[BRIEF NOTE] On Turkey and the Uighurs

[rfmcdonald]

In Tuesday's Globe and Mail, Frank Ching observed ("Why the West is silent on rioting in Xinjiang") that Western countries were generally uninterested in taking a stand on the recent riots there.

Last year, Western countries put pressure on Beijing to hold a dialogue with representatives of the Dalai Lama, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy even threatening to boycott the Beijing Olympics if China refused. Beijing's protestations that Tibet was an internal Chinese affair were disregarded.

This time, however, the Western response is muted. The United States has adopted a mild tone, with President Barack Obama merely calling on all parties in Xinjiang “to exercise restraint.” The European Union has gone even further, taking the position that violence in Xinjiang “is a Chinese issue, not a European issue.” Serge Abou, the Eu's ambassador to China, said Europe also had its problems with minorities and “we would not like other governments to tell us what is to be done.”

While there are similarities between events last year in Tibet and those in Xinjiang this month, the world has changed: China is now seen as an indispensable partner of the United States and Europe, both of which are facing a financial crisis. Beijing's diplomatic assistance in resolving the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues is also seen as too important to put in jeopardy.

The countries that were interested in critizing China were Muslim, most especially Turkey.

What reaction there has been came mainly from Muslim countries. The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments, condemned what it called the excessive use of force against Uyghur civilians. At least 184 people, both Uyghurs and Han Chinese, have been killed.

The OIC statement declared: “The Islamic world is expecting from China, a major and responsible power in the world arena with historical friendly relations with the Muslim world, to deal with the problem of Muslim minority in China in broader perspective that tackles the root causes of the problem.”

The country that has taken the strongest position is Turkey, whose people share linguistic, religious and cultural links with the Uyghurs. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan actually went so far as to characterize what has happened as “a kind of genocide” and said his country would bring the matter up in the United Nations Security Council.

Calling a series of riots that reportedly killed two hundred people of various ethnicities "a kind of genocide" is a bit much, and is more than a bit funny given Turkey's own relationship to actual actsof genocide. Mind, the numbers don't seem especially significant, involving thousands of people in a country with tens of millions of inhabitants.

Thousands of Turks and Uyghur expatriates took to the streets across Turkey after Friday prayers, protesting the violence in Xinjiang and burning Chinese flags and products, AFP photographers and media reports said.

The biggest of the demonstrations was at Istanbul's Fatih Mosque, where an estimated 5,000 people gathered and said prayers for members of the Uyghur community who lost their lives in the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, the NTV news channel said.

"No to ethnic cleansing!" chanted the crowd, waving the Uyghur flag depicting a white crescent on a blue background, as some protestors set fire to Chinese flags and goods produced in China.

Some 200 people attended similar prayers at Istanbul's Beyazit mosque at the call of a Turkey-based Uyghur association and Turkish nationalist groups, after which they held a brief demonstration, shouting "Murderer China", an AFP photgrapher said.

That said, Turkey does have a strong interest in Xinjiang, inasmuch as Turks and Xinjiang's Uyghurs both speak Turkic languages. Early in the 20th century among the Turks of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Pan-Turkism was a popular ideology, serving to justify a reorientation of Turks away from Europe and towards areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia populated by peoples speaking related Turkic languages: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, perhaps even Tatarstan and the Uyghur lands in Xinjiang. This failed, as the consolidation of the Soviet state and the weakness of the Turkish state in the 1920s combined to make Pan-Turkism a dangerous ideology. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey promptly reopened relations, this time apparently hoping not to dominate but rather to cooperate, but with mixed results. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan switched scripts from Cyrillic to Latin, for instance, but Turkey just wasn't a powerful enough force in Central Asia relative to a dynamic China and a Russia with a long history and all manner of links with Central Asia. Even Turkey's historically close relationship with Azerbaijan has been threatened by the ongoing Turkish-Armenian rapprochement. Hugh Pope, author of Sons of the Conquerors, a book on the Turkic world, expects a consolidation of these countries to take place only slowly. Expecting Turkey to exert any influence in Xinjiang, now, is completely unrealistic. Turkey has aspirations, but not the means.