Xinjiang in 1997: The “China’s Chechnya” Crisis

The CIA programs in Tibet, which were very effective in destabilizing it, did not succeed in Xinjiang. There were similar efforts made with the Uyghurs during the Cold War that never really got off the ground. In both cases you had religion waved as a banner in support of a desire for independence or autonomy which is, of course, is anathema to any state. US Ambassador Chas. H. Freeman, Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, 1979-1981. 8/31/18

I heard Ambassador Freeman say those words five years ago and just stumbled on this corroboration:

Uighur card played to break up China

Since February, the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of north-west China has been the target of a series of disturbances and bombings, carried out—by their own claims—by “Uighur” separatist groups attempting to split the region from China. What is at stake in Xinjiang is a project of strategic impor-tance: the Second Euro-Asian Continental Bridge, the “new Silk Road” China-to-West Asia-and-Europe rail line which opened in 1992.

This project, at the core of all current projects to develop the Eurasian landmass, was only finally completed, a century after the first Europe-to-Asia line was built in Rus-sia, when the connection between the Chinese rail system and that of Kazakhstan in Central Asia was finished. Xinjiang is being targetted by foreign-steered and for-eign-headquartered separatist movements claiming to repre-sent the Turkic-language-speaking Uighur “people” of Xinjiang. Although in 1949, Xinjiang’s population was approximately 95% Uighur, today, about half of the 16 million population are of Chinese origin. Xinjiang also has China’s largest deposits of oil and natural gas, uranium, gold, and other raw materials.

Since 1992, Xinjiang has acquired global strategic significance, as the route of the Continental Bridge. The Chinese government is now building two more branches of the “Land-Bridge”: a second connection to Kazakhstan, and the first rail line to the city of Kashi, the Chinese terminus of the Pakistan-China Karakoram Highway. The separatists make no bones about the fact, that these strategic rail lines are their target. The leader of the U.S. branch of the Uighur Liberation Front, Gulamettin Pahta, told EIR on March 11, that the “Continental Bridge” is a Chinese “imperialist” plot that must be blocked.

“They are building railroads, but the people are opposing the railroad, and will destroy the railroad. This is just like the American movies on the history of California. What the Indians did, in fighting the railroads, is what we will do. The same thing is happening. Every train coming into eastern Turkestan is bringing in Chi-nese. This must be stopped,” Pahta said. Just how “successful” the separatists are in fighting the railroads, is questionable. Western press outlets, in an effort to inflame the situation, have repeatedly given all kinds of figures for casualties in disturbances in Xinjiang, and a bomb explosion in Beijing, numbers which Chinese accounts have not confirmed. However, spokesmen for the Uighur Libera-tion Party and the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organization have claimed credit for the violence.

 

Moreover, efforts by the British to inflame relations between China and the Central Asian Republics, by staging some of their “East Turkistan” separatist actions out of states bordering on China, have also been dealt a setback. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, fresh from discussions in Beijing about rail and energy cooperation with China, held a Feb. 22 press conference, in which he denounced the idea of secessionism.

“So-called minorities live in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, the south, and in other regions of China. Their aspiration for self-determination is understandable. However, we can in no way welcome the idea of separatism. There are 6,000 peoples and ethnic groups in the world. If all of them were to decide to declare sovereignty one day, then numerous helpless, dwarfish countries would emerge on the planet, along with the existing powerful countries that are striving for development and prosperity, and this would mean chaos, permanent wars, and endless con-flicts.”

Gulamettin Pahta is a member of an international network of Uighur liberationist groups deployed by the British and Dutch monarchies’ Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), the British Royal Society of Asian Affairs, and Lord Avebury’s House of Lords human rights mercenaries. The UNPO has trained the Uighur liberationists in “diplomatic skills” at the Australian National University, according to its literature, through grants provided by the Dutch Foreign Ministry. After World War II, the Uighur separatists were led by Isa Yusuf Alptekin, who led a revolt in Xinjiang in 1945. Today, the leadership of the network has passed to his son, Erkin Alptekin, who is also chairman of the UNPO.

The British command structure In addition to the Anglo-Dutch UNPO, which has target-ted much of Siberia, as well as large sections of Central Asia and western China for break-up into ethnically divided mini-states, EIR has identified a complex of largely London-headquartered intelligence fronts, all pushing the destabilization of China.

One of the most important British case officers for the Uighur independence movement is Sir William Peters, a former British deputy high commissioner in Bombay and career intelligence specialist, who is today chairman of the Tibet Society and board member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs, the primary British intelligence outfit targetting China.

In 1991, he wrote an optimistic forecast of Uighur and Tibetan rebellion, after a tour of Xinjiang, in the society’s journal, Asian Affairs: “To the south and east [of Xinjiang] lies Tibet. Stories of the Tibetan resistance filter through to Kashgar [Kashi] and its neighbors. . . . To the northeast, Uighurs see the moves toward multipolarity in Outer Mongolia and hear about unrest among Mongols in Inner Mongolia.

The British House of Lords and Foreign Office speaker Lord Avebury, chairman of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, sent an open letter to the British Foreign Office demanding that it “save the peoples of Eastern Turkestan,” who were “faced with national extinction.” In 1995, Lord Avebury told EIR that he was pessimistic that Britain could be successful in defending the Uighurs and Tibetans from Chinese efforts to exterminate them, simply through human rights campaigns, implying that he favored more aggressive London involvement in destabilizing Xinjiang. Lord Ennals, a former British Foreign Secretary, was a top patron of the Uighur and Tibetan independence movements and a leader of the UNPO. Martin, Lord Ennal’s brother, controls Amnesty International, the Foreign Office front which oversees international propaganda campaigns against China, over alleged suppression of the Uighurs and Tibetans.

American ‘cousins’ weigh in