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| The Alliance |
| China equates Muslim rebels with terrorists |
| 2002-06-17 |
| The Chinese government says Islamic extremists, backed by Osama bin Laden, have assassinated local officials and religious leaders, poisoned livestock and blown up buses over the past decade in an effort to wrest control of Xinjiang from China and establish a state of their own called East Turkistan. In Aksu, a city of more than 2 million, the local police chief was gunned down in August in a firefight with Muslim separatists running a bomb-making lab. Since Sept. 11, the Chinese government has argued that its crackdown on separatist-minded Muslim Uighurs here should be considered part of the U.S.-led war on terror. "Terrorism is not only a threat to Xinjiang," Wang Lequan, the Xinjiang Communist Party chief, says. "It is an enemy to the neighboring countries and to the entire world." The Bush administration has rebuffed efforts by the Chinese to equate their efforts to end the conflict with the ethnic Uighurs with the fight against the Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network. Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department noted that China has been a victim of terrorism in Xinjiang, but it added: "We have made it clear to Beijing that combating international terrorism is not an excuse to suppress legitimate political expression or freedom of religious beliefs. Effective counterterrorism requires a respect for fundamental human rights." Aaaaaargh! This is what's so aggravating about the Bush administration! If you're gonna have a War on Terror, then you've got to take the war to all the pieces of the terror networks. You can't stop and say, "well, those guys are meanies, so their terrorists can't be in the network." If al-Qaeda moved into North Korea and started blowing things up, they'd still be al-Qaeda. We wouldn't particularly like being on the same side as the NKors, but we would be, through no fault of our own, or of theirs. Same applies to China. We can argue later over whether post-Marxism can allow enough individual liberties; we know damned well Islamism doesn't. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #2 Yeah, Islamist self-determination means the obliteration of liberty. Let's not attribute freedom of conscience to any "abd" (slave) "allah" (Moslem god). |
| Posted by: RG Fulton 2002-06-17 10:14:17 |
| #1 Innocent Uighur civilians have suffered under the Chinese regime's policies specificially directed at them. Even the Weekly Standard had an interesting article a year or so ago about Chinese oppression of their muslim minorities (I doubt they're quite so excited about articles detailing oppression of muslim separatists now.) Let's leave the relativism to people who lack principles. The US isn't supposed to support a *lack* of civil liberties anywhere. Innocent civilians should not be shot or left languishing in prisons for years on end, whether he be Uighurs or Chechyens or some other group at war (even terrorist war) against a regime all too willing to shell them. The US can only be better than these guys, but we still have to urge them to fulfill that superior premise. |
| Posted by: Gissing 2002-06-21 03:47:50 |