20140304c
Date: 4 Mar., 2014
Subject:Telegraph: Kunming massacre: Has the global jihad reached China?
The Telegraph, UK
Kunming massacre: Has the global jihad reached China?
Was the massacre of 29 people at a railway station in south west China a sign that China has become a target for Islamic militants?
Malcolm Moore By Malcolm Moore, Beijing
11:55AM GMT 04 Mar 2014
No one at the railway station in Kunming noticed the men and women wearing black until they drew their knives and began slashing throats.
Working together, according to Chinese witnesses, the group seemed well-trained: they knew exactly where to stab and cut.
By the time Chinese police reacted, shooting four as the rest of the group dissolved into the darkness, 29 people were dead and more than 130 injured.
No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for last Saturday's attack. But some fear it may be the start of a new cycle of violence as China becomes a target for radicals trained or influenced by Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The state media called the attack "China's 9-11": the moment when Islamic terrorists began to target Chinese civilians.
The authorities have suggested that ethnic Uighurs are responsible, whose homeland is the north western frontier region of Xinjiang.
Since the 1980s, when large numbers of Han Chinese began moving into Xinjiang, the authorities have battled a small but determined independence movement.
Local Muslim Uighurs, angry at becoming second-class citizens in their homeland, have regularly launched attacks on the Chinese authorities, occasionally calling for their own state: East Turkestan.
In the past year, there have been at least five serious attacks reported in the Chinese media, and dozens killed. The cities that have seen the heaviest fighting, Kashgar and Hotan, are roughly the same distance from Mecca as they are from Beijing.
Kunming has a large but transient population of Uighurs, many of whom find work with the city's 500,000-strong population of ethnic Hui Muslims.
It may also be a stopover on the route to South East Asia: roughly 100 Uighurs were arrested on the border with Laos a year ago, according to Radio Free Asia, and a group of Uighurs was also deported back from Cambodia in 2009.
But the attack on the railway station was "anomalous", said Dru Gladney, the author of Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic.
"What you have in Xinjiang are social eruptions and personal vendettas. This felt more like radical Islam, maybe an imitation of the Mumbai attacks or the Chechen attacks, although they did not take hostages or attack infrastructure.
"It was for shock appeal rather than a strategic effort. But attacking civilians is a game changer."
Prof Gladney noted that the attackers were all dressed in black "which is not typical of Uighurs and may be more likely the influence of South East Asian groups".
He added: "Their knives were not Xinjiang knives, which tend to be ornate, with colourful stones and glass, and their flag was the wrong colour. The flag of East Turkestan is a light blue, this one is a dark blue or black and the writing is Arabic not Uighur, and poorly done."
The involvement of two young female attackers suggested that the group may have learned from the Caucasus militants, said Jacob Zenn, a Eurasia analyst at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington.
"Women featured prominently in the Beslan kidnapping in Russia and attacking a train station is also something that is done in the Caucasus but has not been done by Uighurs before."
For years, China has warned that it faces the threat of Uighurs from Xinjiang becoming radicalised in the cauldron of fundamentalists in Pakistan and Central Asia.
"China's ongoing security crackdown in Xinjiang has forced the most militant Uighur separatists into volatile neighbouring countries, such as Pakistan, where they are forging strategic alliances with, and even leading, jihadist factions affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban," wrote Philip Potter, an assistant professor of public policy and political science at the University of Michigan, in a recent paper.
China refers to these terrorists as members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an umbrella phrase for all the splinter groups that operate in Pakistan and central Asia.
"There is no one group that calls itself ETIM," said Mr Zenn. "The Chinese could be referring broadly to East Turkestan movements because there are lots of different groups."
"The Chinese do not have a very clear definition of what it is that represents ETIM," added Raffaello Pantucci, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
The most prominent group is the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), which was formed in 2006 by Uighurs who had fled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1990s, according to Mr Zenn.
"The TIP focuses on propaganda in order to attract funding and it has succeeded because Xinjiang is now included in the global jihad by Al Qaeda, which it did not used to be," he said.
The organisation publishes online statements in English and Arabic as well as Uighur and releases a regular stream of videos from its camps in Pakistan.
"The videos do not show a huge amount: people running with AK-47s, building rudimentary bombs, displaying rocket-propelled grenades," said Mr Pantucci. "They sometimes have an interesting thing of getting senior Al Qaeda speakers to praise them, saying that the Turkestanis are doing a good job."
Some of the members of the group have been reportedly killed in drone strikes alongside "hardline factions of the Pakistani Taliban," he added.
Ironically, TIP claimed responsibility for the last terror attacks in Kunming, a pair of bus bombs that went off before the Beijing Olympics, killing two and injuring 14. At the time, however, the Chinese authorities were keen to play down the potential of a terrorist attack during the games.
According to a cable released by Wikileaks, a businessman in Kunming told James Boughner, a visiting American diplomat, at the time: "When the Uighurs don't do anything, the government blames them for something; when they claim to have done something, the government says they didn't."
Last October, the TIP praised an attack on Tiananmen Square when a man drove his wife and mother into tourists underneath the portrait of Chairman Mao before his jeep exploded into flames.
It has also showed footage of one of the men arrested in an attack on Kashgar attending one of its training camps in Pakistan.
But while China is keen to blame the TIP for attacks on its soil in order to justify its vast security operation in Xinjiang, there is little direct evidence that it is running operations and it may only have between 50 to 200 members.
"Angry people in Xinjiang who feel oppressed might have some material from a terrorist group but does that mean they are members or that there is a causal link?
"The Chinese government is not bothering with that nuance. They are all motivated by ideology so they are all ETIM," said Mr Pantucci.
The most prominent case involving a Uighur terrorist, the conviction of Muhammad Rashidin, or Mikael Davoud, in Norway in 2010 for plotting to blow up a newspaper office, made no mention of an organised Uighur terrorist group.
At his trial, Davoud said he had wanted to attack the Chinese embassy, having been radicalised by the "murder" of his relatives by the Chinese authorities.
He spent time in a religious school in Pakistan before reaching Norway, and was in email contact with Al Qaeda groups in Pakistan. But Peter Nesser, an expert witness at the trial, said there was "nothing in court which tied him to ETIM and it was not mentioned".
After initially putting ETIM on a global terror list to win Beijing's support for the war in Afghanistan, the United States has now removed it.
Prof Gladney said there was "no hardcore evidence that even if this organisation exists, it has any responsibility". He added that there is a fundamental conflict between the ideology of Uighur separatists and Al Qaeda.
"The problem is the global jihadis are anti-nationalist, anti-state, whereas the Uighurs want liberation and sovereignty, their own state. That's why Osama Bin Laden never really mentioned the Uighurs or the Chechens, and probably why Al Qaeda never get on with the Taliban, who were very localised."
Instead, he said, attacks inside Xinjiang are being driven by unemployment among young men. "These young men are fairly well educated, they can speak up to four languages, they use the internet and are interested in the global media. They have aspirations, but there are no jobs.
"They are constantly misrepresented in the media and are angry. And its hard to get married because they have no money so where are they going to go: the mosque," he said.
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