Anti-Chinese Sentiment Fuels Separatist Discontent in Border Region

Imam Aronghan Aji looked the image of respectability as he set out in clerical robes and white turban to lead morning prayers at the ancient Adighar Mosque.

But the leader of state-sanctioned Islam in China’s rugged western reaches never made it. He was stabbed by assassins intent on wiping out Chinese rule. A year and a half later, the dignified octogenarian’s health is frailer, his gait slower, his psyche shaken and his assailants’ message clearer.

“Bribed and incited by separatists, these people were told others would rally around them if they killed patriotic religious leaders,” said Imam Mamatmin, an aide to Aronghan.

A call to rise up is reverberating among Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. Separatists, better financed and better armed than ever before, are feeding on age-old fears and new discontents.

Anti-Chinese sentiment has grown explosive on a volatile mix of religious ferment from the Islamic world, nationalism from newly independent Central Asian countries and anger that Chinese migrants seem to be getting richer while native Turkic-speaking Muslims remain poor.

Although small in number, the separatists can count on support from disaffected Muslims at home and a network of lobbyists championing their cause from Istanbul to Washington.

Since attacks began in early 1996, pro-Chinese clerics have been assassinated in at least four cities--seven on one day alone; bombs exploded nearly simultaneously on three buses in the regional capital of Urumqi; and a border city erupted in a riot. The separatists also are suspected of blowing up a bus in Beijing, 1,400 miles away.

Authorities have closed mosques, conducted mass arrests and deployed army patrols, but the attacks have continued. Months after last February’s riot in Yili, police were uncovering plots for more unrest and finding caches of guns, explosives and separatist propaganda, the state-run Xinjiang Daily reported.

Western investors keen on developing Xinjiang’s oil reserves are already being warned by industry analysts that the violence may disrupt their business.

Friction in Xinjiang is a function of geography. Through its rolling grasslands, snow-capped mountains and forbidding deserts run rich oases that form China’s best land routes to the rest of Eurasia.

The ancient Silk Road that carried luxury goods between China and the Roman Empire traversed Xinjiang (pronounced sheen-jyahng). British spies fought Russian agents, first imperial and then Bolshevik, for influence in the region in the espionage epic known as “the great game.”

“The history of Xinjiang is one of great game politics, and the new great game is bigger and badder than the old great game,” said Dru Gladney, an expert on China’s Muslims at the University of Hawaii.

As China opened Xinjiang’s once closed border over the last decade, Muslim traders and pilgrims traveled the region and brought back radical views of Islamic nationalism. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran have sent money to spur trade and religion and sway public allegiances. From Afghanistan come arms and opium.

Talk in the bazaars of Urumqi and Kashgar, an oasis city on the western border, is not of revolt but resentment. Uighurs, members of Xinjiang’s largest ethnic group, complain that incoming ethnic Han Chinese have unfairly benefited from the still poor area’s recent rapid growth.

Few Uighur faces are found among the oil workers in the Tarim Basin, a Texas-sized wasteland. A new town of gleaming white-tile buildings built to service the industry in the ancient caravan town of Korla mainly houses 4,500 workers from other parts of China.

Anger swells even in Kashgar, an overwhelmingly Uighur city near the Kirghiz and Tajik borders where Chinese influence seems limited to the writing on shop and street signs and a statue of Mao Tse-tung.

The border trade that helped the city thrive a few years ago has stagnated. A swath of the city’s huge bazaar set aside for small traders from neighboring countries stands empty, much of their business taken over by state firms.

“Business is bad. Uighurs can’t get permission to do the things that the Han get easily. Conflict between us is becoming more intense,” said Adil, an unemployed Uighur hanging out in Kashgar’s new town center.

Despite the simmering resentment, Uighurs in Kashgar seem to farm, trade and worship without regard to the Chinese, whom they outnumber 3 to 1.

Muslim men young and old crowd by the thousands into the 550-year-old Adighar Mosque, Xinjiang’s largest, for midday prayers. Imam Aronghan insists his state-sanctioned mosque is flourishing harmoniously and free from government interference.

The imam, a member of Xinjiang’s top government advisory body, would not answer questions about the attempt on his life on May 12, 1996. His assistant, Imam Mamatmin, described the assassins, later caught by police, as people from other parts of Xinjiang in the service of unspecified foreign forces.

“These are not religious believers, but they are cloaking themselves in religion. According to the holy Koran, murder, arson and robbery are not allowed,” said Mamatmin, also a government advisor. “They can never succeed. Our country is strong. Our people are getting richer.”

The imams refused to say if economic discontent was fueling separatism, suggesting that such questions be left to political leaders. The leader of Xinjiang’s Communist Party, Wang Lequan, canceled an arranged interview with Associated Press and did not answer written questions on the issue.

Communist authorities have clearly linked separatism to what they call illegal religious activities. A speech by the head of Xinjiang’s legislature in July and published by Xinjiang Daily seven weeks later said separatists want to set up “the Islamic Republic of East Turkestan.” Other reports warn of actions by the “Party of God.”

Gladney, the Muslim expert, said most Uighurs are wary of separatism, given the experiences of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia--civil war in Tajikistan, poverty in Turkmenistan. But the crackdown has alienated many Uighurs.

“Very few people are engaged in separatist activities,” said an Uighur in the regional government, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his position. “But the authorities have branded these people too severely. They’re turning an entire people into an enemy.”