The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority by Sean R. Roberts

Author:Sean R. Roberts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Human Rights, Minority Studies, Social Science, Genocide & War Crimes, Black Studies (Global), Asia, China, Islamic Studies, Political Science, World, Terrorism, History, Asian
ISBN: 9780691202181
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-09-07T21:00:00+00:00

UYGHUR RESISTANCE AND STATE COUNTERTERRORISM, 2010–2012

In addition to these assimilationist development policies, the Work Forum also ushered in a new era of securitization in the Uyghur homeland. Following the violent and extensive crackdown on Uyghurs during the first year after the riots, the PRC would begin implementing a much-enhanced security environment in the region in 2010. This was the ‘stability’ portion of the state’s post-riot strategy of ‘leapfrog development and lasting stability,’ and would be articulated increasingly in terms of ‘counterterrorism.’ The pressures that this increased security would place on Uyghurs, especially in the rural south, would be particularly intense, and predictably only led to a rise of Uyghur-initiated violence targeting the state.

By the first anniversary of the 2009 Urumqi riots, local officials reported that ‘40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective shells had been installed throughout the region.’87 In Urumqi, there were also reports that city officials were placing permanent barriers between Uyghur and Han neighborhoods.88 However, in the Uyghur-dominated south of the region, the environment was particularly tense. There were limits imposed on traveling outside one’s home region, frequent checkpoints between cities, and ethnically profiled random searches. Furthermore, Uyghur refugees from rural areas, with whom I spoke in Turkey in 2016, repeatedly told me that they had been put under constant surveillance by local authorities for several years after the 2009 riots due to their profiling as particularly ‘religious’ Uyghurs. These refugees, who said their situation was akin to house arrest, reported that these measures were the primary reasons they fled the country. In addition to these efforts to monitor and control the general Uyghur population, even more substantial controls on the practice of Islam were established. Many of these controls utilized public institutions, including schools, hospitals, and mosques, to regulate Uyghurs’ public behavior, beliefs, and dress, to prevent Uyghur children from embracing Islam, and to control the messages they received from their own religious leaders.89

In the face of this intensifying securitization, Uyghur violent resistance to police and security forces would soon become a common occurrence, especially in the Uyghur-majority south. The first report of such violent resistance since the Urumqi riots was an alleged bombing of a police station in Aksu in August 2010, but similar events would be reported over the next several years with increased frequency. While information about this violence remains limited, the majority of incidents through 2012 appear to have been clashes between Uyghurs and law enforcement officers.90 Although Chinese officials questionably labeled all of these incidents as ‘terrorist acts,’ most do not fit this description per this book’s working definition. Rather, they appear more like reactions to equally violent security actions in the region, and many of them obviously were provoked by the invasive security that would increasingly blanket the region.

The most publicized of these violent incidents would be a series of alleged attacks on police and security forces in Kashgar and Khotan in July of 2011. The first of these incidents occurred in the city of Khotan on 18 July. While

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