'Uighur card' used to break up China (1997 article)

by Joseph Brewda for EIR News Service

This is such an eye-opening article from 1997 (here’s the original link). It was written by Joseph Brewda for EIR News Service and published on La Rouche website. Unfortunately, it’s available only in a PDF format online, so I am republishing it here. It shows how the Uyghur separatist problem is not new and how the West has been trying to use terrorism in Xinjiang to sabotage the New Silk Road and break off the region from China. One U.S. foreign policy expert in this article gloats about the possibility of turning Xinjiang into “China’s Chechnya.” The playbook was/is the same: Use former Mujahideen and the newly formed Al Qaeda to turn Xinjiang into a terrorist haven. The terrorists in those days openly talked about attacking the Silk Road trains. The West’s evil plans did essentially pause the New Silk Road for twenty years (1992 - 2012). The article details the extensive roles of the USA, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the fake front-group Amnesty International. You can also see how Western imperialists were salivating about the multiplier effect of separatist movements in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang. Carving up China has been a Western fantasy since the late 19th century.

However, China wisely befriended all its Muslim neighbors (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) during those twenty years and created win-win deals so that all its Islamic neighbors had incentives to protect the New Silk Road. In 2012, Xi Jinping restarted the New Silk Road, now known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Xi also crushed terrorism, and Xinjiang has been free from terrorist attacks since 2017. The US/UK wasted the last three years on atrocity propaganda blitz about genocide and other horror stories only because they couldn’t derail the freight trains of BRI. As the dogs barked, the caravans of Ancient Silk Road moved on. Without further due, here is the article:

'Uighur card' used to break up China by Joseph Brewda

Since February [1997], the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of northwest China has been the target of a series of disturbances and bombings, carried out - by their own claims - by Uighur separatist groups attempting to split the region from China.

What is at stake in Xinjiang is a project of strategic importance: the Second Euro-Asian Continental Bridge, the "new Silk Road" China-to-West Asia-and-Europe rail line which opened in 1992. This project, at the core of all current projects to develop the Eurasian landmass, was only finally completed, a century after the first Europe-to-Asia line was built in Russia, when the connection between the Chinese rail system and that of Kazakhstan in Central Asia was finished.

Xinjiang is being targeted by foreign-steered and foreign-headquartered separatist movements claiming to represent the Turkic-language-speaking Uighur "people" of Xinjiang. Although in 1949, Xinjiang's population was approximately 95% Uighur, today, about half of the 16 million population are of Chinese origin. Xinjiang also has China's largest deposits of oil and natural gas, uranium, gold, and other raw materials. Since 1992, Xinjiang has acquired global strategic significance, as the route of the Continental Bridge.

The Chinese government is now building two more branches of the "Land-Bridge": a second connection to Kazakhstan, and the first rail line to the city of Kashi, the Chinese terminus of the Pakistan-China Karakoram Highway. The separatists make no bones about the fact, that these strategic rail lines are their target. The leader of the U.S. branch of the Uighur Liberation Front, Gulamettin Pahta, told EIR on March 11, that the "Continental Bridge" is a Chinese "imperialist" plot that must be blocked. "They are building railroads, but the people are opposing the railroad, and we will destroy the railroad. This is just like the American movies on the history of California, What the Indians did, in fighting the railroads, is what we will do.”

“Every train coming into eastern Turkestan is bringing in Chinese. This must be stopped," Pahta said. Just how "successful" the separatists are in fighting the railroads, is questionable. Western press outlets, in an effort to inflame the situation, have repeatedly given all kinds of figures for casualties in disturbances in Xinjiang, and a bomb explosion in Beijing, numbers which Chinese accounts have not confirmed. However, spokesmen for the Uighur Liberation Party and the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organization have claimed credit for the violence.

Moreover, efforts by the British to inflame relations between China and the Central Asian Republics, by staging some of their "East Turkistan" separatist actions out of states bordering on China, have also been dealt a setback.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, fresh from discussions in Beijing about rail and energy cooperation with China, held a Feb. 22 press conference, in which he denounced the idea of secessionism. "So-called minorities live in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, the south, and in other regions of China. Their aspiration for self-determination is understandable. However, we can in no way welcome the idea of separatism. There are 6,000 peoples and ethnic groups in the world. If all of them were to decide to declare sovereignty one day, then numerous helpless, dwarfish countries would emerge on the planet, along with the existing powerful countries that are striving for development and prosperity, and this would mean chaos, permanent wars, and endless conflicts."

Gulamettin Pahta is a member of an international network of Uighur liberation groups deployed by the British and Dutch monarchies' Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), the British Royal Society of Asian Affairs, and Lord Avebury's House of Lords human rights mercenaries. The UNPO has trained the Uighur liberationists in "diplomatic skills" at the Australian National University, according to its literature, through grants provided by the Dutch Foreign Ministry.

After World War II, the Uighur separatists were led by Isa Yusuf Alptekin, who led a revolt in Xinjiang in 1945. Today, the leadership of the network has passed to his son, Erkin Alptekin, who is also chairman of the UNPO.

The British command structure

In addition to the Anglo-Dutch UNPO, which has targeted much of Siberia, as well as large sections of Central Asia and western China for break-up into ethnically divided mini-states, EIR has identified a complex of largely London-headquartered intelligence fronts, all pushing the destabilization of China.

One of the most important British case officers for the Uighur independence movement is Sir William Peters, a former British deputy high commissioner in Bombay and career intelligence specialist, who is today chairman of the Tibet Society and board member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs, the primary British intelligence outfit targeting China. In 1991, he wrote an optimistic forecast of Uighur and Tibetan rebellion, after a tour of Xinjiang, in the society's journal, Asian Affairs: "To the south and east of Xinjiang lies Tibet. Stories of the Tibetan resistance filter through to Kashgar [Kashi] and its neighbors. To the northeast, Uighurs see the moves toward multi-polarity in Outer Mongolia and hear about unrest among Mongols in Inner Mongolia. On the western side, there is no telling what direction semi-independent republics in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan might move vis-a-vis China.

A few Uighurs have heard of the Joint Committee for the Manchu, Mongol, East Turkmen, and Tibetan Peoples and are particularly anxious to obtain by whatever means possible the Committee's publication One Voice. They have some links with Isa Alptekin, leader of the Turkestan Liberation Movement. It is noteworthy that Alptekin's son Erkin Alptekin took an active part in the International Convention on Tibet in London from 6 to 8 July [1990]. "The conjunction of revived minority discontent on both national and religious grounds, of improved access across the frontier to fellow tribesmen, of major political change in neighboring countries, and of the sustained world reaction against genocide, colonialism, and apartheid, creates a situation in Central Asia in which radical change is just possible. The present campaign to arouse world opinion on the subject of genocide, colonialism, and apartheid in China could be the lever which pries out from a Politburo due for change radical concessions in areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet."

The House of Lords and Foreign Office speak

Lord Avebury, chairman of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, is another controller of the separatists. In 1994, Lord Avebury sent an open letter to the British Foreign Office demanding that it "save the peoples of Eastern Turkestan," who were "faced with national extinction." In 1995, Lord Avebury told EIR that he was pessimistic that Britain could be successful in defending the Uyghurs and Tibetans from Chinese efforts to exterminate them, simply through human rights campaigns, implying that he favored more aggressive London involvement in the destabilization of Xinjiang.

Lord Ennals, a former British Foreign Secretary, was, until his recent death, another top patron of the Uighur and Tibetan independence movements. He was also a leader of the UNPO. Martin Ennals, Lord Ennals' s brother, controls Amnesty International, the British Foreign Office front which oversees international propaganda campaigns against China, over alleged suppression of the Uighurs and Tibetans.

American 'cousins' weigh in

Among the so-called "Americans" who have joined the Anglo-Dutch drumbeat to destabilize the New Silk Road through secessionist violence in Xinjiang, is one of Henry Kissinger's leading State Department proteges, Dr. Helmut Sonnenfeldt. In an interview with Voice of America on Feb. 14, the retired career State Department official, now with Kissinger at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, predicted that Xinjiang could become a "Chinese Chechnya."

Sonnenfeldt gloated, "I think the Chinese have tried to observe very closely what happened in Chechnya, in part because they may be conscious of the possibility that something of that sort might arise in their own domain."

Sonnenfeldt cautioned that, should such an uprising gain steam, "it needs to be dealt with harshly and rapidly," or else China will be forced to grant the region autonomy - precisely the British strategic plan.

Elsie Walker is another leading propagandist devoted to "rousing world opinion" on Xinjiang. A cousin of former U.S. President Sir George Herbert Walker Bush, she heads the U.S.-based Asians for Democracy, which also mobilizes on behalf of the Tibetan cause.

In October 1994, Uighur liberation leader Erkin Alptekin addressed a conference in New York City of the "Allied Committee of the Peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, Tibet," organized by Walker's outfit. In its official announcement of the conference, the Dalai Lama's so-called Tibetan government-in-exile declared: "This conference is being organized to let the international public know that in the uncertainty, instability, and even turmoil in China, that may result from the death of strongman Deng Xiaoping, the struggle to regain the freedom of these three peoples [Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols] from communist China domination will be pursued relentlessly."

According to both Chinese and foreign news accounts, on the day of Deng Xiaoping's funeral. three bombings took place in Xinjiang. The proposed map of a China broken into pieces, which the separatists distributed at the conference, leaves no doubt what their London masters are attempting.