Beijing says radicalized members of its Uighur minority are terrorists with ties to the Islamic State and al Qaeda, but its repressive policies may be helping to fuel the violence.
By Justine Drennan
FOREIGN POLICY - February 9, 2015
When an SUV crashed through a crowd at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in
late 2013, killing two bystanders and injuring 40, it didn’t take
Chinese officials long to name culprits. The attackers, they said,
had been members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority, with “links to many
international extremist terrorist groups.” Police said they found a
flag bearing jihadi emblems in the crashed vehicle and blamed the East
Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, a group named after the independent
state China says some Uighurs want to establish in the far-western
region of Xinjiang. After the attack, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua
Chunying called ETIM “China’s most direct and realistic security
threat.”
Beijing has long characterized cases of Uighur violence as organized
acts of terrorism and accused individual attackers of having ties to
international jihadi groups. Back in 2001, China released a document
claiming that “Eastern Turkistan” terrorists had received training from
Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and then “fought in combats in
Afghanistan, Chechnya and Uzbekistan, or returned to Xinjiang for
terrorist and violent activities.” Since then, China has frequently blamed ETIM for violence in Xinjiang and elsewhere.
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