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The Impact on Human Rights in Xinjiang Room 480 of the Ford House Office Building Statement of S. Frederick Starr A visitor to Xinjiang today will find much to admire. The land is austere but beautiful, and the great oases that ring the Taklamakan desert are verdant. Thanks to oil and gas production it is a prosperous territory, at least in a statistical sense, with more production than any other non-coastal province of China. Oil wealth has turned the once somnolent Turkic town of Urumchi into a humming metropolis. The newly opened railroad to Kashgar will doubtless produce the same result in that historic center of Turkic and Muslim life. The problem is that nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the new Urumchi are Han Chinese who have only recently settled in a province whose population was 98% Turkic only three generations ago. The same process is beginning in Kashgar, Xinjiang's second city. Meanwhile, the oases on which the majority Uyghur and other Turkic peoples live are very poor by comparison. This is a common problem of development and has certain parallels in the expansion of Russia, Australia, Brazil, and the United States. What is noteworthy is how the Chinese government has dealt with it. For a generation and a half after 1949 Beijing took a hard line to impose its control, using tough top-down controls whenever necessary. After 1985 it shifted to a softer approach, focusing on economic incentives, affirmative action in education, and a respectful place for the Turkic Uyghur language in public life. Then in the late 1990s, concerned over what it terms "splittism" or separatism and radical Islam, China's government shifted back to a policy that is harsh to the point of brutality, as is implied by the very name of its campaign in the region, "Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure!" This policy continues today, and with devastating consequences. Thousands have died in confrontations with the police, including some 300 young people in the northern town of Ili who, in 1997, dared to mount an independent campaign against alcohol abuse. In terms of nearly all the commonly accepted indexes of democracy and human rights, the situation in Xinjiang is lamentable. Permit me to touch briefly on ten areas that should be of concern to your committee. I do so as the editor of a multi-year study of Xinjiang funded by the Luce Foundation and carried out by the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Some eighteen scholars, most of whom know Uyghur and other local Turkic languages as well as Han Chinese and all of whom have carried out research in Xinjiang, contributed to the study, available as a book entitled Xingiang: China's Muslim Borderland (M.E. Sharp). The comments that follow are based on research findings of this book but I take sole responsibility for their contents. So, let us ask:
These in turn are rationalized in terms of the campaign against separatism. Yet the "Strike Hard" campaign has long since wiped out whatever separatist currents may have existed in Xinjiang a decade ago. Those few voices still calling for Xinjiang's independence arise from abroad and are audible mainly on the Internet. Today, the overwhelming majority of Xinjiang Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks would be quite content with a greater degree of autonomy, as opposed to outright independence. Their plea is simply for the current Chinese government to fulfill the expectations that Mao Zedong himself generated when, after conquering the province, named it the "Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region" (emphasis mine). The US government, other western countries, and the EU have rightly been concerned with the state of democracy, human rights, and religious freedoms in the Caucasus and Central Asia. With the collapse of Soviet imperial rule eight new states were created in these regions. At independence, all of them were weak and poor, with small populations ranging from four to 24 million. They were inaccessible to trade and those lacking oil and gas were poor in resources. None had any real experience with democracy and the rights that citizenship should confer. Our efforts in behalf of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom have concentrated above all on these eight states. However, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia constitute only a part of the Caucasus. The rest of the region---Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Chechnya, and Kabardino-Balkaria -- remains under Russian rule. Similarly, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are only part of Central Asia, the rest being Afghanistan and Xinjiang. Merely to mention this raises an obvious point. It cannot be denied that the independent countries I just listed are guilty of many and at times serious lapses in the areas of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom. So, of course, were the newly independent United States of America. But even at their worst, their record in all three areas of concern to your committee is far better than is the record of Russia's rule in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, and of China's rule in Tibet and in Xinjiang. And yet how different is our response to the two situations! When the small, weak, relatively poor, but independent states stumble in the area of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom we editorialize against them, pass censure motions, heap public abuse on their leaders, threaten to suspend aid, and decertify them even for humanitarian assistance. But when large, rich and powerful states impose their rule over other parts of the same region with brutal and primitive force---in the process assaulting the principles of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom---we continue to receive their leaders as honored guests and otherwise remain silent. By the act of its founding the United States placed itself on the side of national self-determination and those seeking freedom from imperial rule. Recently, however, it appears that we have reversed this age-old stance. We seem to acquiesce in serious abuses committed by those who are the heirs of empires acquired by force, and instead focus narrowly on the shortcomings of independent states that have no understanding of how to apply the values we hold high. The word "engagement" is a resonant term in this city's discussion of foreign affairs. Applied to the Caucasus and Central Asia, we seem more willing to engage with those in Moscow who rule the North Caucasus and with those in Beijing who rule Xinjiang, than we are with those in the eight newly independent states who are trying, against formidable odds, to govern their countries under conditions of great insecurity and to build their still fragile economies in a globalized world with which they had little or no direct contact until very recently. Let me be clear: I am not arguing against engagement with the Peoples Republic of China, nor am I proposing that we "give a pass" to governments in Central Asia and the Caucasus when they commit abuses in the area of democratization, human rights, and religious freedom. Instead, I am suggesting that it is time that we take our finger off the scales, and start acting on our values in a consistent manner. At the very least, we must stop allocating rewards and punishments, engagement and rebuke, on the basis of whether a country is large or small, secure or vulnerable, powerful or weak. Removing what appears to many as a double standard will go far towards promoting the noble ends we seek to promote. |
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