From The Scotsman:

A major row has broken out between China and Russia over the location for joint military exercises.

According to the Kommersant daily newspaper, the Russian military had suggested the Xinjiang autonomous region of China, because of the area’s problem with Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, a focus for the international fight against terrorism.

However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal, and instead suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.

Exercises in this area, the newspaper noted in its report yesterday, “would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only in Taiwan, but in the US and Japan, which recently included the island in their zone of common strategic interests.”

“Beijing is trying to use Russia as an additional lever of pressure on the disobedient island,” it said.

Beijing is presumably also mindful of the history of Russian influence in Xinjiang prior to the assumption of full PRC control (the warlord Sheng Shicai who ruled the province prior to the arrival of KMT nationalists during the 1930s operated under heavy Soviet patronage, and the Soviets invested in the area during the period of the second East Turkestan Republic in the late 40s), which might explain why they would be leery about inviting the Russians into what remains a sensitive area.

There were articles on it inside the Times and the Post today so I assume most people have heard of it by now, but Rebiya Kadeer, a leading Uyghur businesswoman, civic leader, and prominent political prisoner for the past five years, has been released from China in advance of Condoleeza Rice's visit to the region. No one has missed the fact that the White House has returned the gesture by dropping a resolution against China's human rights practices in the UN Human Rights Commission, something groups like Human Rights Watch have decried as rewarding China's tendency to release a small handful of high-profile prisoners at moments of greater public scrutiny in order to gain rights concessions from the US. While undoubtedly true, her release still comes as a relief to her family, human rights advocates, and the Uyghur community.

The "crimes" for which Kadeer was imprisoned, as has been widely reported, consisted of mailing Xinjiang newspaper clippings to her husband Sidik Rouzi, an activist in the Uyghur expatriate community living in the United States and working for the US Radio Free Asia service. Dave reports from Under the Tenement Palm that the Han gossip mills in Xinjiang are suggesting much worse about her (without any supporting evidence to the effect, of course), and that no mention has been made of her release at all in Xinjiang itself, reinforcing the notion that this was intended primarily for foreign consumption rather than telegraphing any sort of shift in policies towards the Uyghurs (you can read more about those policies in my paper on the subject from last fall). He promises further updates as knowledge of Kadeer's release becomes more widespread in the community; upon her arrival in Chicago Kadeer was quoted speaking to Radio Free Asia sounding fairly upbeat for someone who's just suffered the past five years in a PRC prison:

"I can smile at my people. I can work for my people, and I can work for the entire Uyghur nation. I can shout out 'Greetings' to my people. For the rest of my life, I will create my own history.”

I'll be curious to know what kind of role Kadeer plays in Uyghur diaspora politics now that she's been freed, but for now it's worth some celebration.

In other Uyghur news, the US is having trouble finding somewhere willing to take captured Uyghur militants due to be released from Guantanamo, since Europe, looking to improve its ties to China, doesn't want to take them. Wu'er Kaixi, probably the second most famous individual Uyghur dissident after Ms. Kadeer (he was a student leader during the Tianenmen protests) takes the Europeans to task for their eagerness to conduct arms sales in the (unfortunately subscription-only) Asian Wall Street Journal.

I'm taking a break from hacking away at my Uyghur paper in order to cut it down to the six pages max requested by the New America Foundation for its application writing sample — a painful task if there ever was one, considering the original version runs in at 26 in full — in order to note the release of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. Many of its findings confirm the continuation of policies previously detailed in my paper; not too suprisingly, the situation is not good for Xinjiang's Uyghurs.   more »

Revised December 6, primarily illustrations and format

---

Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Colin Cookman

From its earliest inception, the modern Islamic terrorist movement has been transnational and pan-Islamic in character. Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had its origins in the corps of volunteers known as the "Islamic Internationale", or "Arab Afghans": young men hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the whole breadth of the Middle East who flocked under the banner of jihad to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the training camps of Peshawar. There they gathered to wage guerrilla war in the name of Islam against the godless Soviet Communists, while the American government looked on with grim satisfaction as it covertly supported efforts to bleed the Russians in their own "Soviet Vietnam".

Following the United States' campaign to topple the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, news reports tracking captured fighters and key figures in the Al Qaeda leadership regularly reiterated, either explicitly or through non-commental labels of ethnicity, the multinational character of the terrorists' network: U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was facing off against a stateless, loosely affiliated coalition of the dispossessed, the globally marginalized, and the violently revivalist. Although the biggest names and largest percentage of captured Al Qaeda members continue to be primarily of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, every now and then reports mention other, more exotic figures in the mix of captured and killed: Chechens from the Caucuses, Uzbeks, Filipino Moros, and, infrequently but not unnoticed, Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.

What motivates those small handfuls of anonymous young men to cross the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan and fight alongside the militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? In order to attempt an answer, we must examine the origins of Xinjiang's oasis peoples, the Uyghurs, and their aspirations for nationhood; the nature of Chinese rule over them today, and its effects on those aspirations; and the extent to which militant Islamic revivalism may have infiltrated China's western hinterlands, and what implications that holds for the Uyghurs and their region. This paper argues that China's discriminatory policies have, more than any other factor, served to alienate the Uyghurs and increase the appeal of militant Islam, in effect making Beijing's worst fears a reality.
   more »