Jack Broome, security analyst specializing in ethno-nationalist conflict and anti-state activity across East Asia and Southeast Asia.
This is the first part of a study on China’s policy toward Islam and Islamism in Xinjiang; read the second part here.
Introduction: Centre-Periphery Relations and the Uyghurs
The first mention of the “War on Terror” came in George W. Bush’s now historic speech to congress a little over a week after the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. Speaking with a tone of solemn defiance the President announced: “Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there”. Rather, said Bush, the new threat to “freedom itself” extended to a “radical network of terrorists … [of] global reach”.[1] Yet in many cases the War on Terror was simply a new means to frame an age-old conflict between the centripetal forces of the state and the centrifugal tendencies of those people living on the periphery.
In his book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam, Akbar Ahmed examines each of the War on Terror’s now numerous theatres—from the snow-capped peaks of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, to the ochre sands of the Sahara or the dense jungles of the Southern Philippines—Ahmed offers an explanation for the systemic insecurity and violence that has long affected these areas. In place of the tired tropes that place Islam at the centre of a “clash of civilizations”, he argues that it was an “inability for Muslim and non-Muslim states alike to either incorporate minority groups into a liberal and tolerant society or resolve the ‘centre vs. periphery’ conflict” that led the U.S. to the world’s last remaining “ungoverned spaces” in its hunt for Al-Qaeda.[2, 3]
This can be seen in the remote and mountainous region of Waziristan which forms part of Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. For centuries this region remained isolated from the world—even Alexander the Great and the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb thought it best avoided. It was not until the Indian subcontinent was colonised by the British that the two main Pashtun tribes in Waziristan—the Wazir and the Mehsud—encountered any form of central rule. However, the British understood that only a form of indirect rule was suitable for Waziristan and organised the region into separate tribal agencies, each with its own Political Agent (PA). After the creation of Pakistan, its founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, not only retained this system of governance, but also took the bold step of withdrawing the military garrisons from the region.
Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, however, and under pressure from Washington to secure the border from fleeing Taliban, the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, ordered the military back into Waziristan for the first time in over half-a-century. Musharraf then claimed that the Pashtun tribes were providing refuge for high ranking Al-Qaeda figures, including second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. This paved the way for a full-scale invasion in 2004, which led to years of violence and instability and ultimately the creation of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or the Pakistani Taliban.
Aceh, on the very northern tip of Indonesia’s largest island, Sumatra, is another area with a long history of centre-periphery conflict that was not able to escape association with the War on Terror. Having remained independent of the various Java-based sultanates in the pre-colonial era, Aceh successfully resisted attempts at subjugation by the Dutch and embarked on a war of succession when President Sukarno failed to deliver on his promise of autonomy. As such, the Acehnese know all too well the struggles of life on the periphery.
During the 1980s and 1990s, a separatist group known as the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) rose to prominence and became the main source of opposition to the central state in Jakarta. Although GAM emphasized the importance of establishing an Islamic state as one of its primary goals, it was largely an ethno-nationalist struggle based on the historic sovereignty of the Aceh Sultanate. Indeed, the Acehnese were typically wary of foreign infiltration, as can be see with the limited success Saudi Arabia found when trying to infuse its Salafi/Wahhabi ideology into the movement. However, with the arrival of the War on Terror, the government in Jakarta was quick to draw links between GAM and Salafi-jihadist organizations like Al-Qaeda, and even reported a plan to transfer Al-Qaeda’s base of operations in Afghanistan to Aceh.[4]
But perhaps one of the most striking example is China, which has struggled with its peripheries for thousands of years, so much so that successive dynasties built and added to a network of walls and other defences that stretch for 21,196 km (14,000 miles)—now known as the Great Wall of China—in order to protect its central lands from “barbarians” to the North and the West. While historically the primary focus was on the Xiongnu—a nomadic people from the Eurasian Steppe—and later the Mongols and the Tibetans, more recently China’s conflicts with its peripheries have centred on the Uyghurs in the far western province of Xinjiang, as well as Taiwan and Hong Kong.[5]
A History on the Chinese Periphery
As a Muslim Turkic minority living on China’s peripheries, the Uyghurs have had to confront multiple centralizing missions from their neighbours to the East. In fact, Michael Clarke of the Australian National University argues that Uyghur resistance against various iterations of Chinese states has been consistent since Xinjiang was brought under Chinese rule by the Qing emperor Qianlong in mid-18th century.[6] An early notable example is the Dungan Revolt which reached Xinjiang in 1864 and led to the establishment of an independent emirate called Kashgaria before General Zuo Zongtang reconquered the region in 1877.
Since then, Uyghur independence movements have on two separate occasions proclaimed an independent “East Turkestan Republic”, first in Kashgar in 1933 and later in Ghuljar in 1945.[7] These were, however, short-lived and since then the Uyghurs have lived under the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Prior to 2001, the Chinese central government’s descriptions of outbursts of violence in Xinjiang tended to adhere more to the language of an ethno-nationalist conflict. In the early days of the PRC, official propaganda reflected the prevailing Communist ideology of the time, referring to acts of dissent as “counter-revolutionary riots”. Later, the emphasis moved towards separatism, with the term “national splittists” becoming a popular epithet for Uyghur militant organizations.[8, 9]
While Islam was always portrayed as a threat, it was not viewed as inherently dangerous. Rather, the concern was the perceived link between Uyghur ethnic identity and Islam, and the potential for this to act as an alternative site of allegiance to the central state. In particular, Beijing sought to hedge against the possibility that Islam might attain a similar role to the one it had in Soviet Central Asia, in which it became a vehicle for mobilization during the secessionist rebellions of the early 1990s.[10]
However, just two weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers, official reports took a dramatic turn towards the language of counterterrorism. According to James Millward, an expert on Xinjiang, what had previously been the work of a handful of separatists was now cast as a “full-blown ‘terrorist organization’” with links to the international jihadist community.[11] On 29 November 2001, the government of released a document entitled ‘Terrorist Activities Perpetrated by “Eastern Turkestan” Organizations and their Ties with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’ which claimed that the “‘East Turkestan’ force” has a total of over 40 organizations, eight of which openly advocate violence, and also contained the first public reference to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
ETIM is described as “a major component of the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden”, receiving financial support from both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In addition, ETIM was said to have established a “special ‘China Battalion’ in Afghanistan with about 320 terrorists from Xinjiang” receiving training in camps operated by Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and even fighting “directly under” their command.[12]
Then in January 2002, Beijing published a “white paper’ entitled ‘“East Turkestan” Terrorist Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity’, which went into greater detail on the activities of ETIM and other “East Turkestan” groups and was the first public acknowledgement of the extent of anti-state activity in the region. On the back of evidence obtained almost exclusively from biased Chinese and Central Asian intelligence agencies, in September 2002 the United States and the United Nations officially recognised ETIM as a terrorist organisation.[13]
Having successfully linked the Uyghur independence movement to the War on Terror, Beijing hoped to gain international support for its repressive crackdown in Xinjiang, as well as improve relations with the Bush administration, which had recently labelled China a “strategic competitor”.[14] There were also some who argued that the U.S. benefitted from this, such as scholar Sean Roberts, who surmising that recognition of ETIM was a quid-pro-quo action in return for Chinese support for the wider War on Terror and perhaps, more directly, the then-imminent invasion of Iraq.[15]
Transnationalisation of Uyghur Militancy
Uyghur militancy has expanded across the globe since that time, appearing in places as far-flung as Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and Thailand . Believed to be a reincarnation of the ETIM, a new organization, known as the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), has grown to become a significant member of the Qaeda-Taliban alliance, operating in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its sister group, the Turkestan Islamic Party in the Levant (TIPL), is one of the most powerful Al-Qaeda affiliates currently operating in Syria.
As the principal Uyghur militant organization, TIP is able to call on hundreds of recruits in the Af-Pak region and potentially over 2000 fighters in Syria. In August 2016 reports began to surface of TIP’s alleged involvement in an attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. While still unconfirmed, if true this would represent the first attack by a Uyghur-aligned terrorist organization on a Chinese target outside of China.
There was also evidence of a small, but seemingly committed, Uyghur presence in the ranks of the Islamic State (ISIS) prior to the collapse of its caliphate at the beginning of 2019. Though estimates for the number of Uyghurs in ISIS have ranged up to 500, the best available data, from the foreign fighter registration forms as examined by Nate Rosenblatt at the New America Foundation, found 114 recruits from China, nearly all identified as Uyghurs from “East Turkestan”.[16]
Rosenblatt’s study noted that for all the highest ranking places of origin for ISIS fighters, fighters tend to hail from regions with “restive histories and tense, local-federal relationships”. This is true for Uyghurs from Xinjiang, for residents of Derna in eastern Libya (which had the highest per capita number of recruits in Rosenblatt’s sample), and for Sunnis of northern Lebanon, who have long been excluded from the halls of power in Beirut.
In an upcoming series of articles drawing on months of research conducted under the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS–Asia), I will look to trace the evolution of Uyghur militancy from its early days as a form of anti-state resistance grounded in the narrative of ethno-nationalism to its current role as part of a trans-nationalised conflict with links to Islamic fundamentalism. Each article will apply a new thematic angle to the separate regional hubs of Uyghur militant activity—beginning in China and following its course to its furthest reaches in Afghanistan, Syria, and Norway. In doing so, I hope to shed light on the failings of China’s counter-terrorism policy in Xinjiang, which has been condemned by Sean Roberts as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and, ultimately, is simply a means to justify state repression of the Uyghur ethnicity.[17]
European Eye on Radicalization aims to publish a diversity of perspectives and as such does not endorse the opinions expressed by contributors. The views expressed in this article represent the author alone.
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References
[1] “Full text of President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress and the nation”, The Washington Post, 20 September 2001. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html
[2] Akbar Ahmed and Harrison Akins, “Waziristan: ‘The most dangerous place in the world’,” Al-Jazeera, 12 April 2013. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134983149771365.html
[3] Akbar Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (2013).
[4] Akbar Ahmed and Harrison Akins, “Aceh elections and the fragility of peace”, Al-Jazeera, 9 April 2012. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/20124884744373421.html
[5] James A. Millward, “What Xi Jinping Hasn’t Learned From China’s Emperors”, The New York Times, 1 October 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/opinion/xi-jinping-china.html
[6] Michael Clarke, China’s “War on Terror” in Xinjiang: Human Security and the Causes of Violent Uighur Separatism (2008).
[7] Michael Clarke, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) 2019 CT Yearbook (2019).
[8] James Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang (2004).
[9] Michael Clarke, China Xinjiang and the Internationalisation of the Uyghur Issue (2010).
[10] Michael Clarke, China’s “War on Terror” in Xinjiang: Human Security and the Causes of Violent Uighur Separatism (2008).
[11] James Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang (2004)
[12] “Terrorist Activities Perpetrated by ‘Eastern Turkistan’ Organizations and Their Links with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban”, China’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, 29 November 2001. http://www.china-un.org/eng/zt/fk/t28937.htm
[13] Sean R. Roberts, Imaginary Terrorism, The Global War on Terror and the Narrative of Uyghur Terrorism (2012).
[14] James Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang (2004).
[15] Sean R. Roberts, Imaginary Terrorism, The Global War on Terror and the Narrative of Uyghur Terrorism (2012).
[16] Nate Rosenblatt, All Jihad is Local, What ISIS’ Files Tell Us About Its Fighters (2016).
[17] Sean R. Roberts, The Narrative of Uyghur Terrorism and the Self-fulfilling Prophecy of Uyghur Militancy, p123, in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in China (2018), Edited by Michael Clarke.
