China’s Uighurs Dream of Independence for Region

KASHGAR, China —  Ancient racial and religious hatreds still simmer in this remote oasis city on China’s fabled Silk Road, ruled from Beijing but geographically and culturally closer to Turkey.

Han Chinese hold most leading Communist Party posts in the region despite being outnumbered by Muslim Central Asians, some blue-eyed and auburn-haired, whose resentment of the settlers from the east has contributed to Kashgar’s bloody history.

Local government officials confirmed for the first time in May that an organized uprising against Chinese rule took place as late as the early 1980s.

According to local sources, the rebellion followed riots in Kashgar in 1981 that exploded when a Chinese shopkeeper shot dead a Uighur peasant who had parked a donkey-cart load of manure outside his premises.

Muslim peasants in Payzawat, 60 miles east of Kashgar, raided a military armory and attacked Han Chinese with the stolen weapons. Units of the People’s Liberation Army crushed the rebellion, with many deaths, local people from the Muslim Uighur ethnic group said.

Kashgar Vice Mayor Mohammed Emin, a Uighur but a non-Muslim Communist Party member, said that a group “bent on destroying ethnic unity” had been responsible but that he knew no details.

Payzawat--called Jiashi County by Beijing--is closed to foreigners, although overseas tour groups now regularly visit Kashgar.

Ethnic Divisions Downplayed

Government and party officials insist that ethnic divisions and religious persecution are a thing of the past. But many Uighurs still consider the Han Chinese colonial invaders in the region of deserts and mountains three times the size of France named Xinjiang, or New Dominion, by China’s Manchu emperors.

“We want our own independent country, as the Tibetans do. But it is impossible now because too many Chinese have come already. There is no hope,” said one well-educated Uighur.

Han Chinese, many ordered to Xinjiang in the 1960s under Mao Zedong’s now-discredited policy of turning wilderness over to agriculture, make up 40% of Xinjiang’s population of 14 million, according to official figures.

The Uighurs, whose language is close to Turkish, and other Muslim ethnic groups say their grievances include cultural discrimination, the use of Xinjiang labor camps as a dumping ground for convicts from east China and past nuclear bomb tests in the region.

Passions are roused, too, against the large concentrations of Chinese troops defending Xinjiang’s sensitive--and still disputed--borders with the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

The Kashgar area is a divided community, with Han Chinese concentrated in the neighboring county of Sule, where local people say a major military base is located. Like most of Xinjiang, Sule is closed to foreigners.

“The Chinese think we are stupid, dirty and backward. They want us to be like them or disappear,” said another young Uighur named Ibrahim, adding that during a visit to Beijing, he had brawled with Han Chinese who taunted him as a “mutton kebab,” after Xinjiang’s Middle Eastern-style food.

Poverty Common

Government officials say many Muslim traders have become wealthy under free-market economic reforms, but outlying villages in southern Xinjiang are grindingly poor. An epidemic of a rare strain of hepatitis, caused by poor sanitation, killed 650 people in Xinjiang in late 1987.

Despite tensions, recent organized political resistance to Chinese rule has been limited to protest marches by Uighur students in 1986 and the sending of occasional anonymous leaflets calling for an independent Xinjiang to Beijing-based foreign journalists.

Local officials point out that Beijing’s policy is now one of positive discrimination toward the Uighurs, who are exempt from China’s strict one child per family policy and are admitted to college with grades below national standards.

Kashgar police authorities take care to dispatch only Uighur officers to deal with incidents involving Muslims out of fear of provoking further unrest, one local police officer said. Courts treated Uighur offenders lightly, he added.

The kid-gloves policy since the early ‘80s has brought a bonanza for the city’s drug dealers, confident salesmen who lounge on street corners to offer visitors hashish at $135 a kilo.

“The worst that can happen to you is a few days in jail,” one young Uighur factory worker said of police policies toward drugs, strictly forbidden in east China.

Vice Mayor Emin denied all knowledge of the drug trade, but Western travelers arriving in Kashgar via the high mountain passes from Pakistan said Chinese customs men had meticulously searched Pakistani traders crossing the border.

Chinese government officials, perhaps with a wary eye on the Afghan guerrillas’ holy war against Communist forces not far away, draw a sharp distinction between permitted religious belief and strictly banned separatist politics.

Not that the Afghan conflict appears to excite the imagination of ordinary Kashgar residents, whose knowledge of world affairs is limited. A blue-eyed, brown-haired foreigner was asked by one peasant trader if he was Japanese.

The Muslim city boasts a towering statue of Mao--which one local building worker claimed is only still in place because authorities don’t know how to demolish it safely--and the same drab boulevards and apartment buildings found in most cities in China.

But rush-hour traffic consists largely of bearded and robed Muslim men and their veiled wives riding donkey carts. Kashgar’s teeming bazaar and Great Mosque, where fanatical Maoist Red Guards set torches to sacred scriptures in 1967, are steeped in the atmosphere of the Middle East.

Muslims now worship freely and even obtain exit visas to make the pilgrimage to Mecca via Pakistan. According to one trader, some do not return from Saudi Arabia but emigrate to Turkey, where many Uighurs have relatives.

“Allah’s road is long, he can be patient,” said Salay Damullaji, a high imam of the mosque, when asked to explain the brutal suppression of Islam during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

“Allah does not intervene immediately on Earth but will give rewards and punishments later.”