Kyrgyzstan's Worried Uighurs

Ethnic Uighurs living in Kyrgyzstan say their whole community has been stigmatised by a government clampdown on a radical separatist movement.

The Uighurs - originally from the neighbouring province of Xinjiang in China - fear they are being victimised because the Kyrgyz authorities want to curry favour with China, and are exploiting the international war on terrorism to do so.

“This concept of Uighur terrorism and extremism is constantly hammered into the Kyrgyz public consciousness,” IWPR was told by Rozimuhammed Abdulbakiev, head of the Uighur Unity Society, Ittipak.

Community leaders voiced their worries about the trend at a national congress of Uighurs held in Bishkek on July 28. Many feel that whenever a crime is committed in Kyrgyzstan and an Uighur is found to be involved, the government and the state-controlled media deliberately ascribe it to the Islamic militant and separatist movement operating across the border in China.

“Anti-Uighur propaganda has created a negative image of the whole community,” said Muzaffar Kurbanov, editor of Vizhdan Avazi (Voice of Conscience), an Uighur-language newspaper in Bishkek.

“We feel that this has led to a hostile attitude towards the Uighur population among the wider population.”

As evidence of changing public attitudes, Kurbanov said some Uighurs found they were treated with suspicion when they applied for jobs.

Other community members agree that the unfavourable media coverage - encouraged by the authorities - has been damaging. After a major fire at a Bishkek market in 2001, there were persistent rumours that Uighur separatists were behind it – despite an official investigation blaming an electrical fault.

“We Uighurs in Kyrgyzstan feel as though we are treading on hot coals. You never know what other crimes we might be accused of next,” said Abdulbakiev.

There are an estimated 50,000 Uighurs living in Kyrgyzstan. Some have been there since the 1940s, while others are more recent arrivals. There is a lot of contact between Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang, with small-time traders - many of them Uighurs - shuttling across the border.

China has always treated the Uighur diaspora in Central Asia with deep suspicion, and has pressured governments there to curb community support for separatism in Xinjiang. The province is home to perhaps eight million Uighurs, who are Muslims and speak a Turkic language, and are thus culturally closer to Kyrgyz, Kazaks and Uzbeks than to the rest of China.

The independence movement has its roots in a brief spell of independence which the region – termed the East Turkestan Republic – enjoyed between 1944 and 1949.

Until 2001, Chinese repression of pro-independence activists in Xinjiang – like that in Tibet – found little support further afield.

That changed after September 11, when the West, Russia and China found common cause in combating radical Islamic groups across the region. In 2002, the US government imposed sanctions on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, ETIM, said to have carried out terrorist attacks in western China. Islamic groups in Xinjiang were alleged to have links with the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

In Kyrgyzstan, the campaign against Uighur radicals began in earnest after the 1998 bombing of a minibus taxi in the southern city of Osh, which left a number of people dead. Four men – Uighurs with Chinese, Turkish and Russian citizenship – were sentenced to death for the attack. Kyrgyz media described them as members of a group called “East Turkestan”. This term is ambiguous since apart from ETIM there is another, much longer established diaspora group called the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation.

Since then the government has consistently asserted that militant Uighurs are operating on Kyrgyz territory. Interviewed by the Res Publica newspaper in July, National Security Service spokeswoman Chinara Asanova said, “We have irrefutable evidence that they [the 1998 bombers] all belonged to the underground extremist organisation East Turkestan.”

Other acts of violence are routinely branded “the work of Uighur terrorists and separatists”, although at least some are more likely to have been committed by criminal gangs.

In one recent case, the pro-government newspaper Vecherny Bishkek was quick to blame “an Uighur organisation” for an attack on a bus which left 19 Chinese citizens dead earlier this year.

Community leaders say they agree that radicals may have been involved in some incidents. But what worries them is that no distinction is drawn between the small number of militants and the larger Uighur community who lead law-abiding lives in Kyrgyzstan.

The Kyrgyz president’s security adviser, Bolot Januzakov, denied that Uighurs have been singled out as a group, “Kyrgyzstan is home to many ethnic groups and we treat all of them equally.”

Some say that blaming the Uighurs is a deliberate policy designed to appease Kyrgyzstan’s giant neighbour to the east.

“There is no Uighur extremist organisation in Kyrgyzstan,” said Tursun Islam, who heads Democracy, a human rights group based in the Uighur community.

“One gets the impression that certain politicians and law-enforcement bodies are carrying out the will of the Chinese special services, whom it suits to accuse Uighurs of terrorism and religious extremism.”

Tursun Islam says the Kyrgyz government has been cracking down on the Uighurs since it joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional grouping in which China plays a prominent role. Set up in 1996, the pact focuses on security matters such as terrorism and Islamic radicalism.

Aside from the international policy dimensions, Uighur leaders fear the Kyrgyz authorities’ present behaviour shows uncomfortable comparisons with Stalin’s policy of persecuting whole minority groups which he perceived as disloyal.

“We don’t want a repeat of the times when you were stigmatised because of your ethnic origin,” said Abdulbakiev.

Sultan Jumagulov is an IWPR contributor in Bishkek.