Hersh, Gauthier, and the Coming of Terror in Xinjiang

Seymour Hersh created a stir with his most recent piece in the London Review of Books, Military to Military.

Hersh reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff under General Dempsey had actively sabotaged President Obama’s Syria policy in 2013, when they took issue with the White House’s apparent acquiescence to Turkey secretly funneling support to unvetted Islamist militants.

The anti-Hersh forces have been in full cry but his claims appears credible.  Quite possibly, the Pentagon has fallen out of love with wonk-warrior COIN fetish for the umpteenth time, and has returned to the reassuring “massive use of conventional forces in pursuit of explicit US goals” Powell Doctrine.  Anyway, plenty of grist for the mill.

My interest, naturally, was attracted to Hersh’s description of a “Uyghur rat-line” organized by Turkey to funnel militants from the PRC’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region into Syria:

The analyst, whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He added that there was also what amounted to another ‘rat line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range from a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from China into Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and then to IS territory in Syria.

Hersh also quoted Syria’s ambassador to the PRC:

‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’

Hersh also consulted analyst Christina Lin (who quotes me! In her pieces) on the Uyghur issue.

So the Uyghur angle in the LRB article leans on “the analyst”, a source Hersh has relied on since 9/11 and whose conspicuous single-sourciness has been a constant complaint of critics seeking to impugn Hersh’s reporting; a Syrian official perhaps happy to add to Erdogan’s woes by hanging the Uyghur issue around his neck; and an analyst dealing to a certain extent in open source information.

Therefore, I paid attention to a statement Hersh made during an interview with Democracy Now!, describing a study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2013:

The third major finding [in the study] was about Turkey. It said we simply have to deal with the problem. The Turkish government, led by Erdogan, was—had opened—basically, his borders were open, arms were flying. I had written about that earlier for the London Review, the rat line. There were arms flying since 2012, covertly, with the CIA’s support and the support of the American government. Arms were coming from Tripoli and other places in Benghazi, in Libya, going into Turkey and then being moved across the line. And another interesting point is that a lot of Chinese dissidents, the Uyghurs, the Muslim Chinese that are being pretty much hounded by the Chinese, were also—another rat line existed. They were coming from China into Kazakhstan, into Turkey and into Syria. So, this was a serious finding.

Unless Hersh is carelessly interpolating a non-sequitur about the Uyghurs in his remarks, it looks like his source told him there was a JCS/DIA finding, based on classified sigint/humint, about Erdogan playing footsie with Uyghur militants.

This is something I am inclined to believe, given the public record concerning the Turkey-Uyghur special relationship, and also the bizarre role of illicit Turkish passports in the travel of Uyghur refugees from Xinjiang, through Southeast Asia, and to their publicly acknowledged safe haven in Turkey.  I’ve written about the Turkey/Uyghur issue several times in 2015 including my July piece Uyghurs Move Edge Closer to Center of Turkish Diplomacy, Politics, and Geostrategic Calculation.

 The other Uyghur related furor in the news concerns Ursula Gauthier, the Beijing correspondent for L’Obs.  It is speculated that Gauthier will not get her journalist’s visa extended by the PRC, in retaliation for an article she wrote pouring scorn on the PRC’s attempts to invoke a massacre of ethnic-Han security personnel and miners, apparently by Uyghurs, at Baicheng in Xinjiang, to claim “war on terror” parity with the November 13 Paris attack.

Details of the Baicheng case don’t quite support Gauthier’s indignation:

The attack occurred on Sept. 18, when a group of knife-wielding suspects set upon security guards at the gate of the Sogan Colliery in Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) prefecture’s Bay (Baicheng) county, before targeting the mine owner’s residence and a dormitory for workers.

When police officers arrived at the mine in Terek township to control the situation, the attackers rammed their vehicles using trucks loaded down with coal, sources said.

…

Ekber Hashim, a police officer who inspected the mine’s dormitory following the incident, told RFA that “nearly all the workers who were not on shift at the time were killed or injured.”

“Some workers were sleeping while others were preparing to work when the attackers raided the building after killing the security guards,” he said.

…

Terek township deputy police chief Kurbanjan and his assistant “survived the incident by throwing themselves into the river next to the colliery.”

“They went [to the mine] as part of a second team after five police officers, including police chief Wu Feng, were killed,” said the officer, who also declined to provide his name.

“The second team had no idea everyone in the first team had been killed when they left the station. They turned their motorcycles around and fled when they saw the dead and injured, but the attackers pursued them in trucks and they were forced to drive the bikes into the river to escape.”

…

Another officer from Bulung named Tursun Hezim said police had received a notice from higher level authorities warning them to keep a lookout for a group of people wearing “camouflage”—a tactic allegedly employed by suspects in other recent attacks in the Uyghur region.

“Based on this guidance, I assume the suspects attacked while wearing uniforms, which allowed them to catch the guards at the colliery and police on the road when they were unaware and successfully make their escape,” he said.

One can’t believe everything one hears in the paper or on RFA, but the Baicheng attack, though executed with primitive implements, does not appear to have been the “Hulk Smash!” explosion of righteous rage by innocent Uyghurs driven to vent their grievances against their oppressors.  It was a careful, pre-meditated attack that involved gulling mine security with the use of fake uniforms, murdering dozens of peasant miners, then setting an ambush for two sets of cops as they rushed to the scene.

Understandably, the PRC was keen to label this outrage terrorism.  The Western media, apparently led by Gauthier, not so much. 

Beleaguered journalists in the PRC may not appreciate my opinion, but I considered Gauthier’s framing quite wrong-headed.  Baicheng and Paris are, in my view, strikingly similar in ways that Gauthier appeared unable to appreciate, as blowback against ham-fisted government policies, as I wrote here.

Fact is, the Baicheng outrage appears to come uncomfortably close to a very particular kind of “terrorism-that-we-don’t-want-to-call-terrorism”: political violence committed as part of a decolonization/national liberation struggle.

There is a sizable list of ethnic groups getting brutalized by central government cum occupying forces: Palestinians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Uyghurs…to name a few.  Resistance by local ethnic/national/religious movements may involve acts of violence intended to bring attention to the cause, demoralize the occupiers, chip away at the resolve of the central government and, in a rather less savory aspect, elicit a violent crackdown that will escalate and spread the violence so local unrest is transformed into a pervasive security and political crisis.

The history of efforts to define “terrorism” is darkly amusing but a consistent theme has been attempts to carve out exemptions for national liberation struggles, not just to soothe the consciences of conflicted liberals, but also to protect overseas supporters from legal sanction.

But openly claiming “national liberation struggle” classification for Uyghur violence (instead of “localized inchoate fury”) would involve acknowledging that some sort of movement with separatist aims exists and poses a security threat to the PRC and its rule in Xinjiang.  This would buttress PRC state propaganda, contribute to the idea that there is something to all the ETIM talk, highlight the existence of Uyghur militants embedded in Islamist groups in Afghanistan and western Pakistan, and direct more professional interest to the efforts of Turkey to exploit refugee Uyghurs as a paramilitary resource in Syria—as described in Hersh’s article-- and potentially across Central Asia and into Xinjiang.

And it would involve Western media outlets giving up on the “PRC is just making up ‘terrorism’/we can’t credence these reports until our reporters can investigate freely” dodge, which is exemplified by a recurring phrase in RFA reporting on Uyghur-related violence that slides along the explaining/excusing/condoning spectrum in reminding the reader that the Uyghurs of Xinjiang suffer under continual, grinding repression.

 “…experts outside China say Beijing has exaggerated the threat from Uyghur “separatists” and that domestic policies are responsible for an upsurge in violence that has left hundreds dead since 2012.”

It would also make life awkward for the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur American Association which have carefully positioned themselves as “not separatists” in order to obtain a platform in the West as the voices of peaceful civil society and human rights aspirations of the Uyghur people, for which they received grants of $275,000 and $295,000, respectively from the National Endowment for Democracy in 2014 (the NED classifies this area of activity as “Xinjiang/East Turkistan” which is, given the supposed non-existence of the “East Turkistan Independence Movement”, somewhat interesting).

Fact is, the PRC is not interested in creating a Palestine-type situation in Xinjiang, with a non-violent/democracy inclined opposition attracting sympathy and some diplomatic and material support from the West.  That’s probably why Ilham Tothi, who had aspirations to serve as a secular/democratic voice of Uyghurs within the autonomous region, is in jail.  The PRC, relying on its military and economic power and, most importantly, the demographic advantage it gains from submerging Uyghurs under a tide of Han immigration (something the Baicheng attack was perhaps meant to discourage), is probably willing to polarize the situation in Xinjiang through oppressive policies and deal with whatever militancy its brutality throws up.   

In my opinion, the CCP sees Chechnya as the worst-case template/resolution: a national liberation struggle co-opted and discredited by an influx of Islamist-tinged terrorists who are, in turn, destroyed by the state in a brutal, prolonged war, shattering the secular/moderate independence movement in the process.

I expect this scenario will drive PRC diplomacy and security policy throughout Central and South Asia in the foreseeable future; and the politically-inflected debate over the existence of “terrorism” in the western reaches of the PRC will be remembered with bitter nostalgia.

Erawan Shrine Bombing: Uyghurs, Turkey, & Passports…or Thailand, Human Trafficking, and Corruption...and Uyghur Patsies?

I’m still an agnostic on the Uyghurs dunnit theory, at least as far as the “aggrieved Uyghurs bombed the Erawan shrine to kill Chinese tourists in revenge for repatriation of Uyghurs to PRC” way.

The only things we know for sure right now is that a) the Thai government is anxious to manage & control this story b) the Thai police leaks like a sieve and c) one has to wonder if the government’s main priority is to put a pretty frame on this story and hang it up as soon as possible.

There appears to be a definite Uyghur element in the case, judging by the detentions of one suspect with a Uyghur name holding a PRC passport (that looks genuine) and another guy with a clumsily forged Turkish passport who, it is suspected, is probably a Uyghur.  Add to that a big stack of bogus Turkish passports--an inescapable element in the conveyor belt of PRC Uyghurs to havens in Turkey--and there's the makings of a plausible Uyghur angle.

Under pressure from the PRC, the Thai government had indeed decided to crack down on human trafficking of Uyghurs through Thailand facilitated by bogus Turkish travel documents.

To reduce the attractiveness of Thailand as a refugee highway, the Thai government decided to repatriate 109 Uyghurs, mainly men but also including 24 women, to the PRC in July 2015.

In order to defuse the outrage of Uyghurs and their sympathizers, the Thai government made a deal with the Turkish government at the same time to send 170 Uyghurs, mainly women and children, to go on to Turkey.  

The latter development went virtually unreported in the Turkish press, which is usually eager to trumpet the Turkish role as protector of the Uyghurs, which leads me to believe the release was soft-pedaled by prior agreement to avoid annoying the PRC.  Given this Turkish government involvement, I tend to discount theories attributing the attack to incensed Turkish hypernationalists a.k.a. The Grey Wolves.

Maybe the Thai government effort to take Thailand out of the Uyghur trafficking picture did not sit well with the Uyghur trafficking networks inside Thailand.  Judging from the people caught in the police dragnet, the traffickers seem to be staffed by Uyghur and Thai Muslims working out of some combination of profit and principle, and maybe they embarked upon a campaign of revenge.

But it seems to me more likely that the attack was linked to an overall crackdown on human trafficking, a business that implicates quite a few people in the Thai government and army.  Uyghurs, in my view, may have executed the bombings...and fulfilled an important role as convenient patsies.

For those of you who, like me, dwell in connect-the-dots-istan, here’s an interesting item from the Guardian from June 2015, in other words in the midst of the Uyghur repatriation effort and two months before the bombing:

Thailand’s state prosecutors are pressing charges against more than 100 people, including an army general, in a multinational human trafficking scandal that came to light after dozens of bodies were discovered in the south of the country earlier this year.

…

“The investigation showed it is a big syndicate. There were networks that brought them [the migrants] from overseas into the country systematically … The office of the attorney general, therefore, treats it as a very important case,” office spokesman Wanchai Roujanavong said.

The discovery has intensified international pressure on Thailand to crack down on smugglers. More than 50 people were arrested in a month, including local politicians, government officials, police, and a senior-ranking army officer who once oversaw human trafficking issues in the south.

Human rights groups have long accused Thai authorities of collusion in the trafficking industry, but officials have routinely denied the claims.

Apparently, “Thai authorities” included an army lieutenant general, Manas Kongpan, who was a kingpin in the south of Thailand, where most of the traffic (mainly of Bengalis and Rohingya to Malaysia) takes place.

The investigation was in the hands of the Thai police, which turned over its report to the Attorney General at the end of June.

Maybe the traffickers and their allies initiated a domestic terror campaign to punish and warn off the Thai government from prosecuting the case too aggressively.

This, to me, is a more convincing explanation of why the Erawan shrine was bombed than the “revenge on Chinese” angle.

If the intent was to kill Chinese tourists, why not bomb…Chinatown?  Why not a vicious attack on “the pilgrim filled Wat Mangkon Kamalawat, Bangkok's most important Chinese temple” as USA Today describes it? Or the Wat Traimit, “Chinatown’s number one attraction”?  For that matter, why not take a swing at the Chinese embassy?

Why set off a bomb near a Hindu shrine next to the Grand Hyatt?

After the bombing, there were several reports of unexploded devices at the scene.  If these reports are true (I haven't seen any followup), it looks like the makings of a “double tap” attack: an initial device goes off, drawing in first responders including police, who are the targets of the secondary devices.

But even if the target of the attack wasn’t the Thai police, I think the target was still Thai, not Chinese: specifically, Thai tourism.  Counting indirect effects, tourism might make up as much of 20% of Thai GDP; a chunk of GDP that is extremely vulnerable to terrorism.

Understandable, then, that the Thai police would be most uninterested in publicly exploring this motive, and encouraging the narrative of an attack on Chinese by aggrieved Uyghurs instead.

The other troublesome issue for the official story, of course, is that nobody has taken credit for the bombing.  No aggrieved Uyghur groups, no ETIM, no ISIS, nobody.  So I draw the inference that whatever beef the bombers had, it’s playing out in private fora, perhaps related to Thai government/security/police policy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Uyghur-linked human traffickers actually committed the bombing; but maybe there was someone else behind them, assisting them in the construction of these relatively sophisticated devices, setting up escape routes, using them as cats’ paws and fall guys…and in the process publicly rolling up a Uyghur trafficking operation facilitated by Turkey and detested by the PRC that the Thai government had decided could no longer be tolerated.

And I would be inclined to think, given the vulnerability of the Thai tourist sector and the possibility that elements of the Thai security forces might be compromised, that the government might even be working toward some sort of secret accommodation with whoever’s actually behind the bombings. 

And I suspect the avalanche of leaks about this case are designed to roadtest, perfect, and promote a neat narrative that the Thai government hopes will put this ugly incident to bed.

And as for Turkey, preoccupied with its moves against the Kurds, the complex and deadly endgame in Syria, and stagemanaging/bumrushing an extremely dicy election, the AKP's youth wing busy attacking HDP and newspaper offices instead of harassing Chinese, real and perceived, for their offenses against the Uyghurs and Islam, maybe it will also be ready to close the books on its calamitous Uyghur refuge program.

Turkey's "Passports for Uyghurs" Scheme Continues Its Messy Public Unraveling

The year-long tug of war between Turkey and the PRC over several hundred Uyghur detainees in Thailand was finally resolved, Solomonic fashion, by Thailand sending 170+ women and children to Istanbul in early July in a little noticed event, and the deportation of 100+ Uyghur men to the PRC this week, which has occasioned much public ballyhoo, some nasty incidents inside Turkey, and toothless (and, I expect somewhat less than wholehearted) official execration by the US and the EU.

A most interesting sidebar to the Thailand story has been the wheels coming off the reckless Turkish passports-to-Uyghurs scheme.

To humblebrag here, I was one of the few to note and write about over the last few months, starting in February and here, and here in April, as well as my recent epic Turkey/Uyghur backgrounder.

 

To complement recent (well, as recent as a day or two before) public references to unnamed foreign countries providing documentation to Uyghurs, a Public Security Bureau official went on record to brief foreign journos that, yes, it is Turkey.

Hat tip to @akahnnyc for the link.  Thanks!

Please note that the PRC Foreign Ministry, as well as Global Times, were already raising the passport issue at the beginning of 2015.  First the PRC employed the polite fiction that some profit-minded freelancers were selling Turkish passports to Uyghurs; then it was “consulates and embassies of unnamed countries” were dishing out documents; now, unambiguously, the PRC is pointed the finger at the Turkish government.

In my opinion, the PRC is in a strong position.  I expect it hopes that by laying out its case it will gain the understanding of the Western media that Turkey really is doing something stupid and dangerous by enabling the flight of Uyghur malcontents who might end up fighting in Syria or worse.

Looks like Reuters might need a few repeat treatments to get the message.  It reports on the PSB backgrounder, throws in some persecuted Uyghur tropes, and completely misses the fact that the deportation of the 100 Uyghur men to the PRC by the Thai government was preceded by allowing 170 women and children among the detainees to fly to Istanbul the week before.

“Turkish embassies in Southeast Asia will give them proof of identity,” Tong Bishan, division chief of the Ministry of Public Security’s Criminal Investigation Department, told a small group of foreign reporters in Beijing on Saturday.

“They are obviously Chinese but they will give them identities as Turkish nationals.”

…
Tong said that hundreds of Uyghurs had been given documents by Turkish diplomats, especially in Kuala Lumpur, and then allowed into Turkey.

Neither the Turkish Foreign Ministry nor the Turkish embassy in Kuala Lumpur were able to immediately provide comment.

The accusation is likely to further anger Ankara, already alarmed by the return of more than 100 Uyghurs to China from Thailand this week.

…
But upon arriving, Uyghurs have no chance of finding legal work and some end up with extremist groups, Tong said, like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which Beijing accuses of waging an insurrection campaign in Xinjiang to set up their own state.

“They are very easily controlled by certain local forces, especially the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and other terrorist groups. They organize the youths, they brainwash them, and get them to the front line to fight. They are cannon fodder,” Tong said.

“There is competition for them. Some are sent to Iraq, some to Syria. The terrorist groups there lack people. They will snatch people away. The terrorist groups will pay, at least $2,000 a person. It’s their way of recruiting soldiers.”

That Mr. Tong knows what he’s talking about, I think.  The outlines of this story have been clear for months.  

The only remaining grey area is whether all the Uyghur men who end up in Syria are simply hapless “cannon fodder” recruited by jihadis, or whether the Turkish security services identify some particularly capable Uyghur militants, provide documents, and enable travel, training, and battlefield experience in Syria in order to cultivate Turkey-friendly assets in Syria or potentially in AfPak/Central Asia.  Might never get to the bottom of that one, unless the PRC decides to crank up the evidentiary apparatus another notch in order to make sure Western journos finally get the point.

Clearly, the PRC does not intend to yield on the issue of “refoulement” (the forcible return to nasty home countries of refugees, a humanitarian no-no, and the default US/EU stance on the handling of Uyghur refugees*) and is doing its best to reduce the political heat for Thailand and other countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, that hold Uyghur refugees and might want to get rid of them.  Per the Reuters piece.

The Bangkok-based newspaper The Nation, quoting a Thai Foreign Ministry release, reported on Friday that the Chinese government has invited Thai government officials to visit China to observe its treatment of the Uyghur migrants sent back to the country in an attempt to quash rumours that they were severely punished or killed.

The National Security Council of Thailand would consider inviting representatives of international organisations such as International Committee of the Red Cross to travel to China with the government officials.

The Thai ministry’s statement said that the Chinese government had reassured the Thai government that it would treat those people with fairness and guarantee their safety.

Moreover, care would be taken of those found not guilty and they would be returned to society. They would also be provided with farmlands, the Chinese government said.

I’m sure there’s a lot of snickering about this, but the PRC wants Uyghurs back and without hope of overseas recourse, havens, or foreign humanitarian hand-wringing.  I would expect the central government would arrange for the ostentatious pampering of these refouled Uyghurs (rather than the standard brutal treatment at the hands of the local security outfits in Xinjiang) in order to reconcile neighboring nations to the PRC’s demands.

The facts that the AKP & MHP youth wings have been harassing the Thai embassy, and the PRC has now essentially gone public with its accusations against Turkey indicate that Turkey was not completely satisfied with the partial release and the PRC is not completely happy with Turkey’s attitude.

But the fact that nobody is talking about the obvious “women & children go/men go back” deal is an indication that the mutual rancor is still contained.  (Here, by the way, is a Daily Sabah story on the 173 women and children after they arrived in Turkey. Note the line: “The rising oppression by the Chinese government and the effects of famine on Uighurs has left nearly 35 million people dead.”  There are only 11 million Uyghurs in the PRC, and the 35 million death toll looks like the China-wide count from the Great Leap Forward/Great Famine of the 1950s; it’s a rather unsettling that such a shaky grasp of the Uyghur situation in the PRC is apparently received wisdom in the mainstream Turkish media.)

There are several other difficult Uyghur refugee cases pending.

There's one, in Indonesia, that looks like pure dynamite that might blow up in Turkey's face.

Judging by reports to date, Turkey allegedly provided passports to Uyghurs implicated in the notorious Kunming railway station outrage (33 dead, 100+ wounded).  Said Uyghurs, instead of docilely flying to Turkey, surrendering their beautiful Turkish passports, and proceeding to the slums of Kayseri (the town in Turkey designated as the haven for Uyghur refugees), appear to have snuck into Indonesia via Malaysia and attempted to hook up with a notorious Muslim militant on a remote island; a militant, by the way, whose organization reportedly declared its allegiance to ISIS.  

Yes, it’s that tasty.

Four men—holding impeccable Turkish passports and insisting they are those Turkish people even though they couldn’t remember the birthdates on the passports—are currently on trial in Indonesia under these charges.  And, no, the Indonesian government is not happy, and has publicly stated it expects to ship the four back to PRC after the trial.

The Turkish embassy is busy dodging the obvious question of whether it will affirm the four as Turkish citizens despite what I expect is compelling evidence provided by the PRC that they are Uyghur citizens of the PRC known to the Public Security Bureau, or whether it’s better to throw in the towel and acknowledge that, yes, they are Uyghur militants who got Turkish passports from some Turkish embassy and started running around Asia in search of mischief.

Fact is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the brouhaha surrounding the refoulement of the 100 Uyghur men back to PRC isn’t part of a Turkish government strategy to dodge the public relations fallout from the Indonesian case.  You know, “We need to shift the frame away from ‘Turkish government irresponsibly gives undetectable travel documents to Muslim terrorists.’  Instead, let’s push ‘China persecutes innocent Uyghur brothers.  And we’ll use the deal we just made with the Chinese…to dump on the Chinese!’”  This, to me, seems like an Erdogan-type brainwave.  And the PRC response is, “Hey, Turkey’s just another crappy authoritarian regime like us.  They can’t get away with that!  Get Tong out to background the Western journos on the passport thing.”

The Uyghur project is obviously important to Turkey politically and, potentially, as a geopolitical play in Central Asia.  Whether the Turkish government is going to suck it up, repudiate the passport program, and leave the Uyghurs to the untender mercies of the PRC government remains to be seen.

But Turkey is playing with fire here.  And I expect the PRC will be relentless in its pursuit of, at least, Uyghur men detained in Asian countries in order to forestall their passage to Turkey.

* In an interesting sidelight, does anybody remember the Uyghurs at Guantanamo?  It’s important because the United States committed itself to the principle of non-refoulement of Uyghur refugees even as the US tacitly green-lit harsh PRC measures in Xinjiang—with the implication that Uyghur dissent was terrorism--as GWOT-justified responses.

The Bush administration harbored sympathies for Uyghur aspirations even as it scooped up Uyghurs for detention and interrogation at Guantanmo.  The Uyghurs were quickly judged to be no threat to the United States even though some of them had received some training in AQ camps in Afghanistan, under the logic that, if they were terrorists, they were anti-PRC terrorists a.k.a. “non-enemy combatants”.  So it was decided they could not be sent back to the PRC because of the fear of torture.  

So the Uyghurs became “non-enemy combatants" and "refugees protected by the principle of non-refoulement".  Which apparently did not protect them from interrogation by PRC security officers after the Guantanamo administration had obligingly softened them up with some sleep deprivation (a technique apparently learned from the experience of US POWs interrogated by the PRC during the Korean War!).  

President Bush tried to release the Uyghur detainees to other countries, but ran into ferocious PRC pressure on any country that dared considered receiving them.  So the Uyghurs were assigned for indefinite detention in low-security facilities at Gitmo. President Obama considered the Uyghur detainees to be the low-hanging fruit of his close-Guantanamo campaign.  But, when he tried to release some of them into the United States (a prerequisite required by other countries to take some Uyghur detainees themselves), he ran into a carefully-constructed and extremely hypocritical and dishonest Republican buzzsaw.  Full facts--including the eruption of Newt Gingrich s the enthusiastic pointman for the sabotage operation-- only at China Matters, natch.   Most if not all of the Uyghur detainees have now been released, I believe.

The PRC has tacitly accepted the principle of non-refoulement as it pertains to Tibetan refugees, who get to continue on to Dharmsala if they "touch base" at a safe harbor in Katmandu, Nepal (This unpublicized deal is the key "canary in the coal mine" for US-PRC engagement on Tibet, especially as the PRC gets less cooperative with the US and more assertive with Nepal.)

But the PRC isn't going to accept a similar arrangement for Uyghur refugees as it, rather understandably, deems the security risks unacceptable.

Below the fold, an update I posted the day before, when the first shoe dropped on the passport issue, courtesy of Global Times.  And, hey, if you want to understand the role of the Uyghur issue in Turkish politics and regional strategy—and the Uyghur element in Erdogan’s gonzo medieval cosplay honor guard—I suggest, humblebragging again, that you read my long, in-depth piece from July 1.

Uyghurs Edge Closer to Center of Turkish Diplomacy, Politics, and Geopolitical Strategy

Me on Twitter on July 1:

IMO most important development in PRC security is mainstreaming of support for Uyghurs in TK national politics. Way more serious than SCS.

Turkish anti-PRC furor was fueled by reports of the PRC campaign against Ramadan.  

In Daily Sabah, the English-language version of Sabah, a Turkish daily closely associated with Erdogan’s AKP party, Kilic Kanat, a professor at Penn State’s Erie campus with a strong interest in Uyghur issues and something of a China hawk, wrote a highly critical piece, China’s war on Ramadan, on the PRC’s campaign against Ramadan observance and, indeed the entire PRC system:

Instead of gaining legitimacy from and the loyalty of its citizens through political reform, participation and pluralism, the government seems to increase the sophistication of its repressive methods… These fears and concerns have reached paranoia in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China. One more time the Chinese government is adapting tragicomic methods and mechanisms to soothe its fear of being destroyed by the ethnic Turkic Uighur minority.

Criticism of the PRC quickly moved beyond the opinion columns, as can be seen from a few days’ snips from Twitter:

Turkey says it is concerned over China’s Ramadan bans on Uighurs - DIPLOMACY  

 

China Ramadan Ban: Turkey Protesters Target Chinese Restaurant In Istanbul During Holy Month Of Fasting http://www.ibtimes.com/china-ramadan-ban-turkey-protesters-target-chinese-restaurant-istanbul-during-holy-1990677#.VZREmsHm9Ih.twitter … [with the requisite irony, it turned out the offending restaurant’s only “Chinese” employee was the Uyghur cook-PL]

Turkish Footballer #AlparslanÖztürk to donate 10% of his salary to Uyghur #Muslims. 

Arda Turan'dan 'Doğu Türkistan' mesajı - Hürriyet Futbol http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/spor/futbol/29415391.asp … via @hurriyet [an internationally known Turkish footballer playing for Madrid asked for prayers for East Turkestan on his social media feed]

A popular Turkish comedian, Şahan Gökbakar, posted a picture on his facebook page showing the PRC flag as a bloody blotch on the East Turkestan flag:

Per Mehmet Söylemez 赵忠海 ‏@ResearChina Jun 29: 

A campaign against China started in Turkish social media today with the hashtag #StopTerorismInChina today. [These tweets are mostly in English and include atrocity photos, some of which are apparently bogus, such as a picture of a woman who hung herself in a well with her two children in India, but was attributed incorrectly to Xinjiang--PL]

A political/electoral component marked protests on June 28, as reported by Today’s Zaman:

In Ankara, the Ülkü Ocakları, a youth organization affiliated with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), prayed at a funeral procession for those killed in East Turkestan, at the Mustafa Asım Köksal Mosque in Keçiören. Speaking after the prayer, Olcay Kılavuz, the head of the youth movement, gave a press statement where he declared that the red flag of Turkey and the blue flag of East Turkestan were equal.  [emphasis added]

Kılavuz also said that members of Ülkü Ocakları would resume their struggle in favor of their brothers in East Turkestan, until their last breath. He added that the government was keeping silent about the killings and ongoing oppression in East Turkestan.

Associate Professor Savaş Eğilmez from the history department of Atatürk University in Erzurum joined other academics in criticizing the current ban against Uyghur citizens fasting in East Turkestan, according to the Anadolu news agency. "We must do all that we can for this oppression to stop," he said.

Another political punctuation point in the campaign occurred on July 1.

In Daily Sabah, illustrated with a picture of a crowd holding up an effigy of a bloody baby, with a weeping woman and the blue East Turkestan flag, appeared the headline:

Turkish people protest China's Ramadan ban imposed on Uighur Muslims 

Protests broke out overnight all over Turkey with thousands of people taking to the streets to demand that China stop its alleged discrimination against Muslims.

Demonstrators gathered in Istanbul, İzmir, Trabzon, Samsun, Bursa, and 20 other locations late Wednesday to chant and shout for justice for an East Turkistan.

…

In Tarabya district of Istanbul - the home of the Chinese Consulate, and the largest protest - hundreds of members of the youth branch of the country's dominant political force, the AK Party, gathered outside the building where they broke fast with water and Turkish bagels.

Slogans such as "Long live hell for torturers", "Silence is consent, wake up and raise your voice" and "We stand with East Turkistan" were shouted.

…

The "concern" expressed Wednesday night is reflective of the sentiment that many Turks have with regard to the Uighur issue.

Many Turks refer to China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region - home to many ethnic minority groups, including Turkic Uighur people -- as East Turkestan.

They believe that Uighur are among a number of Turkic tribes that inhabit the region, and consider it to be part of Central Asia, not China. [emphasis added]

The PRC government hasn’t responded to the demonstrations yet (though it did ask for “clarification” of the Turkish government’s Ramadan criticisms); but it undoubtedly noted 1) the organizational role of the AKP youth wing 2) the East Turkestan flags/slogans in addition to Uyghur friendly-rhetoric in a government affiliated demo and 3) favorable coverage of the demonstrations by the AKP-friendly Daily Sabah. 

 

They may also find it interesting that, at least in Daily Sabah’s coverage, the presence of ethnic Uyghurs—who, one would think would certainly attend such a demo—was not reported.

And as context for the demonstrations, we find that President Erdogan wants to demonstrate the depth of his support for Uyghurs, either out of conviction, geopolitical calculation, or the need to protect his nationalist political flank against the more stridently nationalistic MHP party (whose youth wing had provided the rhetoric at the funeral procession for Uyghur dead on June 28):

Turkish President, MHP leader in row over support to Uighur Turks  

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli have clashed over which of them has actually displayed solidarity with the Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s northwestern East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region.

Messages that Bahçeli posted on his Twitter account late on June 27 fueled the row, as he suggested that nobody was even talking about the plight of Uyghur Turks, while everybody has been obsessed with the developments in the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobane on the Turkish border with Syria, which has been the scene of deadly clashes between Kurdish forces and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters.

“From Nişantaşı to Yüksekova, everybody is concerned about the fight between two terrorist groups in Kobane. Nobody is speaking about China’s brutality in East Turkestan, not even mentioning it,” Bahçeli said.

Violent attacks and unrest have been on the rise in recent years both across China and in East Turkistan (Xinjiang). Beijing has blamed what it describes as “terrorist” incidents on violent separatists from the vast, resource-rich region, where information is often difficult to verify inde-pendently. Rights groups accuse China’s government of cultural and religious repression that they say fuels unrest in East Turkistan (Xinjiang).

Erdoğan appeared to have taken the criticism from Bahçeli personally when he delivered a speech at a fast-breaking dinner a few hours later in the same day.

“Now, some politicians emerge and supposedly refer to me. What do they say? ‘Those who solely deal with Arabs and solely with those in Kobane and Tal Abyad are forgetting Uyghur Turks.’ I am telling that person: ‘Have you ever travelled to the place where Uyghur Turks live?’ But Tayyip Erdoğan went,” Erdoğan said, without citing Bahçeli’s name.

Media outlets revealed in their archives that almost exactly one year ago, in the run-up to the presidential election in August 2014 when he was elected to his current post, Erdoğan suggested that Bahçeli had never been to the region in his life.

At the time, Bahçeli responded to Erdoğan with photographs posted to his Twitter account. Photos showed Bahçeli with Uyghur Turks in East Turkistan (Xinjiang) and Kashgar during a visit to China in 2001 in his capacity as the deputy prime minister of the time.

Amid the sound and fury, a most important development went almost unnoticed.

In what is huge news for the Uyghur diaspora, the government of Thailand allowed 170 of the Uyghurs it had detained for over a year to go to Turkey.  Here’s how RFA reported it:

Gungor Yavuzarslan, the president of the International Journalists Association of Turkish-Speaking Countries, was quoted by the Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) network Wednesday confirming that 173 Uyghurs had arrived in the country a day earlier, and calling their acceptance a “diplomatic victory for Turkey on the international stage.”

A Uyghur scholar living in the capital Ankara also confirmed the group’s arrival to RFA, but said Turkish officials had sought to downplay the move amid ongoing internal political negotiations.

“I am aware of this news, but the Turkish government is trying to form a coalition [between the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement party (MHP)] following the parliamentary election, so they do not want to publicize it,” he said, speaking to RFA on condition of anonymity.

I should say why, given way the MHP & AKP have both been playing up the Uyghur angle, I don’t really understand the comment about the publicity.  

Certainly, the triumph was diluted somewhat by the fact that Thailand split the families, if not the baby, by only allowing women and children to leave and, presumably out of deference to the PRC, continues to detain the men.  Nevertheless, a big win for Turkey and I imagine Erdogan would want to shout this from the mountaintops and tender regard for his probable MHP allies (whom he had just ripped on the same issue in remarks at an iftar dinner) did not really figure in his calculations.

I’m assuming the local press has been told to downplay the news (there have been a couple of brief articles in the Turkish press that I’ve been able to find, and most outlets have reprinted an Al Jazeera article & the RFA piece) so the PRC doesn’t feel it’s getting its nose rubbed in it.  Given the close relationship between the PRC and the new Thai junta, I’m guessing that the Thai government obtained assurances of PRC forbearance before releasing the Uyghurs.

The AP subsequently quoted the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson as expressing displeasure at the release, saying: 

Beijing opposes "any actions that aid and abet, or even support illegal migration."

"We believe that the international community should share common responsibility for combating and preventing illegal migration."

But I didn’t find the reference on the “Spokesperson’s Remarks” (which is highlights, to the PRC anyway, of the press conference, not a full transcript) at the PRC MOFA website, an indication to me that the PRC knew about it, had decided to soft-pedal it, and is now busy moving on.

So we get a picture of popular anger at PRC abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, stoked by two nationalist Turkish parties, the AKP and the MHP, in a spirit of political competition, combined with a general tendency of the governments, both on the PRC and Turkish side to treat the current brouhaha as a secondary element in the ebb and flow of the diplomatic and strategic relationship.

In other words, not much different from other governments that find themselves compelled to modulate their resentment at overbearing PRC behavior in response to Beijing’s outreach, blandishments, and arm-twisting.

Business as usual in the Rising China era, maybe.

But maybe not.

Turkey’s a bit different.

One of the most interesting developments of the last few years has been Turkish neo-Ottomanism.

Turkey grew out of an intensely nationalistic, perhaps even prototypically fascist rejection of Ottoman imperial and multicultural pretensions after the collapse of the empire in the wake of World War I, in favor of a laser focus on the supremacy of ethnic Turks in an ethnically cleansed, militarily defensible, and politically impregnable homeland.

However, in an interesting parallel with Japan’s “quest for normalcy” under Abe 70 years after its shattering defeat in World War II, Erdogan has adopted a quasi-imperial interest in asserting Turkey’s influence both regionally, in the areas of the old Ottoman empire, and in Central Asia, where the Turkish people originated before they made their westward trek to the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

Today, the “stans” of Central Asia are largely Turkic speaking and considered a suitable object of Turkish attentions, and especially those of Turkish nationalists.   This map reconfigures Central Asia into North, South, and East Turkestan.

Xinjiang, the "stan that never was" in my formulation, homeland of the Uyghurs, is East Turkestan.

In current Turkish nationalist cartography, East Turkestan is the opposite bookend to Turkey in a belt of Turkic civilization stretching across Central Asia.  The East Turkestan flag is identical to the current Turkish flag, except in background color (red for Turkey, sky-blue for East Turkistan) making for some nice graphics and patriotic associations.

The Uyghurs figure in Erdogan’s notorious honor guard of 16 soldiers dressed in historical warrior costumes, who astounded the world when they appeared during a welcoming ceremony for President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in January 2015.

Each warrior represents one of the 16 “great (or historic) Turkish empires” commemorated on Turkey’s official seal. 

One of the stars marks the Uyghur Khanate, which was actually centered in present-day Mongolia (Uyghurs subsequently migrated southwestward to present-day Xinjiang).  The Uyghur Khanate appears to have had subjected the Tang Dynasty to a de facto tributary relation when the Chinese empire was weak, doing rather badly, and desperately in need of steppe military muscle.  

The Uyghur Khanate anchors a chain of Turkic empires as conceived by Turkish nationalists, one that extends across Central Asia and, naturally, terminates in modern-day Turkey, in a “March of Empire” narrative that is understandably more popular than the “Turkish tribes asskicked westward by competing steppe kingdoms until they ended up on the shores of the Mediterranean” version preferred by Mongolian nationalists and perhaps some historians.

Thanks to Hurriyet, we know that the Uyghur warrior was the sixth man from the top of the steps on the left, with the black flaps hanging down and almost obscuring his face.

 

The shielding for the neck and face is apparently called a “leather aventail”, available for purchase for only $55 from Leatherhelms.com.  Helm not included.

Wonder if Erdogan will deploy that honor guard next time there’s a state visit from the PRC.

I believe Turkish neo-imperial incitement of Uyghur pride involves more than historical dressup.

As a matter of government policy, Turkey has unambiguously been positioning itself ideologically as the protector of the Uyghurs and has welcomed Uyghur refugees to Turkey.  It has also advocated on behalf of Uyghur refugees who have escaped Xinjiang, providing consular services and even passports, and, as noted above, energetically agitated with the government of Thailand to allow Uyghurs detained in Thailand for illegal entry to continue on to Turkey.

That’s part and parcel of Turkish official discourse.  But there are also compelling hints of shenanigans by Turkish security forces presumably intended to engage, penetrate, exploit, subvert Uyghur militant elements and, if the universal history of covert ops is any guide, abet one or more embarrassing terrorism-related screwups that must be hushed up.

There are dark mutterings that Uyghur fighters perhaps up to a number of several hundred have appeared in Syria thanks to the assistance of the Turkish government.  Uyghur refugees reside in rather miserable conditions in Turkey and some young men might fall prey to the blandishments of  ostensibly freelance but presumably government security forces-linked jihadi recruiters for the Syrian struggle.

There are also signs that the Turkish government has gone a step further and actively facilitated Uyghur illegal emigration from the PRC by providing false passports, perhaps for the purpose of recruiting and developing trained Uyghur militants as a security and power projection asset.

In the end of 2014, the PRC government shut down a “passport forging” ring that was selling falsified Turkish passports to Uyghurs seeking to leave the country. 

I put the phrase “passport forging” in quotes because it would appear to be extremely difficult for these passports to be “forged” by a criminal gang, and not prepared with the assistance of the Turkish government.

Turkish passports include a smart chip.  The smart chip contains more than the alphanumeric text information from the passport page; it also includes biometric data on facial dimensions.  The data is loaded onto a chip, which is then encrypted.

Provision of falsified Turkish passports to Uyghurs apparently became a big deal.  

 Today’s Zaman, a not particularly Erdogan-friendly mainstream outlet, retailed a sensational piece of tittle-tattle from the local Turkish press in April:

According to a story in the Meydan daily, A.G., an aide of Nurali T., a Uyghur Turk working for ISIL to provide militants with passports worldwide, Nurali T.'s office in İstanbul's Zeytinburnu district functions as an ISIL passport office. Each passport was sold for $200, A.G. told Meydan.

More than 50,000 Uyghur Turks came to Turkey with these fake passports from China via Thailand and Malaysia and entered Syria after staying a day in İstanbul, Meydan reported. A.G. claimed that most of the Uyghurs with fake passports were caught by police in Turkish airports but they were released in Turkey after their passports were seized. “The Uyghurs' release in Turkey is due to a secret [little-known] Turkish law on Uyghur Turks. More than 50,000 Uyghurs joined ISIL through this method,” A.G. added.

A.G. further said that Nurali T. organizes recruits from around the world from his İstanbul office. Militants who entered Turkey with these fake passports are hosted either in hotels or guesthouses for a day before they join ISIL in Syria, A.G. said.

The 50,000 militant figure is, hopefully, vastly exaggerated BS.  The best estimates are that there only 50,000 Uyghurs in Turkey en toto. But I suspect there is a grain of truth in it as well.

I infer the Turkish government’s angle is that Uyghurs get falsified travel documents, but these documents are flagged at Turkish immigration and confiscated so the refugees have no alternative to obeying the dictates of their handlers in Turkish security.  Some eager and promising Uyghurs get hustled off to gain training and battlefield experience in Syria, and hopefully survive to become long-term assets for whatever the Turkish security services hope to accomplish in Central Asia as well as the Middle East. 

Since Turkish biometric passports are good for free travel within the EU, I would think the Turkish government would not be interested in advertising that they are handing out passports to Uyghurs, some of whom engage in terrorist activity that advances Turkish interests, or fuel anxiety that they have anything less than a 100% success rate in recovering these passports…or that maybe anti-PRC terrorists exploited the generous Turkish clandestine passport policy to bug out of the PRC for reasons of their own.

And it looks plausible that the first big screwup in Turkish government footsie with Uyghur militants is now playing out in Indonesia, as this June 12 article from Benar News implies:

Uncertain Identity of Uyghur Suspects Focus of Terrorism Trial 

There are four suspected Uyghurs currently on trial in Indonesia.  “Suspected” because they insist they are Turkish citizens per the impeccable Turkish passports they were holding when the Indonesian government arrested them, even though (in a rather basic tradecraft lapse) they apparently neglected to memorize the birthdates listed on the passport.

The case of these four Uyghurs is not just a minor annoyance to the PRC government.  It claims that these detainees were involved in the bloody attack at the Kunming rail station that killed 33 and wounded over 100.

And it’s not just a minor annoyance to the Indonesian government.  It does not believe that the four were engaged in tourism that went awry when they ended up on remote island allegedly attempting to link up with a notorious Indonesian separatist/terrorist/Islamic militant, one Santoso.

Turkish official attitude…well:

Turkey responds
Officials at the Turkish embassy in Jakarta did not deny Asludin’s claim about his clients being Turkish citizens.

“You should take into account what the lawyer says. On the other hand, [the Indonesian] Attorney General officially asked the Turkish embassy to provide the translator for the court. So this is what procedure says, and we follow that,” Ambassador Zekeriya Akcam said in a statement sent to BenarNews on Thursday.

A fine kettle of fish.

In my opinion, the Turkish government looks rather enviously at the Arab Sunni paramilitary muscle on tap to project power and influence in the Middle East for Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

I think President Erdogan would like, as a matter of national self-interest as well as personal ego, to develop a similar capability using Turkic-speaking paramilitary assets to project Turkish power into the Middle East, mainly Syria, to make sure that Turkey has sufficient heft to stand up to Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the subject of Syria’s future or lack of it.

But the paramilitary tool will also give Turkey the option of assisting/intimidating/countering local forces in Central Asia.  That means competing with the PRC, as well as trying to overawe the rickety ex-Soviet stans.

And Uyghurs, otherwise stateless and many with an intense sense of grievance against the PRC and the willingness to leave Xinjiang and fight, are a tempting source of manpower.

I’d speculate that the Turkish government is beginning to regard Uyghur anger as a useful asset in competing with the PRC for influence in the Turkic-speaking stans of Central Asia, and perhaps even punish the PRC for its resistance to Turkish aims in Syria.

Particularly today, burgeoning overt Turkish moral and diplomatic sponsorship of Uyghur aspirations is an important geopolitical issue for the PRC.

For decades, the dominant Islamic political and military formation in South Asia has been Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban.  And the PRC, drawing on its history and contacts as quartermaster for the foreign support of the anti-Soviet mujahideen, has persistently and effectively engaged with the Afghan Taliban, both directly and through Pakistan, to protect PRC interests…and discourage the harboring of Uyghur militants.

Now, however, this system shows signs of breaking down, as IS gains a hearing and adherents among splinter groups that are less than entranced with Mullah Omar, and viscerally opposed to the PRC and its oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Chief among them is the Pakistan Taliban, or PTT, which is not just the branch office of the Afghan Taliban in Pakistan.

The formative event for the creation of the PTT was the storming of the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad by President Musharaff in 2007—at the behest of the People’s Republic of China.

Elements of the PTT, and anti-Mullah Omar factions inside Afghanistan, are declaring allegiance to IS.  And they also provide a welcome to Uyghur militants. 

 

Cracks in the containment regime are emerging at a most unwelcome time for the PRC, since it is escalating the repression of Uyghur political, religious, and cultural expression, and trying to maintain the stability of Xinjiang, a one-time backwater that has been become a linchpin of the PRC’s Central Asia/Silk Road strategy.

If the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan government are unable to dissuade local jihadis from harboring Uyghur militants, and Turkey does not resist the urge to meddle on behalf of the Uyghurs, the PRC faces a situation in Xinjiang potentially analogous to the anti-Soviet war conducted by the mujahideen in Chechnya: local militant forces with cross-border havens attracting foreign fighters and enjoying material and diplomatic support from an outside power as a matter of ideology and strategic self-interest.

I expect the PRC government will put immense pressure on the Afghan and Pakistan governments, the Taliban, and Turkey to deny Uyghur separatists institutional support.  And if the situation in Xinjiang and in Pakistan/Afghanistan shows signs of getting out of hand, I would not rule out the possibility that the PRC’s first international military intervention since 1979 would occur, not in the South China Sea, but in the Central Asian borderlands.

But if Turkey provides material, propaganda, and diplomatic support to Uyghur aspirations as part of a power play in a contest with the PRC for influence in Central Asia,that might not be enough.

As to whether Turkey would recklessly put the Uyghur issue in play and endanger the rickety system of Uyghur control instituted by the PRC and Kazahkstan and endorsed by Pakistan & Afghanistan, well, one word…Syria.

Turkey is determinedly blowing up an entire country on its own doorstep, so I’m not sure it would have overwhelming strategic and moral qualms about screwing up a remote corner of Inner Asia, especially if it turns out cultivating the Uyghur cause is perceived to be good politics, useful diplomacy, and a nastily effective power projection gambit.

And that’s why I think the mainstreaming of support for Uyghurs as a bedrock issue in Turkish politics is big thing for the PRC—bigger than the entire pivot-enabling kabuki over uninhabited rocks, atolls, and sandbars in the South China Sea.