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In Urumqi, intact traditional neighborhoods are becoming a rarity |
COVER STORY
Cover Story
Since Sept. 11, Bejing has been cracking down in Xinjiang. Decades of repression have already made native Uighurs strangers in their own land
Culture Wars
The Bob Dylan of Xinjiang
Photo Essay
Life Under the Crackdown
Timeline
The Uighurs in China
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One Nation—Divided
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Unlike Tibet—"the roof of the world"—Xinjiang is a crossroads, a geographical fact that has always defined it and now binds it between Central Asia and China. In the 9th century, Uighur tribes moved into its Silk Road oases, establishing khanates under the scorching sun. Chinese Emperors erected garrisons when their armies were strong. Ghengis Khan led his cavalry through on his way to Europe. The Uighurs' version of Islam was heavily Sufi, which taught that individuals could get in touch with Allah directly through meditative breathing and dervish-like ecstatic dance. Nights rang with music and the Uighurs' accommodating faith was never known for fundamentalism or strict interpretation of religious law.
In the mid 1940s, when China was rent by civil war, the Uighurs established their own country, East Turkestan, but the Communist Party's army overthrew it in 1949. Then came 40 years of grudging coexistence: as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the province did enjoy some benefits—more investment, preferential college admission, partial exemption from the one-child policy. The 1980s were a hopeful time as the government tolerated illegal madrasahs, which taught religious education. But all that started to unravel with the old Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when Uighurs watched their formerly oppressed cousins in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan break away from Moscow. In 1990 there were uprisings in several cities but the People's Liberation Army crushed the "splittist" rebellion in days. Then the struggle went underground. For the rest of that decade, groups plotted periodic hits, often organizing them from neighboring capitals such as Kazakhstan's Almaty or in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. They slit the throats of imams accused of being Beijing's running dogs, and shot a dozen or so Uighurs in government positions. On the day of Deng Xiaoping's funeral in 1997, separatists set off bombs on three buses in the provincial capital of Urumqi killing nine people. Ten days later they attacked the capital itself, setting off a pipe bomb in a busy Beijing shopping district, shattering windows and injuring passersby.
Chinese in Xinjiang were terrified. "I considered leaving," says Han Xiaoju, who had been living in the province for seven years. Beijing took the incidents very seriously and started up Operation Strike Hard. Police infiltrated mosques, rounded up suspected "splittists," holding them for long periods without trial, and executed 190 people over the next two years. By all accounts, the crackdown succeeded, breaking the separatist groups and teaching Uighurs to behave or else. Underground organizations that flourished a decade ago have been destroyed. Mosques are registered and monitored. The only known "separatist attack" launched since Sept. 11 took place Jan. 1 when an unemployed Uighur sneaked onstage during a New Year's Day song-and-dance revue for the province's top leaders and declaimed an independence-minded poem.
Foreign support for Uighurs has dried up. Until 1996, Uighur separatist units operated freely just across Xinjiang's northern border. But at a meeting in Shanghai that July, Beijing won promises from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (and later Uzbekistan) to crack down on these groups. The Shanghai Five agreement "succeeded exceedingly well," says Nicolas Becquelin of the Paris-based School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, who has researched its effects. He says roughly 200 Uighur activists, most of whom escaped from China in the 1990s, have moved from Central Asia to Turkey in the past few years, and their networks are in disarray.
Last year, the Communist Party was as close as it gets to publicly declaring victory. Its powerful Organization Department issued a nine-chapter report on China's potential flash points and dedicated two chapters to Xinjiang. In a departure from five years of antisplittist brimstone, it noted, "We have to take the endurance of the various ethnic groups into consideration." It then issued a novel prescription for change: the party should "respect the language as well as the customs and habits of different ethnic groups."
That liberal notion was overturned after Sept. 11, when hard-liners in the party worried that unrest in Afghanistan would inevitably spread to Xinjiang, prompting them to include the province in the international war on terror. In January, party leaders in Xinjiang issued a set of orders instructing officials to "put the antiseparatist struggle in the most important position." Under the new, harsher regime, Islamic clerics are forced to endure a "patriotic education" session. Uighur officials are barred from religious activities. The use of the Uighur language is now outlawed in universities and schools for Communist Party cadres. "Sept. 11 gives hard-liners the excuse for the crackdown they want," says June Teufel Dreyer, an expert on Xinjiang at the University of Miami.
Signs of the crackdown are everywhere at Urumqi's Xinjiang University, which is festooned with red banners bearing slogans such as students, teachers and workers, unite to battle the scourge of splittism. The school has no prayer hall because it bars students from practicing Islam. University officials forced 10 students secretly fasting during the holy month of Ramadan to march into the cafeteria and eat. Many Uighur teachers are embarrassing themselves in front of students because they barely speak Mandarin, now the required language of instruction. A Uighur mathematics student lists his indignities in a hushed voice, changing the topic quickly when others pass by.
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