In Xinjiang, it’s payback time

The bomb attacks in Urumqi which took the lives of 31 persons, is only the latest of a series of attacks by the Uighur people fighting for their independence. Not a month has gone by in the last year without violent incidents in the Uighur-majority Xinjiang province of China, and of late even in places as far as Beijing, Kunming and Shanghai. In recent years, it is the Chinese province of Xinjiang that has been more restive than Tibet. In the past two years alone over 300 people have been killed in the violence.

The troubles in Xinjiang may be closer to India than we generally believe. Xinjiang or East Turkestan abuts the Ladakh district of Jammu and Kashmir. The last leg of the ancient trade route linking India to the fabled Silk Route ran from Leh to Kashgar and Khotan through the legendary Karakoram Pass. This was the route on which mule trains brought valuable pashm into India to be woven into fine shawls in the Kashmir valley. For many centuries the kingdom of Ladakh extracted rich levies from traders plying this route and prospered.

The seeds of Ladakh’s decline were sown when the great Ladakhi king Sengge Namgyal, after a dispute with his Kashmir overlord, imposed a blockade of all trade emanating from the Valley. His intention was to economically weaken Kashmir by crippling its pashmina shawl industry.
The traders then discovered an alternative trade route linking Punjab with Tibet and Xinjiang through Shipki La, now in Himachal Pradesh. This brought the shawl weaving centres to Punjab and places like Ludhiana prospered. Historically, India had many other linkages with Turkestan. These links were snapped after China annexed both Xinjiang and Tibet, after the Communists seized power in Beijing in 1949.

Like Tibet, Xinjiang also had a troubled relationship with China. Chinese dominance waxed and waned with the ebbs and tides of imperial power in Beijing. After 1912, when Sun Yat Sen proclaimed a republic, China, enfeebled by now, for all practical purposes lost all authority in Tibet and Xinjiang. Chinese garrisons were driven out and local leaderships assumed complete authority. The Kuomintang regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek tried to reassert Chinese authority but largely failed to do so. While Tibet was securely under the control of the Buddhist theocracy, Xinjiang came under the sway of several warlords till 1941 when a renegade KMT general turned warlord, Sheng Tsi Tsai, established a Soviet Republic under the close guidance of the Comintern in Moscow. The Russians now moved in. They took over all international relations and trade. It had consequences in India, because it caused the British to move Ladakh’s border outwards by incorporating Aksai Chin to create a buffer. In 1949, Stalin handed over Xinjiang to the newly established People’s Republic of China of Mao Zedong.

In 1949 the population of Xinjiang was comprised almost entirely of various Turkic nationalities of which the Uighurs were the largest. Han Chinese only accounted for 6 per cent. Thanks to the continuous migration sanctioned and blessed by the authorities in Beijing, that proportion has now gone up to almost 48 per cent. Much of this is centred in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, which is over 80 per cent Han. The Uighurs are still the majority in the region below the Khotan and Kashgar line. This is the region that abuts India.

In the recent years the government of India has been active in Ladakh. It has begun to build a motorable road that will link Leh via Nubra with the far-flung Daulat Beg Oldi. It has also recommissioned the airfield at Daulat Beg Oldi to receive larger aircraft. DBO overlooks the Karakoram Pass that is linked by motorable roads to Kashgar and Khotan. It is obviously hoped that one day modern caravans will ply these roads and re-establish lost economic linkages with Xinjiang.

This writer visited Xinjiang a couple of years ago for a conference organised by the Chinese authorities at Urumqi. Urumqi is now a modern and well-developed city with many industries. Gas and oil finds in the immediate region have given impetus to the development of the area. But, unfortunately, the gains have not been equally shared. The Uighurs still continue to be less well-off and deprived. The feeling that it is their national resources that are being exploited by the Chinese authorities to mostly benefit the Han migrants is quite pervasive among the Uighurs.

Shopkeepers in the bustling ancient marketplace were quite open and vocal about their sentiments. Many Uighurs speak a bit of Urdu due to the burgeoning relationship developed with Pakistan after the construction of the Karakoram highway. Urumqi has several restaurants that advertise themselves as serving Pakistani food.

There is also another unintended but nevertheless burgeoning Pakistan connection. Well-known Pakistani institutions like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and the Jamaat ul Dawa have trained no less than 4,000 Uighurs to wage a jihad in their homeland. The ISI connection with these outfits is well known.

The Chinese nevertheless continue to assist Pakistan with modern conventional and strategic weapons. It is now well established that the Pakistani missiles aimed at targets in India are Chinese in origin and the nuclear bombs that may be sitting atop them are of Chinese design. Since missiles can be made to point anywhere, the Chinese now fear the takeover of Pakistan by the jihadists as much as India or the USA. So much for Chinese foresight?

When in Xinjiang we had planned to drive down from Urumqi to Kashgar. But it had to be dropped as the road was interdicted by rebels. The Chinese are now seeking to link the Uighur rebels with the al Qaeda. But to paint all Uighur nationalists with the same brush would not be correct.

The East Turkestan Freedom Movement predates the clandestine war on Soviet-controlled Afghanistan by an axis of the USA, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China. This axis even orchestrated attacks on the Turkic underbelly of the former Soviet Union. One fallout of this unholy alliance is the advent of Wahabist Islam in the Turkic regions, which hitherto mostly adhered to the Sufi traditions of Islam.

If what the Chinese claim about the al Qaeda is true then it is just a case of the birds coming home to roost.

Whatever be the reasons behind the groundswell of Uighur sentiments against China, there is a lesson in it for them. That is economic development alone does not guarantee fraternal feelings. History cannot be overlooked by merely rewriting it and airbrushing portraits or smothering it with cash and shopping malls. Democracy is a good place to start to make ethnically and culturally different peoples to feel and think of each other as part of a whole. But the stork carrying democracy is not due to visit China soon and Xinjiang will continue to be troubled place.