Why is their fight for independence ignored brothers?
…
The Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, the northwestern and largest province of the People’s Republic of China, is the homeland of the Uighur people, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group. Historically, this region lay at the crossroads of several civilizations, and it currently lies along the borders of eight countries, including Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. In 1757, the Manchus of the Q’ing Dynasty (1644-1911) invaded and consolidated the area into the dominion of the Chinese polity (Xinjiang literally means “new land”).
Until 1949, China strained to keep a tenuous grip on the region. Frequent Uighur rebellions and insurgencies, aimed at expelling the growing Chinese presence, scarred the region’s political terrain and seriously challenged Chinese authority. Uighur nationalists declared independence in both 1933 and 1944; both secession attempts lasted several years before being ultimately suppressed.
Communist victory in the Chinese Revolution (1949) ended the possibility of Uighur independence or autonomous rule, despite Mao Zedong’s pledge that national minorities would enjoy extensive freedom if the Communists emerged victorious. Mao had made such promises during the darker days of the war, when the then-struggling Communists desperately needed broad support from China’s many ethnic minorities. Afterwards, however, national unification became the overriding priority of the new regime. In 1955, Xinjiang formally became the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, cementing Chinese rule with the veneer of provincial governance. Today the levers of power in Xinjiang do not belong to Uighurs, and the region is autonomous in name only.
Accordingly, for the past half-century, a seething ethnoreligious conflict has colored the social, economic, and political climate of the XUAR. Uighurs yearn for either independence or at least substantive religious, political, and cultural autonomy; but Beijing has intractably refused either option, instead responding to all such demands with religious and political repression. Disembodied and disengaged from meaningful self-governance, Uighurs present the principal internal Muslim challenge to Chinese rule because they occupy a historic homeland, articulate focused claims to self-determination, and stubbornly resist assimilation into the broader Chinese nation.
Two episodes at the turn of the 1990s spurred Uighur nationalists into their current state of militancy. First, the ignominious Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan suggested that a lone Muslim people struggling against an infidel invader could emerge victorious. The Afghan experience intensely influenced many young Uighur political entrepreneurs, and its symbolic power was eclipsed only by the second event–the serendipitous rise to statehood of the Central Asian republics after the Soviet collapse; seeing that their fellow Turkic Muslims of Central Asia now had their own sovereign lands, Uighur proto-separatists now brandished archetypes for their own prospective nation-state.
Since the early 1990s, Uighurs’ increasingly militant demands for independence have translated into a proliferation of separatist literature, numerous protests and riots, selected assassinations and kidnappings of both Uighur and Han Communist Party officials, and infrequent but costly bombing campaigns that in February 1997 extended into Beijing itself–the first incidence of terrorist violence in the capital city since 1949. In response to this burgeoning separatist trend, China has engaged in widespread tactics of repression, stifling public expressions of cultural, religious, and ethnic identity, as well as most forms of political dissent. Thousands of suspected Uighur militants have been jailed and hundreds executed.
The prospects for Uighur independence or autonomy look dim. Uighurs do not enjoy the media spotlight of their southern neighbors, the Tibetans, although they have gradually garnered more international attention–for instance, Erkin Alptekin, a Uighur, was elected as the General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) in early 2001, a post he has held on an interim basis since October 1999. While a Uighur diaspora numbering well over half a million resides in nearby Central Asian republics, China has used political and economic incentives to persuade these countries–most prominently Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan–to reject Uighur separatism. Moreover, in early October 2001 Beijing announced a new campaign against Uighur “splittism” (the government’s vague term for any self-determination movement) with the cover that Uighur separatists were engaging in terrorist activities. Broader repression has increased in the XUAR under the pretense of the international war against terrorism; this also means that separatist-inspired violence will continue, since neither side has offered any peaceful resolution or conflict regulating mechanism.
-read more here brothers-
http://www.selfdetermine.org/conflicts/uighur.html