The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (14 page)

The 1980s were a relatively peaceful time for Xinjiang, when Beijing saw economic and religious opportunities for the Uighurs as the best means to stabilize the province, but in the 1990s, that changed. Unrest in Xinjiang was already brewing by 1988, when small-scale protests in Urumqi erupted over the publication of a book that many Uighurs believed contained racial slurs.
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Tensions over growing Han migration and economic inequality had started to increase, and, following the fall of the Soviet Union, China had reason to view the disturbances in the province as a serious strategic threat: as the Tajiks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Uzbeks all established their own independent Central Asian homelands, Beijing feared that separatist sentiment in Xinjiang would strengthen.
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The expansion of new transit and trade routes across the former Soviet republics made it far easier to move across the long-closed borders, giving easier access to overseas Uighur communities and other new pockets of support and influence.
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One of the most problematic cases was Tajikistan. The country was convulsed by civil war almost immediately after achieving its independence in 1991, drawing in Central Asian militants who would later give vital backing to their
Xinjiang counterparts. The near-collapse of state authority made it a major corridor for weapons, drugs, and militants, running all the way through from Afghanistan to China’s western borders.
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Beijing’s concerns went beyond the practical support that might be extended to separatist groups—they were also worried about an Islamic revival in Xinjiang. Islam had become a rallying point for Uighur protests, which officials increasingly pinned on the influence of “illegal religious activities”.
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The result was a cycle of unrest, violence and repression. Thousands are estimated to have fled from the often brutal campaigns of arrests, raids, executions and extra-judicial killings that took place.
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The “Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure” campaign is described by one Xinjiang expert as having “condemned hundreds of men and women to death by shooting, used torture to obtain confessions, jailed thousands, and stripped many others of the right to work or to practice Islam—all in the name of quelling ‘splittism’, religious extremism, and terrorism”.
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Many found shelter in neighbouring Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, or went further afield. Some were caught up in the war in Tajikistan.
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Others made their way to a Pakistan that was now awash with the men, money, machine-guns and sense of mission left over after the
mujahideen
’s battles against the Soviets. Inside and outside Xinjiang, the cocktail of political tension and violence threatened to have a convulsive impact. A leaked Chinese government document in 1998 listed Uighur independence movements as the main threat to the stability of the Chinese state.
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Many of the Uighurs who became embroiled in the world of militancy across this period appear to have had little intention of doing so. In some cases, extremist groups controlled the crucial transit routes they used through Central Asia. In other instances, young men heading to Pakistani
madrassa
s to seek religious education, or simply a new life away from the Chinese government’s crackdowns, arrived at what were essentially way-stations for jihadi recruitment. The stories of two Uighurs from Kashgar who were captured together in Afghanistan in 1999 and sent to a POW camp in the Panjshir valley are representative. Nur Ahmed went to Pakistan to study in a
madrassa
in Rawalpindi, which provided him with free board and lodging.
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After six months of Quranic memorization—Ahmed spoke no Urdu or Arabic and so could understand neither the text nor his teachers—his principal encouraged
him to go to fight in Afghanistan. A Taliban representative in Peshawar paid for his travel by car to Kabul where Ahmed received twenty days of light weapons training before being sent to the front. He was soon captured. With him was Abdul Jalil, who made his way to Pakistan via Karachi and ended up in Kashgarabad, a large building and guesthouse in Rawalpindi that was run and financed by fellow Uighurs. He was told that a
madrassa
in Kabul would give him free tuition, board and lodging and duly headed there with three other Uighurs. After two months he was instructed to go and fight with the Taliban. He received only five days of weapons training before being sent to the front, where he too was quickly captured. Both Jalil and Ahmed were told that they would be fighting against Americans and Russians in Afghanistan. They were instead being sent into the middle of a civil war.
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Similar stories of naive-sounding young men stumbling into trouble crop up again and again in the Guantánamo Bay case files. Of all the nationals who were detained in the first US military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001–2, Chinese Uighurs were seen to pose the least threat of resuming their involvement in militant activities, and US courts ordered every single one of them—twenty-two in all—released.
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China’s credibility problem when it comes to Uighur “terrorists” goes well beyond the fact that so few of them seemed to be a credible threat. Beijing’s tendency to attribute almost any act of violence in Xinjiang to “separatists”, to claim malevolent intent behind even the most peaceful of protests, and to criminalize political groups such as the World Uighur Congress and the East Turkistan Information Centre leaves the line between the terrorist, the activist and the aggrieved citizen permanently blurred.
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However, this well-founded scepticism about Beijing’s approach should not obscure the fact that there is, and has long been, organized militant opposition to Chinese rule in Xinjiang.

The first major clandestine opposition group had pan-Turkic and Marxist affiliations, rather than Islamic ones. Formed in 1967, the Eastern Turkistan People’s Revolutionary Party was composed of young Uighurs and former officials from the short-lived East Turkistan republic. It was backed by the KGB, which provided weapons, funds and radio transmitters,
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and advocated an “independent, secular, and communist East Turkistan oriented towards the Soviet Union”.
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The main instigator of insurrectionary activities through the late 1960s and the 1970s, deemed at one point to be the most serious “counter-revolutionary
separatist conspiracy”
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since the founding of the PRC, it would eventually fade from the scene following the arrests of its leaders and the withdrawal of Soviet support.
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Taking over its mantle was the forerunner of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement: the East Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP). Like its Marxist predecessor, ETIP also tapped into pan-Turkic currents and sought an independent homeland, but it was closely associated with the Islamist revival in Xinjiang. It first came to prominence during an uprising at Baren, near Kashgar, in April 1990. Like many of the descriptions of militant activity in Xinjiang throughout the decade, accounts of the Baren incident are contradictory, and seem to reflect competing political objectives over how the scale of the violence, the motives behind it, and the response from the Chinese government should be seen.
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The local ETIP leader was a man named Zäydin Yusuf, who had recruited members of the party at mosques in Southern Xinjiang,
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which were used to “disseminate a call to arms”.
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Hundreds of men marched on government offices in Baren, protesting against everything from the Chinese government’s policies of forced abortions for Uighur women to the exploitation of Xinjiang’s resources, chanting the
shahada
and in some instances jihadi slogans.
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The Chinese government sent in troops but in the resulting riots the Uighur fighters captured rifles and ammunition. In the end, large-scale military deployments and even the PLA Air Force were required to crush the mini-insurrection.
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ETIP appear to have suffered from the subsequent clampdown, with many of its activists arrested or killed.
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The Chinese government held other Islamist groups responsible for the attacks that plagued Xinjiang in the intervening years. A bus attack at Chinese New Year in 1992, for instance, was attributed to the “Shock Brigade of the Islamic Reformist Party”.
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The “East Turkistan Democratic Islamic Party” was credited with bomb attacks that killed four victims in 1993.
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A series of bus bombings in Urumqi on the day of Deng Xiaoping’s funeral in February 1997—the last major attack in Xinjiang for a decade—was pinned on the “East Turkistan National Unity Alliance”.
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But it was ETIP that was the reference point for future generations of militants, who would hark back to Zäydin Yusuf and the Baren rebellion in their propaganda videos. When the organization was reconstituted, it was in a new base: Afghanistan.

Uighurs had been involved in the
mujahideen
’s campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s but only in small numbers, and not in separate
fighting units. One visitor to the training camps they attended in Khost and Paktia described them as “lost in the huge crowd of foreign militants. They didn’t have a very visible presence.”
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It did nonetheless mean that a cadre of Uighurs were radicalized and integrated into a network of relationships with other militants. These relationships would prove useful for ETIP’s new leader, Hasan Mahsum, who is believed to have taken over the leadership of the party in 1997. Mahsum was born in Shule County, in the far west of Xinjiang, and studied at an Islamic school established by one of ETIP’s founders.
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He was imprisoned for several months as a result of his role in the Baren uprising, and following a subsequent arrest in October 1993 on terrorism charges, he was sentenced to three years of re-education through labour.
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After another arrest during the first Strike Hard campaign in 1996, he finally left Xinjiang. His travels took him to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, where he sought funding and support from sympathizers for the ETIP’s activities, without a great deal of success.
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Taliban-led Afghanistan proved more fertile territory. The Taliban granted Mahsum an Afghan passport
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and allowed him to set up training camps, as well as running the operations of the group out of Kabul, which in 1998 became the headquarters of the group now known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
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China claims that ETIM sent “scores of terrorists” into China, establishing bases in Xinjiang and setting up training stations and workshops to produce weapons, ammunition and explosives.
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The group’s capacity to operate effectively in Xinjiang remains a point of debate, but the scale of its Afghan base was in less doubt: ETIM itself claims to have trained its members in camps in Khost, Bagram, Herat, and Kabul.
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It was not only ETIM activities in Afghanistan that were a problem for China. It was also the Central Asian militants who worked with them, whose backing would later prove essential to the group’s survival. The most important of these was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The organization was founded by Tohir Yuldashev, an Islamic leader from the Ferghana Valley, and Juma Namangani, a former Soviet paratrooper who had fought as a conscript in Afghanistan in the Soviet forces.
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The two men were initially based in Uzbekistan, but they spent much of the 1990s operating from outside the country. Namangani, who ran the IMU’s military operations, was heavily engaged in the civil war in Tajikistan, where he led a group that included Chechens, Arabs, Afghans,
Tajiks—and Uighurs—in opposition to the Dushanbe government.
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Yuldashev spent the same period in Peshawar, where he built relations with the Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, Turkish and Russian intelligence agencies, transnational terrorist groups, and Pakistani militants and financiers, including the JUI.
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Yuldashev and Namangani formally established the IMU in 1998, and moved their operational base to Afghanistan. They continued to launch forays into Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan from bases in the north of the country, as well as fighting on the Taliban’s behalf.
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From China’s perspective, however, the greatest problem they posed was their capacity to provide a network and support base for an array of other Central Asian militants. The IMU would ultimately become ETIM’s hosts, first in Afghanistan and later in Pakistan, where the two groups ended up becoming virtually intertwined.
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China’s response to the Uighur militants’ growing connections to extremists across the region was to internationalize its Strike Hard campaign. Governments in Central Asia were pressed by Beijing to clamp down on the “three evils”: terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism.
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The founding in 1996 of the Shanghai Five, which later evolved into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, was in large part a product of Beijing’s concerns about Uighur militants and their Central Asian backers.
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For much of the 1990s, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan—the original members, with Russia and China—were the principal focus, and China provided aid and military support to facilitate their efforts.
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In the late 1990s, as ETIM established its base in Afghanistan, China’s campaign stepped up in south-west Asia too. The task in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, was a more complex one for the Chinese than that of bolstering the tough, secular-minded Central Asian states in their crackdowns on religious militants (and other opponents that were tarred with the same brush). For Pakistan, these militants were a vital asset of its intelligence services, and in Afghanistan, they comprised its government.