CHINA:Fear of a terror attack from the huge Muslim province is growing, writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
AS UNREST from Tibet spreads into neighbouring ethnic provinces, Beijing is increasingly fearful of a terror attack from another restive region, the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang in the northwestern part of China, and is stepping up security there.
Xinjiang is home to eight million Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group who share linguistic and cultural bonds with central Asia and where China gets much of its oil and gas.
This month, police said they had thwarted efforts by suspected terrorists to crash an aircraft flying from the Xinjiang capital Urumqi to Beijing, while a senior official said a suspected militant separatist group in Xinjiang, raided by police on January 27th, was planning to sabotage the Beijing Olympic Games.
Many Uighurs are unhappy with the growing economic and political power of ethnic Han Chinese and reject what they see as cultural imperialism from Beijing, much as Tibetan protesters feel about what is happening there.
Beijing says that separatist Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are violent Islamist fundamentalists trying to cut the province off from Chinese rule. Rights groups such as Amnesty International regularly complain about how the Uighurs are treated and accuse Beijing of using its support for Washington's "war on terror" against al-Qaeda as an excuse for clamping down on their activities.
The largest province in China, Xinjiang accounts for 16 per cent of its land area and for hundreds of years the province has been a difficult territory to rule - since the days of the "Great Game" played for influence in the region between Britain and Russia.
This is something the Communist Party in Beijing is as keenly aware of as the Turkish warriors and Manchu warlords who tried in previous centuries.
At least nine people were killed in 1997 during a crackdown on a demonstration by Muslim separatists in Yining to the north. There are periodic reports of bomb blasts in Xinjiang's cities carried out by Muslim separatists.
The separatist Uighurs want an independent east Turkestan state in the region that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and central Asia.
Rebiya Kadeer, a Muslim businesswoman turned activist for Uighur rights in Xinjiang, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. She was jailed for five years for providing state secrets to foreigners before her exile.
China sees the Olympic Games as its "coming out party" to showcase the great advances the country has made within the last generation, but the Tibet unrest and the foiled Xinjiang aircraft attack have pushed domestic security higher on the organisers' agenda.
Xinjiang is awash with rumour. Chinese police dismissed speculation there had been two bus explosions in Urumqi and said they had detained those spreading the rumour.
"It's sheer nonsense and business as usual in Xinjiang," Liu Yaohua, head of the region's Public Security Bureau, told the Xinhua news agency.
On January 2007, Chinese forces killed 18 people in a gun battle near a training camp in the mountains of the Pamirs plateau in southern Xinjiang.
In the attempting hijacking on March 7th, the China Southern Airlines aircraft took off from Urumqi but was forced to cut short its journey to land in the northwestern city of Lanzhou.
The airline gave a 400,000 yuan (€36,000) cash reward to staff for foiling the attack, which officials said was by "internationally backed terrorists".
Groups of exiled Uighurs campaigning for an independent Xinjiang accuse China of making up the aircraft incident to justify a crackdown on Uighurs.