Manufacture, Dissemination & Mythification of the Uygur "Cultural Genocide" Narrative in Western MSM Construction of Xinjiang [XUAR] "Human Rights" Discourse

Updated early draft extract from a book-length work-in-progress: subject to expansion and revision over time.

Sep 10, 2021

Video 1.1: Deconstructing contemporary CNN lies about Xinjiang Uygurs | from China Daily (2021/11/10)

The Silk Road Strategy [SRS]: The Origins of US Foreign Policy Fomenting Radical Islamist Pan-Turkic Separatism, Extremism and Terrorism in XUAR

Destabilizing China’s Xinjiang (“new frontier”) province was a US geo-strategic objective since the Soviet withdrawal of Afghanistan in 1989 (Edmonds, 2010), but was formally officiated as US foreign policy in 1999 when “the United States Congress approved the Silk Road Strategy (SRS)” (Bandeira, 2017). While the US supported the anti-Soviet Afghan Mujihideen in what was “the CIA's largest covert operation ever” (Golling, 2009), the SRS effectively renewed / re-conceptualized the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 “in order to increase the assistance, economic support and the political independence of the countries of the southern Caucasus and Central Asia, advance American geo-strategic interests in the region, and oppose the growing political inﬂuence of regional powers like China, Russia and Iran” (US Congress, 1999: Bandeira, 2017). Two policy points in particular directed what was covertly being planned for XUAR, though that region was inferred rather than directly listed:

“to support the economic and political independence of the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia: (1) to promote and strengthen independence, sovereignty, democratic government, and respect for human rights (italics added)… (7) to support United States business interests (italics added) and investments in the region. “ (US Congress, 1999)

These US business interests were to be implemented initially in infra-structure development to facilitate access to (and financial control over) what US government estimates at the time had further delineated as the untapped oil “wealth” in the geo-specific circumstances:

“landlocked Central Asia could supply more than 80% of the oil imported by the United States by around 2050, which explains the urgent need to control the oil reserves of the region and the pipelines through Afghanistan and Turkey”. Bandeira (2017)

With Turkey a NATO ally - and proxy in a long history of CIA backed Islamic separatism / terrorism since the radicalization of pan-Turkic sentiment (Golling, 2009) - and Afghanistan the stronghold of the radical Islamic group known as the Taliban, these CIA-backed and trained Mujihideen fighters were the same forces that by 1997 incorporated the radical Islamic group Al-Qaeda (with Osama bin Laden at the helm) alongside the Taliban, the latter in political control of Afghanistan as the US began the SRS (Edmonds, 2010).

In fact, following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the end of the Cold War, the US calculatedly buoyed the Taliban, prepared to give them erstwhile authority in Afghanistan in exchange for the Islamists ensuring US control over the flow of Central Asian oil reserves - the SRS objective being the financial exploitation of the nation’s resources (Golling, 2009). As stated by former White House Special Assistant to President Reagan and then Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee:

The assumption is that ‘the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan’. US companies involved in the project included UNOCAL and ENRON. As early as May 1996, UNOCAL had officially announced plans to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through western Afghanistan. (Edmonds, 2010)

Ostensibly thus, with “Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia)” and US “private security companies... to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing jihad for a long time... the US saw the sponsorship of ‘Islamist jihad in the Caucasus’ as a way to (simultaneously) deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism’” (Edmonds, 2010). The US’ SRS agenda was dutifully expanded in talks with the UK, who delineated the particular strategic importance of XUAR in the future development (and exploitation) of the region’s resources. To be most effective, the allies reasoned, for Uygur Islamist separatism to continue (a must to destabilize and contain China) it should be concealed and obfuscated by discursively paralleling the Uygur separatist agenda to the Western media’s then proliferating “human rights” discourse in relation to Tibet and the Dalai Lama. This alliance had actually been first proposed in a letter by Uygur separatist Isa Yusuf Alptekin to then US President Richard Nixon in 1969 in which he argued that the USA embrace his particular Islamist pan-Turkic nationalism (although neither the US nor the international community recognized the “nation” of “East Turkestan” Alptekin argued for in Nixon’s initiating recognition of China and the legitimacy of the CPC):

It will give us speed and enthusiasm in our struggle for liberty if East Turkestan, which has no geographical, historical, or ethnic connection to China, is treated and mentioned in the resolution, side by side with captive Tibet, as having a distinct identity. Assured that you will show interest and affection to the sensitivity of the oppressed and innocent people of East Turkestan. (Alptekin, 1969)

Seizing on Alptekin’s initiating agenda here, the intent was to fuse his pan-Islamist pan-Turkic ultra-nationalism with the “human rights” rhetoric used to bolster the claims to Tibetan independence on the basis of, specifically, “religious freedom”. Alptekin’s claims to an independent nation of East Turkestan, however, deliberately obfuscated the fact that it never officially existed, delineated as the First East Turkestan Republic by Russian backed Uygur separatists in the attempts to form a puppet Uygur enclave initially surrounding only the Kashgar area:

Such “human rights” discourse on XUAR would then become similarly the “official” context for all Western mainstream media reporting, avoiding reference to (and in effect concealing) the radical jihadist separatism, extremism and terrorism behind it.

Video 1.2: The contemporary expression of radical Islamic extremism in Xinjiang | from CGTN (2021/04/02)

This “human rights” agenda regarding the re-conceptualization of XUAR terrorism for Western media dissemination was first outlined by then senior British case officer for the Uygur independence movement, William Peters, himself “a former British deputy high commissioner in Bombay and career intelligence specialist... chairman of the Tibet Society and board member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs, the (then) primary British intelligence outfit targeting China”:

“To the south and east [of Xinjiang) lies Tibet. Stories of the Tibetan resistance filter through to Kashgar [KashiJ and its neighbors .... To the northeast, Uighurs see the moves toward multipolarity 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, Kyrgyzia, and Uzbekistan might move vis-a-vis China. If there is any truth in the story of military help from Kyrgyz across the border for their fellow tribesmen in Xinjiang. this thought will be all the stronger.” (Brewda, 1997)

Peters, a seasoned colonialist, enabled the US-UK SRS agenda to foment Uygur separatist rhetoric to systematically entwine with that of Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, based on concurrent dissemination into XUAR - through such auspices as the CIA-backed Radio Free Asia - of radical Islamic separatist anti-China / pro-Western propaganda to generate the Islamist pan-Turkic Uygur nationalism necessary to foment unrest and violence: “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” (Brewda, 1997). So too Peters noted an existing link - and separatist / terrorist lineage - between Uygur and Tibetan anti-China agendas in the person of CIA-backed Uyghur separatist Erkin Alptekin’s (isa Alptekin’s son) participation in the International Convention on Tibet in London from 6 to 8 July, 1990 (Brewda, 1997). Into Alptekin’s agenda, Peters introduced the construct of “genocide” (on the basis of the violation of “human rights” in suppressing Uygur “religious freedom”) as the most effective rhetorical tool for the Western media to win popular support for Alptekin’s Uygur cause, effectively the cover now for the US’ SRS anti-China destabilization effort in the Central Asian Caucuses:

“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 Asian 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.” (Brewda, 1997)

The SRS intent was clearly laid out in Peters’ statement: to manufacture / discursively construct a mythology of Uygur “genocide” for media dissemination to supplant the violent Islamic radicalism of the separatists - radicalized by key diaspora figures broadcasting extremist rhetoric on CIA sponsored networks in both Central Asia and Europe. The SRS rationale was thus to unite the Uygur separatist agenda in the populist discourse with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet while covertly supporting Uyghur separatism, extremism and terrorism in the effort to force the Chinese government into pro-Western policies re: control of the region’s vast natural resources. To concurrently destabilize China and thus also deprive it of access to the Central Asian oil reserves, the SRS turned to a specifically pan-Turkic Uygur separatist network they had been fomenting initially in Turkey decades earlier through CIA-funded Abdullah Catli, terrorist organization The Grey Wolves and from there into Azerbaijan and XUAR.

As the US pursued its existing network, another British Uygur separatist ”controller” peer to Peters, Lord Avebury, chairman of the British ParIiamentary Human Rights Group, in 1994, subsequently sent an open letter to the British Foreign Office demanding that it “save the peoples of Eastern Turkestan,” who were “faced with national extinction” (Brewda,1997). However, there was pessimism over whether Britain alone “could be successful in defending the Uighurs and Tibetans from Chinese efforts to exterminate them”. That is to say, of the potential effectiveness of the “genocide” construct’s successful dissemination and entry into populist mythography “simply through human rights campaigns, implying that he favored more aggressive London involvement in the destabilization of Xinjiang” (Brewda, 1997). This added aggression extended the media “genocide” narrative through another British “human rights” connection, Lord Ennals, a former British Foreign Secretary, and “another top patron of the Uighur and Tibetan independence movements (who) was also a leader of the UNPO” while Martin Ennals, Lord Ennals’ brother, controlled Amnesty International, “the British Foreign Office front which oversaw international propaganda campaigns against China over alleged suppression of the Uighurs and Tibetan” (Brewda, 1997).

Indeed, in addition to their secret funding of the Mujihideen, the CIA “in the 1970s and the 1980s... had built up a network of contacts with the UygHur separatist elements” (Raman, 2002). Among these was the separatist identified by Peters, the afore-mentioned former Munich-based CIA-sponsored Radio Liberty broadcaster Erkin Alptekin, head of the Europe-based Eastern Turkestani Union and a close Uyghur associate of the (also CIA-funded) Dalai Lama, whom the US CIA propaganda network sought to establish as “the (European) forefront of the (Uygur Pan-Turkic) ethnic separatist movement” (Raman, 2002).

Alptekin was not alone. In 1989 - as the Soviet Union was collapsing from the Afghanistan struggle - following the June 4th incident, a core band of radicalized pan-Islamic Uygurs successively joined Alptekin. This incident, “born of contradictions from market reform, inflamed by Gorbachev’s perestroika, and combined with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its fall on December 26, 1991, spark(ed) a generational crisis in China” (Qiao, 2021). Thereafter, following international media attention given the event, “a wave of disillusioned students and upwardly-mobile young people leave China for the U.S. and other Western nations, with some receiving lavish attention and platforms as ‘dissidents’ who serve a strategic interest for U.S. ambitions vis-a-vis China” (Qiao, 2021). Among these “dissidents” of interest to these U.S ambitions specific to the SRS in Xinjiang were radicalized Uygur separatists / secessionists Rushan Abbas, Dolkun Isa and Nury Turkel, who soon loosely joined with CIA-backed Alptekin and Omar Kanat, both of whom had left a generation earlier, to establish a US base for radical Uygur pan-Turkic Islamic separatism: with Kanat and later Isa guiding the World Uyghur Congress [WUC], with eventual financial support through the National Endowment for Democracy [NED].

The networking of US support for Uygur separatist terrorism extended to US President George HW Bush’s cousin Elsie Walker, head of the U.S.-based Asians for Democracy, which mobilized Tibetan student radicalism to foment unrest in Tibet: indeed she organized for Uygur separatist / terrorist spokesperson Alptekin to address a conference in New York City of the “Allied Committee of the Peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, Tibet,” (Brewda, 1997) in order to facilitate the inclusion of the US-UK manufactured Uygur “genocide” myth in the broader “human rights” and “religious freedom” agenda then dominated by Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Indeed, in its official announcement of the conference, the Dalai Lama declared the SRS agenda in effect validating (dog whistle style) Uygur terrorism in XUAR:

“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, Uighurs, and Mongols] from communist China domination will be pursued relentlessly (italics added)” (Brewda, 1997).

In this relentless pursuit of “human rights”, “according to both Chinese and foreign news accounts, on the day of Deng Xiaoping’s funeral, three bombings took place in Xinjiang” (Brewda, 1997) and the Dalai Lama showed a map of how he - and the US-UK buoying him - envisioned a future China, splintered into pieces, which to Brewda (1997) “(left) no doubt what their London (and Washington) masters (were) attempting”: This attempt was the intended, deliberate destabilization and splintering of China through covert state-sponsored fomenting of Uygur Pan-Turkic Islamist separatism, extremism and terrorism in XUAR, concealing this in the increasing media dissemination of the SRS’ Uygur “genocide” narrative and its related rhetorical constructs of “human rights” and “religious freedom”. Advocating this approach, retired US SRS State Department strategist Dr. Helmut Sonnenfeldt in a Feb. 14 1997 interview from his position alongside Henry Kissinger at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thus forwarded that, with enough fomented terrorist unrest, “Xinjiang could become a ‘Chinese Chechnya’” (Brewda, 1997), an apt parallel since, in addition to the US interest in destabilizing Xinjiang to curb China, “between 1996 and 2002... the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia” (Edmonds, 2010).

Establishing and Financing the pan-Turkic Islamist Uygur Separatist Base in the USA following the June 4th Incident

This impetus towards US-backed Uygur separatism had its geo-strategic agenda develop not just with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90 but with then contemporary events in Deng Xiaoping’s newly “opened up” China. Indeed, following the June 4th incident, the now burgeoning, US-backed Uygur separatist movement embarked on a systematic campaign of terrorism in XUAR, orchestrated by a radicalized Jihadist pan-Islamic group known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement [ETIM] and also as the Turkistan Islamic Party [TIP], initiating the April 5th, 1990 Baren Township Riots in XUAR, “the first terrorist attack of a phase lasting till 2016 during which terrorism was considered a severe problem in Xinjiang” (Qiao, 2021). By 1992, with the Soviets gone from Afghanistan and the US courting the Taliban, US geo-strategic interest in Afghanistan centered on the effort to counter China’s development of what it termed the “new Silk Road” specifically, to sabotage China’s efforts at extending a “land bridge” development into Pakistan:

“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.” (Brewda, 1997)

Intent on undermining these rail developments were US-backed separatist Uygur radicals, including Gulamettin Pahta, then leader of the US branch of the Uighur Liberation Front, who buried their Islamic radicalism in a direct ploy to gain further US support by claiming the “Continental Bridge” was a Chinese “imperialist” and colonialist plot to usurp Uygur territory and sublimate Uygur culture and identity, framing separatism, extremism and terrorism as inherent expressions of Uygur identity in the face of what they rhetorically advanced as the genocidally oppressive policy for XUAR by the CPC “colonizers”:

“They are building railroads, but the people are opposing the railroad, and will destroy the railroad. This is just like the American movies of the history of California, What the Indians did, in fighting the railroads, is what we will do. The same thing is happening. Every train coming into eastern Turkestan is bringing in Chinese. This must be stopped,” (Brewda, 1997)

From 1992 onwards thus, buoyed by the Imperialist theme’s co-development of an incipient Uygur “genocide” human rights mythology for Western media dissemination, terrorist attacks in XUAR greatly expanded, with covert US support for the US based representatives of the separatist Uygur networks concealing their terrorist agenda under the rhetoric of Chinese Imperialism, ironically attributing to the Chinese the very colonialist impulses of the US hegemon. In this superimposed projection of US/UK colonialist heritage onto China, discursively CPC policy was correspondingly manufactured for Western media in the rhetorical litany of presumed CPC oppression of, not a Chinese minority, but a Turkic people whose land had been “invaded” (as suggested in Isa Alptekin’s letter to Nixon), as meanwhile “spokesmen for the Uighur Liberation Party and the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organization... claimed credit for the violence” (Brewda, 1997). This epistemically disingenuous conceptualization of Chinese Imperialist oppression thus was the US SRS favored agenda duly disseminated by Erkin Alptekin in the CIA’s extension of radical Islamist separatism into Europe, intent on radicalizing and mobilizing the Uygur community in Xinjiang, and wider Central Asian and international diaspora, around the Chinese occupation of “East Turkestan”.

Consequently, whistleblower Sibel Edmonds rhetorically propositioned the effect if she were to definitively state that “between 1996 and 2002... the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single uprising and terrorism related scheme in Xinjiang” (Edmonds, 2010). Indeed, under US auspices, and with US State Department complicity thus, meeting with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997 for financial and logistical support (News Wire, 2018) were representatives of the radical Islamist pan-Turkic Uyghur separatist collective, the East Turkestan Islamist Movement [ETIM], with “a goal of liberating China’s Xinjiang province (which bordered Afghanistan) from what it calls China’s colonial occupation, establishing the ‘East Turkestan’ autonomous state and installing an Islamic, pan-Turkic caliphate” (Sumbal, 2013).

CIA-Condoned and Instigated Separatist pan-Turkic Terrorism and the Fomenting of Islamic Extremist Radicalization of XUAR’s Uygur Minority

Active in some form since the 1950s (Raman, 2002), when Mao’s Communist forces liberated XUAR from its hijacking by separatist Islamists who took advantage of China’s post-war unrest in aligning with the KMT to temporarily claim government of a small part of Xinjiang - via the Second East Turkestan Republic - as a faux independent nation they termed “East Turkestan” (but without any historical precedent or international recognition of this “nation” ever existing), ETIM operate(d) at two levels, with one solely dedicated to Xinjiang’s liberation from China and the other “providing assistance to Al-Qaeda and similar Jihadi groups in the region” (Sumbal, 2013). Comprised of radicalized militant members of China’s Turkic Uygur minority, through a network from the Pakistan-China border - where they received support from Pakistan’s then ISI (Raman, 2002) - into XUAR via Kashgar and Yining and extending towards provincial capital Urumqi, where the separatist’s Islamist, Jihadist Pan-Turkic nationalist agenda was gaining a foothold amongst radicalized Islamist Uygur artists and intellectuals, some in positions of governmental influence (Raman, 2002). ETIM sought to radicalize the entire Uygur population into separatist terrorism on the basis of Chinese occupation and oppression of Uygur “human rights” as that specifically of “religious freedom” (as core component of the diaspora Uygur Islamist “identity” but not one widely held within XUAR without the influence of radicalization). So too, ETIM had been responsible for the preceding decade’s worth of terrorism in XUAR: “Incomplete statistics showed that from 1990 to 2001, the East Turkestan terrorist forces inside and outside Chinese territory were responsible for over 200 terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, resulting in the deaths of 162 people of all ethnic groups, including grass-roots officials and religious personnel, and injuries to more than 440 people” (Raman, 2002).

Sympathetic to the separatist agenda were a number of allied pro-”East Turkestan” organizations, boasting a wide range of membership from within the Uygur community:

“Some of these organizations have ideological and possibly even operational link-ups with the Hizb-e Tehrir (HT) or Party of Liberation, which is not based in Xinjiang and which projects itself, without convincing proof, as the largest and the most popular Islamic movement with following in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and which has been fighting to establish an Islamic Caliphate in the historical region once known as Turkestan, encompassing the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China, often referred to as Eastern Turkestan, and the Central Asian Republics (CARS), referred to as Western Turkestan. They are also reported to have links with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which, according to Russian media reports... has re-named itself since June, 2001, as the Hizb-i-Islami Turkestan, or the Islamic Party of Turkestan, and re-formulated its objective as the creation of an Islamic republic out of the five Central Asian Republics and the XUAR of China.” (Raman, 2002)

Drawing on this wider Central Asian network, ETIM could bring directly into XUAR, an agenda of extremism, separatism and terrorism backed by a radical Islamist Uygur diaspora in the neighboring Turkic countries, concurrently being fomented by the CIA as part of the SRS (Raman, 2002: Golling, 2009: Bandeira, 2017), thus creating “two distinct terrorist/extremist movements---one resorting to violence on ethnic grounds to assert the Uighur ‘identity’ (religious pan-Islamic Jihadism) and assert a misrepresentation of Han Chinese domination and oppression while using religious and pan-Islamic arguments to justify violence for the establishment of an independent Islamic State”: East Turkistan (Raman, 2002). Utilizing this network, “the (Uygur) ethnic separatist elements (soon became) the beneficiaries of sympathy and support from the Dalai Lama’s set-up and the Tibetan diaspora abroad, and the US, Taiwanese and Turkish intelligence agencies” (Raman, 2002). Indeed, ETIM’s core network of “religious fundamentalist elements ha(d) been in receipt of support from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-backed Jihadi organizations in Pakistan, the Taliban and bin Laden’s International Islamic Front For Jehad Against the USA and Israel” (Raman, 2002).

Video 1.3: The legacy of ETIM terrorism in Xinjiang | from CGTN (2021/04/02)

Eager to now frame Islamist Uygur Jihadi separatism as “religious freedom” under Han Chinese racist (genocidal) oppression and distance it from terrorism, the US held the October 16, 1998 First International Conference of the Allied Committee of the Peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia at Columbia University in New York (Raman, 2002). In attendance were the CIA-sponsored Dalai Lama and Isa Yusuf Alptekin, father of Radio Liberty Uygur separatist broadcaster Erkin Alptekin, a man chosen for a special SRS tactic. In his speech, the Dalai Lama furthered the emerging SRS agenda to foment destabilization under the protection of “human rights” and “religious freedom”, ideologically loaded in affect but in essence empty rhetorical constructs the USA could deploy at will as discursive tools to suit its political and economic interests:

“Though Mongolians and Tibetans share a common religion and religious heritage, our ties to the people of Eastern Turkestan are no less... (o)ur three peoples are tied together by geography and history, and these days unfortunately by the Chinese occupation of our countries” (Raman, 2002).

Effectively painting the Chinese as brutally oppressing religious freedom, the Dalai Lama then added the next SRS talking point - separatist independence:

“during the last few years we have seen momentous changes come to the world. The Soviet empire has collapsed, and in its wake many formerly oppressed nations have regained their freedom and independence... In view of these changes, I remain optimistic that not too far in the future the true aspirations of the peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Inner Mongolia and Tibet will be fulfilled” (Raman, 2002).

As an Uygur equivalent to the Dalai Lama - and “spiritual leader” - the US promoted Nixon letter-writer Isa Yusuf Alptekin who, from his base in Turkey, echoed the Dalai Lama in his statement, and cemented the role of the US (in Western media reports thereafter) as the benevolent supporter of Uygur “human rights” and “religious freedom”, anchoring for Western viewers the myth of Uygur non-violent “dissent” and CPC genocidal oppression::

“the peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Tibet and Inner Mongolia believe that the United States is in an unique position to play an important role in this matter. Therefore, I kindly request the people of the United States, the United States Congress, the Administration and the press to give due ear to the free voice of our peoples - the Allied Committee. I have devoted my entire life to bring the plight of my peoples to the attention of the Free World. I am almost 95 years old, have lost my eyesight, and God only knows how long I have to live. But one thing is very clear to me: even if I pass away the Allied Committee under the leadership of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, our common spokesman, my brother and my sincere friend, will carry on the non-violent struggle of the peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Tibet and Inner Mongolia with strong determination” (Raman, 2002)

By 1998-1999 thus, with the reality of CIA SRS sponsored pan-Islamic terrorism in Central Asia now buried in the alliance of Uygur separatism with the faux spirituality of the Dalai Lama and reconstructed for Western media as “human rights” and “religious freedom”, the SRS was ready to mobilize the greater ETIM network into further destabilizing China via Uygur “East Turkestan” separatism. Their plan was to radicalize the wider Uygur diaspora and, shielded by the US position as protector of “human rights”, in fact covertly galvanize the diaspora into rhetorical “genocide” discourse as populist apologia / justification for the radical pan-Turkic violence the US intended to now foment, beginning in Kyrgyzstan:

“In 1998, Uighurs in Kyrgyzstan staged a protest demonstration against China in Bishkek. In a protest note to the Kyrgyzstan government, Pan Chan Lin, the Chinese Ambassador, said that “certain forces in Kyrgyzstan are harboring subversive aims against China” and that “this kind of subversive activity on the soil of Kyrgyzstan will harm the warm friendship between Bishkek and Beijing. “ In March 2000, the head of the Uighur community in Kyrgyzstan, Nigmat Bazakov, was assassinated, according to Kyrygz officials, for refusing to back an Uighur separatist group. Last January, a court in Kyrgyzstan condemned to death an Uzbek militant fighting alongside Uighur separatists for Bazakov’s murder. On July 1, 2002, a Chinese diplomat posted in Bishkek and his driver were reportedly assassinated. It is not yet clear who was responsible for the assassination. (Raman, 2002)

While Radio Free Asia continued to disseminate the SRS agenda to use local separatist sentiments to contain China and destabilize XUAR, the ETIM now distributed into XUAR, via DVD (CGTN, 2021), militant videos with children as young as 6 years old holding weapons and vowing violence against the Han Chinese (Sumbal, 2013: CGTN, 2021). With funding from Al Qaeda following the meeting with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (Yegorov, 2000: UNHC, 2021) and thereafter seizing on a legacy of sporadic separatist violence in Xinjiang over the preceding decade, the ETIM inaugurated its terrorist campaign in XUAR with the bombing of the Urumqi Train Station warehouse on 23 May 1998, the armed looting of 247,000 RMB Yuan in Urumqi on 4 February 1999, an explosion in Hetian City, Xinjiang, on 25 March 1999 and violent resistance against arrest in Xinhe County, Xinjiang, on 18 June 1999, incidents which resulted in the deaths of 140 people and injuries to 371 (UNSC, 2011). Gaining momentum, according to the UN Security Council, ETIM rapidly “set up bases outside China to train terrorists and ha(d) dispatched its members to China to plot and execute terrorist acts including bombing buses, cinemas, department stores, markets and hotels (and) has also undertaken assassinations and arson attacks and has carried out terrorist attacks against Chinese targets abroad” (UNSC, 2011).

ETIM’s Uygur Muslim separatist methodology (and that of its numerous umbrella organizations, including the Turkestan Islamic Party [TIM] who used al Qaeda backing to reach into Syria via Turkey (News Wire, 2018) - of fomenting violent unrest to destabilize China - suited the formative SRS. While radicalizing and mobilizing the Uygur diaspora in Central Asia to facilitate further Uygur separatist radicalization towards terrorist action in XUAR, the ETIM needed its Jihadist separatism disseminated to the wider Uygur community in greater XUAR itself, beyond their immediate sphere of influence in Kashgar and Yining. To achieve this, the SRS strategists turned again to the US’ CIA-backed propaganda network in Central Asia, Radio Free Asia, where Washington DC based Uygur separatist Siddiq Ruizi - who had left XUAR for the USA in 1996 (Dillon, 2003) - was disseminating anti-Chinese US CIA propaganda. To successfully radicalize the Uygur population into pan-Islamic separatism, and Jihad; however, SRS needed the ETIM speeches used so effectively in Kashgar and Yining: i.e. radical Islamic separatist propaganda, such as had infiltrated Uygur textbooks in the guise of preserving Uygur “identity”.

Video 1.3: Islamizing Uyghur children through the radicalization of textbook content | from CGTN (2021/04/02)

Broadcast media transcripts of these ETIM speeches, and other text-based propaganda, were in Urumqi on the way to Beijing, uncovered and recorded during Chinese counter-terrorist investigations in Kashgar and Yining (Chu-Minter, 2007). In Urumqi, Ruizi’s Uygur wife Rebiya Kadeer, a wealthy businesswoman and high-ranking CPC member of the XUAR government, had access to the ETIM speeches as well as two years of Xinjiang neican (“internal reference reports”). Kadeer - a covert “East Turkestan” sympathizer - knew both the intelligence value of these documents to the USA as well as the propaganda value of the ETIM speeches to the intended radicalization of the Uygur community in XUAR - and in priming the wider international diaspora - she ostensibly represented as the highest profile Uygur politician. It was her status as Uygur community figurehead that the SRS wanted to now exploit in relation to the status of the Dalai Lama.

A CPC Party Member, Kadeer refused to condemn the “East Turkistan” separatist, anti-China propaganda disseminated by her husband, with US support through RFA, and had not been re-elected to the 1998 National People’s Consultative Conference, to which she had long been XUAR’s most prominent Uygur representative and self-appointed spokesperson for the Uygur minority. Effectively rendered obsolete as a determining force in XUAR’s future development, and removed from her standing as representative of the Uygur people (and thus as symbolic figurehead of Uygur identity), Kadeer subsequently (and illegally) funneled Ruizi in the USA the two years’ worth of the neican publications - Kashgar Daily, Xinjiang Legal News, Yining Daily, and Yining Evening News - with a focus on ETIM inspired separatist speeches (DIllon, 2003). As Kashgar and Yining “are the two areas where separatist attacks are the most common, and Xinjiang Legal News contains extensive police reports on the government’s counter-terrorist operations, the Chinese government prepared to charge (Kadeer) with the offense of ‘passing on classified information to foreigners’” (Chu-Minter, 2007). Further investigation into Kadeer’s business dealings in XUAR revealed that she had “engaged in trafficking in illegal drugs and (was) engaging in illegal economic activities” (Xinhua, 2017): specifically, “Investigations found (Kadeer’s) trade company, registered under her name and her children’s names, dodged taxes amounting to more than 8 million yuan from 1994 and 2004” (Xinhua, 2007).

Removed from her standing as Uygur representative in XUAR, and expelled from the CPC, in August 1999 Kadeer met with Uygur separatist “East Turkestan” radicals and was on her way to meet with US Congressional Research personnel when she was arrested by Chinese authorities (Chu-Minter, 2007). Kadeer was charged with passing state secrets on to foreigners (Chu-Miniter, 2007) and was sentenced to Urumqi’s Liudaowan prison. RTA went quickly into SRS action, continuing to broadcast the ETIM umbrella Uygur separatist ideology into XUAR, hoping to radicalize the Uygur population into further anti-Chinese violence. With Kadeer in Chinese custody, however, the US government itself now had a reason to publicly engage with the Chinese over an agenda they could manipulate in Western media to garner support and obfuscate their real agenda to control Central Asia’s oil reserves: “human rights”, a topic long brewing in internal classified SRS intelligence reports as the optimum US strategy with which to frame Uygur separatism and disassociate it from the violent terrorism it fostered (wikileaks, 2007).

Here additionally aided by Uygur “dissident” and emerging “human rights” lawyer Nury Turkel, who systematically mapped out the discursive rhetorical constructs for the Western media “human rights” based campaign (and political talking points) initially deployed in the effort to force China to release Kadeer. So too, the US now began coordinating its subordinate international allies to its SRS agenda of destabilization. Using Turkel’s “human rights” discourse, the US media jointly with the UK began simultaneously publicizing Kadeer’s arrest in the Western media in terms of “human rights” and creating, for her, an international profile - in absentia - as a victim of CPC oppression: a martyr to the religious freedom of her people. Just as she had lost symbolic figurehead status in Xinjiang, Turkel now sought to establish a new symbolic status within the greater diaspora, in preparation for her release. Yet, just as they put pressure on China to release Kadeer, they covertly increased their media broadcasts of the ETIM radicalization agenda into Xinjiang via RFA, and internally disseminated the counter-terrorist information Kadeer had sent them. WIth Kadeer’s future uncertain, and pan-Turkic Uygur “East Turkestan” separatism in Xinjiang now fully, if covertly, backed by the US as part of SRS (Bandeira, 2017), US intelligence and the Pentagon directed operations specifically to foment pan-Islamist separatism in Central Asia (Golling, 2009). Following Kadeer’s release, an orchestrated campaign to mythologize her as the “spiritual leader” or “mother” of the Uygur people - based on the Dalai Lama - began in US ally Australia.

In the history of this dissemination of radicalized discourse, the US originally had a larger agenda for their new potential Islamic terrorist ally in Afghanistan-based Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda, who had met with ETIM (UNSC, 2011). Once again: Al Qaeda had itself emerged out of US CIA funding of the Islamic Mujahideen against the Soviets during the end of the Cold War (Golling, 2009), again with the intention of destabilizing Central Asia to prevent China, Russia and Iran from gaining power and influence in the region, specifically in relation to the region’s oil supply and untapped natural resource “wealth”. In this Central Asian destabilization incentive, the US’ SRS sought to implement what had emerged as:

“a larger geo-political strategy, involving Turkey and the CIA, in ongoing furtherance of The Bernard Lewis Plan. Originally implemented under the supervision of Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration, the plan was based on Lewis’ idea of an “Arc of Crisis”, created around the southern borders of Soviet Union, by empowering Muslim radicals to rebel against the communists, to bring about the fall of the Soviet Empire. The key aspect of this strategy, over the last 30 years, as revealed in the book and movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, began with support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which became the CIA’s largest covert operation ever. As outlined in Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, control over central Asia, which in addition to Afghanistan, comprises the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, is a key factor in mastery of all of Eurasia, and thereby, the world.” (Golling, 2009)

To which, the US commenced talks with Ayman al-Zawahiri, “(then) head of al Qaeda (in Afghanistan) and Osama bin Laden’s deputy“ (Ahmed, 2013). Subsequently, al-Zawahiri “had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001” (Ahmed, 2013). Al-Zawahiri, according to whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, “as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations” (Golling, 2008). After all, as Graham A. Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, stated directly:

The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia. (Edmonds, 2010)

According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds:

“You’ve got to look at the big picture. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the super powers began to fight over control of Central Asia, particularly the oil and gas wealth, as well as the strategic value of the region. Given the history, and the distrust of the West, the US realized that it couldn’t get direct control, and therefore would need to use a proxy to gain control quickly and effectively. Turkey was the perfect proxy; a NATO ally and a puppet regime. Turkey shares the same heritage/race as the entire population of Central Asia, the same language (Turkic), the same religion (Sunni Islam), and of course, the strategic location and proximity. This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.” (Sibel Edmonds in Lukery, 2008)

In due course, the SRS ensured that the Uygur “genocide” and Tibetan “human rights” construct was extended to include Taiwan, the three of them united under the umbrella of nationalistic “independence”.

“In February,1998, Anwar Yusuf, President of the Eastern Turkistan National Freedom Center, visited Taiwan at the invitation of the World Federation of Taiwanese Associations, reportedly a US-based organization, along with Erkin Alptekin; Professor Thubtin Jigme Norbu, elder brother of the Dalai Lama; Tashi Jamyangling, former Home Secretary of the Tibetan Government in exile; and Johnar Bache, Vice Chairman of the Southern Mongolian People’s Party. They met Liu Sung-pan, the then President of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan; Shui-Bian Chen, the then Mayor of Taipei; and Frank C.T. Hsieh, the then Mayor of Kaosiung” (Raman, 2002).

Following the events of 9-11 and the commencement of the US-led “War on Terror”, the CIA “sought to do the same to China as they had done to the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan” and destabilize China “through third parties such as terrorist organizations and countries like Turkey, a ‘puppetstate’ that nourished pan-Turkish and pan-Islamic ideas” (Bandeira, 2017). With a US military presence in Afghanistan and thus on the border with Xinjiang, “(d)espite their support to the USA in its war against terrorism, the Chinese (were) concerned over the possibility of the USA taking advantage of the war to establish a permanent military and intelligence presence in the CARs as this would enable the US intelligence agencies to keep alive the ethnic separatist elements in Xinjiang by working through the Uygur diaspora in the CARs... (h)owever, the Chinese (did not) openly express these concerns” (Raman, 2002). Nevertheless, just as the US invaded Afghanistan and established a permanent military presence bordering China’s XUAR, as a direct result of SRS backed separatist pan-Islamic, pan-Turkic terrorism:

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia... Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single uprising and terrorism related scheme in Xinxiang (aka East Turkistan and Uyghurstan). Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned and carried out at least two assassination schemes against pro Russia officials in Azerbaijan. (Edmonds, 2010)

To complement their use of al-Qaeda, the US focused on NATO ally Turkey to specifically destabilize China in Xinjiang, utilizing radical pan-Turkic cleric, wealthy businessman Fethullah Gulen, being prosecuted in absentia in Turkey (after fleeing to the USA) for “trying to found a theocratic State order” - a de facto Islamic caliphate - in the country throughout the preceding Cold War (Golling, 2008). Utilizing Gulen’s vast sphere of influence in Central Asia - as publisher of pan-Islamic educational texts in many countries - the US SRS thus prioritized what FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds termed “Operation Gladio B” in 1997-1999 to re-focus on Central Asian indigenous separatism a long-standing destabilization agenda originally launched by the US post-WW2 (Golling, 2008). The original post-WW2 US-sponsored Operation Gladio had fomented “fake-flag” terrorist violence to curb the spread of socialist movements, particularly the orchestration of left-wing Red Brigade terrorism in Italy and right-wing “Counter-Guerilla” pan-Islamist sentiment in Turkey, initially through CIA funding of Gladio operative, and radical pan-Islamist, Abdullah Catli until his untimely death led to exposure of the covert US CIA-backed sponsorship of terrorist violence - and its support from within the State - in Turkey (Golling, 2009).

Operation Gladio: The Turkish Connection to US State-Sponsored Terrorism in Central Asia (In Brief)

CIA-backed Abdullah Catli embodied a specifically pan-Turkic form of Islamic radicalism and had been active in Turkey since the 1970s, when he was absorbed under the auspices of the US/NATO backed Operation Gladio as a key member of the “Counter-Guerilla”, a neo-fascist Islamic organization with ties to the Turkish Mafia who staged a number of violent urban guerilla actions throughout the decade, also incorporating a para-military group known as the Grey Wolves (Goksedef, 2018). By the mid 1990s, the Grey Wolves sought to establish a sphere of influence in the former Soviet states with a Turkic, Muslim population base, beginning with Azerbaijan, where they fought alongside US-backed Chechen rebels in a failed attempt to establish an Islamic caliphate and were banned by the government of Azerbaijan as a terrorist organization (Ali, 2014). Catli, however, was more successful, eventually luring the Azerbaijan government to support the US/NATO agenda, and repeatedly traveling to Xinjiang, where he was active fomenting the pan-Turkic, Uygur nationalism later adopted by ETIM and eventually broadcast into XUAR by the US-backed RTA and its presenter Siddiq Ruizi’s dissemination of the separatist speeches and Chinese counter-terrorism operations illegally sent him by his wife Kadeer. By 1996, Azerbaijan had some 360 radical Islamic mosques and assorted operational NGOs backed by CIA support (Edmonds, 2014)

Following the formation of Gladio B surrounding the War on Terror, after the events of 9/11, the SRS strategists, now based in Afghanistan, began formulating an international pro-separatist propaganda campaign alongside the US funded and directed World Uyghur Congress, an umbrella organization similarly manufacturing international support for pan-Turkic nationalism and Uygur separatism. Increasingly prominent in the Imperialist USA’s hegemonic destabilization agenda was the illegal narcotics trade in the region, with Afghanistan being a major international opium producer: “since the implementation of Bernard Lewis’ Plan, and the US’s involvement in Afghanistan, the country now accounts for almost 95% of the world’s opium production... and it is profits arising mostly from this illicit trade that go largely to financing the deliberate spread of a fabricated brand of Islamic fundamentalism” (Golling, 2009). As stated by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, “you get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one” (Golling, 2009).

Re-Incorporating Turkish Extremism to Target XUAR

The primary recipient of US backing for such pan-Islamist separatist destabilization of Central Asia was radical Islamist and wealthy Turkish businessman Fethullah Gulen, then “leading the movement behind Turkey’s current Islamic renaissance” and “one of the key operatives who have been fronting for the CIA in the radicalization of Central Asia, involving drug trafficking, money laundering, and the nuclear black market, and false-flag terrorism” (Golling, 2009). Gulen had “founded madrassas all over the world in the 1990s, most of them in the newly independent Turkic republics of Central Asia, including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Gulen’s network of madrassas were thus ‘used as a front for enabling CIA and State Department officials to operate undercover in the region, with many of the teachers operating under diplomatic passport’ (Lukery, 2008). So too Gulen was “one of the main tools Washington (was) using... to get Turkey involved in the Xinjiang affair” (Golling, 2009). Through Gulen, the USA (and CIA) sought to use Turkey “as a proxy to gain control over Central Asia via Pan-Turkic nationalism and (Islamic) religion” centering on XUAR (Lukery, 2008). These maddrassas, however, were soon banned in Russia by Vladimir Putin, who rightly claimed they were being used as fronts for the CIA to destabilize Russia through the fomenting of radical Islamist terrorism (Lukery, 2008: Golling, 2009).

Gulen, however, had to flee Turkey following Catli’s death after international media publicization of his involvement in the Cold War Operation Gladio - “a clandestine initiative backed by the United States... which used false-flag terror operations... to destabilize countr(ies) (beginning with Red Brigade terrorism in Italy in the 1970s)” and which had fomented unrest in Turkey during the Cold War - and sought exile in the USA. There, his immigration application was backed by Graham Fuller, former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council and Afghanistan Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA (Golling, 2009). Although State Department lawyers urged that Gulen not be admitted into the USA on the basis of “suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing (Gulen’s) projects” (Golling, 2009), further support by CIA veteran George Fidas and US Amabassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz ensured his visa sanctuary. Abramowitz himself was a Mujahideen and Kosovo rebels backer whose replacement Marc Grossman was implicated by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in a corruption scandal that saw him funnel $1.2 million per annum from Ihlas Holding, a Gulen-linked Turkish conglomerate” (Golling, 2009). Gulen’s financial investment and radical pan-Islamic maddrassas network in Central Asia reached $25 billion in US$ capital, including Schools, newspapers, universities, unions, and television channels” (Golling, 2009).

The Gulen immigration case exposed a tangled web of CIA backing and corruption that established Gulen as aforementioned: “one of the Turkish operatives who have been fronting for the CIA in the Islamization of Central Asia, incorporating drug trafficking, money laundering, and the nuclear black market, and the convergence with terrorism” (Luckery, 2008). For whistleblower Edmonds, the issue was clear - since the War on Terror, the US acted to close minor charities and other organizations accused of sponsoring terror as a mere showcase to continue covertly funding terrorist and separatist violence in Central Asia via Gulen, increasingly focusing directly on XUAR (Lukery, 2008). In Edmonds’ subsequent book, she “charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia” (Ahmed, 2013). Silenced by US authorities, the story was buried by the US media, which instead instigated the SRS campaign to mythologize radical Islamist Uygur separatism and terrorism as consequent to CPC “genocide” in violation of the “human right” to “religious freedom” in contextual appropriation of the existing populist discourse and mythography that attended coverage of Tibet and its symbolic figurehead, the Dalai Lama.

Seizing on similar pan-Islamic sentiments, the US SRS concurrently backed Gullen’s associate - and Abramowitz handled - Yusuf Turani, a militant Uygur separatist determined to turn the Chinese province of Xinjiang into a similarly Theocratic Uyghur Muslim state, referred to as “East Turkistan”. From their US sanctuary, Gulen and Turani remained in close co-operation on the Xinjiang agenda, which the US sanctioned in unofficial support of the appointment of Turani as head of the East Turkestan government in exile, in tandem with Ahmet Igamberdi of the East Turkestan Australia Association in Australia (where he functioned as a strategic base for separatism, extremism and potentially even terrorism financing). The underlying strategy for the destabilization of China covered in a report entitled “the Xinjiang Project” drafted by Gulen’s character witness and CIA Kabul Station Chief in Afghanistan Graham Fuller in 1998 for the Rand Corporation and revised in 2003 under the title ‘the Xinjiang Problem’, which emphasized the importance of the Xinjiang Autonomous region in encircling (and containing) China and provided a strategy for it.” (Golling, 2008). Thus, as a priority foreign policy directive following the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, and in hypocritical counterpoint to the stated objectives of what the US President George W. Bush termed the “War on Terror”: effectively henceforth, “the CIA and the Pentagon..., were now also fostering separatist movements in Xinjiang, the autonomous region in the northwest of the People’s Republic of China” (Bandeira, 2017).

US attention focused on the heavily radicalized segment of the Uygur Diaspora - specifically represented by Rushan Abbas, Dolkun Isa and Nury Turkel - which believed in a separatist, Islamist theocratic pan-Turkic agenda, referred to XUAR as “East Turkestan” and espoused Turani’s US-backed position claiming Chinese CPC colonialist “occupation” of an ancestral homeland existing as an independent nation prior to the Chinese occupation. This historically revisionist deception and support of radical pan-Islamist separatism continued throughout the War on Terror, from the outset of the Afghanistan invasion by the USA, where “the Uyghurs constitute(d) a significant percentage of detainees - at least 22 - at Guantanamo Bay since 2001” (Lukery, 2008). Indeed, just as the War on Terror began, a 2001 US State Department report stated that “(w)e are aware of credible reports that some Uighurs who were trained by al-Qaida have returned to China” (Raman, 2002), however noted that no Xinjiang-based terrorist group (including the ETIM) had yet been placed on the official US list of terrorist groups, despite China’s co-operation with the USA at the outset of the War on Terror by investigating financial records of groups designated terrorist organizations by the USA (Raman, 2002). The US rationale for exclusion of ETIM thus conveniently served the SRS agenda of fomenting unrest by indigenous terrorist groups in Central Asia and, specifically, XUAR:

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Abu Sayyaf of the southern Philippines have been designated as Foreign Terrorist Organisations under the US law of 1996, but not the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Party, though all the three are members of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front For Jehad Against the USA and Israel. In initiating action, either for designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation or for action under the UN Security Council Resolution No. 1373 in respect of bank accounts, the US and the European Union have focused essentially on terrorist organisations, which are perceived by them as international in nature or which are seen as posing a threat to their nationals and interests. Terrorist organisations viewed by them as purely indigenous have been excluded. These multiple yardsticks have been used vis-a-vis China as well as India. (Raman, 2002)

Indeed, the US State Department went out of its way to infer that the Uygur issue was not one of terrorism but a “human rights” issue of socio-cultural oppression tantamount now to what was termed “cultural genocide” - exactly the line the SRS had been taking in their broadcasting of ETIM-inspired separatist propaganda into XUAR via Radio Free Asia since such was supplied them by Kadeer.

China’s response was to demonstrate to Washington that it had long been waging a counter-terrorist campaign in XUAR, indeed since its liberation, from a radical Islamic faux government that had taken advantage of China’s civil unrest to wrest temporary control and declare the region to be “East Turkestan” when in fact such a declaration was meaningless fancy (Raman, 2002). Thus:

After October 7, 2001, the Chinese Government, which previously had been playing down the frequent incidents of violence in the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), started playing them up and projecting them as due to East Turkestan terrorists, who formed part of the international terrorism network and hence should be a legitimate target of the international coalition. It repeatedly urged that the Uighurs captured by the US in Afghanistan should be handed over to the Chinese authorities for trial as terrorists, a request which has not yet been accepted by the US. Addressing a press conference at Beijing in the beginning of November, 2001,Zhang Qiyue, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, claimed that there were hundreds of Uighurs in Afghanistan. The “Xinjiang Daily” published a detailed report on acts the Government considered as “terrorism” in Xinjiang over the past decade. She said that the “East Turkestan” terrorist force had close links with international terrorist forces and that “at least several hundred of these separatist-minded terrorists” once received training in Afghanistan. She added that China was willing to make joint efforts with the international community to fight against all manners of terrorism, “including the ‘East Turkestan’ terrorist force. (Raman, 2002)

As the US began its military assault on, and subsequent occupation of, Afghanistan, at the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Forum held in Shanghai, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin urged the USA that “Terrorism should be cracked down upon, whenever and wherever it occurs, whoever organizes it, whoever is targeted and whatever forms it takes” (Raman, 2002). In agreement was Russian Premier Vlaidimir Putin, who now wanted Chechnyan separatists added to the US terror list, urging “Chechnya and East Turkestan terrorist activities are part of international terrorism” (Raman, 2002). At issue was the official US designation of ETIM as a terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaeda,

For the US to carry through its SRS agenda, however, such a designation of the ETIM was problematic. Then President Bush, knowing such would undermine the SRS, but needing continuing Chinese co-operation in the “War on Terror”, accordingly designated the ETIM a terrorist group (CRS, 2010) but publicly forwarded a policy exempting indigenous terrorist groups from the US War on Terror on grounds of “religious freedom” and “human rights” being local, indigenous grievances, thus enabling the SRS to continue covertly disseminating radical Islamist propaganda inspired by the ETIM (but with any affiliation concealed) into XUAR via RFA despite the ETIM designation: ”The war on terrorism must never be an excuse to persecute minorities... ethnic minorities must know that their (human) rights will be safeguarded-that their churches, temples and mosques belong to them” (Raman, 2002). This US involvement in Uygur separatism and Islamic terrorism - to destabilize the region in the attempt to contain China - was made public by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. Planned media coverage of US support of terrorism and separatism (including US involvement in XUAR), in effect of the same forces the US claimed in public they were ostensibly at war against, was, however, duly suppressed by the US State Department and whistleblower Edmonds silenced (Ahmed, 2013). Specifically, Edmonds asserted that:

“Ayman al-Zawahiri, (then) head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.” (Golling, 2009)

While maintaining dissemination of the ETIM agenda into XUAR, the US needed to distance themselves from the ETIM in order to save face. The solution was to unofficially support the formation of an East Turkestan Government in Exile, headed by Yusuf Turani, who was in effect “the Prime Minister of a nonexistent country after his ‘election’ in the U.S. State Department” (Germann, 2013). Turani, however, was exposed by whistleblower Edmonds as having been active in XUAR as a CIA Gladio B operative fomenting separatist radicalization and violence (Germann, 2013). In effect, the US placed their terrorist operatives as de facto puppets in exile.

Virtually simultaneous to the covert enshrinement of Turani as the official US representative of the Uygur people, terrorist violence resumed in XUAR, with a foiled attack in the town of Kashi in which 21 people were killed, including six terrorists (Yang, 2013). Chinese police investigation revealed that the Uygur terrorists “watched videos from overseas showing terrorist acts and underwent physical training” (Yang, 2013). So too, searches of Uygur establishments linked to the terrorists yielded a large weapons cache (Yang, 2013). Following another terrorist attack 200km away in Serikbuya, XUAR intellectuals spoke out: “terrorist acts in the region threaten the security and stability of the entire country. We must resolutely root out terrorism” (Yang, 2013). So too, further police investigation linked the terrorist attacks to the ETIM who, with support from al-Qaeda, were now launching more sophisticated attacks linked to those perpetrated in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria (Yang, 2013). The same XUAR intellectuals now singled out US hypocrisy in minimizing and dismissing terrorism specifically in XUAR:

“However, the West has been holding double standards in the definition of terrorism. If the East Turkestan separatists carry out evil deeds in Xinjiang, some Western opinions whitewash them as seeking ‘national self-determination.’ Only when their acts threaten their domestic security would Western countries change their attitudes,” (Yang, 2013)

Chinese counter-terrorist measures thus increased when it was found that radicalized Uygur separatist extremists “watched violent jihadi videos, organized ‘underground Koran classes’ and had spread extreme religious teachings since September... (and) had started training for attacks in December and were planning a “major attack” in Kashgar (that) summer” (Germann, 2013).

Video 1.: Retrospective of terrorism (and fighting terrorism) in Xinjiang | from CGTN (2019/12/05)

Manipulating “Human Rights” Rhetoric to Counter China’s Growing Influence in Determining the Future of Central Asia’s Oil Reserves and Planned Pipelines

A major blow to the SRS occurred in 2005 when an attempt to intervene in Azerbaijan on the basis of “human rights” following separatist violence in Georgia, which the Azerbaijani government concluded was the result of US sponsorship, resulted in the US being ordered to leave its airbase, one of its most strategic assets in the Central Asian Caucuses. Much to the US’ chagrin, Azerbaijan renounced the US in favor of strategic alliances with Russia and China - who were aware of the US use of “human rights” to intervene in national sovereignty to suit the SRS agenda. Thus:

The leaders of Uzbekistan and China on Wednesday said they had signed deals aimed at increasing cooperation on energy and regional security. Speaking ahead of an annual meeting of the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tashkent, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Uzbek President Islam Karimov pledged closer ties, particularly on nuclear fuel (Edmonds, 2010)

Following the loss of their air base, the SRS re-focused on the pan-Turkic XUAR network, putting additional pressure on China, again on the basis of “human rights”, to release Uyghur separatist Rebiya Kadeer, by now becoming a de facto diaspora symbolic figurehead in absentia under Turkel’s “human rights” discourse.

On 14 March, 2005, Rebiya Kadeer was indeed unexpectedly released by Chinese authorities on a compassionate basis and was allowed to go to the USA on medical grounds. Her release coincided with a visit by US to China by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and was ostensibly - as reported by Western media - in exchange for the US withdrawing a resolution against China in the UN Commission on Human Rights (Amnesty. 2005). As the US and UK had successfully manufactured the “human rights” issue presented before the UN in securing Kadeer’s release, the Western media, beginning with Amnesty International, obfuscated her involvement in the pan-Turkic violent Uygur separatism since her leaking of ETIM material to her husband, failing to report the details of what she had done in disseminating Jihadist material (and leaking counter-terrorism reports). Indeed, the Amnesty International press release specifically minimized the gravity of her offense, and its links to Islamic terrorism, saying that she had been imprisoned:

...on charges of “leaking state secrets”, having sent newspaper clippings to her husband in the USA.

The use of both italics and inverted commas around “leaking state secrets” and the dismissal of the ETIM inspired Jihadist speeches and counter-terrorist reports as “newspaper clippings” intentionally suppressed in Western Media any admission of Kadeer’s treasonous involvement in fomenting pan-Turkic Uygur separatism and terrorist violence in XUAR. Again shielded from any criticism or journalistic investigation under the protective rhetorical construct of “human rights”, Kadeer was now fully incorporated into the SRS agenda to use this same “human rights” rhetoric to denigrate China’s reputation internationally, while simultaneously promoting further violent unrest in XUAR which would inevitably force China to respond in a manner the US could duly hold up as “human rights” violations and further the “East Turkestan” separatist-led destabilization of China to offset its partnership with Uzbeckistan.

Now in the West, Kadeer was the new symbolic figurehead of the collective Uyghur people and Turkel’s “human rights” discourse in due time led to Kadeer being nominated for a Nobel Prize, an announcement made to the world by US backed front Human Rights House, cementing the SRS agenda to use Kadeer as symbolic figure-head of the Uygur people. Her populist mythification could further splinter China, specifically through allying Uygur and Tibetan separatism, terrorism and extremism on the basis of “human rights” and “religious freedom” from CPC practice of “cultural genocide”. Kadeer’s acknowledgement speech, issued by the Uyghur American Association thus set the tone for her subsequently well-deployed populist mythification and near martyrdom:

“I am honored to have been nominated for such a prestigious prize,... I view it as a mark of recognition of the plight of all Uyghur people. I am a woman of peace... Therefore I oppose all violence and acts of terrorism. I am committed to campaigning peacefully for the human rights of Uyghur people. I will continue to speak out against China’s persecution of not only the Uyghur people, but also Tibetans, Mongolians, and the Chinese people themselves until all of them can enjoy their rights and freedoms.” (hrh, 2006)

China, citing the reasons for Kadeer’s arrest (her ties to separatism in illegally disseminating extremist materials and counter-terrorism police journal reports to her husband in the USA), protested strongly that Kadeer could in no way accurately claim to be the sole representative of the Uygur people (hrh, 2006). Although within the Uygur community remaining in XUAR Kadeer was no longer so esteemed, the US propagated the mythification of Kadeer and human rights martyrdom. By 2006 the US government were getting reports on Uygur unrest in XUAR from prominent Uygurs within the CPC which significantly rooted Uygur protest not in the terms Kadeer sought to frame it - CPC oppression of Uyghur “identity” (i.e. “religious freedom” and “human rights”) - but in a combination of an economic disparity in wages between Han and Uyghurs (rooted not simply in ethnic but in linguistic factors: employers required national language Mandarin speaking employees) and increasing Muslim radicalization (due to the ETIM separatist terrorism rhetoric fueled by Kadeer’s leak of documents to her CIA-backed husband and continuing to be broadcast into Xinjiang via CIA-backed RFA) consequent to changes in the province following increased investment and petro-chemical refinement in the region:

“Job discrimination continues to fuel ethnic tension in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), according to academics and Beijing-based Uighurs. Well-known Xinjiang scholar Yang Shengmin (strictly protect) of Beijing’s Central University for Nationalities also acknowledged that unemployment, which results from “complicated economic factors,” is a source of ethnic tension. However, Li Sheng (strictly protect), a top Xinjiang expert at the State Council-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argued that the Uighurs’ poor work ethic and inferiority to Han in the classroom are partly to blame for high unemployment. In addition to joblessness, Xinjiang authorities are also dealing with inflation, disgruntlement over the Government’s management of religious affairs and protests, allegedly instigated by Muslim radicals, all as the Olympics draw near.” (08BEIJING1661_a)

At issue for the Uygurs in XUAR was not what Kadeer claimed (oppression of Uygur identity), but a legal and pay dispute over equal wages itself brought on not by any ethnic discrimination but simply by the need to maintain use of the national language - Mandarin - in economic and industrial development within the region (and China as a whole). This, however, did not fit into the narrative that the US SRS strategists along with Kadeer and Turkel sought to manufacture and which the US needed to foment further unrest and separatist-terrorist violence in XUAR to destabilize China’s regional co-development incentives in Central Asia. Indeed, Chinese authorities were aware of the mounting economic disparity and sought to remedy this not through security or widespread persecution of a minority but through accessible, standardized education, beginning with the compulsory teaching of the national language, Mandarin, not to destroy Uygur identity but to facilitate greater Uyghur participation in economic prosperity for all Chinese: socialist equality of access and participation. Again, the reality of language standardization in XUAR - modernizing the province in line with the rest of the country - in which minority languages and regional dialects were preserved within local populations but not explicitly taught within the national language education system - did not fit the narrative that the SRS and Kadeer required to fit their contemporaneous construction and mythification of peaceful Uygur oppression. Yet, deliberately and misleadingly terming the CPC policy to be “cultural genocide”, Kadeer, Turkel, Isa, Abbas and the media reports attending them adopted the rhetorical constructs (and underlying “human rights” argumentation) in an attempt to solicit international support for Uygur separatism following the July 5th 2009 Urumqi riots).

Approaching the Beijing Olympics

Ahead of the forthcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics thus, which would showcase China to the World, Amnesty International fed into the “human rights” narrative building around the Uygurs in XUAR, citing not the reality of a pay dispute - and linguistic inequity to employment access and inter-culturally communicative competence and social mobility - but rhetorical amplification of China’s counter-terrorism tactics as enabling “the Chinese authorities to detain and imprison individuals who peacefully exercise their rights to freedom of expression, association and other fundamental human rights” (Amnesty, 2005). All Uyghur violence, ETIM terrorism, and pan-Islamic radicalism (still being broadcast into XUAR by US-backed RFA) was collectively erased from Western media reports on XUAR in favor of the myth of “human rights violations” by the oppressive Chinese occupiers of “East Turkestan” practicing “cultural genocide”. With Kadeer now free to mobilize support for the separatist agenda internationally from a base in Washington DC, and fan further terrorist action against China in XUAR, the myth of “human rights” was to prove a formidable core tactic in the SRS agenda, and the (subsequently unreported since the silencing of Sibel Edmonds) destabilization agenda for Central Asia to contain China’s rise. The mythification of Kadeer could in effect - for the SRS strategists - galvanize international support for Uygur victimhood and thus propagate instability in XUAR under the guise of “human rights” and “religious freedom”.

UK government mouthpiece - and faux human rights organization - Amnesty’s (2005) bio profile of Kadeer established the mythology while simultaneously suggesting that China’s counter-terrorist measures were mere rhetorical covers for the political repression of the Uygur national identity, already characterized in terms of “religious freedom”: i.e. that China was using the “War on Terror” as an excuse for further oppression of the Uygur minority in Xinjiang, the basis for the position forwarded by James Millward in his ETIM denialism. By using inverted commas ““ around all Chinese official justifications and lexical terminology, and re-framing militant Uygur separatism as a “human rights” issue, the reporting device fomented in Western readers a distrust of all Chinese official communications regarding Xinjiang, swallowing them in the mounting rhetoric of “human rights”, of which Kadeer was now duly promoted as a new cause celebre and, once again, the “true” symbolic representative of the Uygur people, this time internationally. With this, the US commenced the mythification of Kadeer as the “spiritual mother” of her people, on a par with the Dalai Lama, and replacing their earlier selection, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, who had died shortly after speaking alongside the Dalai Lama in 1998. With Kadeer safely in the USA, the SRS could resume the discursive agenda they had set in allying an Uygur “spiritual leader” to the Dalai Lama, but put on hiatus following Alptekin’s passing - “genocide”.

For this, SRS quickly sought to establish an online presence for Kadeer and by November 2006 she was announced as head of the World Uyghur Congress [WUC]. The next step for SRS was Kadeer’s mobilization and unification of the Uygur diaspora. So too, an interconnected social media dissemination network was underway, on the stated basis of advocacy for “human rights” for the persecuted and oppressed Uygur people of “East TurkIstan” (under brutal Chinese occupation) and incorporating the Uyghur Human Rights Project [UHRP]. The pretense of “human rights” was thus used, under Kadeer’s erstwhile direction (though from distance) to begin disseminating Uyghur Pan-Turkic separatism (still rooted in the ETIM Jihadism she illegally sent to her US-backed husband Ruizi for RTA broadcast into XUAR and the greater Central Asia region), but rhetorically re-conceptualized and re-constructed to appeal directly to Western sensibilities.

Meanwhile, Chinese intelligence traced Kadeer’s separatist allegiances and financial crimes to her sons, judiciously depriving them of their political rights and sentencing them to incarceration, stating now definitively that Kadeer was “an ironclad separatist colluding with terrorists and Islamic extremists” (Ford, 2009). With Western media unaware of (due to the obfuscating rhetorical devices in reports) Kadeer’s supply of counter-terrorist insurgence and radical ETIM based rhetoric to her husband (and thus the CIA for use in SRS), the myth of a peaceful martyr for an oppressed and persecuted people whose “East Turkestan” homeland was occupied by the Chinese could effectively now be engineered to advance SRS in further plans for the destabilization of Central Asia and containment of China.

In August 2007, Chinese counter-terrorism agents raided and destroyed an ETIM training camp in the Pamirs Plateau in southern XUAR (Xinhua, 2007: AlJazeera, 2007). 18 terrorists were killed, including leader Hasam Mahsum (responsible for multiple attacks in the Hotan area), and intelligence gained from the operation suggested that over 1,000 Uyghur separatists loyal to the ETIM agenda had trained with al-Qaeda (Xinhua, 2007). Now, however, cumulatively outraged by the violence done in their name, Uyghur representative Nuir Bikeli, vice secretary of the Communist Party committee of XUAR, identified the growth in separatist violence in XUAR as the result of Rebiya Kadeer (Xinhua, 2007), further denouncing her US-media based pseudo-spiritual mythification: “To call Rebiya (Kadeer) the ‘mother of all Uygurs’ is absolutely preposterous and ... amounts to defaming an ethnic minority” (quoted in Xinhua 2007). So too, Bikeli attacked the mounting hypocrisy of the “human rights” agenda responsible for Kadeer’s Nobel Prize nomination: “The statements of Rebiya clearly show that she wants to destroy the peace and stability of Chinese society, this does not conform with the requirements of the Nobel Peace Prize” (Xinhua, 2007).

Following Chinese authorities prevention of an Uygur terrorist plan to bomb an airliner ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kadeer again obfuscated the reality of Uygur separatist terrorism to claim (for an unquestioning Western media) that “China is using the occasion to host the 2008 Olympics as an opportunity to further demonise the Uighur people’s legitimate and peaceful struggle and justify its heavy-handed repression in East Turkestan” (Pateman, 2008). This inaugurated a convenient tit-for-tat battle in which Uygur terrorist acts facilitated greater Chinese security crackdowns which the WUC then could mythify in Western media as the genocidal oppression of a peacefully protesting minority: stage-managing terrorism was necessary, whether the acts be successful or foiled, to goad China further into security clampdowns in XUAR and thus maintain the Uygur separatist / WUC momentum necessary for their fabricated counter-narrative of Uygur pacifism and thus their “human rights” martyrdom in the myth of Uygur “genocide”.

Kadeer thus had a new tactic when Al Jazeera reported her statement - on the eve of the anniversary of a Uygur Muslim separatist insurgence in Yining in 1997 - that China’s CCP is committing “cultural genocide” against the Uygur Muslim minority as China considers the oil-rich XUAR region as a “gateway to resource-rich Central Asia” (Al Jazeera, 2007). Al Jazeera acknowledge that “Uyghur separatists have staged series of low-level attacks since early 1990s” and that “China says Uighur separatists are terrorists and linked to al-Qaeda” (Al Jazeera, 2007). However, in their account of the Yining separatist incident, they turned to Amnesty International’s unsubstantiated and hyperbolic assertion that “hundreds if not thousands of people were killed or seriously injured in the (Yining) crackdown after police moved to break up a peaceful demonstration by Uighurs in the city”, obfuscating Al-Qaeda backed Uygur violence / terrorism with the rhetoric of “peaceful demonstration” (Al Jazeera, 2007). Kadeer too minimized the separatism, claiming that “such attacks come from only a tiny minority and most Uighurs want simply to have the right to practice their religions and customs freely” (Al Jazeera, 2007). In Kadeer’s statement, she specifically identifies religious freedom - to practice Islam - as being trampled on by the Chinese anti-terrorist campaign, identifying Islam as a core component of the Uyghur identity, although - by her own inadvertent admission - the Uygur heritage predated their conversion to Islam and had included other religious beliefs.

US President Bush, determined to maintain international anti-China bias on the basis of “human rights” met with Kadeer, promoting her as a “symbol of struggle” for the Uygur people. Condoning Uygur separatist terrorism in XUAR as a “human rights” issue, Bush states that “Rebiya Kadeer’s... sons have been jailed in what we believe is an act of retaliation for her human rights activities, the talent of men and women like Rebiya is the greatest resource of their nations -- far more valuable than the weapons of their army or oil under the ground” (unpo, 2007). Significantly, reporting of this is framed in reference not to XUAR, but to the Uygur faux state of East Turkestan, further obfuscating the province as territorially belonging to China. This US$ National Endowment for Democracy [NED]-backed anti-China separatism was then broadcast on RFA, further provoking separatist unrest in the already tense province and - as was increasingly part of the SRS strategy - forcing China to take ever stricter control measures which they could manipulate in the media as evidence of “cultural genocide”, the rhetorical refrain having enough of an association with the Nazi Holocaust of WW2 to mobilize the international community into isolating, demonizing and unfairly stigmatizing China.

To internationalize Kadeer’s new “face” / persona / symbolic status and cement diaspora loyalty, something was needed that could galvanize the Western public into sympathetic alignment with, and unquestioning acceptance of, Kadeer as the official representative of Uygur “identity”. On July 5th, 2009 that occurred. In communication with WUC leaders and thus with NED support, separatist Uygurs infiltrated what had begun as both a pay dispute between Han and Uygurs and a reaction against Han-Uygur employee violence in Gunagzhou and facilitated acts of violence against Han Chinese, inevitably bringing retaliation, video of which Western media, led by Kadeer and the WUC, would later misrepresent as racial violence directed against peaceful Uyghur demonstrators protesting the erasure of their “cultural identity”. Concurrent to the Urumqi riots, the US-government-financed Radio Free Asia (RFA) continued dissemination of Kadeer’s separatist agenda for a Uygur state - East Turkestan - but concealed the NED geopolitical agenda to destabilize China behind the now established discursive tactic: rhetorical use of the specific term in Turkel’s discursive agenda and Kadeer’s public discourse - “cultural genocide” (RFA, 2012).

Kadeer had indeed first used the term in reference to the Chinese government’s granting of provincial residence status to 6 million migrant Han Chinese workers. According to Kadeer, “the unrest in 2009 has led to the implementation of policies in the region that have not only engendered an atmosphere of fear, but have also accelerated the assimilation (italics added) of Uygurs and their homeland into a greater Han China,” (RFA, 2012). So too, Kadeer specified CCP restrictions on the minority Uyghur’s Islamic religious practices as “endangering Uyghurs’ cultural identity” (RFA, 2012). Correspondingly, RFA extended the “cultural genocide” discourse - as beginning in a process of cultural “assimilation” - into what would thereafter dominate Western media: i.e. “human rights”. Indeed, the next day, YouTube saw the upload of a preview of a new movie - The 10 Conditions of Love - in which Kadeer was mythologized as a peaceful martyr, defending the blood and land of her people (YT, 2009).

Kadeer was well-rehearsed to face international media following the July 2009 Urumqi riots. Indeed, riding high on her nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize and with her new organization the WUC backed by US$ funding through the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] (Bandeira, 2017) - Kadeer immediately seized on the publicity to put her pan-Turkic Islamist separatist agenda before the European parliament in the hopes of facilitating US action against China on the basis of “human rights” in the UN. Seizing on the Western media’s fascination with Tibet and the Dalai Lama (whose office had itself long been receiving CIA financial backing to foment unrest in Tibet), Kadeer paralleled XUAR to Tibet and herself directly to the Dalai Lama, effectively now ensuring that Western media would begin to depict her as a spiritual leader akin to the Dalia Lama: “It is time for the Chinese government to sit and talk with me, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and all those leaders of non-Han Chinese communities who have been vilified, imprisoned and slandered just because we happen to disagree with a bankrupt official policy” (EP, 2009).

Again completely obfuscating her involvement in planning the 2009 Urumqi riots, (and her by now growing irrelevance to the daily lives of XUAR Uygurs) Western media obediently begin to mythologize her as a “spiritual leader” and oppressed pacifist, ignoring a decade of separatist terrorism in XUAR, ostensibly condoned by Kadeer despite her public pronouncements to the contrary. However, Kadeer, though careful to conceal her ties to separatist terrorists fomenting unrest in XUAR leading to the Urumqi 2009 riots, left evidence of her involvement: preliminary surveillance of separatist communication revealed that Kadeer “was found making phone calls before the riot - from her Washington base - to her brother in Urumqi to ‘predict’ that ‘something big would happen’” (CE, 2009). So too, an unnamed Uygur given visa sanctuary in Australia (after leaving China within weeks of the riot on a student visa) was communicating from Urumqi to Kadeer’s WUC associates in Washington DC during the July 5th incident. Indeed, Kadeer was immediately ready with a pre-prepared media response and, mere weeks later, an Australian-based production of a scripted, produced and press-kit fitted biofilm profile of Kadeer was ready to be disseminated to Western media in support of the US SRS, isolating “religious freedom” as the primary “human right” violated by China in its suppression of the Uyghur people, totally obfuscating the fact that the “religious freedom” Kadeer sought (but never mentioned or acknowledged) was pan-Turkic Islamic Jihadism tied to the ETIM as the SRS was now firmly underway from Afghanistan. Thus, “Through the recuperation of traditional gender roles and a strategic use of her (matriarchal) image and personal narrative on the Internet, Rebiya Kadeer (was) able to create diasporic linkages and to mobilize an identity politics scripted for a transnational audience.” (Witteborn, 2011). Scripted, yes: in accordance with the SRS agenda to destabilize China and foment separatist terrorism on the basis of a mythologized “cultural genocide”, with Kadeer as complicit CIA partner.

Less publicized than the July 5th, 2009 Urumqi riots was a planned concurrent bomb plot in Urumqi foiled by Chinese counter-terrorist intelligence agents, an event which coincided with South Korea’s refusal of an entry visa to World Uyghur Congress representative Dolkun Isa, whom Chinese intelligence had previously linked to the terroristic East Turkestan Liberation Organization (09BEIJING2720_a. 2009) and had been one of China’s most wanted terrorists since 2003. Despite the coincidence in these events, they were not internationally reported, nor would Chinese authorities comment on any further connections between Isa and XUAR terrorism:

“When asked whether the reported Xinjiang bomb plot foiled by Chinese authorities involved foreign fighters or funding, Jiang responded that the July 5 incident was a violent act incited by domestic and foreign fighters and that the bomb plot would be handled by competent authorities according to law. Asked to comment on the recent refusal for entry into South Korea by immigration authorities there of World Uighur Congress Secretary-General Dolkun Isa, Jiang stated that she was unaware of the incident” (09BEIJING2670_a. 2009)

As China began detaining Uygur separatists with ties to the July 5th Urumqi incident and subsequent foiled bomb plot surrounding the refusal of Isa’s entry into South Korea, the USA media sought to internationalize Kadeer’s media presence to again propagate the Turkel/Kadeer constructed myth of Uygur victimhood - “cultural genocide” - to counter the actual separatist agenda of violent terroristic unrest in XUAR, and the covert US NED support thereof. With Kadeer mobilizing the sympathy of gullible Western audiences, Isa set about raising the international profile of the Uyghurs, publicizing a December Uygur gathering in Cambodia for purported victims of Chinese persecution seeking political asylum but timed perfectly to impact a visit by Chinese government representatives, leading US official Rodger Baker to suspect Isa’s direct stage-managing of the event:

“Can we get any details on who or what organization helped or directed the uighurs to Cambodia? the timing stinks ahead of Xi’s visit, and it seems to me this was done intentionally, not necessarily by these Uighurs, but by someone “helping” them in order to bring the issue to prominence.... If Dolkun Isa is involved in this (it appears he is the first to raise attention to them, but we need to trace that back), then it is certainly intended to impact Xi’s visit, and to use this as a way to raise the Uighur issue internationally again.” (Noonan, 2009)

The persecution Isa claimed, however, was known to US authorities as “retaliation from Chinese authorities after taking part in violent anti-China demonstrations in Urumqi” during the July 5th incident (Noonan, 2009): Isa, aided by fellow WUC separatist Omar Kanat, was trying to shield terrorists and their separatist sympathizers from further Chinese intelligence agency scrutiny in the guise of mobilizing international sentiment for the protection of Uygur “human rights” as a humanitarian response to Chinese oppression.

Isa’s strategy was to push the Uygur asylum issue in terms of international refugee rights and force the Cambodian government to shield the Uygur separatist / terrorists under international UN treaty on refugee conventions such as would never allow any Uyghur terrorist claiming political persecution to be returned to China for prosecution for their involvement in separatist terrorism in XUAR. Isa’s specific focus was in relation to the July 5th incident that Chinese intelligence agencies were increasingly linking to behind-the-scenes stage management by Isa’s co-conspirator in mythologizing “cultural genocide”, Kadeer. Noonan (2009) further delineated the Uygur separatist stage-management by Isa and Kanat to avoid their XUAR separatist allies from facing punishment by Chinese authorities, including the death penalty for terrorism, with Noonan reporting Chinese executions of Uygur terrorists beginning the previous month of November, prompting Cambodia to tighten its border with China:

“It looks like the World Uyghur Congress organized this through the Macau Interfaith Network and maybe others. the WUC was the first to make announcements about this, and from all the OS it looks like they were involved... Omar Kanat, VP of the World Uighur Congress made the first announcement on December 3... Dolkun Isa made announcements on Dec 4... November 9, the first Uighurs were executed after the July riots. 9 executed, a total of 21 convicted in October. More were convicted last week, a total of 17 sentenced to death” (Noonan, 2009)

Utilizing gullible religious organizations, charities and useful idiot politicians to serve the Uygur separatist/terrorist agenda was the new WUC strategy, effectively aiding the covert SRS destabilization agenda. There was, however, a glitch in the Kadeer / Isa / Kanat pacifist Uygur victim narrative: the Uygur terrorists captured fighting with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo Bay detention. However, even there, the WUC had a sympathetic representative: Uyghur separatist Rushan Abbas, who had left China for the US following the July 4th incident and secured employment working for Hillary Clinton’s US State Department as a CIA translator. By September 2009 - mere months after the stage-managed Urumqi riots, and as the populist mythification of Kadeer began in international media with the Australian screening of the Kadeer self-aggrandizing movie The 10 Conditions of Love - US authorities were anxious to clear from Guantanamo Bay those Uygur terrorists it had captured fighting in Afghanistan and Abbas duly intervened in military procedure to (on sympathetic grounds) allow Uygur terrorist brothers to interact and petitioned her US authorities that the Uygurs were not hostile to US interests as their fight was with China and should thus not be considered “terrorists” in a US War on Terror and released from detention (Farrow, 2009).

Abbas saw this US-centric definition of “terrorism” solely in terms of US decree as a Uygur separatist strategy and another victory for the Uygur terrorist cause under the guise of “human rights”, emotionally constructing a narrative of reunification inherent in the action: “It was just so emotional... These brothers from across the world coming together in an interrogation room for the first time” (Farrow, 2009). Abbas’s humanization of Uygurs recruited to Afghanistan to commit terrorism against China in XUAR fit the US SRS agenda under Clinton, and Uygurs were systematically released and relocated internationally - not a single Uyghur terrorist was sent back to China to face justice for their actions despite the USA adding the ETIM to its designated list of terrorist organizations. Classified as not hostile to US interests in the War on Terrorists, Abbas’ interventions effectively ensured the Uygurs were not considered “terrorists”, not because they were not so, but because their terrorism was directed not at the USA but at China.

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