Miami Herald, 8 August 2011
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

The evidence doesn’t add up to support a Chinese government claim that Uighur unrest in Xinjang is stirred or abetted by defectors to Pakistan or Afghanistan; rather the experts blame anger and hopelessness among the ethnic Muslims under Chinese rule.

BEIJING — Chinese Muslim militants have been to Taliban-controlled parts of neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan, but there is scant evidence supporting Chinese government claims that they returned home to carry out recent terrorist attacks.

Overseas analysts and Uighur activists call the Chinese accusations a smoke screen to obscure the anger and hopelessness among Muslim ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang region they say are driving the violence.

Violence in Xinjiang poses a challenge to China’s development plans in the resource-rich region, as well as Beijing’s contention that its policies toward ethnic minorities are successful. By blaming outside forces it avoids having to acknowledge shortcomings in those policies.

Authorities have pledged to increase pressure further in the far-western region, ordering a sweeping security clampdown and vowing “no mercy” toward anyone accused of violence or separatism.

“Those criminals who dare test the law with their persons and carry out violent terrorist acts, we will punish harshly, showing no mercy and never being soft,” Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu was quoted as telling participants at an anti-terrorism conference Thursday in the regional capital of Urumqi.

Such high-pressure tactics routinely backfire by increasing anger and hopelessness among Uighurs and pushing them closer to extremism, said Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the German-based World Uyghur Congress.

That Uighurs have fled across the border to Pakistan and Afghanistan is not disputed. Twenty-two were captured early in the U.S. invasion and sent to Guantánamo Bay, while 13 Uighurs were reportedly killed by a U.S. airstrike in northwestern Afghanistan last year. Pakistani intelligence officials and Taliban fighters have also confirmed the presence of Chinese Muslims in Taliban-controlled areas of Pakistan, saying they stand out for their lack of a common language with other militants and their relative ignorance of radical Islam.

There are thought to be 100 to 150 Uighur militants in Pakistan’s northwest, most of them in the North Waziristan tribal region, said Mohammed Amir Rana, a Pakistani expert on militancy. They are part of a mix of Pakistani extremists and hundreds from elsewhere in the world.

“One thing is clear, these Uighurs are mixed up with other militants. It will be very difficult to just target them, how can they be isolated?” Rana said.

Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), are culturally, linguistically and religiously distinct from China’s Han ethnic majority, and share many links with the native populations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia. Many deeply resent the Han Chinese majority as interlopers and see mass migration to the region as dooming them to minority status in their own homeland. A low-intensity separatist movement has existed for decades, but recent years appear to have ushered in an upsurge in violence.

“People will start to lose all hope and become more likely to make the wrong choices,” Raxit said.

Such desperation boils over every summer, most recently in southern Xinjiang, where Uighurs predominate.

At least three dozen people, including the alleged perpetrators, were killed in three attacks in recent weeks in the cities of Hotan and Kashgar.

Those came despite a massive security presence that was tightened following a major anti-Chinese riot in Urumqi two years ago in which at least 197 people were killed.

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