dogu-turkistan-sempozyumu

The Role of the International Community in East Turkestan / Prof Dru C. Gladneyconsistently argued that Islam in the region is almost unavoidably rebellious andthat Muslims in general are inherently problematic to a non-Muslim state (Israeli1981, 2002; Dillon 1997, 2004). They thus become, as the novel above suggests,willing stooges for far-fetched neo-conservative inspired CIA and Islamist plots.For these analysts, the questions about Muslim identity in China raised at thebeginning of this paper have already been answered: Muslims in China, whetherUyghur, Hui, or otherwise, are Muslims first and citizens last -their loyalty is toa transnational Islam that will always be a threat to a nationalizing, secularizingstate that seeks to regulate religion in the name of modernity.Civil unrest, or Islamist inspired terrorism?In the paper below, I will argue that the incidents of violence that haveoccurred in the region are best understood as incidents of civil unrest and rarelycan be described as “terrorism” in the traditional sense of the terms (which I taketo mean random acts of violence against civilian populations). The struggles forindependence of the Uighur people from the Chinese nation-state that havetaken place since its incorporation in 1949 are best understood in the contextof efforts to attain sovereignty, not as a religious or Islam-inspired campaign.Except for the fact that the Uighur are a Muslim people, their concerns and issuesresemble that of Tibet; the occasional violence that takes place in the TibetanAutonomous Region in China and protests against Chinese rule are rarely, ifever, described as “terrorist.” As will be demonstrated below, the characterizationof the Guantanamo Uighurs as “ETIM terrorists” is a misnomer at best, andat worst a calculated mischaracterization of a group of people whom the Bushadministration and the Department of Defense had determined as comprisingno threat to the US. At the same time, this testimony will show that the regionof Xinjiang (pronounced Sheen-Jeeahng) has been extremely peaceful since thelate 1990s, and rather than a site of terrorist independence, it has been caught upin an economic boom that would be the envy of any of its surrounding CentralAsian states. This testimony will not support an independent Uighuristan orseparate state, lest it fall into the same turmoil as its Central Asian neighbors, butrather encourages greater autonomy, direct engagement of the Chinese with theUighurs to better understand their complaints, and the need for the US to notcontribute support (even if inadvertently) to any separatist or Islamist sentiments457