The New Dominion

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Security announced at a Thursday press conference that yet another plot by “East Turkestan” terrorists has been thwarted by the authorities. Rather than conducting a spectacular military-style raid on a terrorist stronghold, which has been the case in the past, the police apparently arrested 35 suspects over the course of the past few weeks. Interrogations of the suspects in custody revealed the plot’s aim of disrupting the Beijing Olympics through suicide attacks and the kidnapping of athletes. Additionally, Xinjiang terrorists’ alleged repertoire of weapons has expanded from conventional terrorists delights such as grenades and guns to include poison gas, poisoned meat, remote-detonated explosives, and, of course, suicide bombers.

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in Beijing’s latest weapon in its information war with the specter of Uyghur terrorism, which lead me to believe that Beijing’s information warriors are trying to hone the way they speak about the East Turkestani terrorist threat, so as to produce a narrative that is simultaneously more convincing and more threatening. Thoughts under the break.

As newsmakers in Beijing engage in a constantly escalating duel of words and facts with cynics outside of China (mostly at this point with Tibet activists), they are faced with the task of balancing persuasiveness with the need to portray a threat that grows more dangerous and more lethal by the day. Frankly speaking, a few weeks ago the Tibetans accomplished the latter requirement quite well on their own, but things in Xinjiang have remained relatively quiet sort of creating a need in Beijing to “compensate” by divulging information, real or otherwise, on terror plots that would’ve happened were it not for the impeccable abilities of the Public Security Bureaus throughout Xinjiang. The latest news conference on Xinjiang terrorism also upped the ante in terms of what Uyghur plotters are capable of: now Olympian athletes are facing suicide bombers (sound familiar?), poisoned meat (sound familiar?), and kidnapping (sound familiar?).

What I’m seeing here are “threat details” flowing in between different news threads sort of like the way ink spreads slowly but inevitably when dropped in a test tube of water. Fanatics willing to commit suicide - that’s lethal and dangerous, and we see the possibility coming from both the Tibetans and the Uyghurs now. The Reuters article adds that the captives were ordered to commit suicide in the case they were captured. Food concerns - peoples of China are paranoid about the quality and the edibility of their food, and rightly so, but we’ve also seen those fears merge with not-to-subtle racism against Uyghurs in the “AIDS via kebabs” hoax that was publicly put down by the Xinjiang Health Department a few weeks ago. The fears still linger though, and its likely that Uyghurs poisoning meat for the Olympics will resonate with the residue left over by the AIDS rumors. Olympic hostages are also a lingering wound on the Olympic spirit that will get some people, particularly Germans, pretty worried.

To be fair, let me put a sentence out there to give both sides a look: either the propagandists in Beijing are putting their feelers out, sensing what the people are concerned about, and conveniently crafting a terrorist movement that fits right into that mold, or East Turkestan plotters of the Uyghur persuasion are doing the same thing and trying to hit the nerves of the Chinese populace that are most exposed. Or maybe both.

One interesting deviation from the usual news conference course of events is the lack of a spectacular, one day People’s Armed Police extravaganza where grenades are exchanged between police forces and militants, where x militants are killed and y militants are arrested right next door, where martyrs for socialism are made. It seems that amid a wave of skepticism over the thought of military-grade explosions in the Happiness Garden apartment complex in Urumqi, Beijing to be more subtle about the arrest details and more pressing about the potential results were the arrests not made, thus, we simply see “35 militants arrested over the past few weeks” instead “crash, bang, boom, kapow, and a victory for the people in your local apartment complex.”

Of course, just because the tone of justice is changing doesn’t mean ministry spokesperson Wu Heping is going to skip over some juicy new details about the last crackdown we saw in January. At the same press conference, we got the name of the first plots’ ringleader, Aji Muhammat, scary details about how close these guys were getting to do something (13 test explosions… were they at the Happiness Gardens, I wonder?), and, of course, more emphasis on the international nature of the plotting. Wu alleges that group was ordered to enter the country at the end of last year (begging the quite important question: from where? Pakistan? Uzbekistan, maybe?), and that they were ordered (from somewhere else) to have their attacks ready by April, i.e. now. We can all breath a sigh of relief knowing that we won’t be offed on an Urumqi bus during a terrorist test run.

So basically, tone down the terrorist-police confrontation to decrease the burden of evidence, play up the thwarted outcomes to get the right amount of quaking-in-yer-boots, and finally, plug it into an international network to tap into existing ideas about international terrorism and add a little more legitimacy to what you have to say.

As to what really happened? I’m surprised to see in an article on at The State that names have been released for the newest bust - Abdulrahman Tuersun and Kuerban Mutalifu - something that usually doesn’t happen until a few months later, as was the case with the previous bust. A year later, the sentencing of these fellas usually is quietly published on Chinese newswires with some additional details on “what happened” and “who was involved.” By then, the main media outlets usually don’t care anymore and the government is actually more willing to say more about what happened (though as usual, whether or not those statements are true will never be known…). I’ll actually talk about that in a future post, but we’ll keep our eyes open. Also, check out The State’s article for some commentary by Nicholas Bequelin, a Xinjiang scholr who was consulted for the writing of the article (something we’d like to see more of).

For Mandarin readers out there, here is news about the press conference in Mandarin. We’ll also look it over and publish any details left hidden by the AP translators here.