China Clings to Turbulent Central Asian Outpost

No one wants to talk about the riot. Not the Muslim men trading gossip over tea and mutton kebabs. Not the merchant selling raisins and dates from famous Central Asian oases. Not China’s busy Communist Party functionary.

The most serious challenge this decade to Chinese rule over its predominantly Muslim far west region, the Yining riot runs like an ominous undercurrent through the Xinjiang region.

Nearly two years since the upheaval, the border city remains shaken by fear. Its Han Chinese and Muslim ethnics are sullen. Gun battles and court-ordered executions persist.

“This is not our place anymore. We’re a minority,” said one merchant, a member of Xinjiang’s largest Muslim ethnic group, the Uighurs. “The Chinese and the Uighurs can never be together.” Like other Uighurs, he agreed to talk with a reporter only on condition of anonymity.

As Yining goes, so goes the rest of Xinjiang province. Ethnic nationalism, resurgent Islam and a trade in heroin and weapons that has fueled separatist violence have pierced the porous borders of China’s strategic buffer land with Central Asia.

With resentment over Chinese migration and perceived income disparities sharpening, the simmering conflict has become the most violent internal threat China faces and could ignite ethnic turmoil in other parts of the country.

China’s Communist Party leaders now nervously watch the border, trying to shepherd the prosperity that greater trade with Central Asia could bring while weeding out smugglers of contraband and spreaders of subversion.

Border patrols have been stepped up. People who live near the border with Kazakhstan complain of stricter controls on their movements. Party officials even plan by the end of next year to find permanent housing for the last of the nomads of the border steppes.

On an inspection tour of Xinjiang last summer, party General Secretary Jiang Zemin urged stability above all. He cited economic links with Central Asia as key. Vowing to carry out Jiang’s orders, Xinjiang’s top party official has ordered a “high state of alert” against separatists and their foreign supporters.

“They are intensifying collaboration, plotting to open a new test of strength with us in a struggle that is ever sharper and more complex,” party secretary Wang Lequan told a meeting of regional officials in December.

Yining stands at the crossroads of prosperity and separatism. The city lies on a sprawling oasis that caravans used for centuries to bring Chinese silk bound for Europe across Xinjiang’s forbidding deserts. Uighurs and Kazakhs declared a short-lived East Turkestan Republic there in the last years of World War II.

Tensions between the Muslims and the Chinese worsened when the Soviet Union disintegrated and new nations arose in Central Asia. Yining, where the drab high-rises that blight most Chinese cities tower over onion-domed mosques, is only 280 miles from Kazakhstan’s bustling Almaty city, about one-sixth the distance to Beijing.

On Feb. 5, 1997, calls for independence by Uighurs boiled over in protest. Hundreds took to the streets shouting, “God is great,” and, “Independence for Xinjiang.” Police and soldiers moved in; two days of beating, shooting and burning ensued.

The protest’s genesis and the casualty count in quelling it are disputed. Zhou Yuan, party secretary for the Yili region, of which Yining is the capital, refused during an interview to discuss why the protest erupted. He blamed it on a few organizers who hoodwinked “several hundred” people, and he stuck to the official death toll of 10.

Accounts from Uighur exile groups, purportedly from eyewitnesses, said the protests came amid a crackdown on religious gatherings. They said security forces needed water cannons, tear gas and bullets to quell two days of protests and estimated deaths at more than 100.

A legacy of bad feelings and dread remains. “If the people and the military unite to a man then who in the world will dare to be our enemy,” reads one government signboard in Yining.

One Xinjiang official warned foreign reporters against asking about the riot. Uighurs approached on the street refused to talk about it, lending credence to a rumor circulated by exiles that an order of silence was issued to the populace.

“In our culture, we do what the father says. If he says, ‘Don’t smoke,’ we don’t smoke. Whatever he says, right or wrong, we do,” said one Uighur food hawker at a night market in a Muslim neighborhood.

The silence has not ended the violence. Clashes erupted last April, June and July when suspected separatists resisted arrest by police, Zhou, the Yili party secretary, said. Among the arrested were people trained by groups abroad and infiltrated back into Xinjiang to “commit violent terrorist acts,” he said.

Although Zhou declined to identify which groups were doing the training and where, he said recruitment was done on the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

A Uighur diaspora stretching across Central Asia to Turkey, and lobbying groups in Europe and recently Washington have kept independence dreams alive. Western and Chinese academics say Uighur gangs are believed to be smuggling drugs and using the proceeds to buy arms in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At Horgas, hard on the Kazakh border 55 miles west of Yining, “weapons and drugs are our major targets,” said Major He Jingdong, head of a 30-guard border patrol detail.

Nearly 700 people cross the border-marking dry riverbed every day to trade at Horgas’ daily market.

The Horgas party secretary, Lu Jianxin, blamed the weapons trade on lax officials in Kazakhstan.

The border guard major said his 30 guards are hard-pressed to deal with smuggling. Although he would not describe the contraband discovered, he said smuggling goes on at all of Xinjiang’s 14 border crossings.

Signs for drug-treatment programs dot the 420-mile highway from Yining to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. About halfway, in Jinghe town, one young Uighur estimated that one in five of his friends uses drugs. Xinjiang has China’s second largest AIDS epidemic, primarily transmitted among heroin addicts.

Uighurs in Yining complain that the government has tightened restrictions on passports, allowing only the very young and the very old to travel to Central Asia.

“Our world used to be so big,” said one young clothes merchant. “It would be good if we could get out, see the world, get an education and then come back. Now we can’t go anywhere.”