By CRAIG S. SMITH http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/international/asia/16CHIN.html?todaysheadlines HOTAN, China — A crowd gathered in a sports stadium beneath a blue morning sky here in October to watch court officials sentence a man to death, a scene that has been played out hundreds of times across China this year as part of the Communist Party's latest drive against crime. But this rally was different. The man, Metrozi Mettohti, 34, was given the death penalty for trying to "split the country" and for storing weapons as part of a persistent and occasionally violent separatist movement among China's Uighurs, the Turkic- speaking ethnic group of nine million people, most of them Muslims, concentrated along the country's far western border. Six other men were given jail terms of up to 12 years that day for separatist activities, said local residents and activists abroad. According to one account, Mr. Mettohti shouted "Long live Eastern Turkestan!" — the name of the country separatists would like to create — before being gagged. After the rally, local people say, he was put in the back of a truck, driven to a village outside of town and shot in the back of the head. The execution could not be officially verified. The fragile, fertile strip between China's rugged western mountains and its vast western desert is the only place in the country where people are regularly put to death for political offenses. The country's current anticrime drive, coupled with a renewed focus on Islamic militancy in the wake of the American-led war on terrorism, has only increased the pace of the executions, Uighurs say. "The government gives very little information about the people who are executed, and news of executions isn't published outside the places where they occur," said a young Uighur man in Hotan, speaking in the privacy of a car in a region where most everyone is jittery when talking to outsiders. "Have you heard of `hazat?' " he said, using the Uighur word for jihad, or Islamic holy war. But he was startled when he saw the word written in a reporter's notebook and insisted that his cellphone number be torn from the same page. Then he thought better of discussing politics at all, and with good reason. His brother had been released just days earlier after nearly a decade in jail for publishing separatist tracts. "The secret police are everywhere," the young man said. "You never know who they are." Most of the Uighurs condemned to death here are charged with murder or with otherwise causing deaths, but some, like Mr. Mettohti, are being executed for lesser transgressions. The Chinese government says the executions are meant to keep the separatist threat in check, arguing that Beijing is battling Islamic terrorists not unlike those the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, just a few hundred miles away. But Uighurs say that the number of executions is incommensurate with the threat posed by separatists and that many innocent people have been swept up in the crackdown. Some of those charged with separatism are simply frustrated young men demanding their rights, they say, adding that the war against terrorism war has given Beijing the political cover to pursue policies that are meant to erode their cultural identity. At least 25 Uighurs have been executed this year and scores more are waiting on death row, say people who track these executions in the local news media. They say the number is probably much higher because the government in August stopped publicizing most of the executions, which Uighurs say are part of a larger effort to suppress legitimate dissent and accelerate the ethnic group's assimilation into the country's larger Han Chinese population. This sparsely populated area's oases once watered camels and fortified travelers with raisins, mutton and bread while they paused between mountains and desert on the fabled Silk Road. The Uighurs' local economy is still made up of such stuff. Though called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region today, its autonomy is largely symbolic because all major policy decisions are made by the Communist Party and almost all of the region's senior party posts are held by ethnic Chinese. Though Uighurs accounted for more than 90 percent of the region's population when the party came to power in 1949, they account for less than half now. Hopes for an independent homeland increased after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when a cluster of new, independent Turkic countries appeared on China's western border. But a quick Chinese crackdown dashed those hopes. By the late 1990's, the separatist movement had turned increasingly violent, culminating in a series of bombings and clashes with the police in 1996 and 1997. The Uighurs are at the eastern end of a swath of Turkic-speaking Central Asia that stretches from the Bosporus to the western edge of the Mongolian steppes and includes 120 million people. For centuries, the area was ruled by various khans until the Qing dynasty took control here in the mid- 18th century. The Qing court consolidated its hold on the region in the mid-19th century with the help of China's legendary General Zuo Zongtang (better known in the West as General Tso, for whom a popular chicken dish is named). He renamed the area Xinjiang, or New Territory. Today, Xinjiang is China's largest province, accounting for one-sixth of the country's land and much of its valuable natural resources, most notably oil. Despite centuries of Chinese rule, though, the Uighurs have maintained a vibrant culture, with writers and musicians continuing to produce popular works — some now banned by the government — in the Turkic language. They re-established contact with the Muslim world in the 1980's as the country opened up again. Some Uighurs were allowed to travel to Mecca for the hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage, and many young Uighurs who made the trip brought back a renewed sense of their religious and cultural identity. How many Uighur separatists are operating in Xinjiang today is impossible to estimate. China says several hundred Uighurs have received training from the Afghan Taliban, and several Uighurs are among the Taliban fighters who have been captured in Afghanistan in the last few weeks. But the number of serious separatists inside China is still believed to be small. "This is mostly social and civil unrest by disorganized, disgruntled, fairly impulsive young men, not a widespread movement," said Dru C. Gladney, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii who follows developments in Xinjiang. The unrest of the late 1990's resulted in a surge of executions. Amnesty International reported that at least 190 people, an average of nearly two a week, were put to death in Xinjiang from January 1997 to April 1999. Several of the executions this year have taken place in Yili, known as Yining in Chinese, where a Uighur demonstration protesting China's restrictive policies erupted into a riot in February 1997. At least nine people died in the melee, scores of Uighurs were arrested and many of them were sentenced to death or long prison terms. As recently as Oct. 15, two Uighurs were executed in Yili for their roles in the riots, according to local press reports. Three other Uighurs were given the death penalty with a two- year suspension and six more were sentenced to jail terms, two for life. The repression has deepened Uighur resentment of the Chinese, but has also eroded sympathy for the separatists. In Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road market town, talk of the political tensions are nervously dismissed by most people, many of whom say the desire for independence remains, but the hope for it is gone. "We just want to make money and live in peace," said a young Uighur businessman in Kashgar. "The separatists have brought pressure on everyone." The anticrime campaign is not likely to stop the periodic violence. In September, local Uighurs say, a gun battle on the road from Kashgar to the Pakistan border left one policeman and two Uighurs dead. A third Uighur involved in the incident was caught and is expected to be executed soon. The government has called for an intensification of the crackdown in Xinjiang. China's vast state security apparatus monitors tens of thousands of people whose allegiance to the Communist Party is suspect. While the majority of Chinese enjoy a level of freedom today unprecedented in the 52 years since the Communist Party took control, the party is unforgiving and unrelenting in its pursuit of anyone who challenges its rule. In Uch Turfan, or Wushi, a county seat in a crook of the snowy-peaked Heavenly Mountains, which separate China from Kyrgyzstan, armed guards patrol bridges and children scatter in panic when a strange car stops near them. The town has been a center of anti- Chinese sentiment since the mid-18th century, when Qing troops were sent here to quell a Uighur uprising. According to Uighur legend, seven girls retreated to a rocky mount at one end of town and resisted the troops for days until they were killed by cannon fire. Access to their tomb atop the mount is now blocked by a locked gate. Local residents, most of whom are reluctant to speak to foreigners, say 28 Uighurs were sentenced at a rally outside the town's movie theater on Nov. 11. Among them was a man who had translated the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the Uighur language and distributed it to others. He was reportedly given a 20-year jail term. Most of the others were also charged with political activities and two were executed immediately after the rally. Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the East Turkestan Information Center, based in Sweden, said the men were political activists, but an Uch Turfan court official, reached by telephone, insisted that the men had been executed for murders unrelated to politics. China acknowledges that its prisons hold nearly 2,000 political prisoners, most serving sentences for endangering state security, according to China's Justice Department. But those numbers do not include people locked up in the country's reform-through-labor camps, to which the Public Security Bureau has the power to sentence people without trial. In the last three years, there has been a marked increase in the imprisonment of religious activists in such camps, including Uighur Muslims. Nor does the Justice Ministry's count include political activists charged with other criminal offenses. Many of the state's political enemies are convicted of disturbing social order, illegal publishing or even consorting with prostitutes. Thousands of people are held for days, weeks or even months in Public Security Bureau detention centers and Communist Party guest houses while under investigation for political crimes. The country's Religious Affairs Bureau has even put bishops loyal to the pope into retirement homes where they are neither allowed to leave nor receive visitors. The political activists in Xinjiang stand out because of the potency of their dissent and the power of the government's reaction. Many towns in southern Xinjiang are populated almost entirely by Uighurs, and Chinese rule of the territory has long been marked by Uighur uprisings. In 1933, the short-lived Eastern Turkestan Islamic Republic was declared in Kashgar. A decade later, Uighurs tried to found another republic farther north in Yili and governed a semiautonomous area there under Kuomintang control until the Communists took over in 1949. Uighurs in Hotan staged another failed uprising in 1954 before lapsing into decades of isolation under Mao. Fearing that Islamic orthodoxy could be used as a cloak or catalyst for political activism, China is quietly trying to stop its spread and suppress its religious practices. Dozens of illegal religious schools and unauthorized mosques have been shut this year, according to people and press reports here. Government employees risk their jobs if they go to mosques, and women working for the government are forbidden to wear veils. The government denies that it has also stepped up efforts to dissuade Uighurs from observing Ramadan, Islam's holy month of daylight fasting. But Uighurs say that restaurants and food stalls are given tax breaks if they stay open in the daytime and that schoolchildren are prohibited from going home at lunchtime and are encouraged to eat a noon meal at school. Mainstream Uighurs say the repression and the drumbeat of executions threaten to turn a small ethnic- based movement into a more volatile religious one. Near the medieval bazaar in this ancient Silk Road town where Mr. Mettohti lived stands a beige-brick mosque, which is closed and uncompleted, leaving local Muslims yet again without their traditional home for the festivals at the end of Ramadan. Asking why the mosque's main gate remains boarded up, years after construction began, makes residents visibly nervous. "We wanted to build it taller, but the government would not agree," said a young Uighur man with a thick black mustache. To isolate orthodox Uighur Muslims, some of whom have been influenced by the extreme Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Beijing is mounting a political re-education campaign for 8,000 imams in charge of the region's state-sanctioned mosques. The campaign started in mid- March and will run until the end of December. The Muslim leaders are required to attend seminars on religious and political policies set by the government and on Xinjiang history as written by the Communist Party. "These lessons are essential to the long-term stability of Xinjiang," said a recent report by the official New China News Agency, "as they will guide our students away from ideological confusion and mistakes." |