China is hopelessly caught in a web of lies it spun about so-called Uighur Muslim “terrorists” and is trying to extricate itself by telling a disbelieving world community that they have links with al-Qaeda and are out to destroy the “peace and tranquility” in its Xinjiang province. The latest Chinese attempt to rake up the terror link between Uighur Muslims and al-Qaeda came a few days ago when a court in Turkey refused China’s request to extradite a “prominent terrorist from the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM)”, Abudukadir Yapuquan.
The court also removed all restrictions on the alleged terrorist’s movements inside the country. China elevated the ordinary incident to a high level with its foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian protesting the rejection of their extradition request. "The ETIM is a terrorist organization listed by the UN Security Council and is recognized as such by Turkey," Zhao said. He went on to say that the said “terrorist” had “plotted terrorist activities on Chinese territory many times and is one of the initiators of the ETIM”.
The Chinese media quoted a China sympathiser, Xu Jianying, a research fellow at the Chinese Borderland Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, likened the ETIM to the World Uighur Congress (WUC) – an umbrella organisation based outside China to highlight the plight of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. He blamed both organisations for getting “financial or political support from some countries and regions who have common political interests with the anti-China politicians”. The Chinese charges were dismissed by the west which saw it as the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to show Uighur Muslims in a bad light and deflect global criticism of the Chinese government for violating the human rights of millions of the minority group.
This is the seventh straight year that China has raised the terror issue, in the process even blaming Turkey for “supporting” the “terrorists”. China originally came up with the terror angle in late 2014 when it started accusing Turkey of providing assistance to Chinese Uighur “jihadists” to relocate to Syria and Iraq to get trained by al-Qaeda and its affiliates like the ISIS. An academic research paper written in 2014 by Dr Christina Lin, a former director for China policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, titled “Al Qaeda and ISIS Have Declared War on China – Will Beijing Now Arm the Kurds?”, said: “The Chinese suspect Turkey is supporting Uyghur separatist organizations such as East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and East Turkestan Education and Solidarity Association (ETESA) that recruits from a large Chinese Uyghur Diaspora of more than 25,000 in Istanbul.”
China’s row with Turkey began in the final years of the century when a small of Uighurs calling themselves the ETIM and led by Hasan Mahsum, came to Afghanistan, intent on launching a religion-inspired insurgency against China. The group tried to enlist the support of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but in vain. In the process Mahsum is said to have irritated both al-Qaeda and the Taliban which had their own hands full with their own terror campaigns. Well-known American expert on international affairs and author of “the War on the Uyghurs”, Sean R. Roberts, wrote in Foreign Policy last October: “There is no evidence that this small under-resourced group ever instigated violence inside China or anywhere in the world. Its existence would have been a mostly unknown footnote in Uighur history were it not for the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the advent of what US officials dubbed the “global war on terror.” That was the time when China was beginning to take steps to “Sinicise” the Uighurs in Xinjiang and that had led to the Uighurs demanding the right to self-determination.
The United States and Europe took notice and began to criticise China for abusing the Uighurs’ human rights. Roberts writes about how China saw an opportunity following the 9/11 attacks to link the Uighurs to Islamic terrorism – something the US promised to wage a war against. He says: “If it (China) could rebrand what it considered a threat of Uighur ‘separatism’ as an international ‘terrorist threat’, it could effectively deflect international criticism of its repressive policies toward Uighurs by legitimizing them as part of the now internationally supported assault on Islamic terrorists.”
China submitted white papers to back its accusation, saying that a certain “Eastern Turkistan Terrorist Forces” group was “conspiring with al-Qaeda and the Taliban” and that it was “responsible for over 200 terrorist attacks during the 1990s in China”. Roberts exposed the Chinese charade for what it was, stating that in reality, “almost all of these violent incidents were spontaneous clashes between Uighurs and the police or state security forces, not premeditated terrorist attacks”. However, the United States did not fall for the Chinese campaign and just a month after 9/11, then US President George W. Bush cautioned China not to use the “war on terrorism” as an “excuse to persecute minorities”.
Turkey, meanwhile, also did not take the Chinese bait. Rather, current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, openly condemned the killing of Uighurs in Xinjiang in 2009 as a “genocide”. An angered China sought to get back at Turkey by playing the Kurdish card. At that time Turkey was in a confrontation with the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK), which wanted to establish an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, and parts of Iran and Syria. Turkey, the US and the EU declared the PKK a terrorist organisation. China threatened to support the PKK cause if Turkey did not stop supporting the Uighur cause.
China also had another motive in doing so: Kurdistan was sitting on a sea of black gold – about 130 billion barrels of oil. Not to be outdone, al-Qaeda too launched a broadside against China in 2014, backing publications that that claimed to expose China’s oppressive Uighur policies in “East Turkistan” in Xinjiang. The ISIS too subsequently intervened, threatening to “occupy Xinjiang in its aspirant caliphate”. China refused to desist from calling the Uighur movement a terrorist movement. In October, 2020, as China and the United States became embroiled in a trade war and later over the source of the Covid-19 outbreak, the then US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo declared that his country would no longer recognise ETIM as a “terrorist organisation”. China lodged angry protests, when it realised it could no longer use ETIM’s so-called terror roots to justify the brutal crackdown against the minority Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Since then, China has been using every opportunity to persuade the world community to re-designate ETIM as a terror outfit, but its attempts continue to be in vain.
