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Xinjiang: Front line against terror
By Xu Lingui and Cao Zhiheng |
September 15, 2010, Wednesday
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DRY cleaning store-owner Cao Xia hears about violence quite often in her city of Aksu, a remote place in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, over the 23 years she has lived in the city.
But fear gripped her anew when she heard about the recent bomb attack near her daughter's school. On August 19, three attackers drove an explosives-laden electric tricycle into a crowd on the outskirts of Aksu. The blast killed eight and wounded 15 others.
"They were brutal," said Cao, who migrated from central China's Henan Province with her husband when she was in her early twenties. "After all these years, I thought I had turned numb to the violence. But now I really fear I might die when I go out onto the street."
The Aksu bombing ended a one-year break in violence - the first attack since the deadly Urumqi riot on July 5, 2009. And it was about two years since the bomb attacks in Xinjiang that occurred at around the time of the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Authorities blamed the "three forces" - an umbrella category for separatists, extremists and terrorists - for the attacks.
Xinjiang - with 41.5 percent of its population Uygurs, a largely Muslim Chinese ethnic group - is China's front line against terrorism. The region borders eight central and west Asian countries, many of which have been attacked by terrorist and extremist militant groups.
Despite years of crackdowns, analysts and local officials say the threat, especially from the "East Turkistan" forces, persists.
With the aim of splitting Xinjiang off from China, the "East Turkistan" forces appeared in the 1930s to 1940s and turned extremely violent in the 1990s, says Pan Zhiping, a researcher with the Central Asia Studies Institute under the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences.
Pan says that among the "East Turkistan" forces, the most violent and dangerous is the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) - a terrorist organization based somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The United Nations and the Chinese government have labeled it an international terrorist organization. According to the Chinese police, the group is now led by Memetiming Memeti, 39, after its former head, Hasan Mahsum, was killed by US-led coalition forces in Pakistan in 2003. Al-Qaeda has provided funds and training to the group.
Zhang Xiuming, a retired senior security official of Xinjiang, says dozens of terrorist organizations and armed groups are based in the crescent-shaped belt to the west of Xinjiang - parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan - turning the region into a hotbed of terrorism.
In Urumqi, the air remains tense more than one year after the July 5, 2009 riot which led to the deaths of 197 and the wounding of 1,600.
Authorities named Uygur woman Rebiya Kadeer, president of the Germany-registered World Uygur Congress (WUC), the prime suspect for inciting the unrest. The WUC was listed by Beijing as a terrorist organization in 2003.
The Chinese central government has unveiled unprecedented aid packages to boost development in Xinjiang. The government aims to narrow the gap between Xinjiang and other inland regions as much as possible over the next 10 years. That means Xinjiang's annual growth over the next five years should reach 10.5 percent per year. But the growth target may be missed if stability concerns run deep.
(The authors are writers at Xinhua news agency.)
But fear gripped her anew when she heard about the recent bomb attack near her daughter's school. On August 19, three attackers drove an explosives-laden electric tricycle into a crowd on the outskirts of Aksu. The blast killed eight and wounded 15 others.
"They were brutal," said Cao, who migrated from central China's Henan Province with her husband when she was in her early twenties. "After all these years, I thought I had turned numb to the violence. But now I really fear I might die when I go out onto the street."
The Aksu bombing ended a one-year break in violence - the first attack since the deadly Urumqi riot on July 5, 2009. And it was about two years since the bomb attacks in Xinjiang that occurred at around the time of the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Authorities blamed the "three forces" - an umbrella category for separatists, extremists and terrorists - for the attacks.
Xinjiang - with 41.5 percent of its population Uygurs, a largely Muslim Chinese ethnic group - is China's front line against terrorism. The region borders eight central and west Asian countries, many of which have been attacked by terrorist and extremist militant groups.
Despite years of crackdowns, analysts and local officials say the threat, especially from the "East Turkistan" forces, persists.
With the aim of splitting Xinjiang off from China, the "East Turkistan" forces appeared in the 1930s to 1940s and turned extremely violent in the 1990s, says Pan Zhiping, a researcher with the Central Asia Studies Institute under the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences.
Pan says that among the "East Turkistan" forces, the most violent and dangerous is the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) - a terrorist organization based somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The United Nations and the Chinese government have labeled it an international terrorist organization. According to the Chinese police, the group is now led by Memetiming Memeti, 39, after its former head, Hasan Mahsum, was killed by US-led coalition forces in Pakistan in 2003. Al-Qaeda has provided funds and training to the group.
Zhang Xiuming, a retired senior security official of Xinjiang, says dozens of terrorist organizations and armed groups are based in the crescent-shaped belt to the west of Xinjiang - parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan - turning the region into a hotbed of terrorism.
In Urumqi, the air remains tense more than one year after the July 5, 2009 riot which led to the deaths of 197 and the wounding of 1,600.
Authorities named Uygur woman Rebiya Kadeer, president of the Germany-registered World Uygur Congress (WUC), the prime suspect for inciting the unrest. The WUC was listed by Beijing as a terrorist organization in 2003.
The Chinese central government has unveiled unprecedented aid packages to boost development in Xinjiang. The government aims to narrow the gap between Xinjiang and other inland regions as much as possible over the next 10 years. That means Xinjiang's annual growth over the next five years should reach 10.5 percent per year. But the growth target may be missed if stability concerns run deep.
(The authors are writers at Xinhua news agency.)
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