Many journalists and government officials throughout the world now routinely depict Uyghur independence activists as terrorists tout court. The following passage is representative:
For the past decade Uighur Islamic militants and nationalists have been waging a guerrilla war against the Chinese authorities, which China, in the spirit of the antiterrorist initiatives [after 9/11], has called upon Washington to condemn. On August 26, 2002, the Bush administration, hoping to engage China’s support for its war against Iraq, finally agreed to classify the Uighur militants as terrorists. (Rashid 2003:xiv)
Thus wrote Ahmed Rashid, a noted author well informed about Central Asian affairs, in 2003. His language here is persuasive, and his understanding of the situation is broadly shared by many people aware of the Uyghurs’ struggles with the Chinese state. It also is wrong.1
In this case, the Chinese government sought to persuade the world of its own view of politics in Xinjiang. As we saw in chapter 4, it did so after dramatically changing its public interpretation, switching from the claim that Xinjiang was untroubled by separatist violence to the assertion that it had long been afflicted by political violence. The document “East Turkestan Terrorist Forces Cannot Escape with Impunity,” released on January 21, 2002 (the January 2002 document), purported to demonstrate that years of violent activity in Xinjiang had been the work of terrorists and that those terrorists had links to a global terrorist network run by Osama bin Laden. The document cleverly listed a number of Uyghur organizations, showcased a series of violent events, and cited far larger numbers of events and their casualties, in such a way as to suggest that they all were tightly connected. The document was subsequently shown to be internally inconsistent and unpersuasive in various ways (Clarke 2007; Millward 2004; Shichor 2005, 2006b). Yet as discussed in chapter 4, its principal statistics and the assertion that a single Uyghur Islamist organization had committed many terrorist acts have continued to be reproduced in international media every since, as seen in the preceding quotation from Rashid.
What the U.S. government did seven months later in August, and the UN did on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, was to list one particular outfit as a terrorist organization. That entity was the previously (and subsequently) obscure “Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM), headed by Hasan Makhsum.2 Beijing had hoped that Washington would issue a blanket condemnation of all Uyghurs and organizations seeking to challenge Chinese control of Xinjiang. After Washington listed the ETIM, the PRC went on a new media offensive, insinuating that the United States had joined it in condemning Uyghur separatism full stop. Owing to the Chinese efforts and an “acronymic coincidence,” many people misunderstood or misrepresented the U.S. decision as having targeted the “Eastern Turkestan Independence Movement.” Uyghurs and Uyghur organizations have suffered grievously as a consequence.3
There is no doubt that a large number of Uyghur organizations outside Xinjiang have tried to shape the fate of the region and its peoples. This chapter discusses what the principal organizations have attempted and how the Chinese government has worked to blunt their efforts.4 Both Chinese officials and a number of Uyghur independence activists have greatly exaggerated the impact of these organizations on Xinjiang’s daily politics. In regard to the matter of transborder infiltration, we cannot be too credulous of the claims of either kind of source. The actual authors or sponsors of violence are often hard to establish, and for three obvious reasons: some perpetrators of violence sensibly seek to evade responsibility for their actions to avoid punishment of individuals or sanctions against their organizations. Other individuals may wish to falsely claim credit for documented violent events in order to shore up their claims to be doing something for the cause, particularly in the case of the Central Asian leader Yusupbäk Mukhlisi. For the same reason, they might exaggerate the amount of violence that has occurred. Chinese accusations and Uyghur boasts notwithstanding, there is no independently verifiable evidence that separatist organizations have sent members into Xinjiang, let alone directed antistate attacks in the region.5 Here the disjuncture revealed in chapter 4 between party officials’ talk of frequent and increasing “terrorist violence” in Xinjiang, on one hand, and the suggestive evidence that antistate violence and large-scale protest had fallen to near zero, on the other, is particularly telling.
The groups have succeeded in one enterprise, and on this point, Beijing and members of the Uyghur diaspora are in agreement. By preparing histories and political materials and disseminating them among Uyghurs in Xinjiang and around the world, they have played a role in sustaining both Uyghurs’ sense of themselves as a distinct people and their belief in the possibility of independence in the future. Whereas the governments in Ürümci and Beijing have struggled mightily to impose a single vision of Uyghurs’ past and future on the region’s inhabitants, dissident organizations abroad have managed to smuggle in texts, beam in radio broadcasts, and send ideas across the borders that challenge that vision. Yitzhak Shichor went so far as to argue that while the political struggle for independence was “in a coma inside China, it has been artificially resuscitated outside” (Shichor 2003:284). Shichor is right in the limited sense that there has been no armed and organized opposition inside Xinjiang, although as I demonstrated in chapter 3, broad Uyghur resistance was anything but in a coma.
If Uyghur transnational organizations have not played an obvious role in violent antistate resistance in Xinjiang, neither have they effected much change throughdiplomacy.6 No group has yet succeeded in bringing the Chinese government to the negotiating table, let alone wrung policy concessions from it. One reason is that the epicenter of organizing, the region in which Uyghurs had the greatest hope of mounting an effective challenge to Chinese control, has shifted several times. Each geographical shift necessitated changes in strategies and brought new organizational challenges.7
The locus of the most significant organizations and activities has shifted twice, first from Turkey to Central Asia in the early 1990s and then to the industrialized democracies by the latter half of the 1990s. This is not to imply either that the organizations ceased operations when the emphasis moved elsewhere or that there were none in Central Asia, Europe, or America before the major shifts. Rather, there was a shift in emphasis and allocation of resources.
The key actors from the 1950s through the 1980s were in Turkey. Muhämmäd Imin Bughra and Isa Yusuf Alptekin, key political figures in Xinjiang before 1949, had settled in Turkey along with more than two thousand Uyghur refugees after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s advance into Xinjiang. Muhämmäd Imin’s Šärqi Türkistan tarikhi (History of East Turkestan) became a foundational text for Uyghur independence activists, arguing as it did that Uyghurs had founded many independent states and that East Turkestan was their homeland. Indeed, officials in Ürümci still blamed it as the key ideological inspiration to Uyghur “splittists” in 1991 (Bovingdon and Nebijan Tursun 2004).8 He and Alptekin wrote a number of popular books in Uyghur and Turkish and also supported the publication of newspapers in Turkey that popularized the cause of Uyghur independence.9 The two also helped found several organizations, including the Eastern Turkestan Fund, the Eastern Turkestan Refugee Committee, and the National Center for the Liberation of Eastern Turkestan. After Muhämmäd Imin’s death in 1965, Alptekin became the uncrowned leader of the Uyghur movement and continued to command enormous influence until his death in 1995 (Shichor 2003:288–89).
Soon after arriving in Turkey Alptekin sought to align his appeal with that of the decolonization movement sweeping Asia and Africa. In 1955 he attended the famous Bandung Conference (the inaugural meeting of the Asian-African Conference), which condemned “colonialism in all of its manifestations.” He went to subsequent meetings of the conference in New Delhi in 1960 and Mogadishu in 1965. In addition, Alptekin sought sympathy and assistance from international Islamic organizations, traveling to conferences or congresses in Baghdad in 1961, Mecca in 1963, and Karachi in 1964. Several of these conferences passed resolutions in support of “Turkestan,” and Alptekin tried for some time to induce the member states to implement them. Alptekin even worked to make common cause with Tibetans, meeting with the Dalai Lama in 1960 and again in 1970, efforts that finally bore fruit with the establishment of the “Allied Committee of the Peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet” in 1985 (Shichor 2003:290, 292). In early 1970, Isa Yusuf Alptekin traveled to the United States in hopes of gaining support both in Washington and from the UN for an “independent Turkestan,” though without success (Salisbury 1970).
Alptekin sought and received support from the Turkish government, particularly from officials sympathetic to the Pan-Turkist cause. He was close to several Turkish prime ministers, including Süleyman Demirel and his successor TurgutÖzal. Özal accepted a Uyghur flag, cap, and clothing from the aged Alptekin in a public ceremony in the 1980s, not demurring when Alptekin announced that he was handing over the “Eastern Turkestani cause” (Tyler 2003:241; Ünal 1995).10 Owing to the officials’ support for Alptekin, Uyghur organizations operated with little interference until the 1980 coup that unseated Demirel, and they were reinstated soon afterward with the understanding that Ankara would have a say in their administration (Besson 1998:170).
Muhämmäd Imin and Alptekin after him were temperate in speech and moderate in their demands, outwardly willing to accept greater autonomy in lieu of independence for Xinjiang, even if their writings (and Alptekin’s trip to America) occasionally suggested otherwise. A Uyghur exile claimed that in 1972 Moscow had offered to give Alptekin ten troop divisions with tanks, several of the divisions entirely Uyghur, so that he could take over Xinjiang. Alptekin reportedly declined (Tyler 2003:225). Despite Alptekin’s moderate stance, support from the Turkish government, and considerable sympathy from postcolonial states and Islamic organizations, the movement he led wielded no perceptible influence over China. Until the 1970s, Beijing was relatively isolated and thus invulnerable to international sanctions, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) itself had won wide support as a leader of anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa in the 1960s, making the task of painting it as an imperialist more difficult (Shichor 2003:290–91). The situation did not obviously grow more favorable in the 1980s.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of independent Central Asian states named for their Turkic-speaking majorities seemed to open up entirely new political vistas. This turn of events led to two final efforts to organize an effective movement centered in Turkey. In 1992 Uyghurs from around the world converged on Istanbul to found the Eastern Turkestan World National Congress. The congress was organized with one eye on Central Asia, in the expectation that the newly independent countries belonging to Turkic-speaking Muslims would support the Uyghurs’ quest for independence and finally make coordinated action possible (BBC Monitoring Central Asia 2002). To that end the organizers invited representatives from several new organizations in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. All those attending agreed on the ultimate goal of an independent Uyghur state, and the congress elected an English-speaking Uyghur writer living in Australia, Ähmät Igämbärdi, as president. But the hopeful atmosphere in which the congress was convened soon dissipated, owing to a lack of funds and internal disputes over leadership and organizational goals. Representatives from different regions differed strongly over who ought to be in charge and whether to advocate peaceful or military methods (Shichor 2003:293–94; Tyler 2003:233).11
There were advocates of jihad in the Uyghur diaspora at the time. In 1997 a recent immigrant to Turkey from Xinjiang published a book entitled The Struggle for Independence. Averring that “tears and suffering will not win independence,” the author opened and closed the book insisting that jihad, not a quest for human rights protections, was the only path to success and pointing to the Chechens as “models” for the Uyghurs’ struggle (Äzimät 1997:1–16, 120–39, 183–222; Roberts 2004:424, n. 45). There is no evidence, however, that jihadists held sway at this or subsequent conferences.
The second major conference in Turkey received not only permission to convene but also material support from Ankara. Uyghurs again gathered in Istanbul in 1998 to found the Eastern Turkestan National Center. They chose as their leader Mehmet Riza Bekin, a Uyghur émigré who had risen to the rank of general in the Turkish army and subsequently served in the cabinet of a Turkish prime minister. As a token of support, the Turkish government “lent” the organization a large building until its members could “go back to their homeland freely.” While this organization struck some as an “embryonic … government-in-exile,” it could not paper over the deep political conflicts among the members (Cao Changqing 1999b).
After this meeting, the epicenter of Uyghur organizing shifted away from Turkey, owing to pressure from both Beijing and Washington.12 To understand why, and also to see what had made the congresses in 1992 and 1998 so contentious, we need to pick up the story in Central Asia. In the early 1990s it appeared that the newly independent Central Asian states might be ideal sites for a new phase of Uyghur political action. One factor that strengthened this belief was that while there were some 40,000 Uyghurs in Turkey, Kazakhstan alone had a Uyghur community of more than 300,000, with at least 50,000 more in Kyrgyzstan. Uyghurs and outside observers shared a widespread expectation that fraternal feelings among the various Turkic-speaking peoples would induce the states to provide space for, and even actively assist, those groups. Political developments in Central Asia during the 1990s, however, dashed Uyghurs’ initial optimism. As a consequence, the focus of organizing did not settle in Bishkek or Almaty but shifted instead to Europe and North America, where far smaller communities lived.
Although the disintegration of the Soviet Union turned many Uyghurs’ eyes to Central Asia, the history of Uyghur political action in those states begins much earlier, with the widening of the Sino-Soviet split in 1962. It was in the spring of that year that at least sixty thousand Uyghurs and Qazaqs fled from Xinjiang into the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, exasperated with Chinese policies in the region.13 Seeing the relationship between Moscow and Beijing deteriorate, a group of Uyghurs in Kazakhstan decided to send a letter to Moscow asking for help. Their proposal was that Moscow could harm its rival and simultaneously aid Uyghurs by helping them establish an independent homeland in Xinjiang. Moscow’s response is not recorded. The response by Alma-Ata suggested the risks of such a move. When the Kazakh Party Central Committee in Alma-Ata learned that the group had sent the letter without its approval, Hashir Wahidi, one of the letter writers, was hauled in and harshly interrogated. The secretary of the Central Committee reportedly shouted at him, “If you do this again, I’ll strap you in an electric chair and burn your body to ash!” (Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:35–36).
Ironically, within a year Moscow had apparently communicated to Alma-Ata the utility of giving Uyghur activists some latitude, allowing the establishment of organizations and a militia supposedly to make Xinjiang independent. But these clearly were foreign policy tools rather than autonomous organizations (Eurasianet 2003).14 In 1970 Isa Yusuf Alptekin told New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury that Zunun Taipov, a former leader in the Eastern Turkestan Republic, commanded a “liberation army of Eastern Turkestan” in Kazakhstan with fifty thousand soldiers. Zunun had reportedly founded the army in 1963, recruiting former members of Xinjiang’s Fifth Corps who had fled in the great 1962 exodus. Ziya Sämädi, a famous Uyghur intellectual and another leader of the republic, was said to be in charge of a “committee for the liberation of East Turkestan,” also founded in 1963 (Salisbury 1970; Tyler 2003:233). Chinese sources also speak of both the army and the political organization under Ziya advocating “national liberation,” indicating that both had KGB support. One author argues that by the late 1960s Moscow had decided to use the Uyghurs as a “trump card” in any talks with China (Li Qi 2003:83; see also Li Danhui 2003). During his 1982 visit to Xinjiang, Isa’s son Erkin Alptekin was told by Chinese officials that Russians were regularly sending agents, weapons, and subversive literature into the region. In fact, they blamed on “Russian spies” the burning of a mosque in Qaghiliq in January 1981, which had provoked a major riot (see appendix) (Alptekin 1983:150).15
Moscow also sponsored Uyghur-language propagandizing in Central Asia. As discussed in chapter 2, radio stations in Tashkent and Alma-Ata regularly broadcast programs in Uyghur touting the virtues of Soviet-style titular republics and urging Uyghurs to exercise their right of self-determination. The broadcasts took special pains to emphasize that the Soviet Union was working to help “liberate” Uyghurs, offering Zunun Taipov regular opportunities to advertise the preparations of his military force from 1963 on (Li Qi 2003: 82–83; McMillen 1979:123–24, 227; Zhang Zhirong 2005:269).16 On the basis of archival records, a Chinese scholar has argued that the broadcasts indeed led many non-Hans in Xinjiang to hope that with Soviet help, the region would soon become independent (Li Danhui 2003:98). In 1979 Moscow permitted the writer Yusupbäk Mukhlisi to begin circulating a newspaper, Šärqiy Türkistan awazi (Voice of East Turkestan) in handwritten form. Following the example of the radio broadcasts, the paper advocated independence for Eastern Turkestan and invoked UN principles in support of Uyghur national self-determination. Moscow’s patronage enabled Mukhlisi not only to circulate the paper around the Central Asian Uyghur community but also to mail copies to correspondents in Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Soviet leaders clearly saw Mukhlisi’s paper, like the political organization and the militia, as useful at some points and inconvenient at others. There was no further news of the latter two by the mid-1970s, and in 1980 Mukhlisi’s paper was quietly shut down at the same time that the Soviet Union began new border talks with the PRC (Uighur 1983).17
Some Uyghurs living in Kazakhstan saw Mikhail Gorbachev’s announcement of perestroika as an opportunity to renew their political struggle. In 1990 Hashir Wahidi and several other politically active Uyghurs wrote Gorbachev a letter seeking his support for their cause. He responded, “Because our country signed an agreement with the PRC not to interfere in each other’s affairs, I am unable to help you. However, I wish you the best of luck” (Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:38).
As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1991, several Central Asian leaders strongly opposed the dissolution of the union, fearing that separation from Russia would bring financial ruin. Nursultan Nazarbayev finally and reluctantly declared Kazakhstan independent in December of 1991 (Olcott 1997:556). Within a few months two organizations successfully registered with the government in Almaty: the Uyghurstan Liberation Organization (ULO) and the Eastern Turkestan United National Revolutionary Front (ETUNRF) (Besson 1998:178).18 Most of the members of these organizations were Uyghurs who had emigrated from Xinjiang in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas Uyghurs who had come to Kazakhstan earlier were more concerned with improving their conditions in that country. All faced the challenges of making a life in Central Asia under difficult political and economic conditions while also hoping for an independent homeland elsewhere (Roberts 1998b:517).19
Hashir Wahidi, one of the authors of the 1962 letter to Nikita Khrushchev and the 1990 letter to Gorbachev, took the helm of the ULO at its founding. One of his first moves was to attempt a merger with a new organization headed by Ziya Sämädi. After two meetings, though, it became clear that Ziya had changed his tune since the 1960s. His organization did not intend to “struggle for the motherland’s independence” but had lowered its sights to petitioning China for democracy in Xinjiang (Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:101–2).20
As a political organization, the ULO was explicitly and heavily devoted to propagandizing the Uyghur cause in various media.21 It produced a number of videos, making documentaries on the teratogenic consequences of China’s nuclear tests in Xinjiang and later on the Ghulja uprising, and filming the proceedings of Uyghur political congresses.22 Members staged numerous commemorative events, including memorials to heroes from the Eastern Turkestan Republic of 1944–1949 (among them the recently deceased Zunun Taipov) and an anniversary celebration for the founding of the republic itself. The organization published books on the ETR and on contemporary politics in Xinjiang. Attempting to reach and frighten a wider audience, it promoted a book entitled Concerning the Danger of Chinese Aggression in Central Asia in 1994. The organization’s vice chairman also wrote a history of the Uyghurs, which he serialized in the organization’s newspaper, Uyghurstan (Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:60–62).
The ETUNRF was led from its inception by Yusupbäk Mukhlisi, who claimed for the remainder of his life to be plotting or overseeing violent struggle against Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The evidence suggests more mundanely that like his counterparts in the ULO, he mainly engaged in propaganda, in both print and numerous interviews. He reopened his paper, Voice of East Turkestan, sometime in the 1990s. He gave regular interviews to Western journalists in the 1990s, during which time he could be relied on for assurances that Uyghur organizations had been infiltrating Xinjiang and perpetrating all manner of violence and destruction there for years.23 He bragged that a group under his control, the “Tigers of Lop Nor,” had destroyed aircraft and tanks in the Lop Nor nuclear-testing zone in 1993. In 1997 he claimed that he commanded an underground army of thirty thousand, and his newspaper published a story about a heroic “Commander Abdulghappar Shahiyari” reported to command a “division of many thousands of volunteers” inside Xinjiang. In the same year, his son Mukhiddin (Modan) Mukhlisi claimed responsibility for the Ürümci bus bombings on February 25. In 1999, when he was eighty years old, Yusupbäk told a reporter that his organization directed much of the violent resistance in Xinjiang, mentioning prison breaks and the theft of weapons from arsenals, claims credited by Ma Dazheng (BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 1997; Bransten 1997; Cao Changqing 1999a; Grabot 1996; Kushko 1997; Ma Dazheng 2003:193; PRC: Exiled Leader Claims 20 Dead in Street Fighting in Xinjiang” 1996; Sheridan 2000). The evidence suggests the elder Mukhlisi was a habitual storyteller, but journalists seeking scarce information about Uyghur political activities in Central Asia and Xinjiang regularly lent him a credulous ear, as did the authors of at least one intelligence report. Mukhlisi’s chronic exaggerations notwithstanding, Ma believed in 1999 that his ETUNRF was the “organization most threatening to China,” although Ma focused his concern mainly on the group’s political influence on other Uyghur transnational organs (Ma Dazheng 2003:192–93; McNeal 2002:11).24
Three days after the Ghulja uprising in February 1997, the three main Uyghur organizations, the ULO, the ETUNRF, and the Uyghur Association of Kazakhstan (UAK), agreed to combine forces (East Turkestan Information Center 1997a). The new umbrella organization announced that because affairs in Xinjiang had reached an intolerable pitch, it would now have to take action. The group was strengthened by the addition of hundreds of refugees from the post-Ghulja crackdown, and members were galvanized by the refugees’ eyewitness accounts of that crackdown. But owing to increasing pressure from Almaty, the leaders had to look outside the region for alliances or support. In July 1997 Mukhlisi traveled to Washington with Qähriman Ghojambärdi, head of the UAK, where they met with State Department officials. Hashir Wahidi had planned to travel with them but could not because he was recovering from a beating in his home by unknown assailants.25 They reportedly pleaded with the government officials for assistance in ending “Chinese colonialism” in Xinjiang and also urged that Radio Free Asia begin service in Uyghur(East Turkestan Information Center 1997b). On returning to Almaty, Mukhlisi was then able to use his paper to assert that the meeting had been a success. In it he announced that the U.S. government supported the Uyghurs and would henceforth “mark a day to commemorate their struggle for freedom.” He also reported that there would be supportive programming on the Voice of America and Radio Liberty (BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 1997).
Ma Dazheng observed with alarm that the union of the three organizations, the Uyghur Association, had augmented their collective power dramatically and extended their influence beyond Central Asia. Uyghur organizations outside the region were looking to the association for leadership. It was urgent, he argued, that China “limit as far as possible splittist organizations’ political influence and freedom of action in the countries where they are active” (Ma Dazheng 2003:192–93, 199).
Efforts in this regard in fact began soon after the new Central Asian states emerged. Beijing quickly realized the importance of bringing diplomatic and other pressures to bear on Central Asia as Uyghur organizations there gathered strength and confidence. In mid-1994, Li Peng toured the Central Asian states, promising economic aid to the struggling republics and, in turn, demanding assurances from them that they would provide no assistance to the Uyghur separatists (Dillon 2004:144). In 1995 Nazarbayev signed an agreement with Jiang Zemin, under which security services in Kazakhstan would monitor Uyghurs’ activities and share their findings with Beijing (Raman 1999). Document no. 7, promulgated by the CCP Politburo in 1996, ordered officials to use “all means” available to thwart Uyghur organizations’ attempts to gain international attention. Beijing’s top leaders unhesitatingly proposed complementing diplomacy with power politics. “Take full advantage of our political superiority,” they instructed, and “always maintain pressure” on the Central Asian states (Human Rights Watch 1999:12). The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), originally formed as the “Shanghai Five” in 1996, proved the perfect venue for China both to press the Central Asian states to crack down on Uyghurs and to offer the states benefits for doing so. Despite being advertised as a forum for the discussion of all subjects of interest, from borders to economics to joint military exercises, from its inception the SCO focused heavily on security. The communiqués from its yearly meetings repeatedly stressed military cooperation and reciprocal promises not to give quarter to separatists threatening other member countries’ security or territorial integrity. These agreements were widely understood to be directed principally at Uyghurs throughout Central Asia, as well as at religious and dissident groups (Blank 2004; Dillon 2004:142–55; Gladney 2006; Goldsmith 2005; Ong 2005).
Beginning in 1996 Bishkek, Almaty, and Tashkent all stepped up pressure on Uyghur organizations (Grabot 1996; Rashid 2003:70–71, 202). In April 1996, a week before the inaugural meeting of the SCO, the foreign minister of Kazakhstan warned the Uyghurs in that country that Almaty would tolerate no agitation for self-determination, condemning separatism as the “political AIDS” of the late twentieth century (Agence France-Presse 1996). In June the Kazakhstan government formally closed Uyghurstan, the paper that the ULO had published clandestinely for three years (Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:62–63). In March of the same year the Ministry of Justice in Bishkek banned, for three months, all activities by the organization Ittipak (Unity), including its publication of the paper of the same name, insisting that the organization’s activities went against the “interests of the Chinese people” (BBC Monitoring Service: Former USSR 1996; Dillon 2004:145). All three countries ordered the closing of political organizations that had previously been legally registered. Tashkent went so far as to ban purely cultural organizations (Tarimi 2004).
Soon after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Uyghurs had spoken hopefully of “fraternal loyalties” among Central Asian populations sharing a religion, speaking very similar languages, and claiming intertwined histories. In fact this brotherly feeling proved quite ephemeral. Central Asians indeed had sympathy for Uyghurs, but xenophobes and nationalists proved quite receptive to depictions of Uyghurs not as beleaguered cousins but as dangerous aliens. Nationalist newspapers published dark musings about the demographic threats posed by Uyghurs (“Qazaqstanda Qazaq azayip, Uyghirlar köbeyip zhatir” 2000) or claims that Uyghurs threatened political stability, being violent and terroristic by nature (Imatov 2001). In addition to pleasing China by clamping down on Uyghurs, Central Asian leaders found it quite convenient to blame “outsiders” for domestic political problems.26 In the latter half of the 1990s, it became increasingly clear that Beijing had made it impossible for an effective movement to survive in Central Asia.27 In response to this pressure, the focus of Uyghur activism shifted decisively to the industrialized democracies.
Despite their great distance from the focus of Uyghurs’ political aspirations, the countries of Western Europe and North America, as well as Australia, had two very attractive features. First, they had legal systems that protected lawfully registered organizations and political speech, and second, they were sufficiently strong economically and politically to withstand Beijing’s demands that those protections be abridged.28 At the same time, it was an obvious limitation to advocates of armed resistance that their governments frowned on talk of political violence.
Small Uyghur communities had formed in Germany, the Low Countries, and Sweden and were collecting in Australia, Canada, and the United States as well. Many of these communities formed nationally bounded Uyghur organizations such as the Belgium Uyghur Association, the Swedish Uyghur Committee, and the Australian and Uyghur Canadian Association. Uyghurs also founded transnational groups in Europe such as the East Turkestan Union and the Union of East Turkestani Youth (Shichor 2003:293). These groups regularly hosted cultural events aimed at preserving the Uyghur culture and language for émigrés and their children. Like their counterparts in Turkey and Central Asia, they also devoted great energies to publicizing the “Uyghur cause” and disseminating news affecting Uyghurs. This is true of national groups like the Swedish Uyghur Committee, whose stated goals are aiding to refugees, publishing news about Uyghur affairs, creating films to disseminate internationally, and sponsoring cultural events and museums (Svenska Uygur Kommittén n.d.). Trans national organizations have mounted even more ambitious efforts. The Eastern Turkestan Information Center, founded in Munich in 1991, regularly published a widely read bulletin through 1996, and since that time has promulgated the even more widely read World Uyghur Network News via the Internet.29
Uyghurs from the various states had attended the first Uyghur congress in Istanbul in 1992, and many attended the establishment of the Eastern Turkestan National Center in 1998 as representatives of their national or transnational organizations (Shichor 2003:293–95). As mentioned previously, increasing Chinese pressure on Ankara made it impossible to arrange another such meeting in Turkey. The 1999 conference, held in Munich, was planned to transform the national center into a national congress. The delegates wanted to establish the new congress as a genuine umbrella organization, which recognized the various national and transnational groups but was authorized to act as sole plenipotentiary representative of all, so as to present a much more potent challenge to Beijing. From the moment the congress began, however, there were serious disputes. The delegates fundamentally disagreed on tactics. The European-based Uyghurs insisted that the organization embrace only nonviolent methods, but many of the representatives from Central Asia disagreed, considering violence the sole remaining practical strategy. Yusupbäk Mukhlisi had been so disappointed by the prospectus in advance of the congress that he refused to attend at all. Participants in the congress later referred to the ETUNRF as “the opposition,” a detail that casts doubt on Ma Dazheng’s high estimate of Mukhlisi’s influence on Uyghur transnational organizations.30 The conflict continued with the selection of leaders, in a contest that clearly pitted the much larger Central Asian Uyghur community, now hamstrung by Beijing’s pressure on the various states, against the small European community, which had much greater freedom of movement and activity. In the end, Enver Can, a prominent Uyghur living in Germany, won the election by four votes (BBC Monitoring Service: Former USSR 1999; Cao Changqing 1999b; Shichor 2003:294; Tyler 2003:233–35).
The very first item on the agenda and bone of contention, however, was the name of the organization itself.31 Sabit Abdurakhman, leader of the ULO after Hashir Wahidi’s death, felt that the name should not be the “Eastern Turkestan National Congress” but the “World Uyghur Committee to Save the Motherland” or else the “Uyghurstan National Congress.”32 European delegates insisted that the original name be preserved. In the end, the assembled delegates agreed to a compromise, and the organization was saddled with the unwieldy name “Eastern Turkestan (Uyghurstan) National Congress” (BBC Monitoring Service: Former USSR 1999; Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:220). Yaqub Anat, a poet, proposed “let[ting] the people decide” once independence was achieved (Tyler 2003:235). A reporter who interviewed Anat described this as “one of the exile movement’s pettier feuds” (Hoh 2000). But in fact, it was not a trivial matter.
Instead, this conflict concerned different visions of the future homeland and the contest over the right to define that homeland authoritatively. Did “Uyghurstan” imply, by analogy with the other Central Asian states, that this would be the state of and for Uyghurs? Did it suggest a nationalizing state, where Uyghur might be declared the sole state language and non-Uyghurs would enjoy rights only at the sufferance of the government (Brubaker 1993)? Would non-Uyghurs be second-class citizens? The ungainly name chosen for the organization indicates that there was no agreement on these questions.33 It is not at all surprising that the partisans for a state named for Uyghurs hailed from Central Asia, where they had ample experience of being nontitulars in nationally defined states, while Uyghurs living in the industrialized democracies favored a pluralist, civically defined state.34
The ET(U)NC arranged for its third congress, preceded by a conference on the “occupation” of East Turkestan, to be held in the European Parliament in October 2001, on an invitation from the Transnational Radical Party. The opening of the venue to Uyghur independence advocates seemed to confer increased legitimacy on their activities. This was the first in a series of instances in which Uyghur activists cannily arranged meeting sites with high visibility that suggested international recognition of their cause. Yitzhak Shichor is right to observe that Chinese officials’ greatest concern was not the practical effects of the congress but its “symbolic context,” demonstrating once again the importance of representational politics to the contention between Uyghur activists and the Chinese government.
Beijing complained mightily to Brussels and sought in vain to pressure the European Union to refuse the space to the congress, which it insisted was a terrorist organization. China clearly hoped that this charge, coming less than a month after the September 11 attacks, would be a powerful deterrent. For good measure, the Chinese foreign minister warned that allowing the meeting would “damage Sino-European relations” (BBC News Online 2001). Rebuffed, China sent reporters, who sat through all the sessions but pronounced the meeting “not interesting.” From Beijing’s perspective, it surely did not help matters that the EU’s parliamentary delegate to China acknowledged at the conference that while the European Parliament had a “one China” policy, “we cannot rule the future” (Shichor 2003:309; Tyler 2003:237). To Uyghur activists, the success at staging meetings in Munich and Brussels and garnering international sympathy appeared to confirm the wisdom of the westward shift of organizing, even if it alienated some portion of the large community in Central Asia.
Infuriated at the failure to stop the meeting in Brussels and worried that it augured growing international support for the cause of Uyghur independence, officials in China’s State Council and Ministry of Public Security changed tactics. Taking advantage of the opportunity created by the September 11 attacks and the subsequent “war on terror,” the State Council promulgated the January 2002 document in the hope of persuading the international community that Uyghur activists were not “freedom fighters” but terrorists. The document gave special emphasis to the charges that Uyghurs had met with Osama bin Laden, fought with the Taliban, and received financial and military support from both (Guowuyuan xinwen bangongshi 2002). When the United States and UN listed the ETIM as a terrorist organization in late 2002, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Beijing took it as a hopeful sign. Yet officials remained frustrated at Washington’s decision to list only one organization, rather than issuing a blanket condemnation of what it called “ET terrorists.” Having received advance notice that Uyghur activists were planning yet another congress in Europe, Chinese officials redoubled their efforts. On December 15, 2003, the Ministry of Public Security issued a second document claiming to offer proof that four Uyghur organizations and eleven Uyghurs associated with them were terrorist. The document listed the World Uyghur Youth Congress and the Eastern Turkestan Information Center and announced that China had submitted “most-wanted” notices for the organizations’ leaders, Dolqun Isa and Abduljelil Qaraqaš (Karakash), to Interpol (“Gong’anbu gongbu shoupi rending de ‘dongtu’ kongbu zuzhi ji chengyuan ming-dan” 2003). The ETIC was, as noted earlier, an organization entirely devoted to broadcasting news, and the charge against it was manifestly preposterous. Dolqun Isa issued a scorching rebuttal of the charges against him and the organization he led (Dolkun Isa n.d.).35 Although Chinese newspapers subsequently asserted that the December 2003 document had elicited strong international support (“China Hails Anti-Terror Progress” 2004), governments outside Central Asia offered nothing of the kind; none made moves to add more organizations or individuals to a watch list.
In April 2004, members of the ET(U)NC and World Uyghur Youth Congress once again converged on Munich with representatives from all major regional Uyghur organizations to found the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). Public Security officials in China remonstrated with their counterparts in Germany, arguing that it would be “very dangerous if ‘Eastern Turkistan’ terrorists were allowed to operate” there.36 Once again, Chinese authorities tried to paint the Uyghur separatists as part of a global terrorist network, mentioning the recent March 11 attacks in Spain and suggesting that Uyghur activists threatened not just China’s security but “world peace and stability” as well (Xinhua 2004). German police made cursory investigations but were not persuaded. The congress was held as planned.
The selection of leaders showed careful attempts to balance regional constituencies. Former ET(U)NC head Riza Bekin, chosen as chairman emeritus, hailed from Turkey. Erkin Alptekin of Germany was chosen as chairman. In a blatant thumbing of the nose at Beijing, the WUYC’s Dolqun Isa was appointed head secretary. One of the vice chairmen, Memet Tohti, headed the Uyghur Canadian Association. The congress chose as chairman of the Executive Committee Alim Seytoff, president of the Uyghur American Association. The leadership also notably included representatives from Central Asia, Qähriman Ghojambärdi of Kazakhstan, and Rozimämät Abdubaqi from Kyrgyzstan. If officials in Beijing read the notice of the congress closely, they might have found a bit of gratification in one small touch that suggested Uyghurs had absorbed at least one precept from the CCP: the token woman appointed to the leadership was given charge of the “Women’s Committee.”37
While similar in form to previous Uyghur congresses, the WUC achieved a greater degree of consensus in articulating its mission and strategies. Thus its claim to be the highest authority representing Uyghur interests and suborganizations had more substance to it than similar announcements by its predecessors, the two national congresses.
These facts made it all the more extraordinary when a group of Uyghurs assembled in Washington only four months later, on September 14, 2004, to announce the formation of the “Eastern Turkestan Government in Exile” (ETGIE).38 The organization quickly announced its extraordinarily elaborate leadership structure, with a president, prime minister, two vice prime ministers, and ministers of treasury, natural resources, justice, commerce, transport, construction, education, health, and even national defense. The delegates chose as their president Ähmät Igämbärdi, who still carried some prestige as the former head of the first international congress in Istanbul in 1992 (and remained chairman of the Australian Turkestani Association). Longtime American resident Anwer Yusuf, widely seen as the spearhead of the new organization, was elected prime minister. Particularly conspicuous was the choice of Kazakhstan’s Qähriman Ghojambärdi, appointed only a few months earlier as a representative to the WUC, for the weighty position of the ETGIE’s minister of national defense. The most striking feature of the event beyond the declaration itself, however, was the site where it was declared: room HC-6 of the US Capitol Building. If Turkish government buildings or the European Parliament had lent a certain gravitas to previous organizations, the ETGIE’s access to the Capitol seemed to suggest something more: the direct support of the U.S. government. A notice in Uyghur two days before the proceedings made maximum use of this symbolism, boasting that the site was “the U.S. Congress building, with a status equivalent to the Chinese Government’s Zhongnanhai in Beijing or the Russian Government’s Kremlin” (Turani 2004).
Others responded far more angrily to what looked like an embarrassing mockery of the Uyghur movement by the founders of the ETGIE, just when the WUC had achieved unprecedented concord. They worried that the announcement would earn nothing but derision in the international community and harm Uyghurs’ chances of being taken seriously in the future.39 The announcement of a new government in-exile seemed capable of nullifying in a single stroke the WUC’s claim to be the highest representative Uyghur organization.
The ETGIE founders had clearly anticipated this objection. The Constitution of the Republic of Eastern Turkistan, promulgated in paperback form in Uyghur, Turkish, English, Chinese, and Japanese, appealed to popular acclamation as well as to a historical legacy for authority. The government “has been accepted,” it announced peremptorily (without noting who had done the accepting), “as the sole organ of the Eastern Turkistan Republic authorized to protect the rights of the people of Eastern Turkistan Republic until our country has been liberated from rule by imperialist Communist China” (Šärqiy Türkistan Jumhuriyiti Sürgündiki Parlamenti wä Hökümiti 2005:42–43). Yao Kuangyi, former ambassador to Turkey, soon announced with delight that the founders of the ETGIE had clearly intended to vie with the WUC (Yao Kuangyi 2005). This unexpected development so obviously served the Chinese government’s strategy of sowing divisions within and among organizations that some Uyghurs suspected that Anwer Yusuf had acted on instructions from Beijing.40
Less than a month later, leaders of the WUC called an executive committee meeting in Munich on October 9 and 10, at the end of which they debated the proper response to the ETGIE. At the conclusion of the debate, the executive committee released a statement reiterating that the WUC was the sole plenipotentiary representative of Uyghurs inside Xinjiang and in the diaspora. As such, it would cooperate with the ETGIE only after the ETGIE had legally registered in the United States and “received official recognition” from the U.S. government. Within a month of that announcement, a State Department spokesman stated unequivocally that no such recognition had been granted (U.S. Department of State 2004). This statement elicited yet another angry response from the Uyghur American Association’s discussion board, accusing the ETGIE participants of “building castles in Spain” and demanding that they explain themselves.41 Nonetheless, the WUC’s canny announcement, combined with the State Department’s denial, neatly boxed in the ETGIE. There is no evidence that the organization has successfully registered since that announcement. Instead, its members have settled down to much the same tasks as those at their counterpart organizations: staging demonstrations, writing letters to politicians and international bodies, and issuing regular news reports about matters assumed to be of concern to Uyghurs.42
The hopeful language of some Uyghur groups’ communiqués and the dark fulminations of Chinese officials converge on an important point: the claim that there is a single, unified Uyghur independence movement. Activists name their objective the “cause of the homeland” (wätän däwäsi), and many hold the Manichean view that one is either working for this cause or obstructing it. As has been well established by this point, Chinese spokespersons and writers refer constantly to “Dong Tu” zuzhi (‘ET’ organization[s]) taking advantage of the ambiguity of Chinese nouns as to number. At times, officials make clear that this is an umbrella term for a congeries of different organizations. As we have seen, in the immediate aftermath of Räbiyä Qadir’s second Nobel Peace Prize nomination, a prominent newspaper published an article referring to a single “ET organization.” Yet neither the propaganda emanating from each side nor the energetic politicking of prominent Uyghurs can paper over the fact that there is no single movement. Uyghur communities and that organizations are still divided by different goals and strategies.
The complaint that Uyghurs are divided among themselves has been a constant refrain in the diaspora for decades. Erkin Alptekin, the presumptive leader of the movement by the late 1990s, said in 2000 that “disunity is a historical problem among the peoples of East Turkestan…. If we were a united people, we would not have been under Chinese rule today” (Hoh 2000, 24). Even though Uyghurs regularly lament the divisions within the community and the repeated failure to form a united political organization as their special burden, these weaknesses could have been predicted. Any diaspora community spread over a large number of countries with very different economies, attitudes toward immigrants, and political climates faces obstacles to unified action. This is all the more true when members of the group have been engaged in a decades-long, transnational struggle for independence.
The shifts in geography, goals, and activities have saddled the various organizations with many burdens. Activists face the further difficulty of holding a movement together with exceedingly few resources.43 The groups are heavily dependent on particular patron-states for material resources and often for political support as well. These states have inevitably used Uyghur organizations to pursue their particular interests and then cast them aside for the same reason. This was true of the Soviet Union, to a lesser extent of Turkey, of the Central Asian states for a time, and then more recently of the United States.
The Uyghur American Association (UAA), though a national organization, has in recent years begun to bear the marks of a transnational one.44 The National Endowment for Democracy elected to fund the UAA in 2004 and to renew that funding in 2005. This money gave the group new luster and, needless to say, new resources. Although the endowment is a private organization, and its financial largesse does not indicate U.S. government support—a point that the endowment representative Louisa Coan Greve underscored in her address to the UAA congress in 2005 (Greve 2006)—neither could the implication that Washington tacitly approved be lightly dismissed.45 The endowment is a bipartisan organization (with Republican and Democratic suborganizations) funded with taxpayers’ money and directed to sponsor democratic initiatives around the world. Thus the organization’s funding of the UAA suggests, at minimum, the support of powerful members of US Congress.46
Even more significant in the long run was Washington’s decision to join forces with international human rights organizations in pressing Beijing to release Rabiyä Qadir (better known abroad as Rebiya Kadeer). Once famous in China as the richest woman in Xinjiang, later a member of the Autonomous Region’s and then the National People’s political consultative congresses, Rabiyä had run afoul of the authorities when she began to raise complaints in those representative bodies about the Uyghurs’ status in Xinjiang. Rabiyä was on her way to meet a U.S. congressional staff delegation and deliver information about Uyghur political activists in 1999 when she was arrested. She was sentenced to six years in prison for “leaking state secrets” but was ultimately released and allowed to travel to the United States in March 2005 on the pretext of seeking medical treatment. Within months of her arrival, she was elected head of the Uyghur American Association. A few months later, she traveled to Europe and met with both Uyghurs and European officials in various states. By late 2006, she was the presumptive candidate for president of the WUC, and the organization’s “second assembly” duly elected her on November 27,2006 (World Uyghur Congress 2006b). By early 2007, the WUC Web site listed her as its president, with Erkin Alptekin now described as one of two “chief advisers,” the other being Sidiq Haji Rozi, a noted Uyghur dissident intellectual and long resident in the United States and, not coincidentally, Rabiyä’s husband.47
Just as the government in Ürümci has steadfastly refused to negotiate with Uyghur demonstrators in Xinjiang, Beijing has never publicly acknowledged that it had a legitimate interlocutor among the transnational Uyghur organizations. Put another way, no Uyghur organization has ever been powerful enough to force Beijing to make such an admission. The lack of an organization politically or militarily capable of bringing Beijing to the negotiating table distinguishes the conflict in Xinjiang(as well as that in Tibet) from many other internal conflicts in Asia, such as those in Indonesia and the Philippines (Aspinall and Crouch 2003; McGibbon 2004; Rood 2005).
Beijing’s obdurate insistence that all Uyghur independence organizations abroad (and even some that do not advocate independence) are “terrorist” is the outward face of its strategy of refusing all compromise. This stance neatly complements the demonization of domestic Uyghur critics of Xinjiang’s policies as “splittists, terrorists, and religious extremists.” Just as those who raise the matters of religious freedom or immigration inside Xinjiang stand accused of harboring secret secessionist aims, party officials condemn Uyghurs in the diaspora for using democracy and human rights as pretexts, concealing their final objective of independence.
There appear to be no firm CCP strictures against holding discussions with prominent Uyghurs abroad, only against doing so in public or formally recognizing them as representatives of organizations. China’s top leaders have clearly eschewed the latter option to avoid granting legitimacy to those groups and equally to avoid giving credibility to the idea that talks are necessary.48 Documents intended only for internal circulation, such as the top secret Document no. 7 (1996) or Ma Dazheng’s report, have in fact advocated direct contacts with organizations abroad. Document no. 7 proposed a two-track strategy of “dialogue and struggle.” Its authors recommend precisely the same pragmatic strategy for handling dissidents abroad as for managing dissenters at home: “Divide the outside separatist forces; win over most of them; and alienate the remaining small number and fight against them” (Human Rights Watch 1999:12).
Chinese officials have occasionally approached Uyghur leaders abroad, something public sources emanating from China have never acknowledged. In the relatively open atmosphere of the early 1980s, Beijing’s leaders may have felt there was something to be gained by speaking directly with such figures. In 1981 a group from the Chinese embassy in Ankara met with Isa Yusuf Alptekin, since 1949 the best-known Uyghur leader abroad and long settled in Turkey. Alptekin reportedly put together a list of thirty-one “requests” to the Chinese government on such matters as accuracy in population figures, addressing economic inequalities between Uyghurs and Hans, and religious freedom. Perhaps predictably, the Chinese officials chose not to respond to the requests in any way following the meeting (Derbyshire 1999). The next year Chinese officials allowed his son Erkin Alptekin to return to Xinjiang after an exile of thirty-two years. They might have taken heart from the first sentence of his short report on the trip, which pronounced his visit “entirely satisfactory.” Alptekin noted that he was able to travel freely and meet with relatives and friends, seemingly without surveillance. He also admitted that economic and cultural conditions in the region had improved since the “holocaust” of the Cultural Revolution. Alptekin concluded on a bitter note, however. “There is no need to point out,” he observed, and then went on to point out, that “the people of Eastern Turkistan have no political freedom.” He left readers with the assertion that while Uyghurs were cautiously appreciative of the liberalization after Mao’s death, they would not be satisfied until Chinese rule of the region ended (Alptekin 1983).
Sixteen years later, a Chinese official again approached a prominent leader, a few months after the Ghulja uprising in 1997. This time Yao Kuangyi, China’s ambassador to Turkey, invited Mehmet Riza Bekin to dinner and invited him to return to Xinjiang for a visit. Riza Bekin, a former Turkish general and head of the most powerful Uyghur transnational organization at the time, accepted the invitation in the hope that more formal talks might be in the offing. But over dinner, Yao cautioned Riza Bekin that there was no certainty that Chinese officials would agree to meet him and discuss the status of the region, and so the latter elected not to go. Riza Bekin told a Chinese reporter later that Beijing would have to discuss “real autonomy” (zhenzheng zizhi) for Xinjiang and to acknowledge that the ETNC’s ultimate objective was independence or any discussion would be a waste of time (Cao Changqing 1999b, 1999c).49 There have been no known contacts with Uyghur leaders in the diaspora since Riza Bekin’s dinner with Yao.
Uyghurs outside Xinjiang have long lamented the lack of a Uyghur counterpart to the Dalai Lama. Uyghur transnational groups’ many efforts to establish a single umbrella organization and win broad international recognition of a single charismatic leader are easily understood as efforts to change this stark fact. From 1950 through the late 1960s, Muhämmäd Imin Bughra and Isa Yusuf Alptekin were the main leaders and the objects of most Uyghurs’ ambitions for international status and recognition. As pointed out, they ultimately achieved little recognition outside Turkey and the Uyghur diaspora. The establishment of the WUC and the promotion of Erkin Alptekin in the 1990s seemed to fill many Uyghurs around the world with new hope. Rabiyä Qadir’s triumphant arrival in the United States, her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and again in 2006, and her selection for the Norwegian Rafto Prize in 2005 gave her extraordinary name recognition around the world. The ham-handed attempts by Beijing to paint her as a terrorist and to deter the Nobel committee by threatening the Norwegian government only increased her international standing (Deutsche Presse Agentur 2006; Li Jing 2005; Luo Tianliang 2006). There was no mistaking that her emergence on the world stage had raised new hopes by late 2006 that Uyghurs might finally gain strong international support. Rabiyä’s selection as the symbolic leader—the “mother of the Uyghurs,” as she had taken to calling herself—neatly parried one possible obstacle to that support: in the post-9/11 world, Muslim peoples are widely viewed by non-Muslims as antidemocratic, violent, and atavistically intolerant of women’s rights. If the tokenism of the WUC’s single woman official in charge of Women’s Affairs had seemingly confirmed the last stereotype (even though the organization was avowedly secular), the promotion of Rabiyä swept it away. One might almost posit that in the current climate of anti-Muslim hysteria in the non-Muslim world, only a female Muslim leader could assuage the international community’s concerns.
What makes Uyghurs’ hopes particularly poignant is that even had Rabiyä received the Nobel Prize, she would have faced an international environment a good deal less favorable than that the Dalai Lama enjoyed both before and after he won the prize in 1989. He and the Tibetan Government in Exile (TGIE) had been internationally known for years, and Beijing has several times met with Tibetan delegations. But despite the notoriety and international popularity of the Tibetan cause, these negotiations have won no concessions from Beijing, not even recognition that it was meeting with legal representatives of the Tibetan community. The Dalai Lama publicly renounced the goal of full Tibetan independence in Strasbourg in 1988 (a stance later rejected by the TGIE in 1991). He gained nothing for his pains, and indeed, in a 2006 interview, the newly appointed party secretary in Tibet, Zhang Qingli, sharply denounced the Tibetan spiritual leader as a consistent separatist, asserting that “he has not spent a single day not trying to split the motherland” (Spiegel Interview with Tibet’s Communist Party Chief 2006).50 A few months earlier, Zhang had told officials in the region that the government was still in a “fight to the death” with the Dalai Lama (Macartney 2006). It is widely understood that Beijing now intends to conduct this “fight” by simply waiting for him to die so that it can select his next reincarnation under full Chinese control, as it did the Panchen Lama in 1995, and thus put an end to the irritant he has become. Emissaries from the TGIE traveled to Beijing again for a new round of talks in late October 2008, although the Dalai Lama cautioned in advance that his “faith and trust in the Chinese government is diminishing” (Yardley 2008). At the conclusion of the talks, Vice Minister Zhu Weiqun announced on state television that China would never accept calls for “high-level autonomy” in Tibet and accused the Dalai Lama of plotting “ethnic cleansing” of culturally Tibetan areas (Reuters 2008).
Tibetan youths in Dharamsala and elsewhere have begun to dissent publicly from the TGIE’s platform of nonviolence, but the prospects for effective armed challenges to Chinese control of Tibet seem dimmer today than they did when Tibetan guerrillas enjoyed financial and military support from the CIA in the 1960s (Knaus 1999; Mishra 2005; Sheridan 2008). The message for Uyghurs seeking autonomy or independence cannot be much more hopeful.
Since 1949, Uyghur activists in the diaspora have attempted in various ways to affect Xinjiang’s contentious politics. Despite extravagant claims by both the activists and the Chinese government, they have had little success in intervening directly by smuggling weapons or people into the region. Rumors of Uyghur militias preparing for a secessionist offensive appear in retrospect to have been baseless. Growing Chinese power has essentially eliminated the possibility that Uyghurs might separate Xinjiang from China militarily, a prospect that was already remote by the time the People’s Liberation Army had occupied the region’s major cities in 1950. Neither was it realistic for Uyghur separatists to expect that the Soviet Union would cease merely needling the territory bordering its Central Asian possessions and rouse itself to offer the military assistance that the separatists needed to achieve their aim. The September 11 attacks shattered the slim hopes raised by the intervention in Kosovo that NATO or the United States might step in to do for Uyghurs what the Soviet Union had declined to do.
Instead, politicized Uyghurs have had to focus on propaganda aimed either at inciting uprisings inside Xinjiang or galvanizing external support. While the Chinese government has naturally not been able to squelch protest and crush organizations abroad to the degree that it has domestically, over time it has largely succeeded in excluding them from its neighboring states in Central Asia and reducing them dramatically in Turkey. As the focus of organizing and activism shifted to the industrialized democracies, it meant giving up the advantage of proximity offered by Central Asian states and the broad sympathies of Pan-Turkists in Turkey. Distance and increased policing of China’s borders have made it harder to infiltrate the region than ever before. Radio broadcasts have had a diminished effect since China invested heavily in radio jamming to keep unwanted signals out and in expanding radio and television coverage to beam its own message to Xinjiang’s remotest hinterlands. Security software blocks access to dissident Web sites abroad, and tens of thousands of Public Security employees work constantly to shore up the electronic bulwark against contact between Uyghurs in Xinjiang and those in the diaspora. Beijing’s decision in 2006 to block any news coverage in China of Rabiyä’s second Nobel Peace Prize nomination was quite telling (French 2006).
The geographical shift to Europe and North America has also necessitated changes in tactics. Uyghurs in the diaspora seeking to change the policies in Xinjiang or loosen Beijing’s grip on the region have had to pin their hopes entirely on third parties such as transnational organizations and governments, much as Isa Yusuf Alptekin had to do decades ago. Without the heady talk of decolonization and national liberation common in Alptekin’s prime years and given China’s extraordinary rise in economic and political might, they have had to lower their expectations as well. Given the recent trajectory of policy changes in Xinjiang in the face of everyday resistance and open political protest by Uyghurs in the region, Uyghurs abroad face a serious challenge. The quest for an Archimedean fulcrum that might enable them to move Beijing to respond to more limited calls for political autonomy and human rights protections has thus far proven fruitless.