GREG GIRARD/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES FOR TIME
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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The idea of Xinjiang, or any other part of China, splitting away is heresy to Beijing, and presents at least one practical problem: the province is now so very Chinese. Migration of Han Chinese started in the 1950s when the army sent troops to occupy Xinjiang. The army then organized the soldiers and their families into a military company best known by its Chinese name, the Bing Tuan. Imported workers paved roads, raked the desert into cotton fields and built cities on the sand; their bosses created their own judicial system and ran labor-camp gulags. The Bing Tuan is more a colonizer than a company—"an army with no uniforms," read the lyrics to a startlingly honest company song. It still maintains a 100,000-strong militia; its 2.38 million employees make up 14% of Xinjiang's population.
The company's goal was to checkerboard Xinjiang with towns like Shihezi, a city two hours north of Urumqi, where workers wake in Bing Tuan apartments, ride Bing Tuan buses to Bing Tuan jobs and save their money in Bing Tuan banks. A visit today reveals how badly the system failed. Factories that never should have existed in the middle of a desert stand empty and idle. Construction sites are abandoned and choking coal dust leaves the snowbanks black and oozing.
Beijing's Western Development Plan will channel more than a billion dollars annually for the next five years to lace the province with highways, aqueducts and even a natural-gas pipeline running to Shanghai. That's what's bringing the new generation of immigrants from even poorer provinces. On a recent day in Urumqi, 80 workers from Sichuan province humped sacks of cement up four flights of steps in what will soon be a new bank. They work 14-hr. days, but they earn a windfall $120 a month. Here, as usual, there's not a single Uighur on the site. The first stop for many Sichuanese is Boss Wang's place—he, too, is from Sichuan—where they can get a bed for a buck and a dinner piled high with chili peppers. Boss Wang holds court with his new arrivals, all speaking in the nasal twang of Sichuan. "Uighurs are lazy," he announces, spitting casually on the floor of his own establishment. "They're usually not bad people, but they think it's easier to steal money than to work for it."
Uighurs don't speak so openly about Chinese, and no wonder: secret police patrol the markets and infiltrate mosques. When police come around to check IDs, "they always come in the middle of the night," says a Kashgar man in his adobe home. "They're looking for separatists."
Xinjiang police say there were 800 "separatist incidents" in the first eight months of last year but that's largely a justification for the continuing crackdown: most were crimes such as students scribbling 'Chinese go home' on classroom blackboards. (Even those minor cases fell more than 50% from the year before.) After Sept. 11, Beijing wanted evidence of al-Qaeda links, and the local police obliged. "They said if you want numbers, we'll give you numbers," and reported 2,000 separatist incidents, says a person briefed by senior police officials. In January, a state-run newspaper released a report detailing al-Qaeda's activities in Afghanistan and China called "East Turkestan, An Integral Part of Bin Laden's Terrorist Forces." According to the report, Hasan Mahsum, leader of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, met bin Laden in 1999 and 2001, received promises of "a fabulous sum of money" and "sent scores of terrorists into China." Yet the document doesn't attribute a single attack inside China to Mahsum's scores of terrorists. "Osama bin Laden represents extremist Islamic thinking and has nothing to do with Uighurs," insists Dilixiadi Rashiti of the Munich-based East Turkestan Information Center, who adds as proof that "our men often drink beer and women wear miniskirts." (An estimated 200 Uighurs did study in Afghan training camps after the Taliban came to power in 1996, though, and the Pentagon acknowledges capturing "several" Uighurs but won't reveal where it holds them or whether it will return them to China. The new Afghan government holds about 20 others and has promised Beijing to repatriate them.)
Ibrahim is a veteran of the Uighurs' brief, failed struggle against China. He joined the East Turkestan Liberation Party in 1989. "We thought if we captured and held some territory, we would receive support from outside—Pakistan or Afghanistan," he says. This was a serious miscalculation: in 1990, the P.L.A. crushed the 200 Uighurs fighting with weapons stolen from police stations. Ibrahim escaped to Kyrgyzstan and now lives in Europe. He tells Time he stayed in touch with cell-group leaders inside Xinjiang for as long as he could but lost contact five years ago. "I suppose everyone has been arrested," he says.
With Beijing intent on extending its crackdown, Xinjiang will grow only more divided. At a recent Uighur wedding party in Urumqi, the groom in his suit and the bride in her white dress were modern, wealthy and about as deeply embedded in the government's repression machine as young Uighurs can get. He teaches politics at the local military academy; she works for the Bureau of State Security—the secret police. Most of the 150 guests came from those two work units and had dedicated their careers to working within the Chinese government structure. Yet not a single guest was Chinese. "I guess they have their friends and we have ours," said the wife of a writer for the military newspaper. Beijing might exaggerate the extent of the separatism movement—but in Xinjiang, it's impossible to overstate the divide between Uighurs and Chinese that makes it the mainland's most troubled spot.
‹With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington
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