China Steps Up Suppression of Uyghur
The Weekly Shincho, 30 August 2011
More than two years have passed since the 2009 riots in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Chinese authorities claim the incident has resulted in the deaths of 197 Uyghurs, while the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) comprising Uyghur exile groups maintains between 1,000 and 3,000 Uyghurs have either been killed or are still missing. Since the incident, the Chinese government has set up an elaborate surveillance system, with as many as 60,000 cameras installed across the capital city in an attempt to monitor practically every move its residents make.
The Chinese government is determined to forge ahead with plans to weaken the ethnic and cultural identity of the Uyghurs as it seeks to deprive them of their resolve to defy the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Specific steps were spelled out in Central Document #7, adopted at a special session of the standing committee of the CPC’s Central Politbureau on March 19, 1996. Denying the Uyghurs their indigenous language first and foremost was the main pillar of the program. In 2000, classes held until then in the Uyghur language on the university level were switched to Chinese. Then in 2004, high school classes conducted in the indigenous language were altogether banned throughout Uyghur, followed by a similar step taken at the junior high level a year later. From 2006 on, authorities have intensified Chinese language education aimed at school children, calling it “bilingual education.”
Another pillar of the Chinese program designed to deprive the Uyghurs of their identity concerns religion. Uyghur minors under age 18, university students, and government employees have been banned from entering mosques. According to Iran Radio, more than 100 Uyghur men and women were arrested during Ramadan last month for entering mosques or wearing scarves. Explains an Uyghur resident in Japan versed in the Uyghur situation:
“Previously, men and women born and raised as full-blooded Uyghurs taught school children the history and culture of their native land. Although ethnic education is banned by the CPC, these teachers secretly told children they were not Chinese but Uyghurs. With surveillance cameras having been installed in classrooms now, however, they are no longer able to do so.”
As if depriving the Uyghurs of their indigenous language and religion is not enough, the CPC is further cracking the economic whip at will, setting a sweet trap by appropriating more than US$20 billion as social capital for the construction of roads, schools, and hospitals, while also offering huge rewards to those who inform on anti-Chinese activists.
Uyghur Society Divided
However, such capital infusion hasn’t really enriched Uyghur society. Rather, it has caused confrontation and suspicion to spread among the Uyghurs, along with a widening gap between the rich and the poor. If Uyghurs agree to speak Chinese and stay obedient to the Chinese, they may expect to win favors from them. Meanwhile, if they decide to cling to their ethnic identity and act accordingly, they generally find it difficult to land jobs, and, should they be fortunate enough to find employment, they will be at the mercy of their Chinese employers, who can discharge them at any time. Trapped in the depths of poverty, the result of these policies is increasing division among the Uyghurs themselves rather than integration with the Han Chinese.
It is only natural that resistance movements are waged endlessly by the Uyghurs, who are stressed and desperate under constant surveillance. An incident developed in Hotan in the southern section of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on July 18 this year, followed by another in Kashgar July 30-31.
Chinese authorities regard Hotan, where Uyghurs account for more than 90 percent of the population, as one of the strongholds of the ethnic secession movements in China. Chinese media, including the national Xinhua News Agency and the Global Times (an international daily under the official CPC People’s Daily) reported the Hotan incident constituted a “systematic criminal act committed by a fully armed terrorist group” and that “a criminal group of Uyghurs attacked a police station after using knives to kill two (Chinese).”
But the WUC came up with an entirely different picture, explaining: “Police fired at a group of some 100 Uyghurs at a bazaar near a police station after they demanded that the whereabouts of residents who were being detained be disclosed.”
Noting that the absence of independent media in Hotan makes it “difficult to grasp exactly what happened” in connection with the July 18 incident, Ms Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur leader now in exile in the U.S. who heads the WUC, commented:“If Uyghurs did indeed attack the police station, as the Chinese side claims, their actions reflect the desperation of the Uyghur people suffering from years of violent oppression by the Chinese government…If that was the case, it is critically important to ask why Uyghurs ever attempted to resist Chinese security police, against whom they really had no chance at all.
“It is obviously because they had nothing to lose, having long lost their rights, jobs, what little wealth they had, and had no hope for the future. The Chinese government should take the blame for what happened.”
The claims of the Chinese authorities and the WUC also differ widely concerning the incident in Kashgar, where the Uyghurs account for some 80 percent of the population. Against such a backdrop, the Chinese government is clearly tightening controls. On August 4, Chinese Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu announced that the government “will impose new tough security measures to crack down on and apply pressure to the ringleaders of the riots.” Then on August 12, Zhang Chunxian, the CPC’s Xinjiang Committee Secretary, noted that terrorists continued to be active in the region, and announced that men from the Snow Leopard Command Unit of the People’s Armed Police would be posted in both Hotan and Kashgar to launch offensives against the terrorists.”
Declaring “terrorism, secessionism, and religious extremism” as “the three evil forces” of the Uyghurs, the Chinese government in the name of security employs savage violence against Uyghurs who are unarmed and moderate Muslims. China is dead set on depriving the Uyghurs of their ethnic identity no matter how, demanding their absolute submission and “Chinization.” One Uyghur who has been forced to undergo a dramatic life change as a result of Chinese oppression is a Uyghur woman named Rabiye, who was once married to Tohti Tunyaz, an ethnic Uhghur researcher who studied for a doctoral degree at Tokyo University in the late 1990s.
Sudden Arrest
In February 1998, Tohti was abruptly arrested while temporarily back home in Uyghur to work on a doctoral dissertation at the central archives in Urumqi.
“It wasn’t immediately clear to me what had happened to my husband,” recalls Rabiye. “So, I made four trips to China, managed to finally locate where he was detained in the process, and hired a lawyer to help him clear himself of whatever charges there were against him.”
Wherever she went across China in a lone and desperate search for her detained husband, she was constantly subjected to heartless treatment too cruel to describe, not only by Han officials but by Uyghur officials as well. In point of fact, what she witnessed in China then was an ugliness beyond mere tragedy of ethnic division – the harsh reality of stronger Uyghurs mercilessly oppressing their weaker compatriots, such as Rebiye herself.
In the meantime, Tohti was unjustly sentenced to 11 years of penal servitude. Comments Rebiye:
“For reasons that completely baffled me, rumors had it that I had left him and got remarried in Japan without waiting for his return. But that was not true. I had waited for his return for a long time while raising our two children in Japan. But when we finally managed to talk on the phone after he had finally come out of jail, what he told me was just astounding. As a matter of fact, it was February 13, 2009 – exactly three days after his release. His first words over the phone were, ‘You may get remarried now.’ He told me, ‘You can send me a postcard and let me know you’re remarried.’”
Rebiye started crying. But in the back of her mind was the thought that it would be quite difficult for her husband to return to Japan anytime soon, even after serving out his sentence. At the same time, she knew it would be equally difficult for her to be permitted back into China, now that she had steadfastly criticized the Chinese government while continuing to plead her husband’s innocence to the international community. Weighing her husband’s words against the complicated situations they were both facing, and after much soul searching, Rebiye says she eventually decided to be remarried to a man she thought was trustworthy.
Meanwhile, Tohti is said to be living in his old Beijing apartment. Tokyo University is still waiting for him, having taken the unusual step of granting him an indefinite leave of absence. The teaching staff of Tokyo University has vowed to continue taking a serious interest in Tohti’s winning complete freedom from China’s insidious oppression so he may resume his studies in the Japanese capital.
(Translated from “Renaissance Japan” column no. 474 in the September 1, 2011 issue of The Weekly Shincho.)