by VED SINGH
On March 1, a group of knife-wielding assailants stormed a railway station in the southern Chinese city of Kunming. It was a grisly scene: Attacking passengers at random, the assailants killed 29 people and wounded 130. According to Chinese authorities a gang of six men and two women carried out the attack. Four attackers were shot and the other four have been detained.
Dubbing the incident “China’s 9/11,” Chinese authorities led by President Xi Jinping called for an all-out effort to “punish the terrorists in accordance with the law.”
While no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, authorities have blamed it on separatists from the Uighur community — a Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority from Xinjiang, a semiautonomous province in northwestern China. Security forces reported finding a black flag at the scene calling for the independence of the region, which Uighurs call East Turkestan. More recently, Abdullah Mansour, the leader of the rebel Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), appeared on video appearing to praise the attack. While not claiming responsibility for the murders, he described them, according to Reuters, as “an ‘expensive offer’ for China to reconsider its ‘cruel’ policies” toward Uighurs and predicted that more attacks would follow. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that “the video exposes the true nature of their terrorist organization” and called for the international community to support China’s policies against terrorism.
If a Uighur group was indeed responsible, the attack would represent a considerably expanded theater of operations for the separatist movement. Kunming is some 2,500 miles away from Xinjiang, which, as a writer for The Atlantic put it, “shows that Uighurs are, like Chechens in Russia, expressing their discontent throughout the country, not just where they are based.”
Tensions have simmered between Uighurs and China’s majority Han population for decades. The Han population was first introduced into Xinjiang in 1949 following the People’s Liberation Army’s “triumphant march” into the province, and tensions heightened as China’s economic liberalization began during the 1980s. Xinjiang happens to be a mineral-rich area, which has led to a boon of mining and oil development projects and, with them, a huge influx of Han workers. At the beginning of the 20th century, Uighurs comprised 95 percent of Xinjiang’s population, but represent just 40 percent today. [pc1] This is a policy that is markedly similar to what China has adopted in Tibet, where the goal is to “Sinicize” or “Hanicize” parts of the country that do not have an indigenous Han population.
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The U.S. relationship with the Uighurs is complicated. As part of its bid to secure Chinese cooperation in the “war on terror,” the United States captured 22 Uighur men in Afghanistan and Pakistan in late 2001 and detained them in Guantanamo Bay. According to some reports, U.S. soldiers “softened these detainees” at the behest of Chinese intelligence officials who were allowed to visit Guantanamo Bay to interrogate them. Several years later, after finally admitting that the detainees did not pose a threat to the United States, the U.S. government negotiated the release of the Uighur prisoners to six different countries, with the last three being released and resettled in Slovakia in December of last year. The U.S. refusal to return the prisoners the prisoners to China—where they would have likely faced further abuse—drew the ire of Chinese officials, who accused Washington of abetting terrorism.
Foreign Policy in Focus for more