The New York Times has a must-read article (and watch the slide show too) on the planned demolition of Kashgar’s Old City by China’s ruling communist authorities. It is the latest instance of Beijing’s cultural vandalism which is designed to undermine Uyghurs’ identity and aspirations for self-rule.
“Kashgar’s Old City is where I was born and raised,” says Nury A. Turkel, a Uyghur-American attorney in Washington:
It’s really sad to see a thousand years of Uyghur culture and history integrated through the physical space and architecture of the Old City will be destroyed as a result of China’s politically motivated policies. It will be an immeasurable loss for the Uyghur people. It also will be a loss for the citizens of the world as the atrophy of our global cultural heritage sites continues.
Uyghurs are the Tibetans you haven’t heard about, he writes. Turkel takes issue with recent comments by former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich:
Ethnic Turkic people from the Chinese Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Uyghurs have long faced discrimination and persecution as a minority — a fact recognized repeatedly by the U.S. Congress and State Department, which has noted China’s insidious strategy of using the U.S. war on terror as pretext to oppress independent religious leaders and peaceful political dissenters. Uyghurs’ struggle for self-rule is one against dictatorship and communism, not one to establish a sharia state through violence (as Gingrich claims, in a curious echo of Chinese government propaganda).
Radio Free Europe (RFE) has a terrific piece on the onrush of the bulldozers. See
China’s Ancient Silk Road City Of Kashgar Facing Threat Of Bulldozers
June 30, 2009
http://www.rferl.org/content/Chinas_Ancient_Silk_Road_City_Of_Kashgar_Facing_Chinese_Bulldozers/1765682.html
Excerpts:
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Reports say wrecking crews razed the historic Xanliq madrasah, one of the province’s protected cultural sites, on June 15. Mahmud al-Kashgari, the 11th-century scholar, is believed to have studied at the madrasah.
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Henryk Szadziewski, manager of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, D.C., taught for several years in Kashgar in the 1990s. He tells RFE/RL that there’s no clear indication of what is going to be done with the remaining old city.
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“The [Kashgar] project appears to be a tool to assimilate Uyghurs and to actually stifle peaceful dissent by putting old city residents from an organic living arrangement into a regimented, government-organized living arrangement. The [Chinese] authorities are able to monitor the activity of any peaceful dissent among Uyghurs,” he says.
Szadziewski says the assimilation process is taking place on many different fronts.
“One particular area is language, and we’ve seen a marginalization of Uyghur language in the economic sphere and the educational sphere,” he says. “A ‘China Daily’ report said that learning Mandarin Chinese will help fight terrorism. The statement in itself may cast a sort of aspersion on Uyghur language itself, that it was a suspect language.”