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Admit it: You don’t know where the !@#$% Tajikistan is
by Greg Palast
 Or Kyrgyzstan. Or Turkmenistan. But as your kids will be fighting there among the oil pipes, you should kiss Ted Rall’s crazy ass for going there first - and getting it all down in a book of dead-on cartoons and reportage, Silk Road to Ruin.
Rall almost didn’t make it back. The Taliban who was supposed to execute Rall spoke English - the gunman picked it up as an NYU grad student. As happens when two guys from New York get together, they talked about New York women. Rall told his executioner that you could learn a lot about women by looking at their legs. The Talib said he looks at their eyes. “Not like you got much choice,” Ted opined, noting the draped figures nearby.
This was, by definition, gallows humor. Lucky for Ted, the
fanatic shooter needed a couple of chuckles. We all do. And Ted gives
us plenty to laugh at in his journey through a horrific wonderland run
by a gaggle of lunatic, blood-guzzling dictators (in other words,
allies in our War on Terror) where locals play hockey with goat heads.
Silk
Road even includes the recipe of Uzbekistan’s President, Islam Karimov,
for boiling dissidents alive. (I suggest you skip page 160 where Rall
includes a photo of a boiled father of four.)
Instead of a
bullet through Rall’s head, the Taliban gave him a “safe-conduct” pass.
But Rall’s conduct was anything but safe. When, recently, Bill Clinton
flew to Kazakhstan to cuddle up to the dictator Nursultan Nazarbeyev,
he was ferried in on private jet of a high-roller locking in a creepy
deal for Kazakh uranium. Rall, apparently, missed the jet.
Instead,
Rall caroms through the ‘Stans by bus, barfing and bribing and joking
his way past sex-starved, over-armed fanatics and avaricious body
guards. He’s too whacked by dehydration and diarrhea to worry about the
stark-raving danger of such a journey in war-time (it’s always war time
in the ‘Stans) to tell us the story you won’t find in the captions of
Bill shaking hands with a despot du jour.
Ultimately, what
Rall’s story is about is what everything’s all about: oil. The ‘Stans
are drenched in it, floating on it, or in the way of it. Thus, the
book’s sub-title, “Is Central Asia the New Middle East?”
Rall’s answer is, “Yes, but more dangerous.” Hey, thanks for that.
Ted
Rall and his mighty crayon will be teaming with Greg Palast for a
series of reports on Election 2008. If you’d like to support this brave
new venture in investigative cartooning, make a tax-deductible donation
of $75 or more to the Palast Investigative Fund. We’ll send you a
hardbound copy of Silk signed by Rall. Or pick it up through Amazon.com
Greg
Palast, Willie Nelson, Jackson Browne and Danny Glover will be
appearing next Wednesday, February 20 in New York City with Amy Goodman
at fund-raiser for Democracy Now! Get your tickets here.
Selling Out the Uyghurs, or, Why even More of them Hate Us
excerpted from
Ted Rall’s Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East
A
four-day ride on the westbound express train from Beijing takes you to
China’s Wild West. Xinjiang Province, hundreds of miles beyond an
eroded earthen mound that was once the Great Wall, lies southwest of
Mongolia, east of Afghanistan and north of the Tibetan plateau. Full of
dusty deserts, soaring mountains and eight million Muslims, Xinjiang
is—like so many geopolitically sensitive places—the middle of nowhere
but in between a lot. (Early 20th century British explorer Aurel Stein
noted the region’s “desolate wilderness, bearing everywhere the impress
of death.”) Today Chinese-occupied Central Asia is a case study in how
American foreign policy turns pro-American Muslims into deadly enemies.
“From
the pre-modern era until the mid-18th century, Xinjiang was either
ruled from afar by Central Asian empires or not ruled at all,” Joshua
Kurlantzick writes in Foreign Affairs. During the 1950s Mao’s Communist
Party worked to consolidate its power by centralizing Chinese culture
and politics in Beijing. That meant suppressing cultures and religions
out of step with the majority ethnic Han Chinese, such as the Tibetans
and Mongols. The jackboot came down hardest on Xinjiang, where in 1955
more than ninety percent of the population were Turkic Muslims—mostly
Uyghurs along with smaller portions of such Central Asian tribes as
Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Tatars. The Uyghurs, whose rich
pre-Muslim Buddhist culture gave their language (which can be written
in Arabic and Roman script) to Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire, were
viewed by China’s new government as a threat to national cohesion. They
may have had a point. After all, they had revolted against precommunist
China forty-two times in two hundred years.
Repression of the
Uyghurs has been primarily motivated by the Chinese government’s simple
desire to maintain control of its most remote border region. Their
concern became more urgent after Xinjiang joined the rest of Central
Asia as a major player in the energy sweepstakes, first as a transit
conduit for a new pipeline carrying oil east from Kazakhstan to the
Pacific Ocean and then as a major source of new oil reserves in its own
right. “Xinjiang is going to become China’s largest oil and gas
production base with its oil and gas output predicted to reach sixty
million tons by 2010 and one hundred million tons by 2020, according to
Ismail Tiliwaldi, chairman of People’s Government of the Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region,” the state-controlled China Daily reported in
March 2006. Oil company geologists believe the Santanghu Basin holds
one billion tons of oil.
The current anti-Uyghur campaign
follows decades of similar abuses. “Thousands of mosques were
shuttered, imams were jailed, Uyghurs who wore heads-carves or other
Muslim clothing were arrested, and during the Cultural Revolution, the
Chinese Communist Party purposely defiled mosques with pigs,” wrote
Kurlantzick. “Many Muslim leaders were simply shot. The Uyghur language
was purged from school curricula, and thousands of Uyghur writers were
arrested for ‘advocating separatism’ - which often meant nothing more
than writing in Uyghur.”
Demographic manipulation at the hands
of Chinese central planners has proven even more devastating to the
Uyghur people. The Chinese imposed forced birth control on Uyghurs
while shipping three hundred thousand Han settlers west every year
where there had been only the same number to start. By 1997, there were
more than six million Chinese “settlers” in Xinjiang. The Uyghurs had
become a minority in their own homeland. But Xinjiang was far from
pacified when I visited the provincial capital of Ürümqi that summer.
A
few months earlier, on the eve of Ramadan, the police had arrested
thirty imams in Ghulja. As about six hundred angry young Muslim men
marched toward local government offices in order to demand their
release, police broke up their demonstration with electrical clubs and
tear gas. More Uyghurs returned the next day. Overwhelmed police opened
fire, killing one hundred sixty-seven people and arresting five
thousand. Then the Chinese unveiled a new tactic that would soon become
a frequent occurrence: they drove around the bazaar district with seven
Uyghurs in the back of a truck, executing them one by one. Nine
outraged bystanders were also shot to death.
You couldn’t miss
the tension in the hot stinking air of the most landlocked city on
earth. Uyghur separatists affiliated with the East Turkestan
Independence Movement and other groups had set off bombs all across
China, including three buses blown up in Ürümqi a few months earlier.
The Chinese dispatched hundreds of suspected Uyghur dissidents to
reeducation camps. Scores of others were put on trial and summarily
shot. Good jobs in government and private business are reserved
exclusively for Han Chinese, adding sky-high unemployment to the
ravages of cultural apartheid. Han policemen manning roadblocks
surrounding the old Muslim quarter tried to discourage me from entering
the quarantined zone. “There’s nothing of interest there,” a cop told
me. I insisted. When I arrived at the square in front of a dilapidated
mosque, Uyghur men wearing white skullcaps glared menacingly at Han
colonists zooming by in shiny new Volvos. Fortunately, they brightened
up when they learned that I was American.
“We love the United
States!” one man told me. “They will come help us kick out China.” The
largest Uyghur independence group, the ETIM, seeks the recreation of
the free Republic of East Turkestan declared by earlier Uyghur rebels.
The Home of East Turkestan Youth, known as “Xinjiang’s Hamas,” has two
thousand members.
“I listen to Radio Free Asia,” added an older
guy knowingly. Radio Free Asia aired broadcasts in the Uyghur language.
“America is coming to give us our freedom, we know that, but when
exactly?”
How could I tell these people that most Americans had
never heard of Uyghurs, East Turkestan, or Xinjiang? That the cavalry
wasn’t coming? Given their status as non-entities, even being on the
foreign policy backburner (like the Kurds) would be an improvement.
By
the time of my 1999 trip to the Silk Road city of Kashgar in southern
Xinjiang, what Western media call “a low level insurgency” had heated
up. The Chinese had demolished all but a few blocks of the ancient old
city in order to put up prefab apartment buildings. But the Uyghurs
weren’t taking it lying down. ETIM separatists, some of whom had
trained at jihadi camps in Afghanistan, were blowing up a Chinese
government office every few days. “Goodbye, Interior Ministry!” gloated
my server at a sidewalk noodle joint after the sound of an explosion
ricocheted down the boulevard. “We are fighting hard against China to
show you Americans we are serious. The U.S. stands for freedom.”
Then
came 9/11. The Bush Administration, seeking to avert a Chinese veto of
its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the U.N. security council,
drafted China into its “war on terrorism” by granting it a free pass to
beat up its Tibetans and Uyghurs. Citing the fact that ETIM members had
received arms and training from the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan
(but only to fight China), China convinced the U.S. State Department
and the United Nations to declare the group a “terrorist organization”
affiliated with al Qaeda. “This is an important step toward greater
co-operation in Central Asia against common terrorist threats and the
instability and horror that they sow,” a State Department spokesman
said, conflating the tactic of terrorism with the 9/11 attackers. In
“Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland,” Graham Fuller and Jonathan
Lippman write that this “U.S. declaration [was] catastrophic” for the
Uyghurs. The United States had given Beijing “carte blanche to
designate all Uyghur nationalist…movements as ‘terrorist.’ ” Brad Adams
of Human Rights Watch added: “The worldwide campaign against terrorism
has givenBeijing the perfect excuse to crack down harder than ever in
Xinjiang. Other Chinese enjoy a growing freedom to worship, but the
Uyghurs, like the Tibetans, find
that their religion is being used as a tool of control.”
Twenty-three
Uyghurs have since joined the ranks of the “terrorists” incarcerated at
Guantánanamo concentration camp. Two Uyghur men, twenty-nine and
thirty-one, faced a U.S. military tribunal on November 19, 2005,
charged only with membership in ETIM and attending a Taliban training
camp for anti-Chinese fighters. Even though a man named Mahmut
initially pled guilty to avoid being sent back to China—“If I am sent
back to China, they will torture me really bad,” he told the tribunal,
“they will use dogs…they will pull out my nails”—the three were cleared
of enemy combatant status. The U.S. refused their application for
political asylum. After a lengthy delay, Albania finally agreed to
accept the former detainees. Military insiders say most of the Uyghurs
will eventually be released, but not to China—our ally in the “war on
terrorism”—because they would probably be tortured and/or executed.
Chinese
officials have ordered Uyghur university students to spend more time
studying ideological correctness and to report any classmates they
notice observing the fast at Ramadan. “We have an agreement with the
Chinese government that I am responsible for preventing students from
fasting during Ramadan,” a representative of the Kashgari religious
affairs committee openly admitted in 2004. The same man, speaking to
Radio Free Asia, is charged with ensuring Xinjiang’s
twelve-month-a-year nightlife: “I am responsible for making sure that
the restaurants stay open as normal [during Ramadan]. I have to write a
report every day for the officials higher up about the situation and
also I have two people on duty at night to pass on information and
report to higher up.” Some officials even pressure employers to take
their workers out to lunches during Ramadan. Cultural genocide is a
strange business.
The crackdown swept up the editor of the
Kashgar Literature Journal for publishing an original short story “Wild
Pigeon,” the author of which is already serving a ten-year-prison
sentence for writing what the authorities saw as a thinly-veiled
allegory criticizing harsh Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The editor, Korash
Huseyin, will likely receive a harsher sentence if convicted. As if
persecuting Uyghur activists within China isn’t enough, the government
also demands cooperation from neighboring states. Both the Kyrgyz and
Kazakh governments, violating the international principle of “non
refoulement,” have arrested and extradited Uyghur men wanted for
political offenses.
Martial law remains in full force in
Xinjiang. The post-9/11 crackdown began with hundreds of arrests and
the executions of nine “religious extremists and terrorists.” One of
the dead, convicted of “contributing to disturbance by nationalist
splittism forces,” had been overheard joking that he hoped America
would come to Xinjiang to free the Uyghurs from Chinese rule.
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