{"id":818,"date":"2021-09-06T11:37:10","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T08:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/?p=818"},"modified":"2021-09-06T11:37:11","modified_gmt":"2021-09-06T08:37:11","slug":"as-china-woos-the-taliban-uyghurs-in-afghanistan-fear-for-their-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/as-china-woos-the-taliban-uyghurs-in-afghanistan-fear-for-their-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"AS CHINA WOOS THE TALIBAN, UYGHURS IN AFGHANISTAN FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

CNN<\/a>. 5 September 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Below is an article published by CNN<\/a>. Photo:AFP.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tuhan\u2019s family crossed the border from China\u2019s western Xinjiang region to Afghanistan 45 years ago to escape persecution.Now, as the Taliban exerts control over the country, she fears she and other ethnic Uyghurs could be sent back to China by members of the militant group keen to curry favor with Beijing, which has been\u00a0accused of carrying out a genocide\u00a0on the Muslim minority.Tuhan, who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity from the Taliban, is caught between a homeland where Uyghurs are facing increasing repression, and an adopted country where they are considered outsiders.What worries them most is that they could be deported to China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Over the past few years, the Chinese government has escalated its security and religious crackdown in Xinjiang. Up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have passed through a sprawling network of detention centers across the region, according to the US State Department.Former detainees allege they were subjected to intense political indoctrination, forced labor, torture, and even sexual abuse. China vehemently denies allegations of human rights abuses, insisting the camps are voluntary \u201cvocational training centers\u201d designed to stamp out religious extremism and terrorism.Tuhan said she fears what will happen to her and her family if they\u2019re forced to return.\u201dAll these past years, life was difficult. But what is happening now is the worst,\u201d she said, referring to the Taliban takeover. \u201cIt is just a matter of time before (the Taliban) find out that we are Uyghurs. Our lives are in danger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChina refugee\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Tuhan was just 7 years old when she and her parents fled Yarkand, an oasis on the ancient Silk Road near the Chinese border with Afghanistan.At the time, Kabul was known as the \u201cParis of the East,\u201d and for ethnic Uyghurs, it was a sanctuary from China\u2019s Cultural Revolution, a decade of political and social turmoil from 1966 to 1976, during which Islam \u2014 like all other religions \u2014 was harshly cracked down upon.Tuhan and her family have lived in Afghanistan for decades.Tuhan is one of up to 3,000 Uyghurs in Afghanistan, according to Sean Roberts, a professor at George Washington University and author of \u201cThe War on the Uyghurs,\u201d making them a tiny minority in the country of more than 37 million.Many of them fled China after the Communist Party took control of Xinjiang in 1949. Some \u2014 like Tuhan \u2014 migrated in the mid-1970s, during the chaos of the last years of the Cultural Revolution, crossing mountain passes in the south of Xinjiang to seek refuge, Roberts said.Many of the Uyghurs now hold Afghan citizenship, but their identification cards still identify them asChinese refugees \u2014 including second generation immigrants, according to an ID photo shared with CNN and accounts of two Uyghurs.Abdul Aziz Naseri, whose parents fled Xinjiang in 1976, said his ID still identifies him as a \u201cChina refugee,\u201deven though he was born in Kabul.Naseri, who now lives in Turkey, said he has collected the namesof more than 100 Uyghur families who want to flee Afghanistan.\u201dThey\u2019re afraid from China, because the Taliban was dealing with China behind the door. And they are afraid to (be) sent back to China,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u201cgood friend\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s reason for Uyghurs in Afghanistan to be worried, say experts.In July, a Taliban delegation paid a high-profile visit to Tianjin, where they met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.Wang called the Taliban \u201can important military and political force in Afghanistan\u201d and declared that they would play \u201can important role in the country\u2019s peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process.\u201dIn return, the Taliban called China a \u201cgood friend\u201d and pledged to \u201cnever allow any forces to use the Afghan territory to engage in acts detrimental to China,\u201d according to a statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry on the meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban\u2019s political chief, in Tianjin, northern China on July 28.And last week, a Taliban spokesperson called for closer relations with Beijing in an interview with Chinese state broadcaster CGTN.\u201dChina is a very important and strong country in our neighborhood, and we have had very positive and good relations with China in the past,\u201d Zabihullah Mujahid said. \u201cWe want to make these relations even stronger and want to improve the mutual trust level.\u201dRoberts said Uyghurs\u2019 fears the Taliban could deport them to China to gain more favor with Beijing were legitimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c(The Taliban) have a lot of reasons to try to ingratiate Beijing in terms of gaining international recognition, in terms of getting financial assistance at the time when most of the international community is not giving them financial assistance,\u201d he said.Tuhan\u2019s concern over potentially being forced to return to China is deepened by Beijing\u2019s increasingly aggressive efforts in recent years to bring overseas Uyghurs back to Xinjiang, including from Muslim countries.CNN has collected more than a dozen accounts detailing the alleged detention and deportation of Uyghurs at China\u2019s request in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.In a report published in June, the Uyghur Human Rights Project said there were least 395 cases of Uyghurs being deported, extradited, or rendered back to China from countries across the world since 1997.In a statement to CNN, China\u2019s Foreign Ministry called the Uyghur Human Rights Project an \u201coutright anti-China separatist organization.\u201d\u201dThe so-called data and reports released by them have no impartiality and credibility, and are not worth refuting at all,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cracking down on militants<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Chinese government has a long history of engaging with the Taliban, dating back to the late 1990s, when the militant group last controlled Afghanistan.Beijing has repeatedly urged the Taliban to crack down on Uyghur militants in Afghanistan, primarily the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which it has blamed for almost every terror attack or violent incident in Xinjiang and other parts of the country.During his July meeting with Taliban officials in Tianjin, Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, said ETIM \u201cposes a direct threat to China\u2019s state security and territory integrity.\u201dA video released by state broadcaster CGTN in 2019 compared the ETIM to al Qaeda and ISIS, saying it \u201chas attempted to recruit people on a massive scale, spreading a radical ideology that continues to cause chaos in many countries around the world.\u201dBut experts say there is little independent evidence to confirm China\u2019s claims of ETIM\u2019s size, capabilities and influence \u2014 and there are doubts that it still exists today.ETIM started as a small group of Uyghurs who came to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 1998 with the intent to establish an insurgency against Chinese rule, according to Roberts.The Taliban initially allowed the group to settle in Afghanistan, but in an attempt to seek Chinese support amid international isolation, the Taliban assured Beijing that it would not allow any group to use its territory to conduct attacks against China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These Uyghurs were locked up by the US in Guantanamo. Now they\u2019re being used as an excuse for China\u2019s crackdown in XinjiangIn the 1990s and 2000s, Xinjiang saw a rise in violent attacks, which Roberts said were often spontaneous outbursts of grievances toward the Chinese government\u2019s repressive policies. But after the 9\/11 attacks, Beijing tried to reframe all those incidents as being related to Islamic terrorism directed by external groups such as ETIM, he said.Few peoplehad heard of ETIM until it was designated by the US government as a terrorist organization in 2002, during a period of increased anti-terrorism cooperation with China in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks. That decision, however, has been questioned by experts and officials, who see it as a quid pro quo by Washington to gain Beijing\u2019s support for the invasion of Iraq.Last year, amid worsening US-China relations, the Trump administration delisted ETIM as a terrorist group, drawing the ire of Beijing. The US State Department said the removal was because \u201cfor more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist.\u201dETIM\u2019s founder Hasan Mahsum was killed in 2003 by troops in Pakistan, where he and his followers fled following the US bombing of Afghanistan. The group appears to have died with him, said Roberts.But by 2008, a successor group to ETIM, called the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), had emerged and threatened to attack the Beijing Olympics. The group is known to be affiliated with al Qaeda and later became a key player in the Syrian civil war.\u201dThey\u2019ve been very prolific in terms of producing videos threatening Beijing, but there\u2019s no evidence of them being able to carry out any attacks inside China,\u201d Roberts said.But the Chinese government has continued to use the existence of the TIP \u2014 whichBeijing still refers to by the name ETIM \u2014 to highlight the threat of terrorism and justify its ongoing crackdown in Xinjiang, said experts and Uyghur activists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CNN. 5 September 2021 Below is an article published by CNN. Photo:AFP. Tuhan\u2019s family crossed the border from China\u2019s western Xinjiang region to Afghanistan 45 years ago to escape persecution.Now, as the Taliban exerts control over the country, she fears she and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":819,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}