Beijing to step up terror crackdown

CNN ^ | December 11, 2001 | Willy Wo-Lap Lam

[super175]

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Anti-Beijing "terrorist" forces in Xinjiang have killed more than 40 people and injured 330 since the early 1990s, according to officials in the autonomous region.

Xinjiang, in the west of China, has been a base of Uighur separatism and pro-Islamic religious groups.

[super175]

Willy is an excellent writer, and very eloquent.

However, I have one question for him...

Anti-Beijing "terrorist" forces in Xinjiang have killed more than 40 people and injured 330 since the early 1990s, according to officials in the autonomous region.

So they took 40 of 'yours' but how many of 'theirs' have the CCP taken since the 1950s?

Mao tried to reconquer a land and a people that were conquered by the Qing, and they did it in no different terms than the Qing did...

Therein lies the problem.

[super175]

bump

[tallhappy]

Also, how many of the acts have been terrorism. Terrorist acts are killing civilians, like blowing up buses and things. The ChiComs state this:

Quoting officials, the paper said separatists and terrorists had killed or tried to assassinate senior cadres as well as "patriotic religious personnel" in the region, including a vice-chairman of the regional Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

All these targets were Chinese Communist Party. That's not terrorism. That's insurrection, civil war, rebellion, whatever you call it. But not terrorism.

The fact is the Chinese Communist party has closer ties and links and dealings with the Taliban and al Qaeda than the East Turkestan movement does. They didn't buy US cruise missiles from al Qaeda or build fiber optic networks for the Taliban, but the ChiComs did.

[RicocheT]

Super175 and tallhappy have it right. The Chinese Communist government/party uses the "strike hard" campaign to suppress the long-time residents of East Turkestan. The Han Chinese treat all the minority peoples as third class citizens. The PRC uses the same tactics in Tibet. If terror is measured by which side kills more, the Reds in China are thousands of times more terrorists than those targeted by the strike hard campaign. All terror is wrong, just don't forget the PRC is a dictatorship maintained by inhumane force.

[tallhappy]

The good thing is the Bush administration knows what you are saying.

Bush himself in Shanghai said that the war on terrorism cannot be used as an excuse to persecute minorities. That had to just burn the ChiComs up.

And last week or so Gen. Frank Taylor went to Beijing and said the same thing.

The New York Times put it like this:

Also, General Taylor said he made clear that the United States would not support Beijing's effort to paint Uighur Muslim nationalists in China's Xinjiang region as terrorists. China has been criticized for trampling on people's rights as it tries to stamp out ethnic separatism in the region, but Chinese officials insist that Uighur militants have received outside training and aid.

Some Uighurs had been discovered with the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, General Taylor said, and some have committed acts of violence inside China. But he said that "the legitimate economic and social issues" facing people in northwest China "need political solutions, not counterterrorism."

After Taylor said this, the New York Times oddly titled their article:

"U.S. Official Praises China for Its Cooperation in Rooting Out bin Laden's Terror Network".

[shaggy eel]

,,, a few weeks back "The Economist" ran a page on rising firearms use by citizens in China - for bank robeeries etc. I can't recall whether this group was the source of these weapons but the problem is on the increase.

[Malcolm]

Muslims on one side, the Chicoms on the other. The whole world would be better without either one of them. Maybe they will cancel each other out.....

[shaggy eel]

,,, at the very least, chew up Chinese resources.

[super175]

The Chinese were sometimes blaming America for those guns. To them, it was all the USA trying to start some stuff over there...

I think the charge was that the US was shipping weapons to Western China via the old mujahideen in Afghanistan (Northern Alliance)...

I don't know where they get the guns at for real though...

[Righty1]

Given the fact that we had SFs in Checnya I wouldn't put it past the CIA to run guns to separatists to distract Chi Coms from Taiwan. By the way wasn't it the Chi Coms who got busted for smuggling boat loads of cheap assault rifles into the US?

[super175]

yup, they got busted alright...

[super175]

maybe its the golden rule at work...

[Libertarianize the GOP]

I also have noticed the change in opinion about Chechnya, but it seems to correspond to a change in operational control from Chechen rebels to foreign Muslim fighters. A change that has not served the Chechen people well.

[Lake]

>>Isn't it interesting how after 9-11, the whole attitude in Washington toward the Al Qaeda sponsored Chechen insurgents completely changed? Suddenly terrorism was no longer an acceptable price to pay to gain a strategic edge against Russia.

That's politics. BTW, the Xinjiang Islamic terrorists are not attacking exclusively on the CCP's military targets. They are attacking civilians, buses, post offices and public gatherings.