Alama Iqbal said Aik houn Muslim haram ki pasbani keh liyeh, Neel Keh Sahil ta khak Kashgar
Kashgar of course is in Eastern Turkestan in the land of the Uighurs in China. The Uighurs were taken over by the Peoples Liberation Army and then incorporated into the Peoples Republic of China.
Pakistan liberated 5000 Square kilometers of Kashmir from Bharat (aka India) and ceded the territory to China, so that Chinese could begin to consolidate their national unity and have the ability to link up to Tibet (which was headed towards Bharat). The 5000 square miles of land made the Pakistani-Chinese friendship higher than the Karakorams, deeper than the Arabian Sea, and sweeter than honey. Islamabad should constantly check if the Kashmirs of Aksai Chin are happy under Chinese rule. The Uighurs under Beijing are not happy. The mass migration of the Han into the land of the Uighurs has created unparalleled tension in Eastern Turkistan.
The Chinese press has reported the riots but focuses on things returning to normal.
Mosques opened Friday for prayers in most places in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, except for the capital Urumqi where some were shut for security reasons. The Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar City, China’s largest mosque, received about 3,000 prayers Friday afternoon, with Armed Police and about 20 police vehicles guarding the square. The main gate of the mosque was closed, while two side doors were open for the congregational prayers who entered at about 2:50 p.m. after going through security checks.
Some others prayed in the sun outside the mosque. The service ended at about 3:50 p.m. Customers swarmed into shops after the ritual. Foreign visitors were seen in the streets. Some mosques in Urumqi were closed Friday and Muslims were told to perform their weekly congregational prayer at home following Sunday’s deadly riot.English CRI
When the Americans moved their troops into Afghanistan, China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to isolate iteself from the IMU and the Taliban. My working with the Pakistani Islamic parties, the When Pakistan faced trouble in Swat, the Chinese made some statements about terrorism that that parallelled the rhetoric emanating from the New York Times and the Washington Post. There was a tinge of arrogance reflected in a few analysts in Beijing. That hubris was shattered when Tibet blew up. Today nothing remains of that thinking which allowed a couple of the Beijing thinktanks to get into lecture mode.
The Tibet riots were definately the workd of RAW and CIA hands in Lhasha and other places. The riots in Urumqi were serious enough to impress upon the Chinese president that cutting short the G-8 summit was the right thing to do. In typical Chinese fashion the rioting will become history. However Beijing needs to realize that now, there is a concerted effort by Washington and Delhi to cause problems for China.
Beijing – Chinese riot police arrested several Uighurs Friday after breaking up a small demonstration in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang Province and the scene of a riot Sunday that killed 156 people and injured more than 1,000.
Authorities arranged extra bus services out of Urumqi after China’s worst ethnic violence in decades, but demand outstripped supply Friday as thousands of people poured into bus and train stations to flee the violence-wracked city. Still, Chinese police this week succeeded in averting a major interethnic bloodbath after initially failing to control Sunday’s riot. Similarly, on the Internet, over the airwaves, and in the written media, Chinese propaganda officials utilized new and more sophisticated tactics to overcome early impressions that the authorities were to blame for the carnage and to paint a more nuanced picture.
“Officials are certainly studying the media-management techniques that are practiced elsewhere in the world,” says Rebecca Mackinnon, an expert on the Chinese media at Hong Kong University. “And they actually don’t work too badly.” A combination of censoring the Internet, providing Chinese readers with a wealth of reportage (however one-sided), and allowing foreign reporters to work on the ground represents a new Chinese model for handling the media, says Ms. Mackinnon.
“We’ve moved out of the realm of trying to control everything,” she says, “and into a more subtle realm of manipulation and spin.”CSM
It is now time for Beijing to listen to its friends and beware of its enemies. The religious parties in Pakistan have not jumped on the CIA-RAW bandwagon and are not overtly or publicly criticizing China. However it is a fact that when Beijing cracks down in Kashgar there are reverberations in Kyrgyztan, Kasakhstan and Pakistan. The impact of clamping down on Eastern Turkistan creates waves in all countries in the region. Pakistan has found Uighurs in FATA and also in Swat. When caught, they have been promptly deported to China. Beijing appreciates the cooperation that Pakistan has offered it. However this private appreciation needs to be translated into a structured forum like the SCO. Pakistani admission into the SCO is no longer a luxury. It is a mandated requirement. Pakistan has been very successful in eliminating the scourge of RAW within the Pakistan borders. China has to learn from this and not go down the slippery road of BRIC.
How Beijing changed tactics since 2008 Tibet unrest
Eighteen months ago, when unrest broke out among Tibetans, the government banned foreign reporters from a huge swath of Tibetan-inhabited western China. Denied the chance to offer firsthand accounts of events, most Western media relied heavily on exile Tibetan sources.
The result was an unmitigated international public relations disaster for Beijing, although at home few Chinese questioned the official version that the Dalai Lama had instigated the trouble that left 18 ethnic Han and Hui Chinese dead.
Last Monday, in contrast, after a demonstration by Uighur protesters had spun out of control, the government invited foreign journalists to visit Urumqi to report for themselves on what had happened. A press center was put at their disposal, and tours of the violence-stricken quarters of the city were provided.
The initial assumption among most Western observers was that most of the dead must have been Uighur demonstrators, cut down by police gunfire. Although the authorities have not given an ethnic breakdown of the victims, reporters interviewing eyewitnesses began to suspect that in fact the majority of the dead may well have been Han Chinese, killed by Uighur rioters.
“We are certainly seeing a more varied and nuanced set of reports out of Xinjiang than we saw about Tibet,” says Ms. Mackinnon. CSM
Beijing sees the activities of the Ms. Kadeer as secessionist and Anti-China. The Peoples Daily screams of dire consequences for the culprits and complained about the Western bias in media reporting.
“Kadeer’s credentials got the recognition of overseas East Turkestan forces, and her experience is also an advantage to be capitalized on by Western anti-Chinese forces,” said Ma Dazheng, director of the Xinjiang development research center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Pan Guang, an expert in international affairs and director of the Shanghai International Studies Center, said, “The East Turkestan terrorist forces portray Kadeer as a figure comparable to the Dalai Lama to promote her international influence.”
“Actually, they just want to follow the road of the Dalai Lama to put the so-called Xinjiang issue into the international spotlight,” he said. Peoples Daily
New Delhi’s RAW powered by the US and the UK analysts are going for the jugular attaching China in its underbelly and coming up with strategies to rip apart China. They attempted to do it in the 40s, setting up Manchuria, Hong Kong, and Tibet as distractions in breaking up the Middle Kingdom into small pieces. Nehru wanted Tibet to be independent and part of Bharat. If Pakistan had not helped China in Aksai Chin, Tibet would have been lost. Today the UK analysts are predicting doomsday for China.
“If Beijing gave them proper autonomy, stopped Han migration, and gave the people the language and religious rights that are guaranteed anyway in the Chinese constitution, they might well find that Uighurs would quite happily remain part of China,” said Joanne Smith Finley at Britain’s Newcastle University.
But for Beijing, genuine autonomy is not really an option because of the precedent it could set for other parts of the country to break away from central control. Reuters
China is a diverse and large land with multiple languages and a huge number of races, ethnicities and religions. This diversity has to be celeberated properly. China should join the IOC and sponsor the Eastern Turskistanis to world evetns. Islam hasnnot be hidden away in Cina or discarded in Ughuristan.
Sun Yat-Sen, leader of the republican movement that toppled the last imperial dynasty of China (the Qing) in 1911, promoted the idea that there were “Five Peoples of China”—the majority Han being one and the others being the Manchus, Mongolian, Tibetan and Hui (a term that included all Muslims in China, now divided into Uighurs, Kazakhs, Hui etc.). Sun was a Cantonese, educated in Hawaii, who wanted both to unite the Han and to mobilize them and all other non-Manchu groups in China (including Mongols, Tibetans and Muslims) into a modern, multi-ethnic nationalist movement against the Manchu Qing state and foreign imperialists. This expanded policy with the recognition of a total 55 official minority nationalities, also helped the Communists’ long-term goal of forging a united Chinese nation.
Cultural diversity within the Han has not been officially recognized because of a deep (and well-founded) fear of the country breaking up into feuding kingdoms, as happened in the 1910s and 1920s. China has historically been divided along north-south lines, into Five Kingdoms, Warring States or local satrapies, as often as it has been united. Indeed, China as it currently exists, including large pieces of territory occupied by Mongols, Turkic peoples, Tibetans, etc., is three times as large as it was under the last Chinese dynasty, the Ming, which fell in 1644. A strong, centralizing government (whether of foreign or internal origin) has often tried to impose ritualistic, linguistic, economic and political uniformity throughout its borders.
The supposedly homogenous Han speak eight mutually unintelligible languages (Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Xiang, Hakka, Gan, Southern Min and Northern Min). Even these subgroups show marked linguistic and cultural diversity. In the Yue language family, for example, Cantonese speakers are barely intelligible to Taishan speakers, and the Southern Min dialects of Quanzhou, Changzhou and Xiamen are equally difficult to communicate across. The Chinese linguist Y. R. Chao has shown that the mutual unintelligibility of, say, Cantonese and Mandarin is as great as that of Dutch and English or French and Italian. Mandarin was imposed as the national language early in the 20th century and has become the lingua franca, but, like Swahili in Africa, it must often be learned in school and is rarely used in everyday life across much of China. WSJ.
Dealing the ethnic diversity of 1 Billion people is a difficult task. Beijing has learned a lot from the tibet riots
Blocking search terms on the Web
Chinese news consumers, meanwhile, both on the Web and at the newsstands, were treated to a steady and unvaried drumbeat of official reports blaming the violence on Uighur exiles, with nary a mention of the economic and social grievances that have been fueling Uighur discontent for years.
Internet portals were ordered by the propaganda department to fix their search engines so that searches for phrases such as “Xinjiang Uighur dogs riot” or “Politburo silence” or “Beijing, assimilation policy” would yield no results, according to a “blacklist” leaked by a search engine technician.
Bulletin boards – often the site of lively debate on the Chinese Internet but which are required to censor their content – either deleted all posts related to Xinjiang or allowed through only those ones conforming to government policy. The only video visible was from official TV stations. Twitter and YouTube were blocked.
The approach appeared to mark a further step in Beijing’s efforts to manage the news more subtly, taking a page from the Western public relations playbook and getting ahead of the news so as to spin it, rather than impose a total blackout.
Internet censorship ensured that there was virtually no independent commentary or reporting of the news, but blanket coverage in official sources (all that Internet portals were allowed to carry), such as the state news agency Xinhua and the state-run China Central Television, gave average Chinese citizen enough news to satisfy them. By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the July 10, 2009 edition
The Muslim response has been muted. However privately most Muslim countries have made their displeasure known to Beijing.
But though individual nations have remained largely silent, or echoed China’s position of “non-interference”, the Saudi-based Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a league of 57 Muslim nations, condemned excessive use of force against Uighur civilians and urged China to investigate. (Reuters)
The Wall Street Journal has been publishing incendiary articles on the Uighurs. One of the writers is Ms. Kabeer. Last week she wrote.
When the Chinese government looks back on its handling of the unrest in Urumqi and East Turkestan this week, it will most likely tell the world that it acted in the interests of maintaining stability. It will most likely forget to explain why thousands of Uighurs risked everything to speak out against injustice, or why hundreds of Uighurs are now dead for exercising their right to protest.
On Sunday, students organized a protest in the Döng Körük (Erdaoqiao) area of Urumqi. They wished to express discontent with the Chinese authorities’ inaction on the mob killing and beating of Uighurs at a toy factory in Shaoguan in China’s southern Guangdong province and to express sympathy with the families of those killed and injured.WSJ. Rebiya Kabeer heads up the Anti-Chinese groups in Washington
The rhetoric emanating from New York has not gone unnoticed in Beijing.
Why one Chinese editor disavowed the Wall Street Journal
Foreign reporters were allowed to travel around Urumqi and interview local people, which gave rise to a number of stories sympathetic to Han victims of Sunday’s riot, and those articles that raised questions about the official account came in for heavy criticism in the official Chinese press.
“As of today I will no longer be a reader of the Wall Street Journal,” senior editor Ding Gang wrote Friday in the “Global Times,” a tabloid belonging to the ruling Communist party.
“In reporting the Xinjiang riot, the paper stood publicly at the side of the terrorists and became their representative,” he charged. Urumqi unrest: China’s savvier media strategy Taking a cue from Western PR tactics, Beijing moved away from trying to block coverage altogether – and was benefited by doing so. By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the July 10, 2009 edition
A new development that will impact China is Turkey’s support for the Uighurs. Of course this could be American inspired.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that Turkey would grant a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur political activist, if she wanted to travel to Turkey. On Wednesday, Ms. Kadeer said in an interview that her visa applications to visit Turkey in 2006 and 2007 had been denied, an assertion that Mr. Erdogan did not address on Thursday. Turkey has been active in supporting Uighurs in western China, where deadly protests broke out this week between Uighurs, who are Muslim, and Han Chinese. About 300,000 Uighurs live in Turkey, Foreign Ministry figures show. NYT
