Rock the Kashgar
10 March 2009
AFTER A day and a half or so in the barely tolerable sub-zero temperatures of Urumqi, the time had come to take a 23-hour train to Kashgar, China’s westernmost city close to the frontiers of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The train eases through the white smoke and white skies and white snow of Xinjiang’s formless winter landscape, marked only by chimneys and power stations and electricity pylons and carved up by the long state highways that link the region’s copious natural resources to the wealthy east. Lorries marked with the insignia of the country’s big oil firms surged into the distance, and trucks carried coal to nearby cities.
Apart from the flimsy saplings planted in the gravelly fringes of the Taklamakan Desert, presumably planted as part of the quixotic nationwide attempt to fight off the encroaching sands, there was hardly a trace or particle of life in sight.
Much of Central Asia is so uninhabitable that the various competing nationalities have had to find some kind of modus vivendi within the region’s brief oases. Islam was the traditional way of unifying the region’s warring forces, but the brief periods of peace rarely lasted and tribal fractiousness generally prevailed. Xinjiang has always had strategic significance for ambitious empires, and the paucity of habitable land made cities like Kashgar a crucial battleground in the Great Game.
I watched as the snow gave way to the desert, a grey moistureless wasteland of pylons and power lines and very little else. There were sheets of ice, the occasional shrub or tangle of grass. The place had a harsh, brutal beauty.
After a sleepless night in an intolerably stuffy carriage, we reached Kashgar. We shuffled our way out of the train station behind a massive crowd and were packed into a cab and fired into the city – a spruce conurbation with Islamic characteristics. People say that Kashgar doesn’t feel like the rest of China, but the insignia of Beijing’s political and commercial might are everywhere. Looking over the People’s Square in the centre of the city is a 10-metre statue of Chairman Mao, his right arm stretching towards the sky like Superman. China Telecom, the State Grid Corp, Haier, TCL, and the Peking Duck chain Quanjude.
At night, you see the same sprays of neon that you would see in any second-tier city. Han restaurants and Han hotels are manned almost entirely by Han staff. All this – including the statue of Mao – is presumably designed to demonstrate that Kashgar is an inalienable part of China itself, and not merely a buffer zone lying on the wrong side of the border.
Kashgar’s Islamic flavour does seep through. The centrepiece of Kashgar is the Id Kah Mosque, painstakingly renovated after its destruction by Red Guard mobs during the Cultural Revolution. Drained halal carcasses hang from window ledges. The calls to prayer reverberate through the old town on a series of crackling loud speakers.
Presumably lacking conventional opportunities to advance, most of the locals are involved in small businesses: handicrafts, kebabs, naan. Some sell jewellery and pristine notes of Iraqi currency from the Saddam era, with the man himself grinning.
The old town itself – a maze of adobe houses – is in the process of being reconstructed. Near the main Mosque, a square and a big TV screen – pumping out state TV programmes and propaganda - have been built. Beggars huddle over a fire behind the railings.
Our driver and guide, Abuduryim, was a friendly sort. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he had obviously made whatever accommodations he could with the ruling Chinese. A practising Muslim, he had also served in the Aksu garrison of the People’s Liberation Army and is a member of the Communist Party.
We passed a cluster of bilingual schools – China still attempts to rule benignly - and a number of adobe farmsteads overlooking their barren winter fields. People were gathering for their Friday outing at the nearest Mosque. Donkeys were feeding from buckets on the roadside. Trucks loitered. Kids spilled out from the schools.
On the face of it, China seems to be doing a much better job at pacifying its restive Muslim border regions than Pakistan, ostensibly an Islamic republic but still a maelstrom of inter-ethnic tensions and border struggles. Pakistan was described by its dictator, Zia ul-Haq, as the Muslim equivalent of Israel, and its existence was always predicated on pan-Islamic unity across the Indian subcontinent. China, on the other hand, is a secular Communist regime that has been accused of ethnic cleansing, religious repression and routine torture on its westernmost frontiers. Nevertheless, Kashgar remains in a state of uneasy calm. The chaos that has prevailed in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan is unlikely to encourage leniency in Xinjiang. Kashgar, for what its worth, seems pacified, and its majority Muslim residents seem on the whole to be getting on with bettering themselves.
Last summer, four days before the Olympics Games opened in Beijing, two assailants disguised as policemen drove a truck into an electricity pole close to the city centre and proceeded to throw homemade incendiary devices at a team of seventy officers doing their early morning exercises. They then tried to finish the policemen off with machetes. Sixteen were killed and another sixteen injured during the assault. The authorities suggested that the mysterious East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) were the culprits. Eighteen members of the group had already been arrested over the course of that year.
The two killers themselves – identified as Abdurahman Azat, who sold vegetables, and Kurbanjan Hemit, a local taxi driver - said while in custody that they were fighting a “holy war”.
“Only about five percent of the local population really hate the Chinese,” Abuduryim said. Indeed, local attitudes appear, on the surface at least, to be relatively forward thinking. Most seem to be more concerned about earning money from the hordes of Chinese and foreign tourists hoping to get a taste of Muslim Central Asia without having to brave the possibility that they will be bombed, held hostage or beheaded. But that five percent makes it highly unlikely that the Chinese government will treat the local population with a little more understanding.
It has been suggested that bin Laden's terror network would be eviscerated once and for all should it ever decide to turn its fire on China’s Muslim northwest. The People's Liberation Army, they said, would have no qualms about razing entire villages to the ground and summarily executing the "harbourers" of terror. The government would not allow breast-beating liberal protesters or nitpicking lawyers to interfere with the imperatives of national security.
But China ought to have learned by now about the concept of “blowback”. Over the long term, its traditionally violent and ham-fisted approach to ethnic unrest is likely to cause more problems than it solves. Its opportunistic attempts to blame dissent in Xinjiang on obscure al-Qaeda-backed organizations like the ETIM could be self-fulfilling, as frustrated locals fall into the embrace of foreign jihadist movements. Up to now, Beijing has continued to rely on massive inflows of Han Chinese immigration. Kashgar becomes increasingly Chinese and the local Uyghur population feels increasingly marginalized.
But China’s relationship with Pakistan – close to Kashgar – is one of the key issues. There has been speculation that Pakistan’s security forces offered succour and immunity to al-Qaeda on the strict condition that it refrained from fomenting trouble in China, Islamabad's closest regional ally.
According to a paper published in 2002 by the Strategic Studies Institute, al-Qaeda has never made any significant efforts to train Uighur separatists to fight against China, despite Beijing's claims to the contrary. The Uighurs arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 were “walk-ins” from across the border, and not the result of any serious or sustained effort on the part of any Islamist leader.
In any case, the border between Pakistan and China was under the control of the rebel Northern Alliance even after the Taliban took control over Kabul, making it very difficult for organizations like al-Qaeda to raid China's lawless, porous northwestern frontier.
Curiously, despite the efforts to link all opposition in Xinjiang to the global war on terror, China did nothing to support the rebels. One analyst even claimed that “China, with Pakistan's help, tried all along to prevent the moderate Northern Alliance forces' victory over the radical Taliban."
Close to the scene of last year’s crime lies the office of Kashgar’s border police, where Han migrant workers queue to apply for passes that will allow them to earn money from the mining and water projects currently being built on China’s northwestern edge. In China’s vast frontier regions, there are borders within borders. The real demarcations between Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan are presumably too porous and too difficult to supervise effectively, especially in light of the terrorist threat. Tellingly, Kashgar’s tiny airport only runs flights to and from Urumqi, the regional capital. It doesn’t want to stretch its security forces even further by allowing flights from Dushanbe, Bishkek or Islamabad.
Islam was not always here. We visit an ancient Buddhist stupa. Urbanite that I am, it feels strange being in a part of China where the only sound you hear is the one you make yourself. A small lizard sprints from a nearby outcrop and settles under a tangle of grass. There appears to be nothing else alive within the vicinity, apart from our driver and a bored looking youth manning the site on behalf of the local tourist bureau.
We move on to Iparhan’s tomb, a cavernous dome with stacks of multicoloured sarcophagi housing members of the fragrant concubine’s clan. Famed for her beauty, Iparhan was kidnapped by soldiers employed by the emperor Qianlong and carried thousands of miles to his harem in Beijing, freshened during the journey by camel milk baths and butter massages. When she died two decades or so later, 128 people were employed to carry two caskets carrying her remains and her possessions back to Kashgar. By the time they arrived in Hami, they had to ditch the possessions in order to find room for the corpse of her elder brother, who had died during the journey. By the time they reached Kashgar, only four people were left to carry the caskets.
The bodies were buried with their heads tilted west, towards Mecca.
Women were often used to cement political alliances or to assuage enemies, and it wasn’t always the emperor of Beijing who was the beneficiary. Compare Qianlong’s efforts to secure the prettiest women of Xinjiang for his own personal pleasure with the experiences of his predecessors during the Han dynasty. Like the more famous barbarian hordes led by the Huns or the Visigoths on the fringes of Rome's dominion, the Tartar warrior castes on China's frail northwestern borders caused enough mayhem to persuade Gao Di, the Chinese emperor, to capitulate and sue for peace with what Edward Gibbon describes "a disgraceful article of tribute."
The Tartars are an ugly and even deformed race; and, while they consider their own women as the instruments of domestic labour, their desires, or rather their appetites, are directed to the enjoyment of more elegant beauty. A select band of the fairest maidens of China was annually devoted to the rude embraces of the Huns.
Gibbon records the laments of one princess, “condemned by her parents to a distant exile, under a Barbarian husband; who complains that sour milk was her only drink, raw flesh her only food, a tent her only palace”.
Almost a century after Doctor Sun Yatsen declared the Muslims of the northwest to be one of the country's five important races, and despite fifty years of Communism and a number of Party campaigns against "big Han chauvinism," the same sort of attitude - Chinese civilization fending off the barbarians at the gate - still seems to prevail.
By now, the authorities insist that there have been centuries of unbroken sovereignty in the region, and their official statements are bathed in the politically-correct language of inclusion, but in Xinjiang, the Uyghurs and others remain the basmachi, the nomad bandits marauding behind the Great Wall.
On Saturday, we hired a car to the Karakul Lake, some three hours away along the highway to Pakistan. Before the checkpoint that marks the edge of Kashgar County, signs warn that terrorist groups will be “struck hard”, and “ethnic splittism” must be “resolutely opposed”.
The priorities of the regime are clear as we enter a region populated by Kirgiz nomads with no natural attachment to Beijing and little opportunity to benefit from Chinese economic growth. The mines and hydropower plants in the vicinity are staffed in the main by migrant workers spilling out from the overpopulated and impoverished southwest. There is no place for the ill-educated herdsmen unfortunate enough to find themselves on the wrong side of the national divide.
The valleys of the harsh but spectacular Pamir Mountains cut through frozen lakes and desert slopes. Impoverished Kirgiz hang around at the curves of the highway, offering primitive carvings and gaudy trinkets.
The area surrounding the frozen Karakul, about 5,000 metres above sea level, was bitterly cold but spectacularly beautiful. We were whisked around the circumference of the lake on a pair of motorbikes, the freezing highland winds scorching our cheeks and forehead. All memories of my hangover quickly evaporated.
We drank tea in the house of one of the riders, a Kyrgiz herdsman called Mamateh, with his wife and children. It was a small little dome, like a yurt but made of solid mud and rock, with a hole in the top to release the smoke produced by a furnace burning goat shit. In the back, five young goats brayed and scoffed the grass that had been put in the trough in front of them.
