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Thursday May 28, 2009

Condemned: A Chinese ethnic minority vendor at a handcrafts street in Kashgar, in China's far west. Kashgar was a hub of politics and commerce on the old silk road. It is now the site of a silent genocide. (Guang Niu/Getty Images)

Kashgar is a city in China of about 350,000 people at the western edge of the forbidding Taklamakan, "the most dangerous desert on earth," according to Colin Thubron, the great British travel writer who's skirted its periphery.

To refer to Kashgar as a city in China is geographically correct. To refer to it as a Chinese city would be culturally and historically incorrect. Kashgar is the heart of the Uighur world, a Turkik Muslim minority of some 8 million people spread through Western China and Central Asia. In Kashgar the landscape of minarets and meandering alleyways has more in common with the Middle East than with China--with Islam than with Communism.

The Uighurs make sure of the distinction, too: they have been battling absorption and elimination by China for most of the past century. In the 1930s, the Uighurs declared themselves independent and called their country the Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkestan. But Bejing imposed its will in 1949, and has been committing what Thubron calls a "silent demographic genocide" since, literally pouring in Han Chinese to outnumber the Uighurs, and using a rail line to Kashgar, opened in 1999, to accelerate the dilution. It's working. Ethnic Han Chinese numbered less than 300,000 in the Uighurs' province 50 years ago. The Uighurs are now outnumbered.

They've rebelled a few times. They've been brutally suppressed, killed in the streets and imprisoned in labor camps by the thousands.

So what has any of this to do with the Middle East? A couple of things. First, there are 17 innocent Uighurs sitting in prison at Guantanamo Bay who nevertheless have become embroiled in the fallout from the "war on terror." They were cleared of wrongdoing six years ago. Bush agreed that releasing them back to China would get them executed. A federal judge ordered them released into the United States in October. But nobody wants them. That's the Guantanamo stigma. It doesn't matter how innocent you are. You're branded for life. And can't sue for damages.

How the Uighurs ended up in Guantanamo is a shame in itself.

To win China's support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration declared the Uighurs' East Turkistan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization in league with al-Qaeda. It's nothing of the sort, but nuance was never a Bush forte, and is even less of one for China. Bush's designation gave China's brutality toward Uighurs extra cover. Some Uighurs fled to nearby Pakistan or Afghanistan. There, in late 2001 and early 2002, many fell victims to bounty hunters looking to cash in on the CIA's prize money for alleged terrorists. Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in his memoirs wrote that "millions" were paid for 369 prisoners turned over to American authorities. Among them: the Uighurs.

"I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention," U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina said last October, ordering the Uighurs released. Still, they linger.

The second factor that connects the Uighurs to the Middle East is more tangential, but, it seems to me, even more critical: they represent a Far-East extension of Islamic culture that's being slowly, systematically and irredeemably wiped out.

The New York Times ran a shatteringly tragic story about the Chinese government currently in process of demolishing Kashgar--demolishing the entire city, its vast historic districts that attract a million visitors a year included, and replacing it all with modern constructions. Some of the constructions are supposedly in the Uighur style. Don’t believe it. And the Uighurs are supposedly being compensated for their loss and invited to return to newer housing, though the new houses cost more than what they're being compensated for.

Why is the Beijing government doing this? Because it claims to be protecting the Uighurs' poorly constructed dwellings from devastation in an earthquake. Rebuilding the city, you see, is a preventive measure.

Again, don’t believe it. It's a way to ethnically cleanse Kashgar more effectively, expropriating land and dwellings, and accommodating the new influx of Chinese from the East into the sort of houses they're more used to. It's Thubron's silent genocide, plus the noise of construction--the demolition of an Islamic culture that's going apace, unopposed, unobstructed.