There are many mosques in Xinjiang, where only Muslim men can worship. Paul Mooney / The National
HOTAN, CHINA // It is Friday afternoon and the scene in front of the Jama mosque in the old city of Hotan, once a trading point for jade along the historic Silk Road, is much as it has been for centuries, save for the few cars and motorcycles fighting for space with the donkey carts laden with produce and travellers.
The street is lined with pedlars selling myriad goods: live poultry and rabbits, lamb’s head, donkey and camel meat, and Muslim hats, known in Uighur as doppa.
A stream of men, many with long wispy beards, push through the narrow door of the mosque, taking off their shoes and donning white hats before beginning their prayers.
But something does not seem right. The worshippers are all older men. Children, university students, women and government employees are all curiously missing, prohibited from entering the mosque in the Muslim majority province of Xinjiang in north-west China, where the government fears separatist tendencies among the Uighur majority, a Turkic ethnic group that bridles at Chinese control of the area.
Observers say that the Chinese government is carrying out nothing less than a systematic cultural destruction. The fear in Xinjiang is so strong that not one of the local people quoted in this story would agree to use their names.
“There’s an ever-increasing degree of invasiveness in people’s daily lives,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, and an expert on the province. “What the Chinese government is trying to do is remake the social fabric of Xinjiang.”
He said there is a huge pressure regarding anything that involves cultural identity, which he says the government views as a political threat. “Culture is the battlefront of national security for the country,” Mr Bequelin said. “They are destroying the whole cultural heritage.”
“Beijing perceives Uighurs as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state, and it views Islam as feeding Uighur ethnic identity,” said Nury Turkel, former president of the Uighur American Association, and a lawyer in Washington. “The Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB] officials in East Turkestan believe they won’t be able to dilute Uighur culture unless religion is wiped out entirely.”
Like many other Uighurs who do not recognise Chinese control, Mr Turkel refers to the area as East Turkestan.
Uighurs say state interference is pervasive. Imams are selected by the government and are closely monitored. In addition, religious schools and books on Islam are controlled or banned.
Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plain-clothes police watch who comes and goes. In recent weeks, seven Muslim schools have been shut down, according to an announcement last week by the World Uighur Congress, which is based in Germany.
There is also interference in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, when strict fasting is observed. Mr Bequelin said officials of the RAB were ordered to reduce the influence of Ramadan.
The government attempts to restrict fasting during this period, trying to ferret out which government officials are observing the practice by seeing which homes have lights on in the very early morning hours, when families are preparing their morning meal before fasting begins at dawn.
Uighurs claim that local officials force restaurants to remain open during the fasting period. State units organise lunches for government employees, and in some areas, say students in Hotan, universities provide free lunches for students, hoping to encourage them to break the fast.
A list of 23 prohibited religious practices pertaining to Uighur Muslims was posted on local government websites in the region last year. Such activities as having an imam say a particular prayer at a wedding, mourning ceremonies, and people praying together outdoors were banned. Each of more than a dozen mosques visited had large posters containing the State Council’s Religious Affairs Regulations, which lay out government control of religion in China.
Uighurs are only allowed to participate in the haj under the strict auspices of the Chinese government. Quotas limit the number of Uighurs allowed to travel there and the few who can go pay exorbitant fees. Throughout the old part of Kashgar, an admonition has been stencilled on the walls of houses in both Arabic script and Chinese: “Unauthorised religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
More seriously, Mr Turkel said, the government has seized virtually every Uighur person’s passport to prevent people from travelling abroad.
“Passports have been systematically confiscated,” he said. “Getting a passport is almost impossible for a Uighur individual. The world needs to know about this.” “Everyone’s passports have been taken away,” confirms a student standing in the large square in front of the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, nervously looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is listening. “You can get a passport to go abroad to study, but it’s very difficult, unless your family has a lot of money or government connections.”
Mr Turkel said the Chinese see religion as a “stumbling block to the full assimilation of the Uighurs into China proper,” adding that the travel restrictions are another way of controlling Islam.
“They want Uighurs to be less religious, less spiritual,” he said. “For the Chinese government, having a group of Uighurs who have been outside China would result in more exposure of the human abuses against the Uighurs.”
He adds that the Chinese do not want Muslims to have a real sense of Islam. “They want Uighurs to continue believing the Chinese government trained imams’ teaching and preaching of Islam,” he said. “They want to impose the Chinese version of Islamic beliefs.”
A graduate student in Hotan who has researched education said that in 2012 the teaching of the Uighur language will officially be halted in Xinjiang schools. There has also been pressure on students and government employees not to grow beards, a common practice among Muslim men.
“During the National People’s Congress in March, Chinese TV showed minorities entering the Great Hall of the People wearing all sorts of minority costumes,” a high school teacher said behind the closed doors of a small electronics shop in Hotan. “But here we can’t even wear a Muslim hat.”
Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority, was incorporated into China in 1884, during the Qing dynasty, although it enjoyed several short periods of independence before being brought back into the Chinese empire in 1949, when the Communists came to power.
Since then, the Chinese government has encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Han from overpopulated coastal cities to Xinjiang. The immigration programme has resulted in a demographic shift in the province of 18 million: what was once 90 per cent Uighur is now more than 40 per cent Han. In 1949, the Han made up just six per cent of the total. And the proportion is expected to grow even larger when the rail line between Urumqi, the capital, reaches Hotan next year.
“A lot of people are worried about this,” the education researcher said. “With the arrival of the railway, a lot more Chinese will come here. The majority of the people are strongly against this.”
Uighurs also denounced the forced transfer of young women to eastern China to work in factories, arguing it is an attempt to reduce the Uighur population and break the tradition of women serving as the propagators of Islam among children.
Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, which has sent secret investigators to interview the women, says “hundreds of thousands” of children have been sent into “slave labour”. “They’re locked up, can’t call their parents and can’t leave,” he said. “And if they do flee, their parents will be severely punished.”
The graduate student expressed indignation that teenage girls from his village were being sent away to work in factories as the government was encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang. In many large hotels and government agencies, the staff is predominantly – if not completely – Han.
“Why are they sending so many of our women away and then bringing in Chinese here to work?” he asked while sitting in a Hotan restaurant.
Perhaps most disappointing to Uighurs in Xinjiang is that the Muslim world has remained silent.
“Muslim countries aren’t doing anything to show concern about how the Chinese government is abusing the faith of nine million Muslims,” said Mehmet Tohti, the vice president of the World Uighur Congress. “Not one has said anything on behalf of the oppressed Uighur Muslims in China,” he said. “All the countries that could have said something are politically leveraged by Beijing. Speaking up for the Uighurs is too costly for them economically and politically.”
Mr Bequelin said that even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, whose website says its goal is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world”, has remained silent. “The Uighur issue is a forgotten issue for most Muslim countries,” he said.
藏狗和东突是同病相怜。
回复删除骂藏独分子为藏狗不太妥当。毕竟藏狗很名贵,骂藏猪更好,与脏猪和藏族都谐音。
回复删除不叫臭味相投吗?
回复删除和新疆的伊斯兰好战分子搞在一起,对名声可不利!!!
回复删除不过看起来是有点贫困,中国政府还是需要政治改革,消灭腐败,扶持贫困地区的发展的。
回复删除汉狗郑重声明:狗字版权所有,不得翻印。
回复删除需要比一比藏、维,也需要比一比藏、维、蒙呢!其余的不会比的。可参考下文:
回复删除摘自博讯。
关于爱国主义(附:蒙古歌曲欣赏)/
1 爱国主义与现代民族国家
人类进入近现代社会,帝国与王权纷纷瓦解,国家的主权从帝王手中落入平民之手。在欧洲,中世纪的臣民们效忠于被教皇加冕认可的国王。这些臣民,后来变成了 政教分离而且没有国王行使统治权的现代民主国家的“国民”,失去了原有的效忠对象----君王。于是,为了维护国家的继续存在,人们便塑造了一个新的效忠 对象----民族。这就是人们通常所说的爱国主义。因此,民主化与民族主义化是一卵双生子,缺一不可。众所周知,孙中山的民主革命,同时也是民族主义革 命。“创立民国”的口号与“恢复中华”的口号并驾齐驱,表达了现代民族国家不可或缺的两个支柱----“民主政治”与“爱国主义”。“爱国主义”或者“民 族主义”或许可译成Nationalism。它还可以直译成“国家主义”。这个国家,不是指帝国(empire),而是指民族国家----Nation。 因此,爱国主义的终极目标是建立或者维持其民族国家。Nation这一词,可以译成民族,其中已经成功建立国家者,可以译成国民(指国民总体)。中共别有 用心地把我们都译成ethnic group,具有强烈的政治目的性。之所以要拐弯抹角地否认我们是与汉人对等的nation,其醉翁之意在于遏止我们建立民族国家的欲望与努力。藏人或者 藏族,本来就是Tibetan,简单准确。而中共统战部的网站,居然煞费苦心地写出这种不伦不类的英文词组-----Tibetan ethnic minority group ,读着好累。(http://www.zytzb.cn/zytzbwz/nation/jieshao/80200607280097.htm)。
2 两种爱国主义
事实是,在当今的中国存在着两种针锋相对的爱国主义。这就大大阻止了中国建立民主政体与民族国家的进程。一种是汉人的中华爱国主义,这种爱国主义对现今的 中国来说是向心力的爱国主义。另外一种是,藏人,蒙古人,维吾尔人的爱国主义,这种爱国主义是离心力的爱国主义。从满清帝国崩溃以后,汉人一直在致力于建 立民族国家。但是,这种民族国家的建立,必须以单一民族为前提。当然,世界上大多数民族国家都不是百分之百纯净的单一民族国家,也可以包括少数民族。然 而,所谓少数民族,就是附着在“国族”周围的,没有对等独立倾向的文化群体。这种群体可能是赫哲族,也可能是景颇族等等。然而,蒙古人不是这类群体,藏人 也不是。那么怎么办?办法大概有三种,第一,分道扬镳各自建立民族国家,然后友好相处。这种方式就是现在的蒙古国与中国的关系,对两者都有好处。第二,将 这些蒙古人,藏人,维吾尔人同化掉,最终形成稳定的民族国家。这将是一个漫长的过程,会引来双方长久的疼痛。而且,即使同化成功,也不会一劳永逸,死灰复 燃的可能性随时存在。最近满族人的觉醒,就是很好的例子。第三种方法,暂缓建立民族民主国家,继续保持帝国专制体制(一如其前身满清帝国),等待所谓民族 融合(实为民族同化)慢慢完成,然后再逐步建立民族民主国家。我个人觉得,中华人民共和国就是步履蹒跚地行走在“帝国”与“民国”的途中,而且,帝国崩溃 的各种征兆已经日渐明显。就像北朝鲜可以把自己称作“民主主义人民共和国”一样,所谓曾经的“中华民国”和现在的“中华人民共和国”,仅仅是一种称呼而 已,它的实质是帝国。国民党曾经的一党独裁和当今中共的一党专制,都是帝国的元老院体制。
3 中国的爱国主义教育
既然存在着离心倾向的爱国主义与向心倾向的爱国主义,政府在西藏的爱国主义教育便目的明确了。一,极力宣扬美化中华文化,大力培植中华爱国主义。二,巧妙 而持续地丑化藏文化,努力削弱此种离心方向的爱国主义。比如,他们总是沸沸扬扬地夸大西藏历史上的所谓农奴制,却避而不谈中国女人缠足的漫长历史。同样都 是对人性的摧残,为什么厚此非彼呢?因此可见,中国爱国主义教育在西藏的两个既定方针应该是:美化中华与妖魔化西藏。然而,美化中华可以肆无忌惮,公然造 谣,涂脂抹粉。但妖魔化西藏就需要披上一层外衣,不可露出马脚,否则适得其反,会引来藏人的反感。狡诈阴险,诡计多端,玩弄把戏-----这就是中共爱国 主义教育的方法。 对这种爱国主义教育的回答,可以引用唯色女士介绍的一首诗,这是丹增达瓦的回答:
有一个不争的事实
你决不会是我的爱
不管你怎么变换着小丑的伎俩
怎么把弄你的三十六计
但你决不会是我的爱
4 少数民族与中华民族
共产党中华人民共和国成立后,为了向人们展示其民族政策与国民党中华民国的民族歧视政策截然不同,不但废止了中华民国时期冠以一些非汉族群体的“宗族”称 谓,而且更改了大量带有民族歧视性的称呼和地名。甚至,为了彻底体现各民族的平等,无论人口多少,无论历史文化深浅,非汉族的所有群体,都一律升格为“民 族”。通过民族调查而实行的民族识别工作,在中华人民共和国全境展开。孙中山时期,被勉强正式视作“民族”的非汉族只有满蒙维藏四个(即五族共和)。而 1950年中共所正式承认的民族,为蒙古,满,回,藏,维吾尔,苗,瑶,彝,朝鲜等九个。接着,1954年新识别出二十九个,1965年十六个。到 1979年基诺族被识别为“民族”为止,中国的非汉民族最终达到五十五个。与此同时,中共开始使用“少数民族”这一概念来把所有的非汉民族归于一类。如果 我们把中华民国时期“五族共和”的汉满蒙藏维理解为五个对等的民族,中共却通过使用“少数民族”这一称谓,客观上使汉族独树一帜,非汉其他民族则一律被归 为一个新的下位的类别群体概念之中。
通过这一系列的民族“平等政策”,一方面,使得至今为止被视作“部落”或“部族”的大量群体升格为“民族”而自我意识增强。另一方面,在与汉族的关系上, 使得蒙古,藏,维吾尔等历史悠久并拥有独特宗教文化与政治共同体意识的民族(肩负着历史的民族),降格为与刚刚被识别的吉诺族同归一类的“少数民族”而自 我意识减弱。因此,藏,蒙古,维吾尔等民族的非中华文化历史特性及其对汉族的对等共同体意识,被这种民族平等政策巧妙地掩盖或淡化了。
然而,这种表面上的民族平等政策,却被近年来的“中华民族多元一体论”所打破,曾经一度废止的非汉族宗族论重新粉墨登场。1988年,费孝通正式提出“中 华民族多元一体论”后,汉族被定位为“中华民族的核心”,藏,维吾尔,蒙古等民族成了“中华民族”不可或缺的外围构成要素(宗族?)。
5 三种不同性质的民族问题
最后,引用一下达希敦多布先生在《中国民族问题辨析》中的一段论述:
“在坚持民族平等、各民族都有自决权的原则下,我们必须承认并非每个民族都应该自成一国,这在现实中具有不可操作性,也不是每个民族皆有此条件与要 求。考虑到历史与现实,中国的民族问题其实存在三个层次:一是外来移民民族,如俄罗斯族等,由于该类民族移民中国历史较短,本身规模有限,多为零星散居, 没有形成历史疆界,其民族权力主要体现在平等的公民权与文化权,政治上分离的要求相对较弱,也缺乏合理性;二是壮、苗、彝、瑶等土著民族,此类民族大小不 一,经济文化发展程度参差不齐,但却是中国不同地区的土著民族,甚至有与汉族居住区明确疆界区隔,然而此类民族大多历史上未曾建立过自己的民族国家,未形 成全民族的国家意识。又因为长期生活于汉族国家中,无论是其民族文化还是民族认同经长期不断磨合,与汉族的矛盾冲突比较缓和,其民族在政治上的诉求比较模 糊,一般真正意义上的民族区域自治即可满足他们的要求;第三是蒙、藏、维等主要民族,他们皆有悠久的民族国家传统与历史传承,与汉族国家有明确的地理上的 疆域分隔和国家认同上的畛域之分。他们的传统文化自成一体,完全可以和包括汉族在内世界任何民族媲美。他们只是在晚近才成为满清帝国的藩属,但仍具有高度 的自主性,比被满清征服统治的汉族国家拥有更高的政治地位,他们在满清帝国的这种特殊地位很难用现代主权观念来硬套,因此他们也一直抗拒后来的汉族国家把 主权强加于他们。这类民族的自决要求政治层次较高,他们要求的是能体现其国家传统的政治地位,显然民族区域自治很难满足这一要求,财政补贴等金钱贿赂(如 果有的话)更是隔靴搔痒,抓不到问题的实质。解决这些民族的自决问题需要双方高度的政治智慧与汉族政治家的道德勇气。”
蒙古国爱国歌曲:Amin Hairan Eh Oron(心爱的祖国)
此文于2009年04月01日做了修改
私自朝觐也是不可以的???
回复删除看了上面的那些所谓的“评论”(其实完全称不上思考),我更加坚信中国人残忍起来是会成为希特勒第二的,他们同样不承认国内少数民族作为人的各种基本权利,屠杀只是时机与时间的问题。
回复删除而且,中国人不能够像德国人那样奉献出尼采、叔本华、黑格尔那样的思想巨匠,德国人的冲动有着复杂的思想累积,而中国人的屠杀冲动将只会是野蛮的原始嗜杀本性与民族主义的杂交变种。如果有能力他们完全可以依葫芦画瓢上演一场场东京大屠杀、纽约大屠杀、巴黎大屠杀……,缺的只是实力,而不缺乏勇气,无知、无羞辱感让他们可以做到不怕天谴、不怕报应!
王乐泉真能扯蛋. 穆斯林朝觐是好事嘛,凭什么自己去就是非法活动? 昏官一个!!!
回复删除王乐泉家乡的汉人小寡妇上坟可以自己去,为什么新疆的穆斯林朝觐就非得扎堆?
回复删除安然,放心,他們最多還有幾次長春圍城,獻忠屠蜀什么的。從歷史上看,中國人對外族不敢做出什么來,至少比之對自我的水平,差太遠了,你可以看看這個中國人相食史 | 閩越國
回复删除安然,你可以看看這個,比起中國人對內的水準,對外是歷來非常懦弱的,只不過,奴才的子孫們不會叫而已
回复删除中國人相食史 | 閩越國
看了上面的那些所谓的“评论”(其实完全称不上思考),我更加坚信中国人残忍起来是会成为希特勒第二的,他们同样不承认国内少数民族作为人的各种基本权利,屠杀只是时机与时间的问题。
回复删除===============================
现在不承认你们穆斯林在拉萨合法权利的是藏人,不是汉人。你们不和我们合作,你们能有好处?
对付类似藏人这样的野蛮民族,应该用鞭子,这是他们唯一懂得语言。
回复删除阿提拉
回复删除别忘了冉闵屠胡,
我们汉族本质为尚武之民族,只不过长期以来被儒家的中庸之道压制而已,否则何来疆域辽阔的土地(如汉,唐,明初疆域全盛时)?
别忘了冉闵屠胡,
老实听候我们汉族的话,则万事皆安,否则难免冉闵再现,屠胡令再出!
Only older men allowed in mosques
回复删除There are many mosques in Xinjiang, where only Muslim men can worship. Paul Mooney / The National
HOTAN, CHINA // It is Friday afternoon and the scene in front of the Jama mosque in the old city of Hotan, once a trading point for jade along the historic Silk Road, is much as it has been for centuries, save for the few cars and motorcycles fighting for space with the donkey carts laden with produce and travellers.
The street is lined with pedlars selling myriad goods: live poultry and rabbits, lamb’s head, donkey and camel meat, and Muslim hats, known in Uighur as doppa.
A stream of men, many with long wispy beards, push through the narrow door of the mosque, taking off their shoes and donning white hats before beginning their prayers.
But something does not seem right. The worshippers are all older men. Children, university students, women and government employees are all curiously missing, prohibited from entering the mosque in the Muslim majority province of Xinjiang in north-west China, where the government fears separatist tendencies among the Uighur majority, a Turkic ethnic group that bridles at Chinese control of the area.
Observers say that the Chinese government is carrying out nothing less than a systematic cultural destruction. The fear in Xinjiang is so strong that not one of the local people quoted in this story would agree to use their names.
“There’s an ever-increasing degree of invasiveness in people’s daily lives,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, and an expert on the province. “What the Chinese government is trying to do is remake the social fabric of Xinjiang.”
He said there is a huge pressure regarding anything that involves cultural identity, which he says the government views as a political threat. “Culture is the battlefront of national security for the country,” Mr Bequelin said. “They are destroying the whole cultural heritage.”
“Beijing perceives Uighurs as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state, and it views Islam as feeding Uighur ethnic identity,” said Nury Turkel, former president of the Uighur American Association, and a lawyer in Washington. “The Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB] officials in East Turkestan believe they won’t be able to dilute Uighur culture unless religion is wiped out entirely.”
Like many other Uighurs who do not recognise Chinese control, Mr Turkel refers to the area as East Turkestan.
Uighurs say state interference is pervasive. Imams are selected by the government and are closely monitored. In addition, religious schools and books on Islam are controlled or banned.
Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plain-clothes police watch who comes and goes. In recent weeks, seven Muslim schools have been shut down, according to an announcement last week by the World Uighur Congress, which is based in Germany.
There is also interference in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, when strict fasting is observed. Mr Bequelin said officials of the RAB were ordered to reduce the influence of Ramadan.
The government attempts to restrict fasting during this period, trying to ferret out which government officials are observing the practice by seeing which homes have lights on in the very early morning hours, when families are preparing their morning meal before fasting begins at dawn.
Uighurs claim that local officials force restaurants to remain open during the fasting period. State units organise lunches for government employees, and in some areas, say students in Hotan, universities provide free lunches for students, hoping to encourage them to break the fast.
A list of 23 prohibited religious practices pertaining to Uighur Muslims was posted on local government websites in the region last year. Such activities as having an imam say a particular prayer at a wedding, mourning ceremonies, and people praying together outdoors were banned. Each of more than a dozen mosques visited had large posters containing the State Council’s Religious Affairs Regulations, which lay out government control of religion in China.
Uighurs are only allowed to participate in the haj under the strict auspices of the Chinese government. Quotas limit the number of Uighurs allowed to travel there and the few who can go pay exorbitant fees. Throughout the old part of Kashgar, an admonition has been stencilled on the walls of houses in both Arabic script and Chinese: “Unauthorised religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
More seriously, Mr Turkel said, the government has seized virtually every Uighur person’s passport to prevent people from travelling abroad.
“Passports have been systematically confiscated,” he said. “Getting a passport is almost impossible for a Uighur individual. The world needs to know about this.”
“Everyone’s passports have been taken away,” confirms a student standing in the large square in front of the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, nervously looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is listening. “You can get a passport to go abroad to study, but it’s very difficult, unless your family has a lot of money or government connections.”
Mr Turkel said the Chinese see religion as a “stumbling block to the full assimilation of the Uighurs into China proper,” adding that the travel restrictions are another way of controlling Islam.
“They want Uighurs to be less religious, less spiritual,” he said. “For the Chinese government, having a group of Uighurs who have been outside China would result in more exposure of the human abuses against the Uighurs.”
He adds that the Chinese do not want Muslims to have a real sense of Islam. “They want Uighurs to continue believing the Chinese government trained imams’ teaching and preaching of Islam,” he said. “They want to impose the Chinese version of Islamic beliefs.”
A graduate student in Hotan who has researched education said that in 2012 the teaching of the Uighur language will officially be halted in Xinjiang schools.
There has also been pressure on students and government employees not to grow beards, a common practice among Muslim men.
“During the National People’s Congress in March, Chinese TV showed minorities entering the Great Hall of the People wearing all sorts of minority costumes,” a high school teacher said behind the closed doors of a small electronics shop in Hotan. “But here we can’t even wear a Muslim hat.”
Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority, was incorporated into China in 1884, during the Qing dynasty, although it enjoyed several short periods of independence before being brought back into the Chinese empire in 1949, when the Communists came to power.
Since then, the Chinese government has encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Han from overpopulated coastal cities to Xinjiang. The immigration programme has resulted in a demographic shift in the province of 18 million: what was once 90 per cent Uighur is now more than 40 per cent Han. In 1949, the Han made up just six per cent of the total. And the proportion is expected to grow even larger when the rail line between Urumqi, the capital, reaches Hotan next year.
“A lot of people are worried about this,” the education researcher said. “With the arrival of the railway, a lot more Chinese will come here. The majority of the people are strongly against this.”
Uighurs also denounced the forced transfer of young women to eastern China to work in factories, arguing it is an attempt to reduce the Uighur population and break the tradition of women serving as the propagators of Islam among children.
Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, which has sent secret investigators to interview the women, says “hundreds of thousands” of children have been sent into “slave labour”. “They’re locked up, can’t call their parents and can’t leave,” he said. “And if they do flee, their parents will be severely punished.”
The graduate student expressed indignation that teenage girls from his village were being sent away to work in factories as the government was encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang. In many large hotels and government agencies, the staff is predominantly – if not completely – Han.
“Why are they sending so many of our women away and then bringing in Chinese here to work?” he asked while sitting in a Hotan restaurant.
Perhaps most disappointing to Uighurs in Xinjiang is that the Muslim world has remained silent.
“Muslim countries aren’t doing anything to show concern about how the Chinese government is abusing the faith of nine million Muslims,” said Mehmet Tohti, the vice president of the World Uighur Congress. “Not one has said anything on behalf of the oppressed Uighur Muslims in China,” he said. “All the countries that could have said something are politically leveraged by Beijing. Speaking up for the Uighurs is too costly for them economically and politically.”
Mr Bequelin said that even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, whose website says its goal is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world”, has remained silent. “The Uighur issue is a forgotten issue for most Muslim countries,” he said.