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TIBET AT A TURNING POINT: THE SPRING UPRISING AND CHINA’S NEW CRACKDOWN
As with Buddhism in Tibet, the practice of Islam is strictly curtailed in East Turkistan,
in part because the institutions of Islam represent an alternative pole of authority to
the Chinese government for the Uyghur people, for whom Turkic and Islamic Central
Asia has far more cultural resonance than China. Restrictions on the practice of Islam
include the following: no government workers and no one under the age of 18 may
enter a Mosque; teaching the Qur’an to children even in the privacy of ones own home
is forbidden; imams can train at only one government-controlled school and there
are tight restrictions on which versions of Islamic texts can be studied.
And as with Tibetans in Tibet, Uyghurs in East Turkistan are being marginalized in the
face of large-scale migration from mainland China: in 1949 less than 6% of the population
of the region was Chinese; whereas now the figure is rapidly approaching
50%, greatly enabled by construction of a railway to the regional capital Urumchi
(Chinese: Wulumuqi) and beyond. 16
An event occurred in February 1997 which has some resonance with recent events
across the Tibetan plateau, when several hundred Uyghurs staged a demonstration in
a small city named Gulja (Chinese: Yining) in East Turkistan, protesting against numerous
human rights abuses which culminated when even the Uyghur people’s traditional
social gatherings were banned by local authorities. In what is referred to by
Uyghurs in exile as the “Gulja Massacre,” police opened fire on the protestors killing
around a dozen on the spot, while in the ensuing weeks and months dozens more
died in detention from the results of torture and abuse. Possibly thousands more
Uyghurs were detained in labor camps or imprisoned. 17
In an incident linked to the Gulja Massacre, three bombs exploded in Urumchi later
in February 1997, killing nine people and injuring more than 70. Even prior to this
incident, the regional authorities led by Wang Lequan were already describing participants
in the Gulja protests — which had started peacefully — as “terrorists”.
According to Amnesty International’s records, the last known public executions
carried out in the PRC — by firing squad in an open, public place — were Uyghurs
convicted in the wake of the Gulja protests. However, recent reports suggest the practice
of public executions in East Turkistan has resumed, with three people reportedly
executed by firing squad in front of a crowd of several hundred students and government
workers who had been bussed in from areas around the town where
the executions took place, southwest of the city of Kashgar in the far west of East
Turkistan. 18
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