Translation:

“On the Pakistani and Chinese media full of nonsense”

Abdullah Mansur

29/4/2009

[Arabic]

In the Name of God the Most Merciful, the Most Kind

Praise be to God, and Prayers and Salutations to the Prophet of God. But now,

[Uyghur]

In order to achieve its own political goals, the Chinese government, a habitual braggart who is always making up ridiculous things, has in recent times changed its methods, and having taught this game to Pakistan and other of its lackeys, has begun to play it together.

To people of sound mind, this is not something secret.

In this unsightly political game, where the second list of terrorism suspects came to nothing, the Chinese government had conducted itself in a way not befitting the government of a state, and had been disgraced before the people of the world.

In Afghanistan, the American government, in need of help in today’s difficult circumstances where they cannot do without a crutch, made China happy by labeling the Turkistan Islamic Party as terrorists and obtained China’s economic, political, and some military assistance.

In this situation, the Chinese government happily stained its lips and once again set about playing with the government of Pakistan internationally. According to what is known of this game, nine Uyghur members of the Turkistan Islamic Party, which has organized attacks on the Pakistani Security Forces, were supposedly arrested and handed over to China.

The Chinese government, which has all the time been imprisoning the people of Eastern Turkistan without reason, making false accusations and deceiving people, had in recent months, through the hands of its concubine Pakistan, arrested several Eastern Turkistanis occupied with their own private studies and business in Lahore and other cities.

In this way, the Chinese government has sought to show that it is a powerful country can challenge the Turkistan Islamic Party and to
break the spirit of pious Muslims living inside and outside the motherland. The Pakistani government has made this empty disclosure aiming to show its collaboration with the Chinese government against the Turkistan Islamic Party through concrete actions, and that it is reducing the pressure on both sides by blocking the flow of Eastern Turkistani Muslims to the jihad region of Pakistan and Afghanistan with the goal of preparing for jihad.

In recent times, the Pakistan government has not captured or handed over to China a single member of the Turkistan Islamic Party.

A state with the slightest sense of honor would of course not take pride in such falsification. Thus it would be best for the Pakistan and Chinese governments to tidy up this foolish propaganda which is now exposed. Likewise, the world’s news agencies would save themselves embarrassment if they more carefully relayed the propaganda of these states who go around making atom bombs out of “hot air.”

We would like to openly warn you: If any country captures a member of the Turkistan Islamic Party and hands them over to China, they will definitely receive a concrete response. This response, of course, will not be something for them to hear, but to see.

It will be most beneficial for the people of the world, among them the people of Eastern Turkistan, to clearly comprehend that, in the view of the Chinese, each
Eastern Turkistani living abroad, no matter who they are, is an enemy and terrorist. Their strongest desire is to seize them one by one, or group by group if possible, not leaving a single one, and imprison them and their land Eastern Turkistan.

For this reason, we honestly recommend that all the oppressed people of Eastern Turkistan living in exile stand alert on full guard against this viciousness of the Chinese government.

Commentary:

I feel very strongly that the speaker has Yarkand accent. The “r”s are a giveaway, as they are sometimes American and sometimes palatal glides. Note also his raised vowels and some odd moments where he seems to palatalize what would be a stop consonant in standard Uyghur, i.e. äjiship instead of ägiship. This may be immaterial. The last time we saw a video like this was when TIP spokesman Sayfullah threatened the Olympic Games. It was difficult to make much out, but he certainly rolled his “r”s.

On another linguistic note, this video uses, for the first time in my experience, the term hijrät to refer to the Uyghur diaspora. Hijrät, from Arabic, means “flight,” as in the hijra, when Muhammed fled from Mecca to Medina. This is an interesting cue, doubtless employed self-consciously, to emphasize Islamic, rather than ethnic or national, kinship. A brief, unscientific survey of secular Uyghurs shows me that this usage is highly marked, creative, and clearly charged with Islamic symbolism.

Similarly, the speaker only uses the word “Uyghur” once, preferring “East Turkestani.” As I noted in a recent post on an interview with Rabiyä Qadir, this is language that makes the problems in Xinjiang more than Uyghur issues. While Rabiyä Qadir reaches beyond Uyghurs to anyone living in the region, emphasizing cooperation with non-Muslims for the sake of national self-determination, the TIP plays up the Muslim angle. This is more likely to inspire violence within Xinjiang, but Islam could be a much better catalyst for action in Xinjiang, especially among rural Turkic Muslims who have not completely internalized the idea of an ethnonational identity.

Finally, catch the last line of the speech. “…stand alert on full guard…” If you’re a terrorist, scaring the people for whom you claim to struggle, putting them on “alert,” is a great way to get them to do your job for you.

And as usual, there are some interesting points to look at when the three categories of news stories are taken as a whole – firstly, a number of the Western agencies are reporting that a police station itself was attacked, going so far to say that the explosives part of the attack involved throwing grenades directly into the police barracks. But the Xinhua article in English now says that the attack was carried out as the joggers were going past the Yiquan hotel (strangely called “Yiquan” in Xinhua’s own English version of the article, in Chinese, it’s called 怡金, or Yijin), 200 meters away from the station, and that there are now witnesses who were guests at the hotel. This is just most likely information getting more clear as time passes but for now the Western reports are still a little behind. Nothing underhanded, I believe.

However, another conspicuous point of note is the difference currently between the way the state news agency is covering the incident in its English language and Mandarin language presses. We’ve noted before here on The New Dominion that there is a clear tendency for Xinhua to cover things differently depending on if they’re talking to their Western audience (English) or their domestic audience (Mandarin). In English, the story is very prominently located on the front page, and the language makes it very clear that this was a “terrorist attack” and that the dreaded specter ETIM/TIP was probably involved.

Terrorist plot was suspected in the violent attack targeting border police in China’s westernmost city of Kashi, which left at least 16 policemen killed and 16 others injured Monday.

The regional public security department said it had got intelligence that the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” planned to make terrorist attacks during Aug. 1-8, just ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

Yet in Chinese, the story is modestly buried way near the bottom of small-font links (albeit on the front page) as I’ve captured in this picture:

Furthermore, the actual Xinhua article itself is probably an eighth of the size of the article created by the same agency on the same incident in English, stating only that two “criminal suspects” (犯罪嫌疑人) carried out a “surprise attack” (袭击). There is no reference to terrorism or ETIM whatsoever in this carefully camoflagued post. Again, as we have seen before, there is a strategy that drives the state to report the scary gory details to the foreign press but remain subdued at home (though the effect of private reporting – we’re talking blogs and twitter clones – remains unscrutinized for now).

We’ll stay on top of this story and report any more details that may come out. Something very unprecedented is that the attacks were neither remote, as with timed bus bombs, nor suicide, as with the hijacking attempt earlier this year, but ended with the arrest of both attackers, one with a “leg injury”, were apprehended, perhaps giving us more of an opportunity to discover (after the Chinese interrogators get to work and after the censorship bureaus decide what’s kosher) more about the motivations and origins of the attacks.

Poppycock.

Xinjiang stands in an unfortunate position. The land known as Xinjiang, as we know it now, is a political unit with somewhat arbitrary borders, the product – at first – of a treaty between the Qing and Russian Empires following a war with the Junghar Mongol state that was started by Central Asian Sufi sheikhs and involved the Tibetans. Yaqub Beg, the Khokandi warlord, never kept a hold on the whole territory. What the Qing reconquered and reconstituted as a province under the leadership of General Zuo “Tso” Zongtang (of chicken fame) encompassed the old Junghar territories, small independent kingdoms, and two regions that had been held, at one time, by the Buddhist Idiqut and Muslim Karakhanid Empires. The borders were drawn with the involvement of the British, who had been interested in making it a buffer state. Xinjiang has been referred to as the “pivot of Asia” by Owen Lattimore and as the end of or a stop on the “Silk Road” by countless others.

So, the trend in Xinjiang studies has long been to emphasize the diversity of identities found among individual members of its ethnonational groups – though this is certainly changing – while the trend in popular media, which usually can’t handle diversity and still make them interesting, has been to try and simplify the region, to make it readable to the outside world. Even the idea of being “in between” is based on the assumption that something is positioned between identifiably homogeneous points. Uyghurs and Han become monolithic animals, one color each, who wrestle over an undifferentiated, homogeneous, and ultimately timeless national desert. Journalists, whose situation I must admit I understand, have to make something as alien as a peaceful Islamic women’s protest in a place like… Khotan? How do you pronounce that?… and make it accessible.

So, we have the convenient example of Tibet. It’s nearby, it’s big, it’s also in China, people there are violently suppressed, and no one really has a good understanding of it, so it’s an ideal parallel to make. Indeed, when asked at a loud and crowded party, “So, what’s Xinjiang?”, I have been known to answer, “It’s like Tibet, but it’s full of Turks.” It’s an easy analogy to make.

Let’s look at the facts, though. One of the reasons Uyghurs and Tibetans don’t network well is that they don’t like each other very much. The Muslim/Buddhist divide is very strong, especially in Xinjiang, where the above-mentioned Buddhist Idiqut and Muslim Karakhanid Empires fought each other, on and off, for several centuries. For a long time, the word “Uyghur” became synonymous with “idol-worshipping Buddhist”. Indeed, the Uyghur word but means “idol”, as in the kind you’re not meant to worship, the kind that Muslims used to whack the heads off of before the Eighth Route Army and the Red Guards took over for them. Pan-Islamism has been a major political force in Xinjiang for centuries. So has Pan-Turkism, disciples of which, returning or journeying from points west, were largely responsible for the Xinjiang that we see today. Tibet simply hasn’t had a similar intellectual history, a similar epistemological chain giving rise to a similar kind of separatism or nationalism.

Xinjiang’s only periods of “independence”, those looked to by nationalist groups, never covered the entire area of Xinjiang as we now know it. Otherwise, there were periods, which they do not invoke, when that land area was controlled as the personal fiefdom of some outsider, for example Yang Zengxin. Tibetans in Greater Tibet have a clear and internationally-respected (there’s the key!) claim to a historically verified Tibetan Empire focused around today’s Tibet, a religion particularly peculiar to that area, and all of the bureaucracy that comes with both of those things. Uyghurs have no Dalai Lama. They have a close-knit, but ultimately inefficacious intellectual elite that, even when it is hopping mad, prefers to write a mildly subversive allegory rather than raise an armed rebellion. Their modus operandi is to work for a better life for their families and for other Uyghurs now, not to organize actively for a future independent state. This does not necessarily go for the Uyghur diaspora, which is, in any case, too small to gain much notice.

In broader terms, Xinjiang is not as centralized as Tibet is. Ürümchi, which has only really mattered for about a century, is not the symbolic capital of the Uyghur spirit, nor is it even a particularly loved or revered city among Xinjiang people overall. Rather, the Uyghur population, which largely retains its home-town orientation, is found in clusters, linked by long highways across large, open spaces, with every city having some claim to authenticity and its own local problems. Protests and other expressions of discontent, I think, will remain local, not general, and led by unsung heroes of local problems, not by charismatic figures from abroad. One might actually suggest that the riots in Lhasa started the same way, but that’s a topic for another blog.

It was the above-linked post on Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times blog that really got me to notice the simplistic way in which Xinjiang is viewed, the way it parallels Tibet, a similarly nebulous image in the popular discourse. Everything is in a global context readable by post-9/11 Americans, full of familiar images, less information than an example of an already-hegemonic theory of the world. Terrorism is Islamic — a position accepted by many Chinese, as well — and dissent against China is Buddhist. The editors’ blog of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine that should know better, even refers to the protests in Xotän as “the second front”, albeit only in passing. What, now Buddhism owns dissent in China? Does Falun Gong get this treatment?

It’s time to start studying and understanding Xinjiang on its own terms. I have only seen one newspaper – The Guardian – consult an actual expert on Xinjiang who is not a member of an Uyghur nationalist organization, Nicolas Becquelin. His reasoned and expert opinions show that there are factors internal to Xinjiang and in relation to the central government of the PRC that are responsible for recent displays of discontent.

We are also lucky that we live in a time when a field of “Xinjiang Studies” is forming around the world (outside of China), creating a broader and richer dialogue on this not-so-mysterious region – Indiana University’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies has a program for studying Xinjiang, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University has a position for a professor of Xinjiang Studies, and the field is booming in Japan. There are more examples, and I encourage you to find them.

In the meantime, there is already a long history of quality research on Xinjiang done by scholars from the PRC itself. This includes work in Chinese, Uyghur, Mongolian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and, yes, even Sibe, as well as possibly other languages. Xinjiang is home to several universities, which are home to scholars who do serious research, often of very high quality, on their own Autonomous Region. It would take a sea change in the way the world thinks of language and power to get this work the broad recognition it deserves, especially in the popular eye. However, an effort made by outside researchers to seek out these scholars and their work, in tandem with a greater effort on the part of news organizations to seek less biased sources, will make this region better-known. Perhaps someday we will hear some reporter ask, “Is Yunnan the next Xinjiang?” Maybe projects like our own serial translation of The Awakened Land will inspire someone to look a little further.

So, is Xinjiang the next Tibet? Michael Manning over at The Opposite End of China has, once again, beat us to the punch:

Q: Is Xinjiang the next Tibet?

A: Is Afghanistan the next Bhutan?

Finally, I should note that the PRC-funded Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee, a paramilitary group involved in the construction of a New World Order under the leadership of the Sino-Jewish Cabal (that’s irony, folks), suggests that the protests in Xotän were, in fact, incited by Amnesty International under the control of British intelligence agency MI-6. Their pigtailed puppet, Rabiyä Qadir, justified and encouraged the splittists’ acts of inharmonious violence with her snake-tongued lies. See? Now even crazy people care about Xinjiang.