalism-china/p16079
A Pillar of Legitimacy
China’s nationalism today is shaped by its pride in its history as well as its century of humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan. China expert Peter Hays Gries writes: (PDF) “Chinese nationalists today find pride in stories about the superiority of China’s ‘5000 years’ of ‘glorious civilization.’” This yearning for lost glory is accompanied by the story of victimization in the past, a narrative central to what being Chinese today means, says Gries. China perceives itself as a victim of Western imperialism that began with the First Opium War and the British acquisition of Hong Kong in 1842 and lasted until the end of World War II in 1945, during which it suffered humiliating losses of sovereignty.
“Chinese nationalism was actually partly a creation of Western imperialism,” says Minxin Pei, a senior associate in the China program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pei says the first surge of Chinese nationalism was seen in 1919 in what’s now widely referred to as the May 4th Movement when thousands of students demonstrated against the Treaty of Versailles’ transfer of Chinese territory to Japan. Some of these student leaders went on to form the Chinese Communist Party two years later in 1921. “The current Chinese communist government is more a product of nationalism than a product of ideology like Marxism and Communism,” says Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese cultural studies at Duke University. Kang says today nationalism has probably “become the most powerful legitimating ideology.”
“The current Chinese communist government is more a product of nationalism than a product of ideology like Marxism and Communism.” —Liu Kang, Duke University
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening up of the Chinese economy by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, and the pro-democracy protests of 1989, nationalism was once again revived by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), say experts. Gries writes: “Lacking the procedural legitimacy accorded to democratically elected governments and facing the collapse of communist ideology, the CCP is increasingly dependent upon its nationalist credentials to rule.” As the International Herald Tribune noted in an April 2008 editorial, stripped of Maoism as its guiding light, the CCP frequently has fallen back on nationalism as societal glue.
Beyond the party’s control, the emergence of the Internet in the last two decades has given nationalists more power to vent their anger after particular incidents. It has also brought the huge Chinese diaspora in places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Europe, and North America, into closer contact with those residing within China’s borders, facilitating an easy flow of information. “It makes it much easier for the nationalistic rhetoric,” says Pei. He says the young, urban, and educated Chinese are more nationalistic and they are the ones using the Internet. “Compared to before, the Internet has democratized opinion but this democratization of opinion is not evenly distributed and the fringe elements tend to exploit this new opportunity far more actively than the mainstream,” Pei says.
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So, the Bush administration is to blame for the terrorist dining in the Pentagon?
I don't understand the point of the nationalism article you posted. It doesn't refute the idea of Marxism. You can have Marxist nationalists.
Are Mexico and Canada part of the US? If not, why would you think I meant to exclude them?
I do not approve of the United States assassinating (or just regular murdering) its own citizens.
It depends on the SEAL team's current situation. If it needed to deploy, I'm not sure why a SWAT team couldn't be deployed instead (unless a Fort Hood type attack). If it reacted informally, like the Marines did in the recent story that made its rounds on the internet, where they apprehended a shop lifter.
I'd like to see you discuss Guro's question about the cultural differences between China and the US. No more question dodging just by asking more questions!
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So, the Bush administration is to blame for the terrorist dining in the Pentagon?
*Sure. Good thing Obama has reversed all those policies, right? I mean there is no way political correctness would prevent the US Army from taking action on an officer who was emailing al-Awlaki about jihad, right?
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I don't understand the point of the nationalism article you posted. It doesn't refute the idea of Marxism. You can have Marxist nationalists.
*In the case of China, as I stated before it does. I posted it to backstop my assertions on that point. Not even communist party members believe in communism in China. They try to use their party connections to leverage themselves into business deals, some legal, some not. The CCP is like some classic rock bands where all the original members have died, retired and a whole other group is touring under the same name. The CCP is about maintaing power, but their motivation is self interest, not a glorious worker's paradise. My point, related to cultural confidence and China is the best educated and affluent young people there are also very supportive of the rise of an aggressive and dominant China. They might listen to American pop on their Ipods, eat at McDonalds and wear western clothes, but they have no problem with the PLA nuking a US carrier group so Taiwan can be invaded.
Are Mexico and Canada part of the US? If not, why would you think I meant to exclude them?
*Just curious how you'd call that. Sometimes proximity changes things for some people.
I do not approve of the United States assassinating (or just regular murdering) its own citizens.
*We are trying hard to whack al-Awlaki, who of course is a native born US citizen (and has a really nice CV, by the way).Do you object to that?
It depends on the SEAL team's current situation. If it needed to deploy, I'm not sure why a SWAT team couldn't be deployed instead (unless a Fort Hood type attack).
*Not all tactical teams are created equally. That includes experience, training and equipment. There are certain scenarios, like an "upgraded Beslan" type where explosive breaching would be vital for there to be any realistic chance of rescuing any of the hostages. If I recall correctly, the plan with the NEST (Nuclear Emergency Support Teams) scientists would have SEAL/Delta operatives to secure the nuclear devices before they went in to disarm it.
If it reacted informally, like the Marines did in the recent story that made its rounds on the internet, where they apprehended a shop lifter.
*I'm not advocating that we have the military intrude into conventional civillian law enforcement, but we are at war and just as the current plan in place if we have a hijacking of a aircraft is that military aircraft will shoot it down if control is not regained. Obviously, that's a worst case scenario, but a realistic one.
I'd like to see you discuss Guro's question about the cultural differences between China and the US. No more question dodging just by asking more questions!
*I thought I already did.
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GM, we Jews have a tradition of answering questions with questions. You are now under serious consideration for being nominated to the status of "honorary Jew" :lol:
This is a nice way of saying you are still ducking the question. :-D
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Just saw your post #148.
Still remaining is that somehow you continuously give the impression to people of above average IQ, above average education, above average reading skills, and greatly overlapping POVs that you are advocating that we do things in the US the Chinese way or some analog thereof. Why is that?
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GM, we Jews have a tradition of answering questions with questions. You are now under serious consideration for being nominated to the status of "honorary Jew" :lol:
This is a nice way of saying you are still ducking the question. :-D
Oy! I take that as a badge of honor. There is a certain Rabbi who's name I share.... :wink:
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"I take that as a badge of honor."
It is. :lol:
Now please deal the the question presented without asking questions. :-D
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Please restate it, so I can be sure I answer it. I thought I already did.
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"Still remaining is that somehow you continuously give the impression to people of above average IQ, above average education, above average reading skills, and greatly overlapping POVs that you are advocating that we do things in the US the Chinese way or some analog thereof. Why is that?"
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"Still remaining is that somehow you continuously give the impression to people of above average IQ, above average education, above average reading skills, and greatly overlapping POVs that you are advocating that we do things in the US the Chinese way or some analog thereof. Why is that?"
The way I advocate isn't so much the "Chinese way" but how Americans would have once upon a time. Brutal ruthlessness is crosscultural. There is a time a place for it. One need not speak Mandarin to do that.
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So, you are advocating brutal ruthlessness within the US?
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So, you are advocating brutal ruthlessness within the US?
In certain contexts, it's the only viable option that actually reduces violence and the loss of innocent life. For example, in US correctional facilities, the standard is the "No hostage" policy. "No hostage" means that the employees of the facility work under the understanding that if they are taken hostage, they will not be useful as a hostage. No gates will be opened, no inmate will walk out, no matter what. If the perimeter officers have to shoot through the hostage to prevent the escape of the inmate(s), that's what will happen. If the control room officer has to watch a co-worker get his/her throat cut rather than buzz a gate, that's what has to happen.
Sound brutal and ruthless?
Well, there was a Canadian prison sometime back that didn't have that policy. Guess what happened. Well, they ended up adopting it after having a flood of hostage takings and escapes.
Sometimes brutal ruthlessness is the best sword and shield to protect the innocent.
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Sounds like American civilational confidence to me :-D, not brutal ruthlessness of the sort by Chinese in the article that you posted.
Anyway, I'm tired of going round the mulberry bush on this one. I think my point has been made and so move on.
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http://www.economist.com/node/21524940
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http://www.economist.com/node/21524940
Exactly what happened in Khotan is uncertain. An exile group campaigning for Xinjiang’s independence from China said the police fired on protesters who had been peacefully airing grievances about police repression of Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group of Turkic origin who until recently dominated Xinjiang but now form less than half the population. Officials say the police came under attack by “terrorists” armed with Molotov cocktails, bombs and knives. The assailants, says one official account, stormed a police station and unfurled a banner “promoting separatism”. Another account says they had black flags on which were written: “Allah is the only God. In the name of Allah.”
**Those are known as the "Black flags of jihad" which is really strange because I've been told jihad means an internal spiritual struggle and that islam is a religion of peace. Amazing how many muslims seem unfamiliar with these core concepts. How could so many misunderstand their own religion?
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**When we in the west tend to think of the Chinese as being the Han, who are the vast majority of the Chinese population in the mainland as well as the Chinese diaspora, there are many ethnic minorities in China. It's a common belief among the Han that the Chinese ethnic minorities are better at singing and dancing and have an innate sense of rhythm. In China, political correctness means not pissing of the CCP.
Tang Lijiu of Urumqi’s East-West Economic Research Institute says that creating the right kind of jobs for Uighurs is the key. “Because of their lifestyle, asking them to go into big industrial production, onto the production line: they’re probably not suited to that,” says Mr Tang, who is Han Chinese. Better, he suggests, to develop something like, well, basketball. That, Mr Tang says, might work in the same way that America’s National Basketball Association creates “more job opportunities for blacks”. This kind of musing perhaps helps explain why the vast region of Xinjiang remains perilously unstable.
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By REBIYA KADEER
As the U.S. and its allies were reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, China's Communist regime manipulated the occasion to present itself as a victim of Islamic extremism. Beijing also accused the U.S. of practicing double standards by not giving unqualified support to its military offensive against what it calls "Muslim separatism" in northwest China. It insisted this campaign is an integral component of the war on terror.
These complaints are entirely driven by the regime's domestic agenda. The West should not be fooled by China's attempt to make its nationalities policy more palatable. For decades, China has brutally crushed even the mildest aspirations for self-rule among the non-Han Chinese peoples in its midst.
Beijing's actions in Tibet are the best-known example of this policy, yet it is no different in northwest China, the ancient homeland of the Uighur people. In 2009, the state's response to mass demonstrations for democracy and human rights was to beat and shoot at protesters, and to randomly arrest male Uighurs on a mass scale.
Since then, a palpable tension has prevailed. In recent weeks, following the reported killing in July of more than 20 Uighurs by security forces in the city of Hotan, China has deployed an additional 200,000 security personnel as well as its special anti-terror force, in order to deter fresh protests in a region that is home to 10 million Uighurs.
Enlarge Image
CloseAFP/Getty Images
An elderly Chinese Muslim Uighur man prays at his hat shop in Kashgar, China.
.China's leaders have enthusiastically offered a justification for the repression of Uighurs that is not available to them in the case of Tibet. For while most Tibetans are Buddhists, Uighurs are overwhelmingly Muslim. So the Beijing regime presents its campaign against the Uighur people's peaceful struggle for self-rule as part of the global battle against Islamists.
The hypocrisy on display here is astonishing. China, after all, has consistently supported radical, anti-Western currents in the Middle East. It is a stalwart ally of Iran's murderous regime and has opposed international measures to curb Syria's rulers. In Libya, China supplied Gadhafi's dictatorship with weapons until the last possible minute.
Even before 9/11, Beijing was effectively encouraging al Qaeda, using its position on the United Nations Security Council to oppose sanctions against Afghanistan's Taliban after the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.
Within days of 9/11, China's official Xinhua news agency was lauding the attacks as a "humbling blow" against America, a theme that continued this anniversary year, even as Beijing's propagandists complained about Washington's "blind eye" toward the conflict in the Uighur region. Clearly, China does not object to rooting out terrorist groups as long as it is allowed to define who the terrorists are.
Meanwhile, China has skillfully taken advantage of the West's ignorance of Uighur history and culture to insert itself into the antiterror camp.
As practiced by the vast majority of Uighurs, the religion of Islam has nothing in common with the radical Wahhabi and Salafi strains that have caused such terrible strife in the Middle East and South Asia. Just as we reject communism, we reject clerical rule. We aspire to a democratic state in which religion is a matter of individual conscience.
Indeed, if China had honored its 1955 commitment to the autonomy of the Uighur people, there would probably be no conflict. Our demands—to fly our own flag, to reap a fair dividend from the oil, coal and other natural resources flowing through our region, to end the mass transfer of Chinese settlers into our territory—are hardly unique. Some leading European democracies have reached similar arrangements with their constituent nationalities, such as Spain's Catalans.
Rather than negotiate with us, China's rulers prefer to label the Uighurs as terrorists, with myself as their leader. I am often asked why such a powerful state apparently regards me—a slight, elderly woman who has spent many years in Beijing's jails—as an existential threat. I always reply that China should fear not me, but the consequences of resisting the legitimate demands I articulate. For as the Soviet Union and then Yugoslavia demonstrated, states that refuse any compromise with their minorities can easily implode.
As the U.N. General Assembly's 66th session proceeded this week, I participated in the We Have a Dream Global Human Rights Summit (www.ngosummit.org) just down the street, which brought together human rights defenders from all over the world. Our final declaration was a rallying cry based upon the U.N.'s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It included the demand that China and other authoritarian states be removed from the U.N.'s key human rights bodies.
In confronting China's cynical and hypocritical identification of our legitimate struggle with terrorism, we will counter that the true issue is the trampling of basic human rights under the excuse of national sovereignty.
Ms. Kadeer is president of the World Uighur Congress and the author of "Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China" (Kales Press, 2009).
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/xinjiang-procedure_610145.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Xinjiang Procedure
Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.
Ethan Gutmann
December 5, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 12
To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.
One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.
Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.
With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.
Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.
Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.
Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.
Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the doctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion’s share of transplant organs originate with executions, but no mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally speak of performing such surgery. To do so would remind international medical authorities of an issue they would rather avoid—not China’s soaring execution rate or the exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic elimination of China’s religious and political prisoners. Yet even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs.
Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two years—police, medical, and security personnel scattered across two continents—related compartmentalized fragments of information to me, often through halting translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and, in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just a procedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider atrocity.
Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in China’s northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians, and their language is more readily understood in Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing’s name for the so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as “new frontier.” When Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Following the flood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural gas production center by the end of this century.
To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunistic the switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chinese state security personnel into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighur detainees.
While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims of the detainees’ actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, some Uighurs fled to Afghanistan where a portion became Taliban soldiers. And yet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met a Uighur woman who won’t shake hands or a man who won’t have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted, returning to the vodka bottle.
So if Washington’s goal is to promote a reformed China, then taking Beijing’s word for who is a terrorist is to play into the party’s hands.
Xinjiang has long served as the party’s illicit laboratory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital) to the more recent creation in the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world’s largest labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, Xinjiang was ground zero.
In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.
Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming.
“Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking. “What kind of screams?”
“Like from hell.”
Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around.
A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?”
Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.”
The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he would never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?”
“Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.”
“What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?”
“Nijat, do you have any beliefs?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.”
I first met Enver Tohti—a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a man—through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess that my first impression was that he was just another emigré living in public housing. But Enver had a secret.
His story began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when he was a general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver recalled an unusual conversation with his immediate superior, the chief surgeon: “Enver, we are going to do something exciting. Have you ever done an operation in the field?”
“Not really. What do you want me to do?”
“Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance. Have everyone out front at nine tomorrow.”
On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistants and an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the chief surgeon’s car out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district, which specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back to talk to Enver: “When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill.”
“Can you tell us why we are here?”
“Enver, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
“I want to know.”
“No. You don’t want to know.”
The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People were milling about—civilians. Enver half-satirically suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and drove around to the execution field.
Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followed the chief surgeon’s car, Enver never really did get a good look. He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies lying at the base of the hill, but the armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over.
“This one. It’s this one.”
Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one had long hair.
“That’s him. We’ll operate on him.”
“Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling for the artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.”
Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s not dead.”
“Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now! Quick! Be quick!”
Following the chief surgeon’s directive, the team loaded the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb: Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table. Just open the body. He kept making attempts to follow normal procedure—sterilize, minimal exposure, sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. “No anaesthesia,” said the chief surgeon. “No life support.”
The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded—like some sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at him. “Why don’t you do something?”
“What exactly should I do, Enver? He’s already unconscious. If you cut, he’s not going to respond.”
But there was a response. As Enver’s scalpel went in, the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again. Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon. “How far in should I cut?”
“You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are working against time.”
Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitched the man back up—not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so the body might look presentable—he sensed the man was still alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare to look at the face again, just as he imagined a killer would avoid looking at his victim.
The team drove back to Urumqi in silence.
On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: “So. Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal day. Yes?”
Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that the bullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia. He had done what he could; he had stitched the body back neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enver revealed what had happened that Wednesday.
As for Nijat, it wasn’t until 1996 that he put it together.
It happened just about midnight, well after the cell block lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in the detention compound’s administrative office with the medical director. Following a pause in the conversation, the director, in an odd voice, asked Nijat if he thought the place was haunted.
“Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered. “Why do you think that?”
“Because too many people have been killed here. And for all the wrong reasons.”
Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up.
“Nijat, we really are going to hell.”
Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn’t bother to smile.
On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wondering whether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before, the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division. It was a natural fit because Bahtiyar was tall, good-looking, and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did not see himself as a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder.
For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the force, Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities. Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered him to investigate the Meshrep—a traditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighur music and dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbal remedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities read it as a disguised attack on the Chinese state.
In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entire Ghulja police force—Uighurs and Chinese alike—were suddenly ordered to surrender their guns “for inspection.” Now, almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But Bahtiyar’s gun was held back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. “Your gun has a problem,” Bahtiyar was told.
“When will you fix the problem?”
The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and looked up at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer’s gun had a problem.
Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February 5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja. The day before, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was claimed, severely abused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all participants in the Meshrep. The young men came without their winter coats to show they were unarmed, but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators.
Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, but he didn’t see it; all Uighur policemen had been sent to the local jail “to interrogate prisoners” and were locked in the compound throughout the crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compound and thrown naked onto the snow—some bleeding, others with internal injuries. Ghulja’s main Uighur clinic was effectively shut down when a squad of Chinese special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the clinic’s ambulance. As the arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelessly overcrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for daily executions. On April 24, Bahtiyar’s colleagues witnessed the killing of eight political prisoners; what struck them was the presence of doctors in “special vans for harvesting organs.”
In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghulja hospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I provide no personal details, she told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treat Uighur protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence, while another got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, “If you treat someone, you will get the same result.” The separation between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would stockpile prescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy, while Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug.
Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester’s body returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at gunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By June, the nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur protester had been arrested and beaten severely. His family paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidney damage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqi where the hospital staff laid it out: One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700). The kidney will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplant was to come from a 21-year-old Uighur male—the same profile as their son. The nurse learned that the “donor” was, in fact, a protester.
In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-work tour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor—let’s call him Murat—was pursuing a promising medical career in a large Urumqi hospital. Two years later he was planning his escape to Europe, where I met him some years after.
One day Murat’s instructor quietly informed him that five Chinese government officials—big guys, party members—had checked into the hospital with organ problems. Now he had a job for Murat: “Go to the Urumqi prison. The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. That’s all you have to do.”
“What about tissue matching?”
“Don’t worry about any of that, Murat. We’ll handle that later. Just map out the blood types.”
Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy Uighurs in their late twenties. As the first prisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began.
“You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking blood.”
At the word “blood,” everything collapsed. The men howled and stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back into line. The prisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The Chinese guards grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard.
“It’s just for your health,” Murat said evenly, suddenly aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make sure that Murat wasn’t too sympathetic. “It’s just for your health,” Murat said again and again as he drew blood.
When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the instructor, “Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?”
“That’s right, Murat, that’s right. Yes. Just don’t ask any more questions. They are bad people—enemies of the country.”
But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learned the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to match up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out.
Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja, five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time, Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospitals are leading the way.
By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought.
Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, number of House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate.
By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let’s be clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment admitting the obvious—China’s medical environment is not fully ethical—and see progress. Foreign investors suspect that eventually the Chinese might someday—or perhaps have already—abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure.
In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group.
Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take Enver’s number.
The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged, but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever.
Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank Jaya Gibson for research assistance and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.
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China: Passengers Help Thwart Hijacking Attempt
Jun 29, 2012 | 0834 GMT
Chinese airline passengers on June 29 helped thwart a hijacking attempt on a plane in Xinjiang, Reuters reported, citing Xinhua. Six people tried to hijack the Tianjin Airlines plane 10 minutes after departure from an airport in Hotan, but passengers and air crew subdued them.
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http://syndicatednewsservices.com/2013/06/26/report-36-killed-after-knife-gang-attacks-china-police-station/
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http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1343155/chinese-police-launch-manhunt-eight-after-tiananmen-jeep-crash
Chinese police launch manhunt for eight after Tiananmen jeep crash
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 30 October, 2013, 4:46am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 30 October, 2013, 3:28pm
Keith Zhai keith.zhai@scmp.com
Tourists in front of the gate in Tiananmen Square yesterday, the scene of Monday’s deadly jeep crash. Photo: Reuters
Beijing police are searching for at least eight people believed to be linked to the apparent suicide car crash in front of the Tiananmen Square gate on Monday afternoon that left five dead and 38 injured.
Police set up a special team to investigate the case yesterday.
Hotels in the capital have been asked to be on the lookout for the suspects, according to a notice seen by the South China Morning Post and staff at several hotels.
The suspects include a 21-year-old Sichuan-born male named Liu Ke. The name suggests the suspect is Han Chinese. His registered address is a residential complex belonging to police in Changji , Xinjiang , an autonomous region known for ethnic tension between Turkic-speaking Muslim Uygurs and Han Chinese.
The seven others have ethnic Uygur names and come from Xinjiang, the same police notice said. The notice listed five Xinjiang vehicle number plates, including one of a motorcycle, that are of interest to police.
Video: Scenes from Tiananmen Square car crash
Police said an SUV careened 500 metres along the pedestrian walkway at the northern end of Tiananmen Square, ploughing into dozens of tourists before bursting into flames just after noon.
The three people in the vehicle, a male tourist from Guangdong and a Filipino woman were killed. Three other Filipino tourists and a Japanese man were among the injured. While the central government has said little about the incident, the manhunt suggests it was not an accident.
The crash - at the symbolic heart of the nation - came just days ahead of a key political congress. And on Monday morning, all seven members of the supreme Politburo Standing Committee attended an event at the Great Hall of the People, across the road from where the incident occurred.
In Xinjiang, police began searching for the suspects. A hotel employee in Hotan said officers had told staff to turn away Uygurs matching the description "big beard, Uygur and male," said the employee, who refused to be named. "We are not allowed to accept guests who fit this description, even if they have valid documents to prove their identity."
Police in Hotan and Beijing declined to comment. Xinjiang government spokesman Luo Fuyong said he could not confirm if the three people in the vehicle were Uygurs from the region.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the incident was being investigated and that while Xinjiang "enjoys sound economic and social development", it sometimes experiences violence and "terrorism".
"We sternly oppose and crack down on such incidents to ensure the safety and security of society as well as people's lives and properties," she added.
Watch: China's Foreign Ministry response to Tiananmen crash
Security near the crash site has been tightened, with more plain-clothes officers patrolling the area and a fire engine stationed nearby.
Newspapers mostly carried news of Monday's crash low down on their front pages and in contrast to the Global Times used brief reports from state media -- highlighting official efforts to control discussion of the event.
Chinese media outlets are known to receive instructions from the government directing their reporting.
The state media reports, carried by all major newspaper and news websites, stressed official rescue efforts and did not contain information about whether the incident was deliberate.
Chinese social media sites, which are closely controlled albeit less strictly than print media, were an early source of pictures of the crash and speculation that it was an act of protest, but eyewitness accounts were rapidly removed.
On Tuesday Weibo searches for "Tiananmen" and "bomb" returned a statement that "According to relevant laws and policies... search results will not be displayed."
Searches for "Tiananmen" and "Xinjiang" did not produce any results posted after Monday.
Xinjiang, in China's far west, is home to ethnic minority Uighurs, many of them Muslim.
State media have reported several violent incidents there and a rising militant threat, but Uighur rights groups complain of ethnic and religious repression, while information is tightly controlled.
Police have arrested 140 people in Xinjiang in recent months for allegedly spreading jihad, and killed 22 Uighurs in August in an "anti-terrorism" operation, the official news agency Xinhua reported earlier.
One of the suspects named was from Lukqun, where state media said 35 people were killed in June in what Beijing called a "terrorist attack".
China politics expert Willy Lam said the Tiananmen incident "looks like a terrorist attack" but cautioned that more information was needed.
"If it is indeed a terrorist attack it shows that Beijing's efforts in trying to stamp out terrorism have not been very successful," he added.
But Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur intellectual, said the police notice was not definitively linked to the Tiananmen crash, and even if a Xinjiang car was involved, it would not establish that members of the minority were responsible.
"Some media has suggested it was a terrorist attack carried out by Uighurs, without evidence being produced," he told AFP.
"I worry that this event, even though it may have nothing to do with Uighurs, could lead local governments to increase repression and discrimination."
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/web-preaches-jihad-to-chinas-muslim-uighurs-1403663568?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth
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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/33-dead-130-injured-china-knife-wielding-spree-n41966
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http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/11/19/456629626/chinas-muted-response-to-isis-killing-of-a-chinese-citizen
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/world/asia/xinjiang-seethes-under-chinese-crackdown.html?emc=edit_th_20160103&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/07/03/overpowered-passengers-beat-two-hijackers-to-death-on-chinese-flight/
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I heard NYU lawyers are already on a flight to Bejing to offer free defense to the hijackers and another group from NYC is also on the plane to figure our how to sue for the two that died.
Everyone has a right to a full defense. Blah blah blah
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/01/isis-vows-to-shed-blood-like-rivers-in-first-threat-against-china/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/01/isis-vows-to-shed-blood-like-rivers-in-first-threat-against-china/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social
Yeah, my money is on China. China can do anything it wants without a murmur of complaint from the international community.
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Summary
A railway station attack in Kunming, China, on March 1 suggests that ethnic Uighur militants, whose attacks in the past mostly targeted police and public officials in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, have shifted to a strategy of seeking to inflict mass civilian casualties anywhere in the country. While these militants may be part of small, disparate cells with a relative lack of central control and training, they have now proved capable of striking in China's far southwest borderlands only months after another Uighur group attacked China's capital, Beijing. This suggests that China's counterterrorism efforts will have to expand nationwide.
Analysis
A group of around 10 knife-wielding men attacked people in the Kunming railway station in Yunnan, China, stabbing victims indiscriminately, according to eyewitnesses. They ultimately killed 29 and wounded 130, according to the latest reports. Police shot and killed four attackers, arrested one female attacker and are pursuing the other five.
The incident, which Beijing called an "organized, premeditated, violent terror attack" carried out by ethnic Uighur militants linked to the Xinjiang separatist movement, drew a swift and strong political response. Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the capture of the remaining attackers and for the country to maintain a high level of awareness about the dangers of terrorism and the importance of supporting national counterterrorism efforts. Xi also sent two top security officials to Kunming. Meanwhile, Premier Li Keqiang urged police to increase security measures, especially in crowded areas.
The March 1 attack suggests two important developments in Uighur militancy: maximizing civilian targets and expanding the geography of operations.
First, the target set at Kunming rail station — random civilians — differs from most previous Uighur attacks. Typically, militants have attacked police, whether on training exercises, on patrol or at police stations, or have become embroiled in confrontations when police disrupted one of their meetings. While mass civilian deaths occurred during July 2009 riots in Urumqi, they have not recurred. A move to maximize civilian casualties will give rise to greater fears among the Chinese public and is also likely to prompt more unified public demands for a forceful state response. Security attention in mainland cities will now shift toward counterterrorism even as authorities strive to keep social tensions under control.
Second, the location is unprecedented for Uighur militant attacks. Uighur separatism and militancy are based in Xinjiang province in China's far northwest. With few exceptions, this is where attacks have occurred. To give an idea of the distances involved, Kashgar, a frequent site of such violence, is 5,000 kilometers (more than 3,000 miles) from southwestern Kunming.
Yunnan is a poor but rapidly growing, mountainous, ethnically diverse province. It borders ethnic autonomous regions such as Tibet and Guangxi along with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. As elsewhere in China, Yunnan has seen unrest and violent incidents in response to official corruption, land seizures, environmental degradation, unemployment and other grievances. It has more ethnic tension than most of China and has an expansive regional drug trade and black markets because of its position between China and Southeast Asia. Local attacks in Kunming often involve explosives — the large mining sector makes dynamite widely available — such as a bombing that killed 11 people in 2003 and two nearly simultaneous bombings in 2008 of public buses.
Evidence suggests Chinese internal intelligence has perceived heightened threats to Kunming in recent years, whether related to Uighur militants or otherwise. Security forces staged an unusually large show of force in the city in August 2011. This surge suggested that authorities might have received intelligence of an impending attack. The stated purpose was to provide security for Kunming's Communist Party Conference taking place around that time; alternate motives for the surge, if any, were never revealed.
While there has not been solid confirmation of the attackers' backgrounds, it is worth noting that the number of Uighurs living in the province has increased in recent years. Since the 2009 riots in Xinjiang, the government has stepped up relocation policies that have increased the Uighur presence in the rest of China, including Kunming — but this has failed to achieve the intended goal of better assimilating them into mainstream Han Chinese society. Uighurs in Yunnan have been linked to the drug trade in the far west along the border with Myanmar.
Aside from these shifts in target set and geography, the Kunming attack may show another attempt by Uighur militants to increase the national political symbolism of their attacks. The incident occurred at a politically sensitive time as the country prepares for the Two Sessions, the annual meetings of China's National People's Congress and People's Political Consultative Congress. While Chinese security forces have increased their presence and raised their level of alertness in Beijing ahead of the meetings, Kunming lies in a distant border region that is neither the focus of security attention nor as well protected as more central areas. Moreover, railway stations are soft targets that are notoriously difficult to secure. These factors explain how the militants managed to create such a high body count with just knives and handheld tools. While Kunming does not have particular political significance, militants planning to strike at this politically significant time would have known that they had a greater chance of breaching security at soft target far from the country's political and security center.
Kunming is not the first indicator that small cells of Uighur militants have become more active lately in Xinjiang and other provinces. In late October, just ahead of the Communist Party's Third Plenary Session, three Uighurs with a cache of weapons drove a vehicle through crowds near the Tiananmen Rostrum in Beijing. The vehicle burst into flames in front of the portrait of Mao. That incident showed the possibility that Uighur militancy would seek to expand its geographic reach and aim at more symbolic political targets. While militants in the Beijing incident apparently did not maximize civilian deaths, it is not clear whether this was intentional or the result of flawed execution.
The March 1 Kunming attack does not carry anywhere near the political symbolism as the October attack close to the Communist Party's headquarters, but it suggests that Xinjiang militants are improving their ability to operate outside their region. This is of particular concern for China as the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and regional militant networks realign their attention toward regional opponents. Unlike other militants in South Asia and the Middle East, Uighur militants in China have not exhibited the trend toward suicide bombings with improvised explosive devices. Attacks like the one in Kunming leave the perpetrators a chance of survival, even if the attackers are likely to die.
Understanding the full significance of the Kunming attack will require determining whether the attackers were based in Xinjiang and orchestrated the attack across vast distances — as in the Beijing attack in October — or whether they were a radical cell already located in Kunming or elsewhere in Yunnan without personal networks across provincial borders, making them harder to detect. The answer will help determine the level of capabilities Chinese security must contend with. Like all others, Chinese security forces will always struggle to prevent small cells of independent militants from using rudimentary tools to attack soft targets. Beyond that, while Uighur militants have shown similar methods of attack, they have generally lacked signs of effective centralized planning and training. While the Kunming incident may have involved a small independent cell, it and the Beijing attack in October raise the question of whether Uighur militants have attained a higher level of interregional planning and coordination.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-bans-veils-abnormal-beards-western-province-xinjiang-n741501
China Bans Veils and ‘Abnormal’ Beards in Western Province of Xinjiang
by SAPHORA SMITH
China has banned wearing veils as part of a major crackdown on what it sees as religious extremism in the western province of Xinjiang.
The measure, which comes into effect Saturday, also bans "abnormal" beards and names, as well as other "extremist signs." Forcing others to wear veils is also forbidden.
Xinjiang, China's westernmost region, is home to the Uighurs, a Muslim group which claims to face discrimination from the Han Chinese.
Image: Muslim Uighur woman in Xinjiang
A veiled Muslim Uighur woman walks passed a statue of Mao Zedong in China's Xinjiang Province. Kevin Frayer / Getty Images
It is unclear what other forms of dress, if any, are outlawed under the legislation which was passed by the Xinjiang People's Congress last week. The policy is seen to discriminate against Muslims.
The definition of veil was vague but it appeared the niqab, which covers the face, and burka, which covers the face and body, would be included under the ban. It was unclear if the hijab, scarves which cover the head, are forbidden.
The law also failed to explain what constituted an "abnormal" beard or name, but suggested that they encouraged "religious fanaticism."
According to regional officials the policy harks back to speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2014, in which he said religious extremism of "ethnic separatists" in Xinjiang threatened national security.
Addressing a party workshop on Xinjiang in Beijing Xi said separatists "severely damage the stability of Xinjiang, as well as national security with religious extremism as their ideological basis, violent terror as the main method, and national division as their ultimate goal."
Xinjiang, which borders Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long seen tensions between the native Turkic Muslim Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese.
In the last decade the province has been beset by violence which the government blames on Islamist radicals or separatists.
This is not the first time regional officials have tried to ban veils or beards. In 2014 the north-western city of Karamy banned people wearing head scarves, veils and long beards from boarding buses.
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http://news.softpedia.com/news/china-forces-muslim-users-to-install-spying-software-on-smartphones-517116.shtml
China Forces Muslim Users to Install Spying Software on Smartphones
Users who don’t comply are detained for up 10 days
Jul 23, 2017 07:29 GMT · By Bogdan Popa ·
The Chinese government is forcing some of the ethnic minorities to install a smartphone application that would help monitor their activities, with law enforcement warning that those who do not comply would be detained for up to 10 days.
The initiative was started in Xinjiang in western China, with authorities sending a message via WeChat to residents in Urumqi requiring them to install an Android application called Jingwang whose role is to spy on users and detect any possible “terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books, and electronic documents.”
Most of the people in the region are part of the Muslim minority, according to local media, and the message is being spread in both Mandarin and Uyghur, with the latter being the language spoken by the ethnic group called Uighur, whose population counts 8 million people.
Android app to spy on users
The message also includes a QR code to download the app, along with a warning that those who do not install the application would be detained for up to 10 days.
Law enforcement warns that random checks would be performed in the coming weeks to make sure that everyone installs the app and no infringing content is stored on the devices. If the app is running and content that violates the guidelines is detected, users are prompted to delete it. Those who do not comply are also detained, the police warns.
The app can spy on the majority of activities performed on the phone, with logged data including conversations on WeChat and Weibo, two of the most popular communication platforms in China.
Information like Wi-Fi login details, device IMEI, and SIM card data is also collected and transferred to a government server, along with information on the media files stored on the device and which are compared to digital signatures of content flagged as infringing or linked with terrorist activity.
At first glance, the spying efforts only seem to be targeted at Android devices, but given that iOS is running on less than 10 percent of the devices in China, there’s a good chance that most people who are part of the minority group are affected.
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http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/why-are-5000-chinese-fighting-syrias-civil-war-20562
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http://havokjournal.com/national-security/china-will-eventually-enter-war-terror-dont-expect-side/?utm_source=Havok+Journal&utm_campaign=2649a90698-Havok_Journal_Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_566058f87c-2649a90698-214571297
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China
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
The government has turned the remote region into a laboratory for its high-tech social controls
Pedestrians pass a “convenience police station” in the Erdaoqiao neighborhood of Urumqi.
by Josh Chin and Giulia Marchi for The Wall Street Journal
Updated Dec. 19, 2017 10:58 p.m. ET
Pedestrians pass a “convenience police station” in the Erdaoqiao neighborhood of Urumqi.
URUMQI, China—This city on China’s Central Asia frontier may be one of the most closely surveilled places on earth.
Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera.
China’s efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group have turned the autonomous region of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital, into a laboratory for high-tech social controls that civil-liberties activists say the government wants to roll out across the country.
It is nearly impossible to move about the region without feeling the unrelenting gaze of the government. Citizens and visitors alike must run a daily gantlet of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras and machines scanning their ID cards, faces, eyeballs and sometimes entire bodies.
Life Inside China’s Total Surveillance State
China has turned the northwestern region of Xinjiang into a vast experiment in domestic surveillance. WSJ investigated what life is like in a place where one's every move can be monitored with cutting-edge technology.
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When fruit vendor Parhat Imin swiped his card at a telecommunications office this summer to pay an overdue phone bill, his photo popped up with an “X.” Since then, he says, every scan of his ID card sets off an alarm. He isn’t sure what it signifies, but figures he is on some kind of government watch list because he is a Uighur and has had intermittent run-ins with the police.
He says he is reluctant to travel for fear of being detained. “They blacklisted me,” he says. “I can’t go anywhere.”
All across China, authorities are rolling out new technology to keep watch over people and shape their behavior. Controls on expression have tightened under President Xi Jinping, and the state’s vast security web now includes high-tech equipment to monitor online activity and even snoop in smartphone messaging apps.
China’s government has been on high alert since a surge in deadly terrorist attacks around the country in 2014 that authorities blamed on Xinjiang-based militants inspired by extremist Islamic messages from abroad. Now officials are putting the world’s most state-of-the-art tools in the hands of a ramped-up security force to create a system of social control in Xinjiang—one that falls heaviest on Uighurs.
At a security exposition in October, an executive of Guangzhou-based CloudWalk Technology Co., which has sold facial-recognition algorithms to police and identity-verification systems to gas stations in Xinjiang, called the region the world’s most heavily guarded place. According to the executive, Jiang Jun, for every 100,000 people the police in Xinjiang want to monitor, they use the same amount of surveillance equipment that police in other parts of China would use to monitor millions.
Authorities in Xinjiang declined to respond to questions about surveillance. Top party officials from Xinjiang said at a Communist Party gathering in Beijing in October that “social stability and long-term security” were the local government’s bottom-line goals.
Chinese and foreign civil-liberty activists say the surveillance in this northwestern corner of China offers a preview of what is to come nationwide.
"A woman undergoes a facial-recognition check at a luxury mall in Urumqi."
.
“They constantly take lessons from the high-pressure rule they apply in Xinjiang and implement them in the east,” says Zhu Shengwu, a Chinese human-rights lawyer who has worked on surveillance cases. “What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on the fate of all Chinese people.”
During an October road trip into Xinjiang along a modern highway, two Wall Street Journal reporters encountered a succession of checkpoints that turned the ride into a strange and tense journey.
At Xingxing Gorge, a windswept pass used centuries ago by merchants plying the Silk Road, police inspected incoming traffic and verified travelers’ identities. The Journal reporters were stopped, ordered out of their car and asked to explain the purpose of their visit. Drivers, mostly those who weren’t Han Chinese, were guided through electronic gateways that scanned their ID cards and faces.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Farther along, at the entrance to Hami, a city of a half-million, police had the Journal reporters wait in front of a bank of TV screens showing feeds from nearby surveillance cameras while recording their passport numbers.
Surveillance cameras loomed every few hundred feet along the road into town, blanketed street corners and kept watch on patrons of a small noodle shop near the main mosque. The proprietress, a member of the Muslim Hui minority, said the government ordered all restaurants in the area to install the devices earlier this year “to prevent terrorist attacks.”
Days later, as the Journal reporters were driving on a dirt road in Shanshan county after being ordered by officials to leave a nearby town, a police cruiser materialized seemingly from nowhere. It raced past, then skidded to a diagonal stop, kicking up a cloud of dust and blocking the reporters’ car. An SUV pulled up behind. A half-dozen police ordered the reporters out of the car and demanded their passports.
An officer explained that surveillance cameras had read the out-of-town license plates and sent out an alert. “We check every car that’s not from Xinjiang,” he said. The police then escorted the reporters to the highway.
"A security camera has been erected next to the minarets of a mosque in the Uighur village of Tuyugou."
.
At checkpoints further west, iris and body scanners are added to the security arsenal.
Darren Byler, an anthropology researcher at the University of Washington who spent two years in Xinjiang studying migration, says the closest contemporary parallel can be found in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the Israeli government has created a system of checkpoints and biometric surveillance to keep tabs on Palestinians.
In Erdaoqiao, the neighborhood where the fruit vendor Mr. Imin lives, small booths known as “convenience police stations,” marked by flashing lights atop a pole, appear every couple of hundred yards. The police stationed there offer water, cellphone charging and other services, while also taking in feeds from nearby surveillance cameras.
Always Watching
In Xinjiang, China's government has put the world's most state-of-the-art surveillance tools in the hands of security forces.
License-plate camera
Used to track vehicles breaking law, on watch list or from outside Xinjiang
Iris scanner
ID technology used at some checkpoints.
Location tracker
Mandatory in all
commercial vehicles.
Voice-pattern analyzer
Can identify people by speech patterns.
Smartphone
scanner
Searches for encrypted chat apps and other suspect content.
ID scanner
Used to check identification cards.
QR code
Knife
Includes ID number and other personal information
Buyer identification information is marked by laser on blade.
Sources: Government procurement orders; iFlyTek Co.; Meiya Pico Information Co; Darren Byler, University of Washington; Human Rights Watch; police interviews; interviews with Uighurs in exile.
.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Young Uighur men are routinely pulled into the stations for phone checks, leading some to keep two devices—one for home use and another, with no sensitive content or apps, for going out, according to Uighur exiles.
Erdaoqiao, the heart of Uighur culture and commerce in Urumqi, is where ethnic riots started in 2009 that resulted in numerous deaths. The front entrance to Erdaoqiao Mosque is now closed, as are most entries to the International Grand Bazaar. Visitors funnel through a heavily guarded main gate. The faces and ID cards of Xinjiang residents are scanned. An array of cameras keeps watch.
After the riots, authorities showed up to shut down the shop Mr. Imin was running at the time, which sold clothing and religious items. When he protested, he says, they clubbed him on the back of the head, which has left him walking with a limp. They jailed him for six months for obstructing official business, he says. Other jail stints followed, including eight months for buying hashish.
The police in Urumqi didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Imin now sells fruit and freshly squeezed pomegranate juice from a cart. He worries that his flagged ID card will bring the police again. Recently remarried, he hasn’t dared visit his new wife’s family in southern Xinjiang.
.
At a checkpoint in Kashgar, passengers get their ID cards and faces scanned while police officers check cars and drivers.
Chinese rulers have struggled for two millennia to control Xinjiang, whose 23 million people are scattered over an expanse twice the size of Texas. Beijing sees it as a vital piece of President Xi’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road” initiative to build infrastructure along the old Silk Road trade routes to Europe.
Last year, Mr. Xi installed a new Xinjiang party chief, Chen Quanguo, who previously handled ethnic strife in Tibet, another hot spot. Mr. Chen pioneered the convenience police stations in that region, partly in response to a string of self-immolations by monks protesting Chinese rule.
Surveillance Economy
The value of security-related investment projects in Xinjiang is soaring.
8 billion yuan
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
2015
2016
2017*
*January-March
Source: Industrial Securities Co.
.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Under Mr. Chen, the police presence in Xinjiang has skyrocketed, based on data showing exponential increases in police-recruitment advertising. Local police departments last year began ordering cameras capable of creating three-dimensional face images as well as DNA sequencers and voice-pattern analysis systems, according to government procurement documents uncovered by Human Rights Watch and reviewed by the Journal.
During the first quarter of 2017, the government announced the equivalent of more than $1 billion in security-related investment projects in Xinjiang, up from $27 million in all of 2015, according to research in April by Chinese brokerage firm Industrial Securities .
Police Officers Wanted
Advertisements for policing positions in Xinjiang have risen sharply.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Government procurement orders show millions spent on “unified combat platforms”—computer systems to analyze surveillance data from police and other government agencies.
Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet and filmmaker, says Uighurs who had passports were called in to local police stations in May. He worried he would draw extra scrutiny for having been accused of carrying sensitive documents, including newspaper articles about Uighur separatist attacks, while trying to travel to Turkey to study in the mid-1990s. The aborted trip landed him in a labor camp for three years, he says.
He and his wife lined up at a police station with other Uighurs to have their fingerprints and blood samples taken. He says he was asked to read a newspaper for two minutes while police recorded his voice, and to turn his head slowly in front of a camera.
.
Later, his family’s passports were confiscated. After a friend was detained by police, he says, he assumed he also would be taken away. He says he paid officials a bribe of more than $9,000 to get the passports back, making up a story that his daughter had epilepsy requiring treatment in the U.S. Xinjiang’s Public Security Bureau, which is in charge of the region’s police forces, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the bribery.
“The day we left, I was filled with anxiety,” he says. “I worried what would happen if we were stopped going through security at the Urumqi airport, or going through border control in Beijing.”
He and his family made it to Virginia, where they have applied for political asylum.
Annotations in red added by The Wall Street Journal. Notes: * Xinjiang considers it suspicious for Uighurs to visit a list of 26 mostly Muslim countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. ** “Persons of interest” refers to people on the police watch list; “special population” is a common euphemism for Uighurs seen as separatists risks. Sources: Tahir Hamut (provided the form), Uighur Istiqlal TV and Adrian Zenz (confirmation of 26-country list).
Chinese authorities use forms to collect personal information from Uighurs. One form reviewed by the Journal asks about respondents’ prayer habits and if they have contacts abroad. There are sections for officials to rate “persons of interest” on a six-point scale and check boxes on whether they are “safe,” “average” or “unsafe.”
China Communications Services Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of state telecom giant China Telecom , has signed contracts this year worth more than $38 million to provide mosque surveillance and install surveillance-data platforms in Xinjiang, according to government procurement documents. The company declined to discuss the contracts, saying they constituted sensitive business information.
Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Co. Ltd. worked with police in Urumqi to adapt a hand-held device it sells for investigating economic crimes so it can scan smartphones for terrorism-related content.
A description of the device that recently was removed from the company’s website said it can read the files on 90% of smartphones and check findings against a police antiterror database. “Mostly, you’re looking for audio and video,” said Zhang Xuefeng, Meiya Pico’s chief marketing officer, in an interview.
Inside China’s Surveillance State
Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S.
China’s All-Seeing Surveillance State Is Reading Its Citizens’ Faces
China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People
Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups
.
Near the Xinjiang University campus in Urumqi, police sat at a wooden table recently, ordering some people walking by to hand over their phones.
“You just plug it in and it shows you what’s on the phone,” said one officer, brandishing a device similar to the one on Meiya Pico’s website. He declined to say what content they were checking for.
One recent afternoon in Korla, one of Xinjiang’s largest cities, only a trickle of people passed through the security checkpoint at the local bazaar, where vendors stared at darkened hallways empty of shoppers.
Li Qiang, the Han Chinese owner of a wine shop, said the security checks, while necessary for safety, were getting in the way of commerce. “As soon as you go out, they check your ID,” he said.
"Shopkeepers perform an antiterrorism drill under police supervision outside the bazaar in Kashgar."
.
Authorities have built a network of detention facilities, officially referred to as education centers, across Xinjiang. In April, the official Xinjiang Daily newspaper said more than 2,000 people had been sent to a “study and training center” in the southern city of Hotan.
One new compound sits a half-hour drive south of Kashgar, a Uighur-dominated city near the border with Kyrgyzstan. It is surrounded by imposing walls topped with razor wire, with watchtowers at two corners. A slogan painted on the wall reads: “All ethnic groups should be like the pods of a pomegranate, tightly wrapped together.”
Villagers describe it as a detention center. A man standing near the entrance one recent night said it was a school and advised reporters to leave.
Mr. Hamut, the poet, says a relative in Kashgar was taken to a detention center after she participated in an Islamic ceremony, and another went missing soon after the family tried to call him from the U.S.
The local government in Kashgar didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Police officers at a gate in the Old City of Kashgar.
.
Surveillance in and around Kashgar, where Han Chinese make up less than 7% of the population, is even tighter than in Urumqi. Drivers entering the city are screened intensively. A machine scans each driver’s face. Police officers inspect the engine and the trunk. Passengers must get out and run their bags through X-ray machines.
In Aksu, a dusty city a five-hour drive east of Kashgar, knife salesman Jiang Qiankun says his shop had to pay thousands of dollars for a machine that turns a customer’s ID card number, photo, ethnicity and address into a QR code that it lasers into the blade of any knife it sells. “If someone has a knife, it has to have their ID card information,” he says.
On the last day the Journal reporters were in Xinjiang, an unmarked car trailed them on a 5 a.m. drive to the Urumqi airport. During their China Southern Airlines flight to Beijing, a flight attendant appeared to train a police-style body camera attached to his belt on the reporters. Later, as passengers were disembarking, the attendant denied filming them, saying it was common for airline crew to wear the cameras as a security measure.
China Southern says the crew member was an air marshal, charged with safety on board.
—Fan Wenxin, Jeremy Page, Kersten Zhang and Eva Dou contributed to this article.
-
Funny how quiet the international community is about this. Too busy condemning the US and Israel.
China
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
The government has turned the remote region into a laboratory for its high-tech social controls
Pedestrians pass a “convenience police station” in the Erdaoqiao neighborhood of Urumqi.
by Josh Chin and Giulia Marchi for The Wall Street Journal
Updated Dec. 19, 2017 10:58 p.m. ET
Pedestrians pass a “convenience police station” in the Erdaoqiao neighborhood of Urumqi.
URUMQI, China—This city on China’s Central Asia frontier may be one of the most closely surveilled places on earth.
Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera.
China’s efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group have turned the autonomous region of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital, into a laboratory for high-tech social controls that civil-liberties activists say the government wants to roll out across the country.
It is nearly impossible to move about the region without feeling the unrelenting gaze of the government. Citizens and visitors alike must run a daily gantlet of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras and machines scanning their ID cards, faces, eyeballs and sometimes entire bodies.
Life Inside China’s Total Surveillance State
China has turned the northwestern region of Xinjiang into a vast experiment in domestic surveillance. WSJ investigated what life is like in a place where one's every move can be monitored with cutting-edge technology.
.
When fruit vendor Parhat Imin swiped his card at a telecommunications office this summer to pay an overdue phone bill, his photo popped up with an “X.” Since then, he says, every scan of his ID card sets off an alarm. He isn’t sure what it signifies, but figures he is on some kind of government watch list because he is a Uighur and has had intermittent run-ins with the police.
He says he is reluctant to travel for fear of being detained. “They blacklisted me,” he says. “I can’t go anywhere.”
All across China, authorities are rolling out new technology to keep watch over people and shape their behavior. Controls on expression have tightened under President Xi Jinping, and the state’s vast security web now includes high-tech equipment to monitor online activity and even snoop in smartphone messaging apps.
China’s government has been on high alert since a surge in deadly terrorist attacks around the country in 2014 that authorities blamed on Xinjiang-based militants inspired by extremist Islamic messages from abroad. Now officials are putting the world’s most state-of-the-art tools in the hands of a ramped-up security force to create a system of social control in Xinjiang—one that falls heaviest on Uighurs.
At a security exposition in October, an executive of Guangzhou-based CloudWalk Technology Co., which has sold facial-recognition algorithms to police and identity-verification systems to gas stations in Xinjiang, called the region the world’s most heavily guarded place. According to the executive, Jiang Jun, for every 100,000 people the police in Xinjiang want to monitor, they use the same amount of surveillance equipment that police in other parts of China would use to monitor millions.
Authorities in Xinjiang declined to respond to questions about surveillance. Top party officials from Xinjiang said at a Communist Party gathering in Beijing in October that “social stability and long-term security” were the local government’s bottom-line goals.
Chinese and foreign civil-liberty activists say the surveillance in this northwestern corner of China offers a preview of what is to come nationwide.
"A woman undergoes a facial-recognition check at a luxury mall in Urumqi."
.
“They constantly take lessons from the high-pressure rule they apply in Xinjiang and implement them in the east,” says Zhu Shengwu, a Chinese human-rights lawyer who has worked on surveillance cases. “What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on the fate of all Chinese people.”
During an October road trip into Xinjiang along a modern highway, two Wall Street Journal reporters encountered a succession of checkpoints that turned the ride into a strange and tense journey.
At Xingxing Gorge, a windswept pass used centuries ago by merchants plying the Silk Road, police inspected incoming traffic and verified travelers’ identities. The Journal reporters were stopped, ordered out of their car and asked to explain the purpose of their visit. Drivers, mostly those who weren’t Han Chinese, were guided through electronic gateways that scanned their ID cards and faces.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Farther along, at the entrance to Hami, a city of a half-million, police had the Journal reporters wait in front of a bank of TV screens showing feeds from nearby surveillance cameras while recording their passport numbers.
Surveillance cameras loomed every few hundred feet along the road into town, blanketed street corners and kept watch on patrons of a small noodle shop near the main mosque. The proprietress, a member of the Muslim Hui minority, said the government ordered all restaurants in the area to install the devices earlier this year “to prevent terrorist attacks.”
Days later, as the Journal reporters were driving on a dirt road in Shanshan county after being ordered by officials to leave a nearby town, a police cruiser materialized seemingly from nowhere. It raced past, then skidded to a diagonal stop, kicking up a cloud of dust and blocking the reporters’ car. An SUV pulled up behind. A half-dozen police ordered the reporters out of the car and demanded their passports.
An officer explained that surveillance cameras had read the out-of-town license plates and sent out an alert. “We check every car that’s not from Xinjiang,” he said. The police then escorted the reporters to the highway.
"A security camera has been erected next to the minarets of a mosque in the Uighur village of Tuyugou."
.
At checkpoints further west, iris and body scanners are added to the security arsenal.
Darren Byler, an anthropology researcher at the University of Washington who spent two years in Xinjiang studying migration, says the closest contemporary parallel can be found in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the Israeli government has created a system of checkpoints and biometric surveillance to keep tabs on Palestinians.
In Erdaoqiao, the neighborhood where the fruit vendor Mr. Imin lives, small booths known as “convenience police stations,” marked by flashing lights atop a pole, appear every couple of hundred yards. The police stationed there offer water, cellphone charging and other services, while also taking in feeds from nearby surveillance cameras.
Always Watching
In Xinjiang, China's government has put the world's most state-of-the-art surveillance tools in the hands of security forces.
License-plate camera
Used to track vehicles breaking law, on watch list or from outside Xinjiang
Iris scanner
ID technology used at some checkpoints.
Location tracker
Mandatory in all
commercial vehicles.
Voice-pattern analyzer
Can identify people by speech patterns.
Smartphone
scanner
Searches for encrypted chat apps and other suspect content.
ID scanner
Used to check identification cards.
QR code
Knife
Includes ID number and other personal information
Buyer identification information is marked by laser on blade.
Sources: Government procurement orders; iFlyTek Co.; Meiya Pico Information Co; Darren Byler, University of Washington; Human Rights Watch; police interviews; interviews with Uighurs in exile.
.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Young Uighur men are routinely pulled into the stations for phone checks, leading some to keep two devices—one for home use and another, with no sensitive content or apps, for going out, according to Uighur exiles.
Erdaoqiao, the heart of Uighur culture and commerce in Urumqi, is where ethnic riots started in 2009 that resulted in numerous deaths. The front entrance to Erdaoqiao Mosque is now closed, as are most entries to the International Grand Bazaar. Visitors funnel through a heavily guarded main gate. The faces and ID cards of Xinjiang residents are scanned. An array of cameras keeps watch.
After the riots, authorities showed up to shut down the shop Mr. Imin was running at the time, which sold clothing and religious items. When he protested, he says, they clubbed him on the back of the head, which has left him walking with a limp. They jailed him for six months for obstructing official business, he says. Other jail stints followed, including eight months for buying hashish.
The police in Urumqi didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Imin now sells fruit and freshly squeezed pomegranate juice from a cart. He worries that his flagged ID card will bring the police again. Recently remarried, he hasn’t dared visit his new wife’s family in southern Xinjiang.
.
At a checkpoint in Kashgar, passengers get their ID cards and faces scanned while police officers check cars and drivers.
Chinese rulers have struggled for two millennia to control Xinjiang, whose 23 million people are scattered over an expanse twice the size of Texas. Beijing sees it as a vital piece of President Xi’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road” initiative to build infrastructure along the old Silk Road trade routes to Europe.
Last year, Mr. Xi installed a new Xinjiang party chief, Chen Quanguo, who previously handled ethnic strife in Tibet, another hot spot. Mr. Chen pioneered the convenience police stations in that region, partly in response to a string of self-immolations by monks protesting Chinese rule.
Surveillance Economy
The value of security-related investment projects in Xinjiang is soaring.
8 billion yuan
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
2015
2016
2017*
*January-March
Source: Industrial Securities Co.
.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Under Mr. Chen, the police presence in Xinjiang has skyrocketed, based on data showing exponential increases in police-recruitment advertising. Local police departments last year began ordering cameras capable of creating three-dimensional face images as well as DNA sequencers and voice-pattern analysis systems, according to government procurement documents uncovered by Human Rights Watch and reviewed by the Journal.
During the first quarter of 2017, the government announced the equivalent of more than $1 billion in security-related investment projects in Xinjiang, up from $27 million in all of 2015, according to research in April by Chinese brokerage firm Industrial Securities .
Police Officers Wanted
Advertisements for policing positions in Xinjiang have risen sharply.
Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life
Government procurement orders show millions spent on “unified combat platforms”—computer systems to analyze surveillance data from police and other government agencies.
Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet and filmmaker, says Uighurs who had passports were called in to local police stations in May. He worried he would draw extra scrutiny for having been accused of carrying sensitive documents, including newspaper articles about Uighur separatist attacks, while trying to travel to Turkey to study in the mid-1990s. The aborted trip landed him in a labor camp for three years, he says.
He and his wife lined up at a police station with other Uighurs to have their fingerprints and blood samples taken. He says he was asked to read a newspaper for two minutes while police recorded his voice, and to turn his head slowly in front of a camera.
.
Later, his family’s passports were confiscated. After a friend was detained by police, he says, he assumed he also would be taken away. He says he paid officials a bribe of more than $9,000 to get the passports back, making up a story that his daughter had epilepsy requiring treatment in the U.S. Xinjiang’s Public Security Bureau, which is in charge of the region’s police forces, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the bribery.
“The day we left, I was filled with anxiety,” he says. “I worried what would happen if we were stopped going through security at the Urumqi airport, or going through border control in Beijing.”
He and his family made it to Virginia, where they have applied for political asylum.
Annotations in red added by The Wall Street Journal. Notes: * Xinjiang considers it suspicious for Uighurs to visit a list of 26 mostly Muslim countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. ** “Persons of interest” refers to people on the police watch list; “special population” is a common euphemism for Uighurs seen as separatists risks. Sources: Tahir Hamut (provided the form), Uighur Istiqlal TV and Adrian Zenz (confirmation of 26-country list).
Chinese authorities use forms to collect personal information from Uighurs. One form reviewed by the Journal asks about respondents’ prayer habits and if they have contacts abroad. There are sections for officials to rate “persons of interest” on a six-point scale and check boxes on whether they are “safe,” “average” or “unsafe.”
China Communications Services Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of state telecom giant China Telecom , has signed contracts this year worth more than $38 million to provide mosque surveillance and install surveillance-data platforms in Xinjiang, according to government procurement documents. The company declined to discuss the contracts, saying they constituted sensitive business information.
Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Co. Ltd. worked with police in Urumqi to adapt a hand-held device it sells for investigating economic crimes so it can scan smartphones for terrorism-related content.
A description of the device that recently was removed from the company’s website said it can read the files on 90% of smartphones and check findings against a police antiterror database. “Mostly, you’re looking for audio and video,” said Zhang Xuefeng, Meiya Pico’s chief marketing officer, in an interview.
Inside China’s Surveillance State
Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S.
China’s All-Seeing Surveillance State Is Reading Its Citizens’ Faces
China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People
Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups
.
Near the Xinjiang University campus in Urumqi, police sat at a wooden table recently, ordering some people walking by to hand over their phones.
“You just plug it in and it shows you what’s on the phone,” said one officer, brandishing a device similar to the one on Meiya Pico’s website. He declined to say what content they were checking for.
One recent afternoon in Korla, one of Xinjiang’s largest cities, only a trickle of people passed through the security checkpoint at the local bazaar, where vendors stared at darkened hallways empty of shoppers.
Li Qiang, the Han Chinese owner of a wine shop, said the security checks, while necessary for safety, were getting in the way of commerce. “As soon as you go out, they check your ID,” he said.
"Shopkeepers perform an antiterrorism drill under police supervision outside the bazaar in Kashgar."
.
Authorities have built a network of detention facilities, officially referred to as education centers, across Xinjiang. In April, the official Xinjiang Daily newspaper said more than 2,000 people had been sent to a “study and training center” in the southern city of Hotan.
One new compound sits a half-hour drive south of Kashgar, a Uighur-dominated city near the border with Kyrgyzstan. It is surrounded by imposing walls topped with razor wire, with watchtowers at two corners. A slogan painted on the wall reads: “All ethnic groups should be like the pods of a pomegranate, tightly wrapped together.”
Villagers describe it as a detention center. A man standing near the entrance one recent night said it was a school and advised reporters to leave.
Mr. Hamut, the poet, says a relative in Kashgar was taken to a detention center after she participated in an Islamic ceremony, and another went missing soon after the family tried to call him from the U.S.
The local government in Kashgar didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Police officers at a gate in the Old City of Kashgar.
.
Surveillance in and around Kashgar, where Han Chinese make up less than 7% of the population, is even tighter than in Urumqi. Drivers entering the city are screened intensively. A machine scans each driver’s face. Police officers inspect the engine and the trunk. Passengers must get out and run their bags through X-ray machines.
In Aksu, a dusty city a five-hour drive east of Kashgar, knife salesman Jiang Qiankun says his shop had to pay thousands of dollars for a machine that turns a customer’s ID card number, photo, ethnicity and address into a QR code that it lasers into the blade of any knife it sells. “If someone has a knife, it has to have their ID card information,” he says.
On the last day the Journal reporters were in Xinjiang, an unmarked car trailed them on a 5 a.m. drive to the Urumqi airport. During their China Southern Airlines flight to Beijing, a flight attendant appeared to train a police-style body camera attached to his belt on the reporters. Later, as passengers were disembarking, the attendant denied filming them, saying it was common for airline crew to wear the cameras as a security measure.
China Southern says the crew member was an air marshal, charged with safety on board.
—Fan Wenxin, Jeremy Page, Kersten Zhang and Eva Dou contributed to this article.
-
Chinese police watch as Muslims exit a mosque in Kashgar, China, June 26, 2017. Photo: johannes eisele/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
32 Comments
By Marco Rubio
Aug. 9, 2018 6:51 p.m. ET
The phrase “re-education camp” invokes Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Vietnam after the communist takeover. But this form of repression is alive and well in Xi Jinping’s China. His government is imposing a “political re-education” campaign in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, targeting the Uyghur Muslim population, Kazakhs and other ethnic Muslim minorities.
Xinjiang today is “a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid,” wrote one expert. Its residents make up only 1.5% of China’s population—but accounted for 21% of arrests in 2017. This massive increase over the previous year doesn’t include detainees in re-education centers.
China has detained as many as one million people in camps. While Chinese authorities deny that such camps exist, satellite images show the recent construction of massive structures in Xinjiang. Research from China scholar Adrian Zenz details Chinese government procurement and construction bids for new re-education facilities and “upgrades and enlargements” to existing ones.
Security personnel subject camp detainees in Xinjiang to torture, medical neglect, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and other deadly forms of abuse. They also force detainees to submit to daily brainwashing sessions and hours of exposure to Communist Party propaganda. The prisoners’ overseers require recitation of party slogans before eating.
Outside the camps, Chinese authorities aggressively suppress expressions of religious identity. Xinjiang residents face daily intrusions in their home life, including “home stays” where Communist Party officials live with local families. Chinese authorities prohibit “abnormal” beards and veils in public, as well as some Islamic names. Standard religious practices—abstaining from alcohol, tobacco and pork, or fasting during Ramadan—provoke the authorities’ suspicions.
The government has embraced tools Mao only could have dreamed of: big data, iris and body scanners, voice-pattern analyzers, DNA sequencers (including some sold by an American company) and facial-recognition cameras. Authorities use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted messaging apps and require residents to install monitoring software in their smartphones.
Radio Free Asia leads in reporting on this crisis. In retaliation, Chinese authorities have detained dozens of family members related to Uyghur journalists working for RFA in the U.S. In recent testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, RFA journalist Gulchehra Hoja lamented, “It’s a cruel irony that we as journalists can find out so much about what’s happening inside China’s Northwest, yet so little about our own families and loved ones. We are afraid to ask our friends and others there, because any contact and communication could endanger them as well.” China also has used Uyghurs living in the country as leverage to gather information about exiled Uyghurs’ activities—or to compel some to return to China.
China largely has avoided consequences for this reprehensible behavior. It no longer should.
The U.S. should apply Global Magnitsky Act sanctions against Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo. A Politburo member, he first gained experience with repression in Tibet. His tenure as party chief in Xinjiang has coincided with the proliferation of re-education camps, and he is seen as an innovator in his dark craft.
All government officials and business entities assisting the mass detentions and surveillance in Xinjiang should face sanctions too. The Commerce and State departments should add Chinese state security agencies to a restricted end-user list to ensure that American companies don’t aid Chinese human-rights abuses.
Consistent with the administration’s commitment to “reciprocity” in relations with China, the U.S. should deny visas to executives and administrative staff of Chinese state-run media companies operating on American soil until all family members of RFA journalists are released.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the plight of RFA reporters and their families in July. Vice President Mike Pence has discussed the crisis publicly too. But words must be followed by action. State should work with like-minded governments to increase public pressure against China at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and many Muslim-majority nations have remained virtually silent, perhaps for fear of upsetting China. If the U.S. takes a bolder stance, other nations shouldn’t be afraid to follow.
Stability in Xinjiang is crucial to Mr. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative. Public condemnation of China’s human-rights record, including its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, would be most unwelcome.
Despite its efforts to project a benevolent image around the globe, the Chinese Communist Party remains repressive, brutal and utterly intolerant. Consider what one official reportedly said about the “political re-education” campaign in Xinjiang: “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one—you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” American leaders must find the political will to confront this evil.
Mr. Rubio, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Florida.
Appeared in the August 10, 2018, print edition.
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Beijing is increasingly giving in to the demands of the people. In northern China, authorities postponed the demolition of an iconic mosque after thousands of residents protested against its demolition (a particularly interesting concession, considering the government’s efforts to control religious activity). Beijing has also introduced new measures to mitigate the risks associated with peer-to-peer lending, including responding to investor inquiries and compliance inspections. Protesters have been demanding as much for days. President Xi Jinping is a consummate pragmatist, so his capitulations are not all that surprising. But they come amid reports that increasingly question his ability to control the government and maintain law and order. It’s unclear whether Beijing’s concessions, then, constitute a new strategy to control the people or are an illustration that Xi is already losing his ability to do so.
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Beijing is increasingly giving in to the demands of the people. In northern China, authorities postponed the demolition of an iconic mosque after thousands of residents protested against its demolition (a particularly interesting concession, considering the government’s efforts to control religious activity). Beijing has also introduced new measures to mitigate the risks associated with peer-to-peer lending, including responding to investor inquiries and compliance inspections. Protesters have been demanding as much for days. President Xi Jinping is a consummate pragmatist, so his capitulations are not all that surprising. But they come amid reports that increasingly question his ability to control the government and maintain law and order. It’s unclear whether Beijing’s concessions, then, constitute a new strategy to control the people or are an illustration that Xi is already losing his ability to do so.
I think the Chinese power structure is very worried right now.
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Strangely, we need to side with the Muslims on religion in China if the government won't side with the US on technology and trade.
Can't we shut down their internet filter in the cyberwar?
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Daily Memo: Spotlight on China's Uighurs, a Common Enemy in Syria
All the news worth knowing today.
China’s crackdown on Muslims in the country’s western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is finally attracting mainstream attention. On Monday, a U.N. commission lent credibility to multiple reports claiming as many as 3 million Uighurs (a Turkic-speaking, largely Muslim ethnic minority), as well as some ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, have been forced into “re-education camps” in Xinjiang. The region has been home to a low-boil insurgency and occasional ethnic rioting for decades. On Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported that China’s surveillance of Uighurs is extended even into the U.S., with Chinese state security allegedly compiling a global database of Uighurs and stepping up monitoring of their activities abroad. Maintaining tight control over peripheral buffer regions like Xinjiang is a geopolitical imperative for China. But Beijing is evidently starting to feel the heat, with Chinese state media publishing a series of defensive reports claiming, among other things, that the measures have prevented Xinjiang from becoming “China’s Syria.” For the most part, foreign governments over the past years have been conspicuously quiet about the Uighur issue – including leaders in majority Muslim countries who have sought to pressure, say, Myanmar over its alleged ethnic cleansing of its Muslim Rohingya minority. China’s tight media controls and ability to lock out foreigners from the area certainly gives it greater ability to contain the story. But with international unease growing about Chinese assertiveness on multiple fronts – and with several governments grasping for leverage against Beijing – it’s doubtful that China can keep its crackdown in Xinjiang confined to the shadows as much as it’d like.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/china-muslims-camps-uighur-communist-party-islam-mental-illness.html
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/china-muslims-camps-uighur-communist-party-islam-mental-illness.html
Expect little to no pushback toward China from the same groups that scream about Israel.
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang/chinese-official-says-china-is-educating-not-mistreating-muslims-idUSKCN1LT1LV
Chinese official says China is educating, not mistreating, Muslims
Tom Miles, Stephanie Nebehay
3 MIN READ
GENEVA (Reuters) - China is not mistreating Muslims in Xinjiang province but is putting some people through training courses to avoid extremism spreading, unlike Europe, which had failed to deal with the problem, a Chinese official told reporters on Thursday.
FILE PHOTO - Police keep watch outside the Id Kah Mosque before morning prayers in Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, March 23, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Reports of mass detentions of ethnic Uighurs and other ethnic Muslims in China’s far western region have sparked a growing international outcry, prompting the Trump administration to consider sanctions against officials and companies linked to allegations of human rights abuses.
“It is not mistreatment,” said Li Xiaojun, director for publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office. “What China is doing is to establish professional training centers, educational centers.”
“If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so, in dealing with religious Islamic extremism,” Li told reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. Human Rights Council session in Geneva.
“Look at Belgium, look at Paris, look at some other European countries. You have failed.”
China frequently comes under fire for its human rights policies. On Wednesday, it was accused by U.N. chief Antonio Guterres of reprisals against activists, including the alleged torture of a human rights lawyer. Critics say its surveillance in Xinjiang approaches martial law conditions.
“As to surveillance, China is learning from the UK,” Li said. “Your per capita CCTV is much higher than that for China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region.”
Europe’s top rights court ruled on Thursday that Britain had violated privacy and free speech with a “Big Brother” electronic surveillance program.
Li said it was normal practice for Xinjiang police to use closed-circuit television for the public good, especially after ethnic riots in 2009, which were blamed on “foreign forces”.
He said the Xinjiang education centers were not “detention centers or re-education camps”, which he dismissed as “the trademark product of eastern European countries”, an apparent reference to Soviet Gulag detention camps during the Cold War.
“To put it straight, it’s like vocational training ... like your children go to vocational-training schools to get better skills and better jobs after graduation.
“But these kind of training and education centers only accept people for a short period of time – some people five days, some seven days, 10 days, one month, two months.”
He rejected the idea of having a U.N. expert visit the region, saying there was no need.
He said the poorest people in remote areas were most susceptible to radicalization, and that mosques were being used to that effect.
Islam was a good thing in China’s view, but Islamic extremists were the common foes of mankind, he said.
“They are very bad elements. You can see that in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Pakistan, in Iraq, and many other countries.”
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Can't say that I know how to answer that argument.
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The Big Picture
________________________________________
In recent years, China has intensified its security crackdown on Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in Xinjiang as part of its efforts to control the strategic region, but the move has drawn international criticism. Now, the United States is weighing whether to impose human right sanctions as part of its campaign against China.
________________________________________
2018 Fourth-Quarter ForecastAsia-Pacific
International criticism is growing against China over its crackdown on Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in the western province of Xinjiang — and now there are rumblings that Washington could impose targeted sanctions against Beijing as peer competition grows. The White House reportedly is considering all its options to increase pressure on China, including sanctions on human rights grounds that could cause wider international ramifications.
What Happened
China has responded to the global criticism by seeking to justify its actions, which primarily target the Turkic Uighur minority and are almost certain to lead to a wider backlash, both internationally and among the Uighurs. On Oct. 7, Xinjiang's government revised local legislation on "de-extremefication." The law, designed to restrict radical religious ideology and "extreme elements," called for the promotion of scientific knowledge, education and the national language, Mandarin, as well as resistance against "extreme" thinking and practices. Xinjiang's government has also legalized the use of "vocational training centers" to "educate and transform" people who have been influenced by extremism — effectively acknowledging the network of such centers after long denying their existence.
Following massive, Uighur-Han riots in Xinjiang in July 2009 and a series of terrorist attacks in Beijing and Yunnan, Chinese authorities initiated a heavy security crackdown, imposed greater censorship over the internet and increased their scrutiny of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims. Since 2014, officials in Xinjiang also have banned men from growing beards and both men and women from donning Islamic garb, in addition to shuttering mosques and imposing greater Mandarin usage among the population. But the crackdown has apparently reached a new level over the past three years, as authorities led by Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo have taken a hard-line approach in attempting to impose control over the resource-rich border region. As many as 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims, such as the Hui and Kazakhs, have been detained or subjected to political reeducation since 2009.
The Stakes for Beijing
For Beijing, the possibility that battle-hardened Uighur militants could return from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq through Central Asia underscores an acute security threat amid the expansion of terrorism and the refugee crisis elsewhere in the world. At the same time, China's struggle to control Xinjiang, along with Tibet, underscores Beijing's historical obsession with creating, expanding and ruling buffer regions to secure a unified and centralized regime. Because of Xinjiang's long history of autonomy and its complicated relations with central Chinese authority far to the east, Beijing views the region as a vulnerability, particularly if its populace pushes for separatism or if a foreign power makes inroads in the region, as the Soviet Union did in the 20th century. And at a time when China sees that the United States is trying to contain it in the Pacific and challenge its export-oriented coastal economies, Xinjiang's significance is only likely to increase for Beijing as it pushes for overland access to Eurasia as part of its Belt and Road Initiative through the western territory.
Beijing sees an iron-fisted approach that has often blurred the boundary between extremism and religion as the only way to solve its problems and strengthen its control over Xinjiang.
Beijing's security crackdown — alongside the consequences of years of resource exploitation and a failure to adequately manage ethnic tensions — has angered locals who feel that authorities have excluded them from the country's economic gains and discriminated against them on an ethnic basis. The government, however, sees an iron-fisted approach that has often blurred the boundary between extremism and religion as the only way to solve its problems and strengthen its control over the restive region. As part of the approach, Chinese authorities reportedly have detained large numbers of Uighurs, sending many to reeducation centers as part of what appears to be an accelerated campaign to implement greater ethnic and cultural assimilation. In addition to the reeducation camps, Beijing reportedly has resettled large numbers of people from largely Uighur southern Xinjiang in the Han-dominated north or sent Uighurs from other regions of Xinjiang to northeast China or elsewhere — a step up from past practices, in which Beijing relied on province-to-province labor contracts or small-scale population transfers between Xinjiang and other provinces to dilute ethnic populations in Xinjiang.
What's Next
The United States and the European Union have ramped up pressure on China over the harsh security measures, while the issue could eventually become a bone of contention between Beijing and Muslim-majority states. At present, Beijing appears to have no qualms about invoking a backlash — whether local or international — over what it views as an internal issue, but the matter could grow if Washington raises the stakes by imposing sanctions.
Looking Ahead
Sanctions related to human rights typically focus on individuals and corporate entities accused of facilitating crackdowns, but the current White House could push the limits of executive action to widen the target before imposing any formal sanctions.
• The U.S. Congress is currently considering sanctions against Chinese officials such as Xinjiang Party leader Chen Quanguo. The list could also include other political officials or business executives whose companies are active in Xinjiang, such as state-owned energy firms, or which are involved in surveillance.
• The United States could target Chinese and U.S. tech companies that have contracts with Chinese state security for products like surveillance equipment.
• Other options could include measures against certain Chinese companies active in Xinjiang that would prohibit them from doing business with U.S. companies or using U.S. financial institutions.
• Washington could exert greater control over the export of U.S. technologies that are linked to surveillance technologies in use in Xinjiang.
• The U.S. Congress recently passed a bipartisan bill that seeks to impose a visa ban on Chinese officials who deny American citizens, government officials and journalists access to Tibet. And if the United States were to expand its human rights sanctions to other parts of China, it could target companies involved in strategic materials like rare earth elements.
• Stratfor is tracking the responses of important Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia, to see how the issue factors into their respective relationships with China.
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China gives zero fcuks about "the international community's opinion".
The Big Picture
________________________________________
In recent years, China has intensified its security crackdown on Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in Xinjiang as part of its efforts to control the strategic region, but the move has drawn international criticism. Now, the United States is weighing whether to impose human right sanctions as part of its campaign against China.
________________________________________
2018 Fourth-Quarter ForecastAsia-Pacific
International criticism is growing against China over its crackdown on Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in the western province of Xinjiang — and now there are rumblings that Washington could impose targeted sanctions against Beijing as peer competition grows. The White House reportedly is considering all its options to increase pressure on China, including sanctions on human rights grounds that could cause wider international ramifications.
What Happened
China has responded to the global criticism by seeking to justify its actions, which primarily target the Turkic Uighur minority and are almost certain to lead to a wider backlash, both internationally and among the Uighurs. On Oct. 7, Xinjiang's government revised local legislation on "de-extremefication." The law, designed to restrict radical religious ideology and "extreme elements," called for the promotion of scientific knowledge, education and the national language, Mandarin, as well as resistance against "extreme" thinking and practices. Xinjiang's government has also legalized the use of "vocational training centers" to "educate and transform" people who have been influenced by extremism — effectively acknowledging the network of such centers after long denying their existence.
Following massive, Uighur-Han riots in Xinjiang in July 2009 and a series of terrorist attacks in Beijing and Yunnan, Chinese authorities initiated a heavy security crackdown, imposed greater censorship over the internet and increased their scrutiny of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims. Since 2014, officials in Xinjiang also have banned men from growing beards and both men and women from donning Islamic garb, in addition to shuttering mosques and imposing greater Mandarin usage among the population. But the crackdown has apparently reached a new level over the past three years, as authorities led by Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo have taken a hard-line approach in attempting to impose control over the resource-rich border region. As many as 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims, such as the Hui and Kazakhs, have been detained or subjected to political reeducation since 2009.
The Stakes for Beijing
For Beijing, the possibility that battle-hardened Uighur militants could return from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq through Central Asia underscores an acute security threat amid the expansion of terrorism and the refugee crisis elsewhere in the world. At the same time, China's struggle to control Xinjiang, along with Tibet, underscores Beijing's historical obsession with creating, expanding and ruling buffer regions to secure a unified and centralized regime. Because of Xinjiang's long history of autonomy and its complicated relations with central Chinese authority far to the east, Beijing views the region as a vulnerability, particularly if its populace pushes for separatism or if a foreign power makes inroads in the region, as the Soviet Union did in the 20th century. And at a time when China sees that the United States is trying to contain it in the Pacific and challenge its export-oriented coastal economies, Xinjiang's significance is only likely to increase for Beijing as it pushes for overland access to Eurasia as part of its Belt and Road Initiative through the western territory.
Beijing sees an iron-fisted approach that has often blurred the boundary between extremism and religion as the only way to solve its problems and strengthen its control over Xinjiang.
Beijing's security crackdown — alongside the consequences of years of resource exploitation and a failure to adequately manage ethnic tensions — has angered locals who feel that authorities have excluded them from the country's economic gains and discriminated against them on an ethnic basis. The government, however, sees an iron-fisted approach that has often blurred the boundary between extremism and religion as the only way to solve its problems and strengthen its control over the restive region. As part of the approach, Chinese authorities reportedly have detained large numbers of Uighurs, sending many to reeducation centers as part of what appears to be an accelerated campaign to implement greater ethnic and cultural assimilation. In addition to the reeducation camps, Beijing reportedly has resettled large numbers of people from largely Uighur southern Xinjiang in the Han-dominated north or sent Uighurs from other regions of Xinjiang to northeast China or elsewhere — a step up from past practices, in which Beijing relied on province-to-province labor contracts or small-scale population transfers between Xinjiang and other provinces to dilute ethnic populations in Xinjiang.
What's Next
The United States and the European Union have ramped up pressure on China over the harsh security measures, while the issue could eventually become a bone of contention between Beijing and Muslim-majority states. At present, Beijing appears to have no qualms about invoking a backlash — whether local or international — over what it views as an internal issue, but the matter could grow if Washington raises the stakes by imposing sanctions.
Looking Ahead
Sanctions related to human rights typically focus on individuals and corporate entities accused of facilitating crackdowns, but the current White House could push the limits of executive action to widen the target before imposing any formal sanctions.
• The U.S. Congress is currently considering sanctions against Chinese officials such as Xinjiang Party leader Chen Quanguo. The list could also include other political officials or business executives whose companies are active in Xinjiang, such as state-owned energy firms, or which are involved in surveillance.
• The United States could target Chinese and U.S. tech companies that have contracts with Chinese state security for products like surveillance equipment.
• Other options could include measures against certain Chinese companies active in Xinjiang that would prohibit them from doing business with U.S. companies or using U.S. financial institutions.
• Washington could exert greater control over the export of U.S. technologies that are linked to surveillance technologies in use in Xinjiang.
• The U.S. Congress recently passed a bipartisan bill that seeks to impose a visa ban on Chinese officials who deny American citizens, government officials and journalists access to Tibet. And if the United States were to expand its human rights sanctions to other parts of China, it could target companies involved in strategic materials like rare earth elements.
• Stratfor is tracking the responses of important Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia, to see how the issue factors into their respective relationships with China.
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After Mass Detentions, China Razes Muslim Communities to Build a Loyal City
Authorities take down once-bustling Uighur neighborhoods to create a compliant economic hub
By Josh Chin and
Clément Bürge
March 20, 2019 7:00 a.m. ET
URUMQI, China—In this old Silk Road city in western China, a state security campaign involving the detention of vast numbers of people has moved to its next stage: demolishing their neighborhoods and purging their culture.
Two years after authorities began rounding up Urumqi’s mostly Muslim ethnic Uighur residents, many of the anchors of Uighur life and identity are being uprooted. Empty mosques remain, while the shantytown homes that surrounded them have been replaced by glass towers and retail strips like many found across China.
Food stalls that sold fresh nang, the circular flatbread that is to Uighur society what baguettes are to the French, are gone. The young men that once baked the nang have disappeared, as have many of their customers. Uighur-language books are missing from store shelves in a city, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, that has long been a center of the global Uighur community.
Supplanting the Turkic culture that long defined large parts of Urumqi is a sanitized version catering to Chinese tourists. On a recent morning in the Erdaoqiao neighborhood, the once-bustling heart of Uighur Urumqi, nang ovens were nowhere to be seen—but souvenir shops sold nang-shaped pocket mirrors, nang bottle openers and circular throw pillows with covers printed to look like nang.
Before and After
Urumqi’s Heijiashan neighborhood was once a center of Uighur migrant life in the city. In 2010, a year after deadly ethnic riots, authorities began knocking down its low-rise courtyards and moving some residents into high-rises, but stopped after running into local resistance. They resumed razing older houses after the current crackdown began in 2017, and are preparing to build new residential towers on the site. PHOTOS: GOOGLE EARTH
The transformation of Urumqi (pronounced u-RUUM-chi) is the leading edge of a campaign by China’s ruling Communist Party to forcibly assimilate the Uighurs. Beijing says the detentions combat terrorism and the demolition, along with billions of dollars of investment in the region, is bringing development.
“Ethnic unity is the lifeline of all ethnic groups in China and the foundation of economic progress in Xinjiang,” the region’s governor, Shohrat Zakir, told China’s annual legislative session last week.
The party’s goal, experts say, is to reinforce its control in Xinjiang by remaking the long recalcitrant region in its own image, and to secure it as a hub for President Xi Jinping’s global development ambitions.
When plans for Urumqi’s urban overhaul were announced in 2017, the party-controlled Xinjiang Daily said the government would offer compensation to residents forced to move, and planned new residential districts “designed with full consideration of the customs and convenience of all ethnic groups.” The Urumqi and Xinjiang governments didn’t respond to requests for comment about the urban overhaul.
Women perform a traditional dance in Urumqi’s main bazaar in November, part of an effort by authorities to promote tourism in the city.
Women perform a traditional dance in Urumqi’s main bazaar in November, part of an effort by authorities to promote tourism in the city. Photo: Bloomberg/Bloomberg News
China’s Communist Party has waged an aggressive campaign in Xinjiang to counter what it says are violent, extremist tendencies among the region’s 14 million Turkic Muslims, most of them Uighurs.
To realize its “deradicalization” goals, authorities have detained what United Nations experts say have been as many as a million Muslims in a network of internment camps—and subjected the rest to mass digital surveillance. Chinese leaders characterize the camps as vocational training centers, promoting them as an innovation in the global war on terror and disputing the one-million figure.
“We can’t have a culture anymore,” said a Uighur resident of Urumqi who works at a state-owned resources company. He said he stopped visiting his local mosque after officials came to his house to confiscate his Quran. “No one goes any more. It’s too dangerous,” he said.
Workers in September walk by the perimeter fence of what authorities say is a vocational center, one of a number of camps holding detained Uighurs in Chjna’s Xinjiang region.
Workers in September walk by the perimeter fence of what authorities say is a vocational center, one of a number of camps holding detained Uighurs in Chjna’s Xinjiang region. Photo: thomas peter/Reuters
By squeezing some expressions of Uighur identity and turning others into cultural kitsch, the government is trying to weaken ethnic bonds, said Darren Byler, who studies Uighur migration at the University of Washington.
Since the post-Mao reform period began in the 1980s, Urumqi has seen bombings, protests and other acts of ethnic strife. Riots in 2009 left close to 200 dead and many more injured.
Since then, the party has grown steadily more forceful in trying to snuff off out a long-simmering Uighur separatist movement. Beijing says the separatists are motivated by radical Islam and blames them for the riots and a series of attacks in the years following.
Scholars and human-rights activists say much of the violence has been a response to heavy-handed policing, restrictions on religion and perceptions among Uighurs of being marginalized in what they see as their homeland.
“A lot of people have left,” said an employee at a once-popular live-music bar in one of Urumqi’s Uighur-dominated districts. With barely a dozen customers on a recent Saturday night, he declined to explain where the people had gone. “That’s political. I can’t say,” he said.
Moments later, three men, one equipped with a body camera, entered the bar and wrote down the identification card numbers of the Uighur customers. The employee said the men had been sent by local officials, and that such inspections were routine.
Photos from Urumqi's past show structures that, for the most part, no longer exist. Counterclockwise from upper right: Urumqi's old southern gate in 1910; Southern Urumqi in 1920; a commercial street in the south of the city in 1981; a tailor's shop in the city's Uighur-dominated Tianshan District in 1987.
Urumqi served as a garrison town for much of its roughly 250-year history, and its residents are mostly members of China’s Han majority, with Uighurs over the past decade accounting for around 13% of the city’s people.
But in a single year, 2017, Urumqi’s official population fell by 15%—to 2.2 million from 2.6 million the year before, the first drop in more than three decades.
Cleared OutDetentions of Uighurs that began in 2017lowered the population of Urumqi for the firsttime in decades.Registered residentsSource: Urumqi Statistical Yearbook
1980’902000’100500,0001,000,0001,500,0002,000,0002,500,0003,000,000
That was the year, in May 2017, that city police began rounding up local Uighurs and taking them to detention camps, residents said. Around the same time, they said, authorities in Urumqi forced Uighur migrants from other parts of Xinjiang to return to their hometowns. The Urumqi government has yet to release a new population breakdown by ethnicity.
As Uighurs were forced out of the city, government money flowed in. Beijing wants Urumqi to serve as a hub for the Belt and Road Initiative, Mr. Xi’s plan to build infrastructure across Eurasia and elsewhere in an updating of Silk Road trade routes. Last year, the city approved a $6 billion airport expansion and broke ground on $4 billion in construction projects in the city’s suburbs, including a Belt and Road industrial park.
Total investment in infrastructure, factories and other fixed assets topped 202 billion yuan ($30 billion) in 2017, up 25% over the previous year, and grew a further 9% in the first 10 months of 2018, according to official data.
The Urumqi government also earmarked 70 billion yuan ($10 billion) last year to demolish and rebuild the city’s shantytowns, which housed large numbers of Uighur migrants from southern Xinjiang. Authorities see young migrant men, the same group that baked the city’s nang, as instigators of violence and ripe targets for radicalization.
One settlement reduced to rubble is Heijiashan, once a low-rise jumble of makeshift houses built around a market and two mosques. Before being flattened over the course of 2017 and 2018, it was a center of Uighur migrant life in the city, said the University of Washington’s Mr. Byler.
“On Fridays, 5,000 to 10,000 people would come for the prayer,” Mr. Byler said.
On a recent visit, the mosques still stood in the shadows of rising apartment towers, but appeared abandoned. While attempting to film them, Journal reporters were detained and taken to a nearby police station.
Summoned by police, a district propaganda official said the government had taken care not to raze the mosques. “That shows the government’s respect for Islam,” said the official, a Mr. Xing.
The city had more than 400 mosques as late as 2015, according to state media. Several have been closed down or repurposed in recent years, while those still in service are surrounded by razor wire and surveillance cameras, with only a trickle of elderly worshipers.
Chinese authorities have lately started to release some detainees and put them under house arrest, according to Gene Bunin, a Russian-American who lived in Urumqi and who helps maintain a database of members of minority groups who have gone missing in Xinjiang. Mr. Bunin said he began receiving reports of the releases from detainees’ friends and relatives in December, following a wave of criticism of the camps in international media and at the U.N.
The Communist Party’s aim isn’t to eradicate Uighurs, according to Adrian Zenz, an expert in Chinese ethnic policy. Instead, he says, the party wants to strip the influence of Islam from Uighur culture to present the semblance of cultural diversity without the substance.
“It was supposed to be automatic. With material progress, the masses should be rescued from the opium of religion,” Mr. Zenz said. “The current regime is trying to lend history a hand.”
Authorities in Xinjiang are also looking to promote tourism, which would bring more investment and help eradicate the poverty they say nurtures radicalism.
North of downtown Urumqi, tourists can pose for pictures under a towering sculpture of a nang and purchase more than 150 varieties of the staple from industrial kitchens at a new 2.2 million square-foot Nang Culture Industry Park.
“Staff wear white, and their squeaky clean image bumps up the ‘attractiveness index’ not a small amount,” a local Communist Party-controlled newspaper said in a story on the park in January.
The tourism effort can also be seen in the transformation of the former Uighur commercial center, Erdaoqiao. The neighborhood was the site of the worst violence during the 2009 riots. In November 2017, when the Journal visited to document the reach of Beijing’s surveillance state, Erdaoqiao hummed with activity and tension.
A year later, it resembled a theme park.
A pair of pedestrian promenades guarded by large security gates have replaced streets previously dense with cars, pedestrians and police outposts. Around a large central bazaar, the sounds of commerce conducted in Uighur have given way to a loudspeaker broadcast offering cheerful greetings in Mandarin and English.
“Hello, dear tourists!” says the recorded voice, inviting visitors to enjoy “the magnificent reappearance of the commercial hub of the Silk Road.”
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The Islamic World’s China Blind Spot
Many Muslim states are afraid to criticize Beijing over its repression of Uighurs
By Charlotte Allen
March 28, 2019 7:21 p.m. ET
Muslim worshippers in China's Xinjiang region, June 23, 2017.
Muslim worshippers in China's Xinjiang region, June 23, 2017. Photo: johannes eisele/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
After a shooting rampage left dozens of Muslim worshipers dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, the governments of Muslim-majority countries condemned the attack. Some cited Islamophobia as a cause of the violence. This is understandable, but most of the Islamic world remains silent about the world’s worst instance of official Islamophobia.
About 15 years ago China began a program of protracted cultural genocide against the nearly 11 million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. Government-run concentration camps reportedly hold more than one million Uighurs. Former detainees report that the government desecrates Qurans and forces prisoners to eat pork and renounce Islam. Others have been tortured and starved. Beijing first denied the existence of the camps but now euphemistically calls them “vocational education centers.”
The oppression doesn’t stop at the camps’ gates. The government has destroyed mosques throughout Xinjiang and prohibited veils for women, long beards for men and halal signs at restaurants. Inhabitants are subject to a massive and sophisticated surveillance system, including facial-recognition cameras and mandatory biometric testing. The international press has limited access to the region, though this paper has reported that in the provincial capital, Urumqi, the government is razing entire Muslim neighborhoods to make way for a skyscraper development.
Why this scale of violent repression? Xinjiang has never truly been part of China. It did not fall under Chinese rule until the mid-18th century, when the Qing dynasty conquered large portions of it after a century of warfare. Its Turkic residents don’t have much in common ethically, religiously or culturally with the rest of China. Even other Muslim groups don’t feel a strong solidarity with Uighurs: The country’s 10.5 million Hui Muslims are ethnically Sinitic and speak Chinese. They are dispersed throughout the country and pose little political threat.
In recent decades, Beijing has flooded Xinjiang with the country’s majority Han Chinese. In 1949 they comprised only 6% of Xinjiang’s population; now they’re around 40%. The government claims that its goal is merely “assimilation” and the modernization of a backward culture. But as U.S. Naval Academy professor Miles Maochun Yu notes, Beijing also has imported a huge Communist Party apparatus into Xinjiang as well as an increased military and police presence.
Beijing argues the crackdown is necessary to stop Uighur terrorists. Several extremist-separatist groups operate in Xinjiang, and some may have ties with international Islamist organizations. They have been responsible for numerous deadly incidents in China over the past two decades.
Beijing’s transformation of Xinjiang into a large-scale Muslim prison camp is reminiscent—except on a more concentrated scale—of its increasing suppression of Christianity in recent years. Christians have witnessed crosses toppled from churches, arrests of pastors and worshipers, and successful pressure on the Vatican to force Chinese Catholics into a state-supported “official” Catholic Church. Christian groups and governments throughout the world rightly condemn these practices.
Yet leaders of Muslim-majority nations remain mostly silent about the Uighurs’ plight. Governments that quickly criticize Israel over any issue involving Muslim Palestinians have been silent in the face of the industrial-scale oppression of Muslims. Some Islamic countries—such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh—have gone so far as to praise Beijing’s supposed antiterrorism measures while claiming ignorance of the situation in Xinjiang.
The lone exception has been Turkey. Ten years ago Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now president) described China’s treatment of the Uighurs as “genocide.” But even Ankara’s voice has been muted of late: A Turkish appeal to Beijing on Feb. 19 to close the internment camps came not from Mr. Erdogan but a Foreign Ministry spokesman.
The explanation for the Islamic world’s attitude lies partly in China’s heightened military presence in parts of the Middle East and surrounding waters. More significant is Beijing’s large-scale investment through its Belt and Road Initiative. Announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, the program aims to link the Eurasian landmass, the Middle East and North Africa through Chinese-financed public-works projects. China offers unsustainable loans to gain political and economic leverage over its partners.
It’s all well and good for Muslim-majority countries and their representatives to denounce Islamophobia in the West. But it is troubling that large-scale Islamophobia, and the systematic violence against Muslims that follows, can be eased out of the public conversation simply by the oldest of lures—money.
Ms. Allen is author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus” (Free Press, 1998).
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China’s Brutality Can’t Destroy Uighur Culture
The Turkic people has an ancient language and traditions. Even Mao didn’t expect to erase it.
By S. Frederick Starr
July 26, 2019 5:16 pm ET
A police vehicle patrols in Kashgar, China, June 25, 2017. Photo: johannes eisele/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Daily headlines tell the story of China’s mass internment of Uighurs in its Xinjiang province, along with the closing and destruction of Uighur mosques and the demolition of their neighborhoods. But the press largely ignores other aspects of their identity, notably their significant cultural and intellectual achievements. These details matter, because Uighurs’ resilient culture may ultimately frustrate China’s efforts to stamp them out.
Uighurs are one of the oldest Turkic peoples and were the first to become urbanized. When the ancestors of modern Turks were still nomadic, Uighurs were settling into sophisticated cities. One of their branches, known today as the Karakhanids, had a capital at Kashgar, near China’s modern border with Kyrgyzstan. When Karakhanids conquered the great Silk Road city of Samarkand, they established a major hospital and endowed not only the doctors’ salaries but the cost of heating, lighting and food. That was 1,000 years ago, before the Normans conquered England.
Uighurs were active experimenters in religion. Besides their traditional animism, they embraced Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and finally Islam. They were also among the first Turkic peoples to develop a written language. And with writing came literature and science.
Yusuf of Balasagun (c. 1020-70) was chancellor of the Karakhanid state. His “Wisdom of Royal Glory” celebrates the active and civic life. Rejecting mystic Sufism, Yusuf embraced the here and now, proclaiming that “the next world is won through this world.” The widely read text helped popularize a literary version of the Turkic language, the equivalent of the works of Chaucer in English or Dante in Italian. His rhymed couplets bemoaning the disenchantments that come with the passage of time reach across the centuries.
A contemporary of Yusuf was Mahmud of Kashgar, a pioneer linguist, ethnographer and geographer. Mahmud spent much of his career in Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. He knew that the Arab Caliph was totally dependent on Turkic soldiers and civil servants, but saw how the Arab rulers scorned and segregated them as second-class citizens. Mahmud’s mission was to promote Turkic peoples and to encourage Arabic and Persian speakers to learn Turkic languages.
Both Yusuf and Mahmud have been considered saints in Uighur culture, and they remain part of the public consciousness. The Chinese government doesn’t dare touch their grand mausoleums near Kashgar, so instead it seeks to strip the two Uighur heroes of their religion and ethnicity, regarding their monuments as undifferentiated landmarks in a Chinese world.
Meanwhile, Kashgar itself, which was 99% Turkic when Mao Zedong conquered it in 1949, is rapidly being transformed into a Han Chinese city. The government has bulldozed much of the old city and entire districts of traditional Uighur homes, replacing them with generic Chinese high rises. In Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the Han are now an overwhelming majority, and Kashgar is fast following suit.
Beijing hopes its ruthless “Strike Hard” campaign will stamp out the Uighurs as a distinct group. But sheer numbers will make that effort near impossible. Official data put the Turkic population of Xinjiang at 8.6 million, but it is likely well over 10 million. To exterminate them would require a double Holocaust.
Beijing’s alternative to genocide is to destroy the language and culture, but a culture’s identity cannot be so easily destroyed. Memories of Yusuf, Mahmud, scores of other poets and saints, the language, folklore, cuisine and way of life are simply too deeply rooted. The Uighurs also have developed coping mechanisms. While the government demands that boys be sent to Chinese schools, girls are continuing the study of their native language. Efforts to suppress the Uighurs’ culture will further radicalize them and drive their lives deeper underground.
The Uighur tragedy now holds the world’s attention. Beijing has managed to bribe Saudi Arabia, Turkey and several other Muslim countries into silence, but the gag order cannot be sustained for long. Meanwhile, multiple countries near and far now host large, well-educated and active communities of Uighur expatriates. They report on developments in Xinjiang that might otherwise pass unnoticed and provide Uighurs at home a channel to communicate with the world. They also translate books and articles into Uighur, which helps their co-nationals in Xinjiang overcome their isolation.
Even Mao recognized the distinctness and resilience of the Uighur people. Faced with the vast territory of Xinjiang that was overwhelmingly Turkic and Muslim, he named it the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. He thus acknowledged the Uighurs’ identity and proposed to grant them a degree of self-government.
Three-quarters of a century later, the only workable solution is still for Beijing to give Uighurs and the other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang more political and cultural autonomy. If China’s other provinces demand the same treatment, President Xi Jinping can remind them that he is simply following Mao’s lead on the issue and not advancing a new model for Chinese governance as a whole. It might seem unlikely that Beijing would back down in such a way. But its alternative is to continue a costly conflict that brings shame at home and abroad and is unlikely ever to subdue the proud and ancient Uighur people.
Mr. Starr is editor of “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland” and author of “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age,” which is being translated into Uighur.
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https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/chilling-video-shows-chinese-police-transferring-hundreds-of-blindfolded-shackled-prisoners/news-story/67a3f1742b261c6dc78334ff16b6d775?fbclid=IwAR2xtcw9wGD8IAyo8iMv1xcqK-IHkDdft3BpcdKpJtbCTYBhv4cwxXbkIiY#.fdo1q
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https://www.businessinsider.com/china-uighur-monitor-home-shared-bed-report-2019-11?fbclid=IwAR1n1aGglZ15KFi6yUcM5kZTC-aXpvH3tsXkw3gtuKLJOZkCsAR_hbC1QGQ
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https://www.businessinsider.com/china-uighur-monitor-home-shared-bed-report-2019-11?fbclid=IwAR1n1aGglZ15KFi6yUcM5kZTC-aXpvH3tsXkw3gtuKLJOZkCsAR_hbC1QGQ
China plays to win. This is also the plan for Australia and New Zealand.
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Beijing’s Secrets of Xinjiang
Leaked documents reveal repression—and embarrassment.
By The Editorial Board
Nov. 18, 2019 7:14 pm ET
Schoolchildren walk below surveillance cameras in Akto, south of Kashgar, in China's western Xinjiang region, June 4. PHOTO: GREG BAKER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
An extraordinary leak from within China’s Communist Party government sheds new light on President Xi Jinping’s campaign of repression against Muslim Uighurs in the western Xinjiang region. The scale of the crackdown laid bare, on top of what the world already had pieced together about Beijing’s anti-Muslim cultural cleansing, demands a response. The leaks offer clues to what such a response might be.
The existence of camps in which the government is confining more than a million Uighurs has been known for some time, and foreign reporters have managed to get close enough to the walls and fences to photograph them. Outside analysts also have pieced together high-tech elements of the surveillance state Beijing has developed to control Xinjiang, such as facial-recognition technology.
Now the 403 pages of documents reported in The New York Times Saturday offer the first glimpse from the inside of how the Party has justified this repression to itself, and the sort of planning that goes into 21st-century political and thought control. The cache includes internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other Party leaders explaining their persecution of a minority ethnic group, as well as how-to manuals for local officials on the ground.
A surprise is the extent to which Mr. Xi appeals to Western examples to excuse himself. The papers show he seized on a string of terror attacks committed by Uighur extremists in 2014 as a pretext for what became a wide-reaching crackdown, and he claimed to be mimicking some American counterterror policies.
The papers also show how 21st-century totalitarians try to get away with it. Conflate Uighur identity with Islamist extremism, tag both as a “virus,” and then label Uighur cultural traditions such as not smoking as “symptoms.” Speaking of diseases, make sure real ones don’t spread in camps with so many inmates. If Party officials dissent—and at least 12,000 Party members were investigated for supposedly doing so—arrest them or subject them to humiliating internal discipline.
Another document offered local officials a Q&A on dealing with elite Uighur students who returned home from universities to discover their families were in prison camps: Intercept the students, tell them their families aren’t criminals but that the student’s own behavior will determine how long his parents or siblings languish in a camp, and tell students they should be grateful the Party is ideologically reeducating their relatives.
Most striking is how embarrassed Beijing appears by all this. Mr. Xi in one 2014 speech urged cadres to ignore “hostile forces” who might complain about persecution of the Uighurs. Yet this exhortation not to fear foreign criticism was delivered in secret—because Beijing would rather no one knows what it’s doing in Xinjiang.
A prime objective of the student-handling program is to discourage them from spreading news of their families’ incarceration via social media. The Party was sufficiently embarrassed about its crackdown that when local officials were punished for not cracking down enough, neither the Chinese public nor foreigners were told that was the reason someone was removed from office or imprisoned.
Mr. Xi has tried to consolidate his power and build a cult of personality, and his repression of the Uighurs fits that pattern. But the leaked documents suggest there is internal dissent in Beijing’s corridors of power that could grow and challenge Mr. Xi if his Uighur repression begins to carry international costs. The same applies to a crackdown in Hong Kong.
So far, however, the West has been largely silent, and Muslim countries are worse. A good start would be to put Xinjiang and Hong Kong on the public agenda of all world forums involving Chinese leaders. China will try to intimidate into silence countries that depend on its money and trade, but that’s no excuse for Western leaders, the World Bank or United Nations. Muslim leaders should also be called out for their silence.
In October the U.S. finally imposed sanctions on Chinese individuals and groups involved in the eradication campaign against Uighur culture, but more can be done. Chinese leaders care about world opinion, and they need to hear that the world will not ignore their abuses against the Uighurs.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/pompeo-says-documents-confirm-china-committing-very-significant-xinjiang-abuses_3157370.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=034e79c287-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_27_02_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-034e79c287-239065853
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/chinese-oppression-uyghurs-enabled-by-free-trade-wests-shame/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202019-11-30&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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The April 7 episode of the PBS Frontline series is titled “China Undercover.” As of this moment, the whole thing is available online (below). Promo: “A special undercover report from China’s secretive Xinjiang region. FRONTLINE investigates the Communist regime’s mass imprisonment of Muslims, and its use and testing of sophisticated surveillance technology against the Uyghur community.”
Review: Chilling. Hat tip: Powerlineblog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=wM1DjkPWtj0&feature=emb_logo
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Please post in the "China" thread as well.
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August 3, 2021
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What We're Reading: A History of Uyghur Resistance
Weekly reviews of what's on our bookshelves.
By: Valentina Jovanovski
The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land
By Gardner Bovingdon
In “The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land,” author and professor of Central Eurasian studies Gardner Bovingdon explores the history of Uyghur resistance in northwest China. Though the book was published over a decade ago, it provides fresh insight and thorough background on an issue that has recently made headlines and garnered the attention of policymakers and activists across the West.
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority group in Xinjiang province, officially called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The area was first incorporated into present-day China in the mid-18th century but remained isolated from the rest of the country – in part due to the region’s physical distance from China’s core and in part due to the Uyghurs’ linguistic and cultural distinctiveness from the Han, the majority ethnic group in China.
Bovingdon offers a plethora of examples of Uyghur resistance throughout the book – too many to cover here. But suffice it to say that many involve objections to Beijing’s claims about the Uyghurs’ historical links to the Chinese nation. Beijing has, for example, long claimed that Xinjiang has been part of the Chinese nation “since ancient times,” despite the fact that it joined what is today China less than three centuries ago. Chinese officials also claim that most Uyghurs oppose separatist movements or acts of protest against the Chinese state.
It’s not hard to see why the Chinese are so adamant about asserting these historical ties – real or not. According to Bovingdon, the Hans, who comprise more than 90 percent of the population of China, have overwhelmingly bought into the notion of Chinese nationalism. The strongest resistance to this concept comes from Xinjiang and Tibet. Even the name “Xinjiang” is an area of debate; many Uyghurs prefer Eastern Turkestan or Uyghurstan, though Beijing has banned the use of both. At a conference in Xinjiang in 1951, a group of Uyghur leaders proposed the establishment of a “republic of Uyghurstan,” an idea that reemerged on several occasions thereafter but was shot down, harshly, by Chinese officials every time.
Beijing’s efforts to stamp out any hints of resistance have evolved in recent years into the establishment of internment camps that, by many accounts, involve indoctrination, organized physical and sexual abuse, and torture of the Uyghur population. Bovingdon’s book, which includes many anecdotes from his personal interactions with people from the community, provides critical context to the issue.
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https://rumble.com/vpr8pb-nba-star-calls-out-cowardly-celebrities-for-self-serving-silence-on-china.html?mref=22lbp&mc=56yab&fbclid=IwAR2dvx8vglfBw8ieVaxw4TNwXGg3WUEIeHCJprE4BS44uL7dq8ldLHjvKhc
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/china-vs-islam/