King Daoud Mehsut of Kucha, in China, the 12th in his royal line and the last man in China to have sat on a monarch’s throne, is a man of noble bearing and proud visage.
The old man’s fate, however, is dispiriting. Once a leader of Uighur people — the Muslim ethnic group that predominates in this far-western province of Xinjiang — King Daoud is now wheeled out by two young Chinese female assistants presenting him as a tourist attraction to visitors prepared to buy a 200 Yuan ($28.60) ticket. “I get a cut,” he says simply.
King Daoud’s humiliation, say some Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gur), is a sign of what is in store for their culture in the face of the Chinese government’s relentless drive to settle more and more ethnic Han Chinese in traditionally Uighur territory, rich in oil and minerals.
“We feel like foreigners in our own land,” complains one Uighur teacher in the provincial capital of Urumqi, who offers only a nickname, Batur, for fear of angering the authorities. “We are like the Indians in America,” he says.
Though Xinjiang’s 8 million Uighurs have shown only a few signs of the sort of unrest that shook Tibet recently, the Chinese government is just as nervous about “splittism” here among the country’s fifth-largest ethnic minority, afraid that beneath the surface calm, resentment is bubbling.
The authorities claim to have foiled three Uighur terrorist plots in recent months — one aimed at bringing down a passenger plane and the other two at the Olympic Games in Beijing — though they have given scant details to support the reports.
That concern, many Uighurs say, translates into harsh government control of their lives, restrictions on the use of their language in schools and on their Muslim religious practice, and a colonial-style economy that keeps most local people in menial jobs while Han immigrants run businesses and the local administration.
Since the Communist government took over Xinjiang in 1949, the proportion of Han Chinese (China’s dominant ethnic group) in the province has shot up from 6.7 per cent to 40.6 per cent, according to official figures. The Han population now almost matches the Uighur population, after a six decades-long campaign by Beijing to settle Han in the remote region.
“The government wants the Uighurs to be their slaves, they want our race to vanish,” says a clothes trader in the bazaar in Urumqi who calls himself Qutub. “They are drying out our roots.”
Though Han and Uighur people share the land, they have little in common, little to do with each other and little desire to change that state of affairs.
Uighurs are resentful of the way Han Chinese monopolise the best jobs and the top political posts. Han residents routinely complain that Uighurs are dirty, lazy and dishonest.
“I don’t have any Uighur friends. I don’t deal with them,” says Mi, an old man in Urumqi who says he has lived in Xinjiang for 50 years. “They are rude and brutal.”
Often, Chinese people seem insensitive to Uighur fears that their distinctive culture, derived from their Turkic origins, is being stifled by the Han immigration.
The Chinese government has brought economic development to Xinjiang, acknowledges Qutub. But he is not impressed. “They give us bread,” he says. “But they take away our hearts.”
“The Uighurs are in a very difficult position,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. “They can modernise but at the expense of their culture, or they can refuse to do so and end up marginalised economically.”
Of special concern to many Uighurs is their religion (Islam), which local people say is attracting increasing numbers as an expression of their identity, and which the authorities see as a potential breeding ground for separatism.
On the wall of the 16th-century ochre brick mosque in Kucha, a predominantly Uighur town of 200,000, a red banner proclaims in Chinese and Uighur script: “Fight Against Illegal Religious Activity: Create a Harmonious Society.”
Inside the prayer hall, a notice board explains “illegal religious activity”. Near the top of the list is a warning that indicates the Chinese government’s worries: “It is forbidden to praise jihad, pan-Turkism or pan-Islamism.”
“If you get too religious, the government gets worried,” says one cotton farmer in a village 50 miles south of Kucha, where, he says, 50 young men have been arrested in recent months for studying at private religious schools, accused of belonging to the outlawed Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Islamic Party.
“There is no religious freedom here,” the farmer says bluntly.
ETIM, a shadowy group that advocates an independent Islamic state for Uighurs, is seen by the Chinese authorities as the principal security danger in the region. The organisation “is the pre-eminent threat to the Beijing Olympics”, says Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.
That threat, Gunaratna says, comes from “ETIM’s operational network” comprising about 40 men who have linked up with Al Qaida allies.
Meanwhile, back in his government-refurbished palace that has been transformed into a “Triple-A Tourist Spot”, King Daoud seems resigned to his role as a folkloric money spinner for Xinjiang’s real rulers, with whom he long ago made his peace.
His “kingdom has disappeared”, he acknowledges. “I am the last vestige of the feudal system.”
Soon, Batur fears, his people, too, will go the same way if the Chinese government maintains its present policies. “The government thinks Uighurs are a threat to Xinjiang’s stability,” he says. “If they can assimilate us soon, there will be no threat. Xinjiang will be Chinese, and there will be nothing for them to worry about.”
Eroded by immigration
Uighurs are the largest Turkic ethnic group in China’s vast far-western Xinjiang region.
The Red Army first moved into Xinjiang in the late 1940s, and China began occupying the region in 1955.
Uighurs speak a Turkic dialect and write in the Arabic script. Uighurs, who have Caucasian features, once made up 90 per cent of the region’s population but Han Chinese immigration has seriously eroded that.
Sporadic protests have broken out in the region, with violent separatist attacks throughout the 1980s and in 1997. Ethnic nationalism and religious solidarity have renewed ties among Muslims across the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, prompting Beijing’s sensitivity to separatist influences from central Asia.
Chinese authorities recently blamed Uighur separatists for a series of terrorist conspiracies, which they denied.
-Source: Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, Reuters. Compiled by Peter Smith
