2

HOW THE UYGHURS BECAME A ‘TERRORIST THREAT’

2 Häsän Mäkhsum giving a religious lecture in Afghanistan, circa 1998–2001.

Uyghurs were classified as a ‘terrorist threat’ in the early 2000s, not because of anything Uyghurs did; they were classified as such through a politically motivated process initiated by the PRC and, after intensive lobbying, reified by the US. While this classification only branded one small and little-known Uyghur exile group in Afghanistan as a ‘terrorist organization,’ it has subsequently had major ramifications for all Uyghurs everywhere and especially in China. This classification was unquestionably pursued by the PRC opportunistically, but it was also the ambiguous nature of the US-led GWOT’s enemies that made it possible.

HOW GWOT IDENTIFIES ITS AMBIGUOUS ENEMIES

It is important to note that the ‘terrorist’ enemies of GWOT have been ambiguous since the very beginning, and this was likely a deliberate decision of those who declared the war. When, on 20 September 2001 President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the American people, laying out his proposed response to the attacks on the US that had occurred nine days earlier, he famously declared a broad war on ‘terror’ that would begin with Al-Qaeda, which had been identified as the perpetrators of the attacks, but ‘not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’¹ In characterizing this vague enemy, Bush confidently noted that ‘the terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars; … [their] directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children.’² While Bush’s characterization of these ‘terrorists’ suggested a formidable and evil foe, their actual identity remained mostly undefined and open-ended, likely deliberately so. As of this book’s publication, this war is still with us, and its enemy remains as ambiguous and demonized as ever. This ambiguous framing of the war’s enemy ensured that GWOT would be an open-ended war that could be articulated in different ways by different actors around the world. In many ways, it is not a war at all, but a narrative that can serve as a political tool in the hands of states to advance a variety of different agendas.

Indeed, the US would set the precedent for the use of this war as a political tool as it quickly pivoted to make its version of GWOT more about fighting ‘rogue states’ in the international system than about fighting the vaguely defined ‘terrorists’ that Bush had described. The US invasion of Afghanistan, whether justified or not, at least had a direct connection to the 11 September attacks as the base of operations for Al-Qaeda, which had ordered the attacks. However, by January 2002, when George W. Bush gave his infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, it had become clear that the US was intending to fight not only states who were allegedly providing support and sanctuary to ‘terrorists,’ like Afghanistan, but also those states which might do so in the future due to their unsanctioned manufacture of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ In particular, Bush noted that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were all allegedly in the process of creating such weapons, which they could provide to alleged ‘terrorists.’ As he ominously declared, ‘states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.’³ From that time on, the Bush administration’s version of GWOT became more about regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq than about destroying alleged ‘terrorist organizations.’

In the context of this book, the US manipulation of GWOT’s ambiguous enemy to target unrelated enemies is primarily important for the precedent it set for other states. Elsewhere, such manipulation has generally not been used to justify targeting international enemies as the US had done, but instead as justification for attacking domestic opponents, especially if they are Muslims. The amorphous nature of GWOT’s enemies and their wide geographic dispersal has invited such a response, especially from authoritarian regimes seeking excuses to discredit domestic dissent of all kinds. Furthermore, since the war is inherently global, it has its own international architecture, which can be manipulated by states to brand domestic opponents as internationally recognized ‘terrorists.’

GWOT’s ‘terrorist lists’

Within this global anti-terrorism architecture, one of the most important tools for states wishing to implicate domestic opponents as enemies in GWOT is the system of international ‘terrorism lists’ that serve to recognize groups as global ‘terrorists.’ In essence, being put on such a list in the context of GWOT serves the purpose of a ‘scarlet letter,’ justifying the violent targeting of the groups and individuals in question wherever they might be located and whatever may be their actual goals and actions. While numerous countries keep such lists, only one list portends to demonstrate the general international consensus on whom should be categorized as a ‘terrorist,’ especially in the context of GWOT. This is the so-called United Nations Security Council (UNSC) ‘Consolidated List.’

This list was originally created by the UNSC in 1999 under Resolution 1267 as a means of sanctioning Al-Qaeda and the Taliban for their involvement in the 1988 bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania.⁴ However, it became substantially more powerful following the declaration of GWOT when it began including any organization or individual alleged to be associated with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. While this list quickly became the primary means of identifying the ‘terrorist’ enemies in this new war, criteria for inclusion had nothing to do with the acts carried out by a given group and was instead determined through ‘guilt by association.’ Other lists that would prove to be powerful in the post-2001 environment include those of the US and the EU, given that these lists represent the ‘terrorists’ targeted by the leading militaries mobilized in GWOT.

As Lee Jarvis and Tim Legrand have argued, these lists are the basis for ‘vast aspects of the Western world’s counter-terrorism frameworks.’⁵ Initially, they were meant to provide a legal means for targeting alleged ‘terrorists’ for a variety of international sanctions, but in the context of GWOT, they have also justified state-initiated violence against those represented on them. As such, states have used them to deflect political criticism of controversial extra-legal actions taken against those listed, including non-sanctioned assassinations, extra-judicial detentions, and surveillance not allowed by domestic law. As Jarvis and Legrand point out, the designation of groups as ‘terrorists’ on these lists has become ‘a fulcrum of states’ counterterrorism capabilities and ambitions.’⁶

In this context, it was not surprising that the PRC would aspire almost immediately after GWOT’s declaration to get Uyghur groups recognized on these international lists. The Chinese state had long dealt violently with dissent from Uyghurs, particularly when it was suggestive of aspirations for self-determination, and the PRC’s violent suppression of Uyghur dissent had increased throughout the 1990s, drawing sustained international criticism. While the international community is generally critical of the violent suppression of self-determination movements, in the context of GWOT, dealing with ‘terrorists’ violently is not only tolerated by the international community, but encouraged. Thus, the PRC had strong motivation after 9/11 to portray all Uyghur dissent as ‘terrorism’ and aligned with GWOT’s ambiguous enemies.

BRANDING UYGHURS AS A ‘TERRORIST THREAT’

During the early days of GWOT, the PRC had yet to directly link Uyghurs to the ‘terrorists’ against which the war was being waged, but this would change by October 2001 when the Chinese state began a concerted effort to re-brand its concerns about Uyghur calls for independence as an international ‘terrorist threat’ linked to Al-Qaeda. While the PRC’s sudden characterization of Uyghurs as being part of international ‘terrorist’ networks in the context of GWOT seemed out of place at the time, in retrospect it made perfect sense given China’s experiences during the 1990s in former Soviet Eurasia where the labels of ‘terrorist’ and ‘extremist’ were in common usage as a means of discrediting domestic opposition. The PRC’s initial interaction with this discourse would emerge from its involvement in the ‘Shanghai Five’ group, which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The ‘Shanghai Five’ and the origins of China’s narrative of the Uyghur ‘terrorist threat’

The ‘Shanghai Five’ group, representing China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, was formed in 1996 as a means of resolving issues of border demarcation and diplomatic relations between China and the four states of the former Soviet Union which it bordered. At its initial meeting in Shanghai, it agreed to establish annual meetings, which were held in Russia (1997), Kazakhstan (1998), Kyrgyzstan (1999), and Tajikistan (2000) respectively. The agenda at these meetings would quickly expand beyond border demarcation and diplomatic relations to focus increasingly on security concerns.⁷ In these subsequent Shanghai Five meetings, the PRC’s concern about Uyghur nationalist aspirations would become an increasingly important part of the concessions it sought from its neighbors, especially following the Ghulja incident and Urumqi bus bombings of 1997. The Chinese government was well aware of the activities of the Uyghur nationalist communities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and it worried that these exiles in Central Asia were fueling calls for independence among China’s own Uyghurs.

Given the PRC’s preoccupation with the Uyghur issue at the time, it was not surprising that security concerns were dominant in the discussions of the Shanghai Five group in Almaty in 1998 where the group added a new dimension to their collaboration – ‘ combating separatism, religious extremism and international terrorism,’ a trinity of threats that would eventually become known as the ‘three evils.’⁸ In 2001, when the group returned to Shanghai for its annual meeting, it announced the founding of a new regional security cooperation organization that became known as the SCO. One of the first orders of business of the new SCO was to draft and ratify the ‘Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism’ that was adopted in June 2001, roughly three months before the 11 September attacks on the US.⁹

The power of the ‘three evils’ was that it blurred the lines between three different perceived threats, equating them as a unitary threat in the policies of the states concerned. For the PRC, it was critical that ‘separatism’ was included in this trinity of security threats to allow coordination on combating Uyghur calls for self-determination. As Jiang Zemin would note at the Almaty meeting, the five countries represented ‘should strengthen mutual support in safeguarding the national unity and sovereignty of our nations,’ a thinly veiled call for international collaboration in the PRC’s fight against Uyghur calls for self-determination.¹⁰ By contrast, the inclusion of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ in this list was more likely the initiative of the former Soviet states, all of which had experience in using the flexible discourse of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ to discredit domestic opponents in the eyes of the international community, particularly given the region’s proximity to Afghanistan. However, most importantly, this trinity of threats allowed all six SCO members (Uzbekistan had been added to the group in 2001) to link their own domestic opponents, whether they were independence movements or merely political competitors, to the quickly escalating international security concern of ‘Islamic terrorism.’

While its engagement with Russian and Central Asian discourses on ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ through the Shanghai Five and the SCO did not result in an immediate transformation of the Chinese state’s framing of its alleged Uyghur ‘separatist’ threat domestically, it did lead the PRC to begin interchangeably using the ‘terrorist’ and ‘separatist’ labels in its reports of Uyghur dissent to the outside world. In a January 2001 report about the destruction of an alleged Uyghur independence organization, the PRC claimed that the group had been involved in multiple ‘terrorist acts.’¹¹ Similarly, in March 2001, the highest-ranking ethnic Uyghur Party official in the XUAR at the time, Abulahät Abdurishit, suggested to journalists that Uyghur ‘separatists’ in the region were receiving assistance from ‘international terrorists.’¹² While the appearance of this narrative about Uyghur ‘terrorism’ in Chinese state discourse was still fairly rare at the time, it had already become a nominal part of that discourse prior to the 11 September attacks, albeit on the margins of broader accusations of Uyghur ‘separatism.’ As such, when George W. Bush declared a worldwide war on international terrorism in late 2001, the PRC already had a good idea of how to implicate the Uyghurs in that war.

China’s campaign for international recognition of a Uyghur ‘terrorist threat’

Signs of the PRC’s intent to brand what it had previously framed as Uyghur ‘separatism’ as a ‘terrorist threat’ already appeared about five weeks after the 9/11 attacks. In being asked about a conference held at the European Parliament by the East Turkistan National Congress, a Europe-based Uyghur advocacy group, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry on 19 October went on a tirade about the group being a ‘terrorist organization.’ Going much further than previous PRC uses of the narrative of ‘terrorism’ to describe Uyghur dissent, he noted:

The force for East Turkistan is a terrorist force with the objective of splitting China. It has closely colluded with the international terrorist organizations to undertake numerous horrible violent terrorist acts in China and its neighboring countries, leading to great casualties. Under the backdrop of increased international cooperation against terrorism, the force for East Turkistan is trying to disguise itself under the pretext of human rights, democracy and safeguarding the minority’s rights to carry on its splittist activities. However, these tactical changes cannot change its nature as a terrorist organization.¹³

This explanation of the ‘Eastern Turkistan terrorist threat’ lacked details, but it outlined a general argument that would be refined by Chinese state officials in the coming weeks and months as it became clear that the PRC was explicitly seeking to implicate the Uyghurs in GWOT.

In an impassioned speech before the UN General Assembly on 11 November 2001, the PRC Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tang Jiaxuan, pledged China’s support for the fight against the international ‘terrorist threat’ and signaled the PRC’s emergent framing of Uyghur dissent as a part of that threat. He noted, ‘China is also threatened by terrorism; the “Eastern Turkistan” terrorist forces are trained, equipped and financed by international terrorist organizations; the fight against the “Eastern Turkistan” group is an important aspect of the international fight against terrorism.’¹⁴ While the PRC had made vague suggestions earlier in 2001 that Uyghur independence activists were receiving assistance from international terrorists, this accusation by the Foreign Minister was being made more forcefully at a high-profile international event. However, the vague phrasing of this statement, just like that of the foreign ministry spokesperson weeks before, left much to the imagination. Who exactly were the ‘Eastern Turkistan terrorist forces’ to which they were referring, and from which ‘international terrorist organizations’ were they receiving financing?

Likely in response to such questions, the PRC Permanent Mission to the UN appears to have released a brief explainer two weeks later that sought to clarify these earlier statements.¹⁵ This document, entitled ‘Terrorist Activities Perpetrated by “Eastern Turkistan” Organizations and Their Links with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban,’ claimed unequivocally that China faced its own ‘terrorist threat’ that was directly connected to Osama bin Laden, enemy number one in GWOT. In the document, the PRC suggested that this terrorist threat came from a vague group called the ‘Eastern Turkistan’ forces, which included over 40 organizations located around the world.¹⁶ It also highlighted eight of these organizations dispersed around the world in Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Switzerland as explicitly advocating violence in their political platforms.¹⁷ In addition to these groups, the document also mentions a variety of other organizations that had allegedly carried out acts of violence inside and outside of China during the 1990s.¹⁸

To most outside observers with knowledge of Uyghur political groups at the time, these claims sounded absurd. Most international scholars studying Uyghurs or their homeland had never heard of the majority of these organizations and did not perceive those named with which they were familiar as a ‘terrorist threat.’ Having studied Uyghurs in Kazakhstan since the early 1990s and being familiar with Uyghur nationalist organizations in the region, I personally had only heard of a few of the organizations claimed by the document to be active in former Soviet Central Asia. I was aware of the United Committee of Uyghurs’ Organizations, known as Ittipaq in Central Asia, which was an attempt to create an umbrella organization for a variety of Uyghur secular nationalist groups in the region, but I also knew this group had few resources, was rife with divisions, and possessed no capacity to carry out acts of violence, let alone inside China. While I was also aware of the Eastern Turkistan Liberation Organization (ETLO) as a more religious nationalist group with ties to Turkey and made up mostly of more recent Uyghur arrivals from China, I knew that this group was small in number and had been virtually destroyed by Kazakhstan’s security apparatus in 1999–2000 thanks to agreements made with China through the Shanghai Five. It was difficult to believe that either of these groups were connected with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Such connections sounded even more absurd for the Eastern Turkistan Youth League based in Switzerland, which was overtly secular and focused on supplying information about the plight of Uyghurs to the international community.

The one organization named in the document that reasonably raised some speculation about a potential Uyghur connection to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which allegedly was operational in Afghanistan. No international scholars studying Uyghurs at the time had ever heard of this group, but they also knew little about Uyghurs in Afghanistan. It was plausible that a militant Uyghur group could have established itself there given its proximity to the Uyghur homeland, its relative openness to offering safe haven to different Muslim rebel groups from around the world, and the widespread negative attitudes of Uyghurs to Chinese rule. Furthermore, if such a group did exist, it also seemed plausible that it might have become associated with Al-Qaeda, as was allegedly the case with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a group of religiously oriented Uzbeks, which was in opposition to the government of Uzbekistan and had fled to Afghanistan in the second half of the 1990s.

Furthermore, the PRC document presented more detailed information about ETIM than about any other Uyghur group it was accusing of being part of the ‘Eastern Turkistan terrorist forces.’ The document claimed that ETIM was led by a Uyghur named Häsän Mäkhsum and had received $300,000 in support from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.¹⁹ It also asserted that the organization commanded a ‘China Battalion,’ and its fighters, after being trained in Afghanistan, fought in combat ‘in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Uzbekistan, or returned to Xinjiang for terrorist and violent activities.’²⁰

While the plausibility of these assertions raised speculation that some Uyghurs could in fact be establishing ties with Al-Qaeda, it attracted little international attention because none of this information could be easily corroborated. There was scant evidence of this group’s existence aside from the PRC’s claims, and the US military apparently found very few Uyghurs among the militants in Afghanistan after it had invaded the country in late September 2001. Therefore, even if there was any truth to the PRC’s claims about Uyghurs seeking to carry out violence inside China from bases in Afghanistan, it did not seem that these alleged Uyghur militants had substantial enough connections to Al-Qaeda to qualify them as a serious concern in the context of GWOT.

However, the PRC remained persistent about its claims of a Uyghur-Al-Qaeda connection and continued to lobby the international community to recognize this connection’s relevance to GWOT.²¹ In January of 2002, the PRC’s State Council Office of Information would release a far more detailed report on Uyghur ties to ‘terrorism’, which also called for international action against the nebulous ‘Eastern Turkistan Terrorist Forces’ named in the first report. This second document, entitled ‘“East Turkistan” Terrorist Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity,’ started with a confident statement on the ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs to China as well as to neighboring regions:

Over a long period of time – especially since the 1990s – the ‘East Turkistan’ forces inside and outside Chinese territory have planned and organized a series of violent incidents in the Xinjiang Uygur [sic] Autonomous Region of China and some other countries, including explosions, assassinations, arsons, poisonings, and assaults, with the objective of founding a so-called state of ‘East Turkistan.’²²

This opening statement in the document is followed by a brief historical description of the origins of Uyghur self-determination movements, both seeking to refute Uyghur claims that the XUAR is their homeland and linking the Uyghur history of self-determination movements to a narrative of ‘international terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremism.’ This section includes assertions that the Uyghur homeland had been a constituent part of China since 60 BC and that Uyghurs are not ethnic ‘Turks’ at all, arguing that Uyghur calls for self-determination under the banner of ‘Eastern Turkistan’ were part of an international conspiracy to split and weaken China that had been subsequently radicalized by ‘extremist Islam’ and ‘international terrorist networks.’²³ While this fantastical account of the history of the Uyghurs and their homeland is easily refuted by historians, it provides insight into the logic of the PRC’s application of a ‘terrorism’ narrative to Uyghur calls for self-determination as well as of China’s melding of the ‘three evils’ as an intertwined unitary threat of ‘separatism,’ ‘extremism,’ and ‘terrorism.’

While this historical section of the document would not garner much international attention, the following section of the document, which provided alleged evidence of ‘terrorist acts’ purportedly perpetrated by Uyghurs, would eventually play a critical role in the international recognition of one Uyghur group as a ‘terrorist threat.’ This section confidently declares that ‘from 1990 to 2001, the “East Turkistan” terrorist forces inside and outside Chinese territory were responsible for over 200 terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, resulting in the deaths of 162 people of all ethnic groups, including grassroots officials and religious personnel, and injuries to more than 440 people.’²⁴ Then, it provides an illustrative list of violent events, mostly from the 1990s, that it classifies as ‘terrorist acts,’ categorized by ‘explosions,’ ‘assassinations,’ ‘attacks on police and government institutions,’ ‘poisonings and arsons,’ and ‘instigating disturbances and riots.’²⁵ Given the lack of detailed information available about these incidents from other sources, it is difficult to know the actual circumstances of any of the described events, whether they occurred as described, and whether they should legitimately be characterized as ‘terrorism.’

However, even taken at face value, very few of them qualify as ‘terrorism’ using this book’s working definition of the term because the overwhelming majority either did not target civilians or did not even constitute premeditated political violence. The ‘assassinations’ allegedly targeted government officials or religious clergy working for state-run religious bodies active in the region’s religious regulation. Even if these were premeditated and politically motivated, they should be viewed more as acts of guerilla warfare than as ‘terrorism.’ The alleged ‘attacks on police and government institutions’ obviously did not target civilians. The claims of ‘instigating disturbances and riots,’ including the Baren events of 1990 and the Ghulja events of 1997, do not fit any acceptable definition of ‘terrorism’ as they began as peaceful protests, and the claims of ‘poisoning and arson’ include too little information to allow one to easily establish a narrative of ‘terrorism’ about them. The only violent incidents that, if taken at face value, may involve ‘terrorist’ tactics, per this book’s definition, are the five different series of explosions discussed in the report. Unfortunately, little is known about these events, and most of them were never reported until the release of this particular document. The two incidents which appeared to involve ‘terrorist’ tactics about which reports do exist are the bus bombings in Urumqi in 1992 and 1997 respectively. However, neither of these bombings were ever claimed by an organization, and little is known about the details of those arrested for them.²⁶

This list of violent acts allegedly perpetrated by Uyghurs during the 1990s, if even partially accurate, certainly offers a snap-shot of the resentment that was building among Uyghurs at this time regarding Chinese rule of their homeland, but it provides no evidence of a ‘terrorist threat’ or even of an organized militant threat. Most of the acts of violence outlined in the document appear to have been spontaneous outbursts of violent rage or the settling of personal vendetta rather than premeditated acts of political violence against Chinese rule. Even if some may have been perpetrated by self-styled militants seeking the liberation of the Uyghur homeland, only two appear conclusively to target civilians.

Following these descriptions of past violence, the document, like the previous communique from November 2001, asserts that the vaguely defined ‘Eastern Turkistan Terrorist Forces,’ who had allegedly carried out all of this violence, are supported by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, unlike in the previous document from months earlier, the PRC did not mention a litany of diaspora nationalist groups involved in this nebulous organization, but focused on its branch in ‘South Asia’ and particularly on ETIM, which was alleged to operate in Afghanistan.²⁷ In particular, the document sought to outline further details of this group’s allegedly close relations with Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Given that the US had apparently detained several Uyghurs who had fled Afghanistan for Pakistan in late 2001, there was at least some reason for the US to view the PRC’s claims about ETIM and its Al-Qaeda links as plausible, but there also remained much suspicion in the US that China was opportunistically exploiting GWOT to further repress Uyghurs.²⁸

Despite the many holes in the document’s argument, this report would be critical to the fate of the Uyghurs in subsequent years. It would become the foundational document in a flawed narrative about the role of Uyghurs in the international ‘terrorist threat’ that would spread throughout the world and that continues to be reproduced by ‘terrorism’ experts to this day. However, the document’s influence in this regard would not be fully realized until its arguments were adopted by the US and the UN in designating ETIM as an international ‘terrorist organization’ later in 2002.

The international recognition of ETIM as a ‘terrorist threat’

On the day that the State Council Information Office of the PRC released this detailed document requesting assistance from the international community in combating its alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs, PRC representatives attended a donor conference in Tokyo where it pledged $1 million in assistance to Afghanistan’s reconstruction and an additional $3.6 million worth of humanitarian goods, essentially in support of the US-led rebuilding of Afghanistan.²⁹ While few details are known about the contents of US-China bilateral talks at this time, it appeared that Beijing was trying to leverage its support for GWOT to get the US to recognize the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs and its purported connections to Al-Qaeda. In the public statements made by US officials throughout late 2001 and most of 2002, it was obvious that they were feeling pressure from China on this issue, but initially the US government was also resistant to this pressure.

George W. Bush and China’s Jiang Zemin had met on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) in October 2001 where they ‘reached an agreement on the formation of a medium and long-term bilateral mechanism for exchanges and cooperation in the fight against terrorism.’³⁰ However, while at APEC, Bush also stated that the PRC should not attempt to use GWOT as an ‘excuse to persecute minorities,’ a comment that appeared particularly targeted at China’s treatment of its Uyghur population.³¹ Subsequently, the US State Department’s Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism, Ambassador Francis Taylor, visited Beijing in early December 2001 to participate in talks on counterterrorism collaboration with China.³² While these talks were generally fruitful, one of the areas of disagreement was regarding the branding of Uyghur dissent as a ‘terrorist threat.’

Taylor acknowledged in his Beijing press conference that US troops had found some ‘Chinese citizens from western China’ in Afghanistan, but he was also adamant that ‘the US has not designated or considers the East Turkestan organization as a terrorist organization,’ further suggesting that ‘the legitimate economic and social issues that confront people in Northwestern China are not necessarily counter-terrorist issues and should be resolved politically rather than using counter-terrorism methods.’³³ The Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Rights, and Labor, Lorne Craner, reiterated this point in March 2002 while introducing the US State Department’s Human Rights Report on China, noting that the PRC had ‘chosen to label all of those who advocate greater freedom in [Xinjiang], near as I can tell, as terrorists; and we don’t think that’s correct.’³⁴

However, in August 2002, something appeared to have changed in the US government’s public proclamations about the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ involving Uyghurs. On 19 August 2002, Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, drafted a document recognizing ETIM as an international ‘terrorist organization’ and a threat to the US. As the document read in the Federal Register, ‘I hereby determine that the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) has committed, or poses a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of US nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.’³⁵ Presenting this policy change in a press conference on 26 August while in Beijing, Armitage noted that ETIM had ‘committed acts of violence against unarmed civilians without any regard for who was hurt.’³⁶

Two days later, this news was followed by shocking statements from a spokesperson for the US Embassy in Beijing claiming that ETIM had been planning attacks on US interests in collaboration with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, including a planned attack on the US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan.³⁷ The spokesperson added that ETIM had carried out more than 200 terrorist attacks in China, including bombings, assassinations, and arson, resulting in at least 162 deaths and 440 injuries.³⁸ As the journalist from the Washington Post who reported on these statements noted, these were figures obviously taken directly from the January report issued by the PRC’s State Council Information Office.³⁹ However, there was an important difference – the PRC document had attributed these numbers to the work of numerous alleged Uyghur groups all characterized as part of a nebulous ‘Eastern Turkistan Terrorist Forces,’ while the US Embassy blamed all of them entirely on the mostly unknown ETIM.⁴⁰ This mistake would subsequently enter into the general narrative about ETIM that was reproduced going forward as ETIM became consistently portrayed, both by the PRC and by international ‘terrorism’ experts, as the singular organization responsible for all alleged Uyghur-perpetrated violence in China during the 1990s.

It was unclear what had transpired between March and August 2002 to precipitate this sudden US support for the PRC’s narrative about a ‘terrorist threat’ involving Uyghurs. The explanation given by US officials remained vague, citing undisclosed classified information about the nature of ETIM. For example, in early December 2002, then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, James Kelly, would defensively state that the decision to designate ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ had been made during the summer of 2002 ‘not as a concession to the PRC, but based on independent evidence that ETIM is linked to al-Qaeda and has engaged in deliberate acts of violence against unarmed civilians.’⁴¹ Seven years later, when asked about the evidence for designating ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ at a Congressional hearing, Randall Schriver, the US Deputy Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in 2002, would likewise claim that there was credible evidence of ETIM’s terrorist activities beyond that provided by Chinese authorities, but he also added that he could not disclose this credible evidence since it was ‘classified.’⁴² This ‘credible evidence,’ if it exists, presumably remains classified to this day.

There were a number of events that had transpired over the course of 2002 which could have yielded this alleged ‘credible evidence’ that served to change US policy. The US had already interned 22 Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay Detention Center earlier in 2002, and intelligence gathered from these detainees could have changed US attitudes towards ETIM’s designation as a ‘terrorist organization.’ Furthermore, the accusations that ETIM plotted to attack the US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan could have contributed to the decision. However, it is unlikely that either of these factors inspired the about-face in US policy. The transcripts of the tribunals with Uyghurs in Guantanamo, which were later released, offer no evidence of the group’s ties to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, eventually leading the US to release all of its Uyghur detainees.⁴³ There were also numerous holes in the story about the planned ETIM attack on the US Embassy in Bishkek. The US Embassy in Bishkek never made a statement on the planned attack, which was instead announced by the US Embassy in Beijing, and Kyrgyzstan authorities merely cited the Uyghurs’ possession of maps for all foreign embassies in the country as evidence for the alleged planned attack on the US.⁴⁴ Given how quickly news about this alleged attack disappeared from the media at a time when an Al-Qaeda plot against the US would be perceived as an act of war, it is likely that there was very thin evidence behind it.

It is much more likely that the US decision to recognize ETIM as a ‘terrorist threat’ was driven by a need to court China’s further support in GWOT. In particular, by August 2002, the US government was already contemplating how to gain international support for an invasion of Iraq. Having delivered his infamous ‘Axis of Exil’ speech in January 2002 implicating Iraq in GWOT, and setting the stage for future military action, President Bush was, according to Colin Powell, already getting military advice in early summer 2002 on how such an invasion might take place.⁴⁵ Furthermore, it would be only a few weeks after the recognition of ETIM that President Bush would make his impassioned case before the UN General Assembly to hold Iraq accountable, noting that the US would work closely with the UN Security Council, of which the PRC is a critical member, to do so. Thus, it is not surprising that articles published by both The New York Times and the Washington Post at the time were already speculating that the US designation of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ could go a long way towards getting China on board to a Security Council resolution allowing the invasion of Iraq.⁴⁶ While there is no concrete evidence that the recognition of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ by the US was done as a quid pro quo act to gain Chinese support or complicity for the invasion of Iraq, it is noteworthy that China never proposed a Security Council resolution to prevent the US invasion.

It is important to note that the US did not only bilaterally recognize ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization,’ but also actively participated multilaterally in an effort to have the UN do so. On 11 September 2002, on the first anniversary of the attacks on the US, the US jointly with Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and China asked the UN to impose sanctions on ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ under UN Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1390.⁴⁷ On the occasion of the UN’s inclusion of ETIM on its ‘Consolidated List,’ the US Department of Treasury also issued a press release that welcomed the designation, repeating once again the assertion that ETIM was responsible for over 200 terrorist attacks, 162 deaths, and over 440 injuries, figures taken directly from Chinese documents meant to characterize the violence allegedly perpetrated by multiple Uyghur organizations.⁴⁸

Thus, within the first year of GWOT, the PRC had successfully implicated at least one small group of Uyghurs in the war with the support of the US and the UN. Furthermore, these actions taken almost two decades prior under suspect circumstances remain in force, as ETIM is still listed on the US Terrorism Exclusion List as well as on the UNSC ‘Consolidated List’ of ‘terrorists’ to this day. This has had numerous ramifications for the Uyghur people as a whole since 2002, and continues to plague them as the PRC claims its mass internment of Uyghurs is an appropriate response to a serious ‘terrorist threat.’ The Uyghur ethnic group as a whole has suffered from this designation because, while the US and UN had not adopted the PRC’s larger narrative that all Uyghur advocacy groups worldwide were part of a singular ‘terrorist network,’ the branding of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ allowed the Chinese state to arbitrarily label virtually any Uyghur group or individual as a member or associate of ETIM, ultimately placing all Uyghurs under suspicion of potentially being its members or sympathizers.

When the PRC announced its first official ‘terrorist’ list in December 2003, for example, it included two Uyghur advocacy groups in Germany and their leadership, suggesting that these groups were aligned with ETIM.⁴⁹ As a result, Dolkun Isa, who is now the leader of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) but at the time was one of the German Uyghur activists on the list, was issued an Interpol ‘Red Notice’ that greatly hindered his international travel, including to the US, until it was finally removed in 2018.⁵⁰ Likewise, the 22 Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay, while all eventually released, were held for years as suspected ‘enemy combatants’ as the US military sought to connect them to the phantom ETIM ‘terrorist organization.’ However, the most serious harm done to the larger Uyghur population by the international designation of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ would be the plausible narrative it provided the PRC that a persistent and dangerous ‘terrorist threat’ existed within the Uyghur community of China. By suggesting that ETIM was active within the Uyghur homeland’s population, the Chinese state would justify almost two decades of violently repressing Uyghur dissent, and eventually Uyghur culture, in the name of ‘counterterrorism.’ If ETIM’s listing on US and UN ‘terrorism’ lists helped to establish this narrative in 2002, the work of ‘terrorism’ analysts would serve to perpetuate it going forward through a deeply flawed body of literature that portrayed ETIM as a cohesive organization with a long history that, while based abroad, also had members in the Uyghur homeland.

JUSTIFYING AND MAINTAINING ETIM’S BRANDING AS A ‘TERRORIST THREAT’

With the US and UN ‘listing’ of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization,’ it was inevitable that this organization would become an object of analysis among ‘terrorism’ experts after 2002. Within a year of the 9/11 attacks, the number of such experts grew exponentially in the US and Europe. Their role in GWOT would be to provide background and up-to-date information about the many ‘terrorist organizations’ that had been identified since the war’s beginning. These experts would come from a variety of different backgrounds, including academia, the intelligence community, the policy community, and the military. They would also inhabit a variety of institutions, including think-tanks, consulting firms, and universities.

These ‘terrorism’ experts would be critical to maintaining the narrative about ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ after its controversial placement on US and UN ‘lists.’ While not intentionally, they have constructed a cohesive history and characterization of ETIM that is riddled with inaccurate and speculative information about the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ of ETIM and, particularly, about this threat’s presence inside China. There are numerous reasons for these inaccuracies, including lack of knowledge of Uyghur history, culture, and especially language, the imperative to present information about organizations to which their only access is propaganda, and their own position in a vast ‘counterterrorism industrial complex,’ which maintains a vested interest in the continued existence of ‘terrorist organizations’ and the threats they allegedly pose.⁵¹ The work of these ‘terrorism’ experts would be critical to maintaining a narrative of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by ETIM to China and the world during the first decade of the war, a time during which this threat was virtually non-existent.

Early literature on ETIM: speculation and criticism

In the immediate aftermath of the September 2002 listing of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization’ by the US and the UN, numerous analysts and academics busied themselves with evaluating this threat’s validity and explaining its nature to policy-makers and the larger public. This proved to be challenging due to the paucity of reliable information about this group. There were no public references to ETIM available in either English or Chinese prior to 2001, and no international experts on the Uyghurs, to my knowledge, had even heard of the group prior to the issuance of the November 2001 PRC document discussed above.⁵² Furthermore, none of these analysts knew the Uyghur language, and only a small minority of them knew Chinese and had a knowledge of Uyghur culture and history. Thus, the only information about ETIM from which such analysts could draw initially were the statements provided by the PRC in the run-up to ETIM’s designation as a ‘terrorist organization’ on US and UN lists, a few sensationalist reports from the late 1990s about Uyghur militancy (also drawing largely on PRC official statements), and speculation regarding how Uyghurs may have come to associate themselves with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Despite the unreliability of the sources on which most early literature about ETIM was based, this body of work would lay a foundation for subsequent characterizations of this group.

Initial sketches of this group following its 2002 designation as a ‘terrorist organization’ can be found on the archived webpages of established think-tanks in the US, such as the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Center for Defense Information.⁵³ The characterization of the group in these short descriptions cautiously approaches questions of ETIM’s capacity and the appropriateness of its designation as a ‘terrorist group,’ but they do all assume that the organization has long been active inside China as one of the largest, ‘most extreme,’ and ‘most militant’ Uyghur organizations seeking independence.⁵⁴ An October 2002 Congressional Research Service report on the ‘terrorism threat’ to China similarly demonstrated the lack of reliable information and openly admitted about ETIM and other alleged Uyghur militant groups that ‘solid information about these groups remains elusive and often confusing,’ but it also suggested that the groups are indeed active and involved in violence inside China.⁵⁵

More influential in the production of knowledge about ETIM than this report or the aforementioned think-tank websites would be the first high-profile book on Al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks on the US, which was written by the controversial Singapore-based ‘terrorism expert’ Rohan Gunaratna in 2002.⁵⁶ In this ‘best-selling’ book, Gunaratna dedicates about three pages to ETIM and the evolution of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs. While this brief section of the book does not cite the Chinese government documents discussed previously, it does adopt their discourse. Without citing any specific sources, Gunaratna notes confidently that ‘today, there are several Islamist groups in Xinjiang fighting for independence, and others have developed an extensive presence in Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan [sic] and Germany, where funds are raised.’⁵⁷ He suggests that this reflects a substantive transformation of Uyghur political objectives from an ethno-nationalist movement to one that is explicitly ‘Pan-Islamic’ in orientation. He further notes, again without citing specific sources, that ‘through a coordinated network, the influx of Chinese Muslims to Pakistan and Afghanistan for indoctrination and training has been frequent in the 1990s.’⁵⁸

In his historical account of how this threat developed, Gunaratna suggests that the Uyghur independence movement, which I assume he equates with a ‘terrorist movement,’ began during the Cultural Revolution and had adopted vaious names, from the Uyghurstan People’s Party to the East Turkistan Party, before settling on the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party, a name that would presumably become the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Afghanistan. He also draws on an unsubstantiated story about the Chinese government training Uyghurs to join the mujahidin in the fight against the Soviets during the 1980s to explain how this group became based in Afghanistan and eventually linked with Al-Qaeda. While Gunaratna’s account of ETIM in the book is brief and only cites two obscure and undetailed sources, it is important for its inclusion in a best-selling book on Al-Qaeda.⁵⁹ As a result, many of his assertions would subsequently show up in later works trying to make sense of ETIM, keeping alive the narrative that this organization represented a significant international security risk with a long history and deep ties to transnational jihadist networks.

A 2003 academic article published in a well-established Criminology journal provides a clear example of how Gunaratna’s book helped subsequently frame the characterization of ETIM among ‘terrorism’ experts, especially in law enforcement. The article prominently cites Gunaratna and takes at face-value the Chinese government’s documents discussed earlier, bolstering their assertions with interviews conducted in China with ‘faculty members in the Anti-Terrorism Division in a criminal justice university.’⁶⁰ Much of the article seeks to explain why ETIM should be considered a ‘terrorism organization’ in the context of the literature on ‘terrorism psychology,’ but this is again based entirely on the suspect evidence provided by the PRC about this group. Furthermore, sloppy research by the author leads to many confusing points that have from time to time re-emerged in literature citing his work, including an assertion that the other groups discussed by PRC documents as part of the nebulous ‘Eastern Turkistan terrorist forces’ are actually sub-groups under ETIM.

It is important to note that a counter-discourse about ETIM was also established at this time among regional experts. In 2004, for example, The East-West Center, a think-tank in Washington, DC, published an important report by James Millward, which critically analyzed the violence in the Uyghur homeland during the 1990s and questioned the validity of a ‘terrorist threat’ to the region.⁶¹ Similarly, other scholars with knowledge of Uyghurs and their minimal links to the outside Islamic world suggested that China’s characterization of a ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs was far over exaggerated.⁶² In more popular policy-oriented media, scholars likewise questioned the Bush administration’s classification of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization,’ implying that it was a calculated move to win China’s support for the invasion of Iraq.⁶³

While this counter-narrative about ETIM moderated US foreign policy positions towards the Uyghurs at this time, many in law enforcement and the military continued to assume that Uyghurs posed a ‘terrorist threat.’ My mother, who worked as a probation officer in New York State at the time, for example, told me that training given to her office in the early 2000s by the FBI characterized Uyghurs as a potential ‘terrorist threat’ to the US and ETIM as a clear part of the Al-Qaeda network. When she told the FBI agent instructor that her son studied Uyghurs, he advised her to warn me to take caution because Uyghurs were among ‘the bad guys.’

This contested nature of the narrative about ETIM was further complicated by the conflicting information emerging from the battlefields of GWOT at the time. While 22 Uyghurs remained in Guantanamo Bay as accused enemy combatants, by 2004, information was emerging that many in the US military had serious reservations about this designation for at least 12 of them.⁶⁴ Additionally, in December 2003, it was reported that the Pakistani military had killed Häsän Mäkhsum, the alleged leader of ETIM, in the northwest of the country in October of that year.⁶⁵ With Mäkhsum’s death, it became unclear what remained of this organization, and there was no evidence that it had any active military operations either in China or in Afghanistan since being designated a ‘terrorist organization’ by the US and the UN.

In this context, the initial narrative about the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs was gradually disappearing from both policy and academic discourse in the US and Europe by 2005. While think-tanks that provided their own sketches of different ‘terrorist groups’ tended to still have entries on ETIM, they mostly played down the seriousness of this group’s threat to both China and the world while still characterizing it as a ‘terrorist organization.’⁶⁶ This trend was further visible in 2006 as the US released five Uyghurs who had been interned in Guantanamo Bay Detention Center to Albania.⁶⁷ The US had decided that these Uyghurs were not ‘enemy combatants’ and, thus, should be released, but not to China where they would likely suffer torture, imprisonment, and/or execution. The fate of these former detainees would revive discussions in popular media about the political nature of ETIM’s designation as a ‘terrorist organization,’ further bringing into question the relevance of this group to GWOT.

The Turkistan Islamic Party and the re-birth of the ETIM narrative

Just as it seemed as if the labeling of Uyghurs as a ‘terrorist threat’ was losing its relevance in the western world, a seemingly new Uyghur militant group made itself known internationally through the internet in 2004. While Häsän Mäkhsum’s ETIM neither had a website nor had posted videos or statements on the internet, this new group seemed to suddenly have the resources to do so. While the organization branded itself as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) rather than as ETIM, its first video, released arouond May of 2004, was an Arabic-language biography of Häsän Mäkhsum, the alleged founder of ETIM.⁶⁸ The video also advertised TIP’s presumably new website – www.tipislamawazi.com. According to the website and the biographical film about Mäkhsum, TIP was merely a new name adopted by ETIM, and this name change had been made in 2000 prior to Mäkhsum’s death.⁶⁹

While TIP’s website and its lone video honoring the legacy of Häsän Mäkhsum did not initially capture much international attention, in 2006, another Uyghur Arabic-language video emerged on the internet, which appeared to be produced by adherents of Abu Musab Al-Suri, the Syrian-born Spanish citizen and well-known jihadist, calling for jihad in Eastern Turkistan. This production did not use the TIP name, but merely had a logo with the stylized name ‘Turkistan’ in Latin and Arabic letters in the top right corner of the video.⁷⁰ In addition to promoting jihad, the video also visually fulfilled most observers’ expectations of the communications of an Islamic ‘terrorist’ group. Prominently displaying a black flag with the Shahadah (Muslim proclamation of faith), the Uyghur speakers pictured in the video, which was dubbed over in Arabic, brandished AK-47 machine guns, wore turbans and camouflage, and covered their faces.

These developments between 2004 and 2006 renewed at least a cautious interest among international ‘terrorism’ experts in the analysis of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs, but the community of people interested in this alleged threat in 2006 remained quite divided over its extent. A 2006 special issue on terrorism in The China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly demonstrates this divide.⁷¹ Of the four articles in the issue, two written by scholars familiar with Uyghurs are explicitly dismissive of the threat posed by ETIM, stressing the PRC’s over-exaggeration of its capabilities, and two, written by a Chinese scholar and by Rohan Gunaratna with a colleague named Kenneth Pereire respectively, make the case that ETIM is closely tied to Al-Qaeda and poses one of the gravest security threats to China.⁷² The article by Gunaratna and Pereire, which discusses the recent aforementioned Abu Musab Al-Suri-related video extensively, further pushes the alarmist narrative about ETIM that Gunaratna employs in his 2002 book on Al-Qaeda, suggesting that the group will likely soon employ suicide bombing techniques inside China and is likely to spearhead an ‘Islamicization’ of the Uyghur conflict with China.⁷³

While regional experts continued to question the importance, or even existance of ETIM, alarmist opinions remained dominant in the literature about the group. Pereire, who co-authored the aforementioned article with Gunaratna, also wrote a 2006 report on ETIM for a Singaporean think-tank, suggesting that the organization represented a serious ‘terrorist threat’ that was ‘underestimated.’⁷⁴ Likewise, a 2007 academic article by Liza Steele and Raymond Kuo concluded that ‘the Uighurs’ [sic] social fragmentation and discontent have spurred an Islamist salient threat of extremism that cannot be ignored.’⁷⁵

Perhaps the clearest academic example of this alarmist interpretation of ETIM at the time is a book by Martin Wayne, which examined China’s ‘counterterrorism’ efforts vis-à-vis Uyghurs through the prism of the counter-insurgency theories that shaped US military strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁷⁶ Wayne, who is a comparative security studies expert rather than a regional studies scholar, makes the case that Uyghur militants have unleashed an insurgency inside their homeland that justifies the PRC’s ‘counterterrorism’ efforts. Citing Gunaratna extensively, Wayne asserts that Uyghur militants have a long history of experience in Afghanistan, referring to past claims of large numbers of Uyghurs trained by the PRC to fight the Soviets, and are seeking to establish a society-wide insurgency inside the Uyghur homeland by working with the global jihad movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.⁷⁷ In doing so, he also praises the PRC’s efforts to suppress this threat, suggesting that they ‘represent one of the few successes in the global struggle against Islamist terrorism.’⁷⁸ Wayne attributes this success to ‘bottom-up’ ‘counter-extremist’ strategies that seek to incentivize Uyghur integration into the PRC.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics and TIP’s ‘coming-out’ party

If the alleged re-emergence of ETIM in the form of TIP invited increased attention from academics and analysts in 2006–2007, it would not be until the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics that this interest would become widespread. This new attention to ETIM/TIP would be fueled by both the Chinese government and TIP itself. On 1 March 2008, TIP released a video message from its alleged Emir, Abdul Häq, who, holding a rifle in front of a map of the Uyghur homeland, warned the international community not to take part in the Olympics because his group was prepared to attack the games.⁷⁹ While this video’s poor production quality did not make TIP look very sophisticated, the threat it posed quickly escalated in the eyes of many when, within a week of the video’s release, the Chinese government claimed that it had foiled an attack on a plane where a Uyghur woman was alleged to have brought gasoline canisters on board.⁸⁰ Subsequently, the Chinese authorities would also claim to have broken up numerous alleged ‘terrorist’ plots by other Uyghurs inside China during the same time.⁸¹ The combination of these claims with TIP’s video had suddenly made the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs inside China a matter of world news in the spring of 2008.

Predictably, these events also caught the attention of ‘terrorism’ analysts in the west. The ‘terrorism’ monitoring websites that had been established in the years since 2001 published several analytical pieces on the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs to the Olympics. The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor featured an article by Elizabeth Van Wie Davis outlining the validity of the threat posed by ETIM in early April 2008. The author writes that US intelligence had long known of this group’s links to Al-Qaeda and that camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan had trained Uyghur militants since the 1980s.⁸² She also assumes that this group is behind a number of alleged violent incidents inside China in the run-up to the Olympics, posing a real threat to the games.⁸³ In May, StratFor published a three part series on the Uyghurs and their threat to the Olympics.⁸⁴ StratFor’s analysis of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs was much more skeptical than that of Davis, suggesting that it was being manipulated by Beijing and that events inside China likely had little to do with ETIM.⁸⁵ Nonetheless, it still recognized ETIM as a potentially escalating ‘terrorist threat.’

This interest in ETIM/TIP was further fueled by the group’s subsequent video releases around the Olympic Games. One of these videos claimed responsibility for bus bombings in Shanghai and Kunming in the run up to the Olympics, which the Chinese government later denied were carried out by Uyghurs, and the other, beginning with dramatic animation of a burning Beijing Olympics flag and a simulation of an explosion in the Olympic stadium, promised further attacks the week before the opening ceremonies.⁸⁶ Indeed, in the week surrounding the opening ceremonies, there were two violent incidents in the Uyghur homeland involving alleged Uyghur attacks on security organs, military, and police.⁸⁷ While these acts were certainly not ‘terrorism’ per this book’s working definition and there was no evidence to connect ETIM/TIP to them, the violence raised more speculation about the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ of ETIM/ TIP inside China.

The events surrounding the emergence of TIP and its threats against the Olympics had very much re-fueled policy debates in the US and Europe about the nature of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs. While public statements from western democracies continued to raise concerns about the PRC’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs and to criticize the misuse of ‘counterterrorism’ approaches for suppressing domestic dissent, these states also acknowledged that China might have some legitimate concerns about a ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs. Furthermore, given that there were simultaneously debates within the US government about the fate of the Uyghurs in Guantanamo, the Uyghurs were increasingly becoming a politicized issue in domestic US politics. ‘Counterterrorism’ expert, Thomas Joscelyn, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD), for example, argued in a series of opinion pieces that the Guantanamo Uyghurs’ admitted interactions with Abdul Häq, who had allegedly trained most of them at a camp in Afghanistan and who was documented now threatening the Olympics, were proof of these detainees’ status as ‘enemy combatants.’⁸⁸ It was also at this time that the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security issued additions to its ‘terrorist list’ in October 2008, adding eight people, all of whom were said to be core members of ETIM, with Abdul Häq at the top of the list.⁸⁹

The post-Olympics narrative of ETIM

In the years after the Olympics, the tracking of ETIM/TIP as an alleged ‘terrorist threat’ by analysts and security studies academics continued to increase. Among private intelligence companies and non-profits specializing in terrorist threats, IntelCenter created a threat wall chart of ETIM/TIP leadership structure based on information from videos and TIP’s website, and the Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation posted translations of items from TIP’s website as well as of transcripts of several TIP videos.⁹⁰ Furthermore, the Jamestown Foundation, Search for International Terrorist Entities, the FDD, and other organizations specializing in analysis of ‘terrorist threats’ expanded their coverage of ETIM/TIP in their regular analytical bulletins. In this way, the narrative of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs was sustained for the foreseeable future, and international attention to it was maintained.

These events had also caught the attention of the larger ‘counterterrorism industrial complex’ at this time, and the US took its first substantive acts against alleged Uyghur ‘terrorists’ since its 2002 ‘listing’ of ETIM and subsequent detention of Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay. In April 2009, the US Treasury placed Abdul Häq, the presumed leader of ETIM/TIP, and the first person on China’s updated ‘terrorist’ list released six months earlier, on a sanctions list. In the press conference that announced this action, the US Treasury spokesperson noted that ‘Abdul Häq commands a terror group that sought to sow violence and fracture international unity at the 2008 Olympic Games in China; today, we stand together with the world in condemning this brutal terrorist and isolating him from the international financial system.’⁹¹ In February of 2010, the US would go further in its pursuit of Abdul Häq, targeting him in a drone strike that was alleged to have killed him.⁹²

The western analytical literature about ETIM/TIP would expand exponentially from 2008–2012. The events surrounding the Olympics provided an impetus for this increased interest in the alleged ‘terrorism threat’ posed by Uyghurs inside China, but TIP would also fuel this interest through the production of many new and better produced videos as well as through the regular publication of an Arabic-language magazine from 2008.⁹³ As IntelCenter, which specializes in the analysis of videos produced by alleged ‘terrorist organizations,’ points out, after having produced its first five videos between 2004 and 2008, TIP would go on to produce 55 videos between 2009 and 2012, putting it in IntelCenter’s ‘top-tier’ of ‘Jihadi video producers.’⁹⁴

This sudden proliferation of media from TIP did much to change the global narrative about the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ associated with Uyghurs. If the many new TIP videos offered more material for ‘terrorism analysts’ to engage, it is important to note that such videos are first and foremost produced as propaganda and must be analyzed from that perspective.⁹⁵ In TIP’s case, it had numerous messages it wanted to convey to different populations. To the Chinese government, it wanted to promote an image of strength and the capacity to challenge the PRC through violent tactics. To its presumed sponsors in the Arab world, for whom it created Arab language media, it wanted to demonstrate its religiosity, its knowledge of Salafism, and its association with other jihadist groups. Finally, to Uyghurs inside China, the group sought to portray a long and cohesive history that linked it to Uyghurs’ historical struggle against Chinese rule, while also encouraging Uyghurs in the homeland to join them in jihad by undertaking local attacks. While these sources do provide a window into TIP’s ideology, goals, and capabilities when examined critically, most analysts have approached them at face-value as communiques of an established ‘terrorist organization.’ Furthermore, since these analysts lack Uyghur language skills, they rely on those few videos produced in Arabic or only the visual cues from the many produced in Uyghur.

Although the 2009 Urumqi riots were obviously not instigated by TIP or any other Uyghur militant movements, they attracted the interest of ‘terrorism’ analysts when the Algeria-based Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb called for revenge on China for its killing of Uyghur Muslims, the first time a mainstream Arab jihadist group had threatened China publicly or had taken up the Uyghur cause more generally.⁹⁶ In addition, the Singaporean ‘terrorism’ expert Gunaratna would fuel claims of a ‘terrorist’ connection to the riots in an interview for Xinhua news agency where he noted that the WUC, which the government claimed was responsible for the violence, included many sympathizers of ETIM.⁹⁷ The Chinese government would also further fuel this alleged connection between ‘terrorism’ and the riots by reporting that it was arresting increased numbers of alleged Uyghur ‘terrorists’ in the post-riot crackdown in the region. Finally, these factors were exacerbated by claims in 2010 of two alleged foiled ‘terrorist plots’ on Chinese interests purportedly planned by Uyghurs in Norway and Dubai respectively.⁹⁸ While the unclear circumstances surrounding these alleged planned attacks will be discussed in the next chapter, it is worth noting here that, for many analysts, this appeared to provide evidence that TIP’s operations, while remaining focused on China, had become internationalized and a component of the Al-Qaeda threat.

In this context, it is not surprising that 2010 saw the publication of two of the most sensationalist books on the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs. The first, simply entitled The ETIM, was written by two journalists with no Uyghur language skills who meticulously, but mostly uncritically, combined Chinese state, TIP, and ‘terrorism’ analysts’ sources to describe this group, its activities, history, and ideology.⁹⁹ In many ways, this book serves as a monument to the cohesive, yet flawed, narrative about this group that ‘terrorism’ analysts built during the first decade of GWOT. The second of these books was a project of Rohan Gunaratna in collaboration with both another Singaporean and a Chinese colleague from Macau, which focuses on issues of ethnic conflict in China.¹⁰⁰ Gunaratna’s manuscript, while suggesting that the PRC should be more humane in its ‘counterterrorism’ efforts, also provides a very alarmist characterization of ETIM/TIP as a serious ‘extremist’ and ‘terrorist’ threat inside China.¹⁰¹

In general, the literature produced by ‘terrorism’ analysts and academics in security studies about ETIM/TIP between 2009 and 2012 established a much more cohesive narrative about this group than previously, but the accuracy of this narrative must be questioned given the thin evidence upon which it was based. While regional experts continued to question the validity of TIP’s threat to China, ‘terrorism’ analysts, who located the group within international militant Muslim networks, tended to ‘hype’ the threat it posed to the PRC.¹⁰² The literature on ETIM/TIP at this time had more material to draw from for contemporary analysis given the efforts of TIP’s media wing, but it relied primarily on those TIP sources that were in the Arabic or Turkish languages, as well as those few that had been translated into English. It also frequently drew background information from more speculative and flawed analysis about ETIM’s evolution and historical continuity published earlier, all ultimately based on PRC state claims.¹⁰³

Thus, a decade after ETIM’s designation by the US and UN, questions of this group’s origins, actual nature, and assumed threat remained unclear and contested. Yet, because analysts confidently characterized the group in their work, the ‘counterterrorism industrial complex’ continued to assume that ETIM/TIP posed a dangerous ‘terrorist threat’ that justified its place on the US and UN ‘terrorism lists.’ This state of affairs was partly due to the liberal assumptions and lack of detailed research that go into ‘terrorism’ experts’ comparative analysis, but it was also an inevitable product of studying a phenomenon that has no consistent definition. For most of the western ‘terrorism analysts’ cited here, a ‘terrorist organization’ is any non-state group that employs violence in the name of Salafi-inspired political Islam and is designated by a western power as ‘terrorists,’ but for the PRC, ‘terrorism’ has a broader meaning that encompasses any articulation of the unitary threat it calls the ‘three evils’: any calls for self-determination (‘separatism’), any expression of Islam not approved by the state (‘extremism’), and any act of violence perpetrated by Uyghurs (‘terrorism’). Both of these definitions are extremely problematic on their own and serve the interests of those who propagate them, but their co-existence in the narratives reproduced about ETIM/TIP is even more problematic and only further obscures the accuracy of characterizing this group as a ‘terrorist organization.’

The designation of ETIM/TIP as a ‘terrorism organization’ is all the more concerning if one looks more closely at the reality of the Uyghur militants who, at least in the eyes of ‘terrorism analysts,’ were associated with ETIM during the first decade of GWOT. While ETIM’s international designation as a ‘terrorist organization’ and the plethora of literature written about the group by ‘terrorism analysts’ would suggest that this was a cohesive group that has a long history of carrying out violent attacks inside China and that, at least since 1998, was an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, my own analysis of those Uyghurs who are assumed to have been members of ETIM/ TIP at this time suggests that none of these assumptions are fully accurate.