Western menace

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Aug 4th 2008 | BEIJING
From Economist.com

A fear of terrorism in China ahead of the Olympic games in Beijing

AFP
THE authorities in China suspect that terrorists were behind one of the bloodiest attacks in recent years on members of the security forces. The incident occurred in the far western region of Xinjiang four days before the start of the Olympic games in Beijing. A senior official had earlier said that Xinjiang terrorists posed the main security threat to the games. Could he have been right?

There have long been suspicions that China has been exaggerating the threat from separatists in Xinjiang in order to justify a massive security clampdown across the country ahead of, and during, the games. Critics of China's human-rights situation say the government’s primary concern is not really terrorism, but the possibility that dissidents might try to use the games to draw attention to their grievances by staging peaceful protests.

If accurately described by China's official news agency, Xinhua, the violence on Monday August 4th in the city of Kashgar, over 3,400km west of Beijing, might give sceptics pause for thought. Xinhua said that two people drove a lorry at a group of policemen as they jogged past a hotel. The two got out of the vehicle, threw explosives and hacked the policmen with knives, it said, killing 14 of the officers on the spot (two more died in hospital). The attackers were arrested.

No details have been given of the attackers or their motives. But Xinhua said that police in the region had received intelligence about planned terrorist attacks by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in the first week of August. ETIM has been labelled by China and America as a terrorist organisation with links to al-Qaeda, but supporters of Xinjiang's independence who are based outside of China have accused both countries of playing up the threat from ETIM. In America's case they suggest that the intention is to secure China's support in the “war on terror”; China itself, say critics, wants to suppress peaceful dissent in Xinjiang, whose biggest ethnic group by official reckoning is Muslim Uighurs.

If this attack did involve ETIM, it would be the deadliest yet attributed to the group. But few incidents involving ETIM have been reported by the Chinese authorities in recent years. Early last year the Chinese police said that they had raided an ETIM training camp on the Xinjiang border, killing 18 suspects and arresting 17 others.

The authorities say that the Beijing games face the biggest threat from terrorism in the history of the games and that Xinjiang terrorists are at the forefront of this challenge. Several recent incidents have been reported by the official media which have been used to give credence to this. In July police said they had killed five people in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, who were planning to carry out a “holy war”. They also said that they had arrested 82 suspected terrorists in Xinjiang who had been plotting to sabotage the Olympic games. In March they accused a Muslim woman of planning to blow up a plane flying from Xinjiang to Beijing.

But the government has resisted blaming Xinjiang terrorists in every case. A group called the Turkistan Islamic Party (possibly another name for ETIM) last month claimed responsibility for bombing buses in Shanghai and Kunming in May and July, but the government rejected the claim. Last week a Xinjiang official, Kuerxi Maihesuti, said that there had only been three or four cases of “terrorist schemes” foiled by the police this year. He also suggested that terrorists in Xinjiang were “not that capable of instigating massive sabotage activities as some hostile forces have hoped to see.”

This latest incident, whether or not it involved terrorists, might be used as a pretext to launch an even tougher crackdown on dissent in Xinjiang, perhaps similar to the one that was launched in Tibet in March following rioting in Lhasa. The authorities’ actions in Tibet are likely to increase public antagonism toward the government and make stability more difficult to sustain in the long term. In Xinjiang the government risks creating a similar problem for itself, and possibly a more violent one.