Lagi Tentang Uighur, Tentang Xinjiang

Bukalah mata, lihatlah penderitaan, ketakutan dan kemarahan masyarakat Islam Uighur. Dengarkanlah tangisan mereka. Bantulah mereka. Mereka adalah saudara kita. Saudara seagama dengan kita. Sejak China menguasai Turkestan Timur dan menukar namanya kepada Xinjiang yang bermaksud tanah yang ditawan. Pelbagai kekejaman telah dilakukan oleh regim komunis itu.

Harun Yahya banyak menulis tentang Turkestan Timur dan masyarakat Islam Uighur dan tulisan beliau boleh didapati secara percuma menerusi laman webnya. Entri ini khusus buat masyarakat Islam Uighur, cuba mengimbau apa yang telah dan sedang mereka tempuh. Mungkin juga entri terpanjang yang pernah ada di dalam blog ini. Ketika pertumpahan darah 2009 memang banyak kisah Uighur diperkatakan. Namun selepas itu semacam hilang ditelan masa. Rasanya memang ramai yang tidak menyedari kezaliman itu berterusan merantai kehidupan umat Islam di sana.

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China's Uighurs struggle to retain their identity

December 15, 2006

By Jehangir S. Pocha, Chronicle Foreign Service

 

2006-12-15 04:00:00 PST Hetian, China -- Abdel rubbed his clean-shaven chin as he and three friends finished up a dinner of goat soup and noodles.

"The government doesn't allow young people here to grow beards," he said in this ancient Muslim city in China's western Xinjiang province. "If you do, they will send you to the lao gai suo (forced labor camps). This is a communist country, and it is scared of Muslims."

Abdel is an ethnic Uighur in his early 30s who asked not to be fully identified out of fear of reprisal from local authorities. His is one of many angry voices reverberating through the crumbling buildings and twisted alleyways of the region's cities and villages, which are proud of a centuries-old Turkic-Persian-culture, but resent official efforts of assimilation. In recent years, Beijing has pushed the Xinjiang's 7.5 million Uighurs to learn Mandarin and adopt Han Chinese ways.

Such resentment has been building since 1949, when Mao Zedong annexed Xinjiang -- then an independent nation known as East Turkestan -- and collectivized land, barred the practice of Islam, and eventually took control of most of the economy.

But since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Beijing has feared the emergence of several independent countries in Central Asia could inspire secessionist movements in Xinjiang and neighboring Tibet, which account for nearly 40 percent of China's landmass.

As a result, local law bars state officials from practicing Islam, and children and teens are barred from entering mosques and practicing Islam until they are 18.

Wang Le Quan, the Han Chinese party secretary and the province's de facto leader, concedes that authorities are taking measures to quell separatist aspirations. Plainclothes police routinely roam mosques and bustling markets, hustling away suspects, who are often punished without a fair trial, according to human rights groups such as Amnesty International.

China has even tracked down Uighur activists in other countries. Most recently, Huseyin Calil, a Canadian Uighur, was detained while visiting Uzbekistan in an attempt to take his three children out of China. Calil, who immigrated to Canada after being accused of supporting separatists, has since been extradited from Uzbekistan and held incommunicado in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, according to his mother.

Seandainya ada yang sudah terlupa. Ini adalah gambar-gambar ketika rusuhan pada 5 Julai 2009 di Urumqi, Xianjiang. Urumqi dalam bahasa Mongolia bermaksud padang rumput indah bertukar menjadi medan berdarah. Beratus orang cedera dan kehilangan jiwa. Ketika itu Xianjiang mendapat perhatian dunia. Demonstrasi ada di mana-mana. Bagaimanapun perhatian itu beransur hilang apabila rejim China mendakwa kejadian itu disebabkan oleh fahaman pelampau agama, gerakan pemisah etnik dan keganasan. Bukan oleh dasar etnik minoriti mereka yang kejam.

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China musnah penempatan Islam di Urumqi, Xinjiang

BEIJING 11 Julai - Pihak berkuasa China memusnahkan sebuah kawasan penempatan di Urumqi, di barat laut negara ini yang menempatkan pendatang yang didakwa bertanggungjawab menganggu ketenteraman awam, demikian menurut media negara hari ini, setahun selepas berlaku rusuhan etnik berdarah di wilayah Islam itu.


Kawasan Heijiashan di wilayah Xinjiang, yang sebelum ini merupakan kawasan kediaman bagi 200,000 orang penduduk akan digantikan dengan kawasan perumahan baru, lapor agensi berita Xinhua yang menyifatkannya sebagai 'kawasan panas kemiskinan dan jenayah'.

Heijiashan adalah satu daripada lokasi berlakunya keganasan pada 5 Julai 2009 melibatkan etnik Uighur beragama Islam dengan etnik Han, mengorbankan hampir 200 orang dengan 1,700 lagi cedera.

"Disebabkan pengurusan yang lemah di kawasan itu, pendatang dengan mudah dihasut penunjuk perasaan.

"Populasi apung di sini sering menganggu ketenteraman awam," kata ketua operasi pemusnahan itu yang dipetik Xinhua, kata Ketua Akademi Sains Sosial Xinjiang di Institut Penyelidikan Asia Tengah, Pan Zhiping.

Beliau menyarankan sebuah model menyerupai langkah yang diambil oleh Singapura dilaksanakan bagi memastikan setiap komuniti mempunyai penduduk daripada pelbagai etnik.

Uighur sejak berdekad menuduh penindasan China dan kebanjiran etnik Han serta taraf hidup yang semian meningkat dan kemajuan di wilayah itu tidak memihak kepada mereka.

Heijiashan merupakan kawasan tarikan pendatang dari kawasan luar Urumqi dengan populasi besar Uighur seperti Kashgar, Hotan dan Yili.

Kerajaan menawarkan rumah baru atau pampasan kepada penduduk yang rumah mereka dirobohkan, namun sebahagiannya tidak berpuas hati dengan tawaran yang dirasakan tidak setimpal. - AFP

Utusan Malaysia 12 Julai 2010

Land seizures in China's Kashgar fuel anger among Uighurs

By Sui-Lee Wee

KASHGAR, China (Reuters) - Uighur merchant Obul Kasim carries emotional scars from his confrontation with an unbending government after he failed to save his 100-year-old mud-brick home from demolition, a victim of the urban renewal marching across the historic Silk Road.

When he refused to leave his Kashgar home in the far western region of Xinjiang in 2004, police handcuffed him and took him to the local station. In 2005 and 2007, he travelled to Beijing to seek redress over what he saw as inadequate compensation, but was rounded up by provincial officials both times.

The issues are jarringly familiar.

Kasim's grievance is probably the most common complaint across China, but the issue takes on new ramifications in Xinjiang, where demolitions are linked by experts to attempts to eliminate the identity of Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority.

Uighurs make up one of the country's most discontented minorities, resentful of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and the country's majority Han Chinese.

"Everytime I think about my housing problem, I'm so angry I can't sit," said Kasim, his brown eyes flashing. "No department has listened to me. My father was so angry because of this, he passed away of a heart attack."

Kasim, who sells embroidered skullcaps near Kashgar's Id Kah mosque, China's largest, said he would return to Beijing to petition after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, though he does not expect much.

The local government offered him compensation of 470 yuan (45 pounds) per square metre for his 510 square metre (5,500 square foot) home. High-rise apartments are now worth 30,000 yuan per square metre.

"A very large source of discontent is land dispossession," Tom Cliff, a graduate student at the Australian National University who spent more than three years in Xinjiang, said in emailed comments.

"Many Uighurs see this as their land being taken away from them with inadequate compensation and no recourse to the law."

Gopuk Haji, a 97-year-old doctor of traditional medicine, said the government gave him a house of 80 square metres, even though his previous mud-brick home was 100 square metres. He dismissed as paltry compensation of 9,600 yuan.

"A real Communist Party must help the people," he said. "This Communist Party is fake. They are only using money to line their pockets."

Sporting a long, wispy white beard and flowing white shirt, Haji said China's former leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were good people. "Now the people are all bad. They are all corrupt. If you don't have money here, you don't have power."

SILK ROUTE

Demolitions proceed at a furious pace across the flat, parched region around Kashgar, designated as "a special economic zone" on the historic Silk Road trade route linking China and Europe.

Heaps of earth and bricks dot residential quarters, while workers lay foundations for drab, modern high-rise apartments. Men in skull caps whack a camel on a dusty street as skyscrapers loom in the distance.

The adobe homes with wooden doors in winding red-dirt lanes were once hailed as the best surviving example of Central Asian architecture.

Ignoring protests from preservationists, the government in 2008 razed most of Kashgar's old city, destroying 80 per cent of the mud-brick houses to build "earthquake-resistant housing".

Managing the Uighurs has been one of the Communist Party's biggest challenges. Tensions erupted into violent clashes between Han Chinese and Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people in the regional capital Urumqi in July 2009.

For Uighurs, Tibetans, and most recently, Inner Mongolians, greater prosperity has not quelled demands for greater autonomy.

"One of the lessons that we can take from Xinjiang is that the pursuit of sheer economic growth as a solution to social problems is not working," said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for New-York-based Human Rights Watch.

Bequelin said that the rest of China may hope the government might change its policies, but "in the case of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, they take to the streets to take a stand".

Mass demolitions in Kashgar's old city, he said, were "taken as evidence of the state's intent to erase and destroy Uighur identity and heritage".

Like 2009, this year has been jittery in Xinjiang, a region that accounts for a sixth of the country's land mass, holds deposits of oil and gas and is home to 8 million Uighurs.

MUTUAL DISTRUST

Many experts believe the roots of the violence in July's deadly attacks in Kashgar and the desert city of Hotan stem from a deep belief among Uighurs that they have been left behind as Han Chinese pour into Xinjiang and dominate opportunities.

Dru Gladney, an expert on Uighurs at Pomona College in California, said more unrest in Xinjiang was inevitable.

"Uighurs are clearly upset with the policies there," he said. "China thinks they can overrun the region with the Han and put in money for security services and that will ameliorate the problem. But it's not working."

On the first Friday of Ramadan prayers, soldiers carrying riot shields and rifles marched past the Id Kah mosque, while a paramilitary officer wearing a helmet and bullet-proof vest took videos of men streaming into the mosque with prayer mats.

Banners declared in Chinese: "Unity is a blessing, separatism is a scourge," and "The Han will never leave the minorities."

Mutual distrust persists.

"When they look at us, I know they have hatred in their hearts," said a Han Chinese taxi driver from southwestern Sichuan province.

The government has blamed the violence in Xinjiang on the separatist "East Turkestan Islamic Movement" (ETIM), designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States in 2002.

Beijing says separatists work with al Qaeda or militants among other Turkic ethnic groups in ex-Soviet Central Asia over the border to seek an independent state called East Turkestan.

Uighurs doubt their claims.

"The ETIM doesn't have a big influence on Uighurs," said a 40-year-old imam, who declined to be identified. "Most people have heard about this separatist movement, but most of them don't know who they are or have seen their faces."

Staring at a poster of two Uighurs shot by police last week on suspicion of involvement in the attacks in Kashgar, Kasim, the Uighur merchant, said: "They are not terrorists. They had their own problems. If they couldn't solve them, then maybe they had no choice."

And asked whether Xinjiang should be independent, he said: "I'm afraid to give you an answer. Walls have ears. But if you are smart, you'll know what my answer is."

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee, Editing by Ken Wills and Ron Popeski)

Reuters Africa, 9 Ogos 2011.

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Inilah antara sebab mengapa rejim komunis tidak mahu membebaskan Turkestan Timur. Ini juga sebabnya etnik Han dibawa masuk memenuhi wilayah ini. Ini puncanya mengapa masyarakat Islam Uighur diasingkan ke kawasan pedalaman, masjid, rumah serta bangunan mereka dimusnahkan. Peluang disekat. Masyarakat Islam Uighur hidup dalam kedaifan dan kemunduran dalam wilayah yang kaya dengan sumber asli.

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Rebut peluang labur di Xinjiang, bantu etnik Uighur

Oleh DR. SAODAH ABD. RAHMAN

PENULIS berkesempatan melawat Xinjiang pada Mei tahun lalu. Ibu kotanya, Urumqi, terletak kira-kira 4,000 kilometer dari Beijing.

Xinjiang meliputi satu per enam keluasan China. Ia mempunyai dua lembah yang dikelilingi oleh gunung-ganang di tiga penjuru.

Mungkin ramai tidak mengetahui Xinjiang merupakan wilayah autonomi umat Islam kaum Uighur dan merupakan wilayah yang kaya dengan sumber semula jadi.

Namun tekanan yang diterima daripada kerajaan pusat membuatkan wilayah itu tidak dapat membangun dengan sewajarnya. Wilayah itu sebenarnya kaya dengan emas dan batu-batu permata.

Xinjiang terkenal sejak berzaman sebagai 'gunung perbendaharaan'. Wilayah itu menghasilkan 3.061 tan emas dalam tempoh enam bulan pertama tahun lalu.

Lembah Juggar, Turpan dan Tarim terkenal sebagai 'mangkuk perbendaharaan' dengan limpahan minyak, gas asli, sylvite, mirabilite, vermiculite bentonite, arang batu, nikel, tembaga dan asbestos.

Hasil pertanian seperti buah-buahan, kapas, gandum dan sayur-sayuran mampu menampung kehidupan masyarakat Islam Xinjiang.

Corak kehidupan tradisi yang lebih mengutamakan saudara sesama Islam memberi peluang kepada orang miskin Xinjiang mendapat makanan dan bantuan kewangan daripada yang kaya.

Tuan-tuan tanah menyediakan makanan percuma kepada pekerja ladang mereka kerana upah yang diberi hanya mampu untuk membeli keperluan asas ahli keluarga pekerja sahaja.

Xinjiang juga merupakan satu wilayah yang kaya dengan sumber air di mana ia memiliki 570 sungai besar dan kecil.

Ia juga kaya dengan sumber biologi, minyak, arang batu dan keindahan alam semula jadi seperti gunung-ganang, padang pasir dan gurun.

Keindahan semula jadi dan keunikannya memberi satu gambaran kepada manusia erti keindahan dunia yang dilakarkan oleh Allah SWT apabila mengunjungi Gunung Altai dan Tianshan.

Altai diselaputi oleh salji dan sangat indah apabila dipanah cahaya matahari. Jaluran glasier membentuk sungai air batu menjalar daripada gunung ke tasik-tasik dan pemandangan sungai-sungai di sekeliling gunung juga amat mempesonakan

Keindahan alam semula jadi sebenarnya mampu menjadikan Xinjiang sebagai tarikan pelancongan utama.

Gabungan antara kekayaan semula jadi, bahan galian, perbendaharaan emas dengan hasil pertanian merupakan faktor utama yang menyebabkan masyarakat Islam Xinjiang amat sukar untuk mendapat kemerdekaan sepenuhnya daripada Cina walaupun pelbagai usaha dilakukan.

Memandangkan kedudukan masyarakat Islam yang serba lemah daripada sudut ekonomi, ilmu pengetahuan, pengalaman dan lain-lain maka aktiviti gerakan secara radikal untuk mendapat kemerdekaan daripada China akan menyebabkan masyarakat Islam kehilangan beribu-ribu nyawa.

Berdasarkan kepada suasana dan penderitaan masyarakat Islam di Xinjiang ketika ini, penulis merasakan negara-negara Islam seperti Malaysia dan negara-negara Arab yang kaya perlu memainkan peranan penting bagi membantu masyarakat Uighur.

Hubungan diplomatik dan perdagangan dengan negara China boleh memberi peluang kepada negara Islam memperkembangkan usaha dan projek pembangunan di wilayah Xinjiang.

Penduduk Islam di wilayah tersebut mungkin mendapat peluang pekerjaan dan faedah pembangunan bersama antara negara-negara Islam dan China.

Suasana umat Islam yang berada di Xinjiang perlu mendapat perhatian negara Islam.

Melalui hubungan diplomatik yang baik dengan negara China maka peluang untuk membantu umat Islam yang terpinggir dan miskin mungkin dapat dilaksanakan.

China yang merupakan satu negara yang paling besar dan kepadatan penduduk yang tinggi mungkin menunjukkan sikap lebih positif terhadap negara-negara Islam kaya yang ingin melabur dan bekerjasama dalam membangunkan wilayah Xinjiang tersebut.

Kemasukan pelaburan asing terutama dari negara-negara Islam tentunya akan memberi manfaat yang lebih baik kepada penduduk Uighur.

Pelabur dari Malaysia dan negara Islam lain boleh memanfaatkan kekayaan sumber semulajadi Xinjiang untuk dibangunkan semaksimum mungkin.

Selain mendapat faedah daripada pelaburan tersebut, kita juga boleh membantu etnik Uighur menjana ekonomi mereka.

Hubungan diplomatik adalah satu cara terbaik untuk memujuk kerajaan China supaya lebih prihatin terhadap konsep kemanusiaan di wilayah Xinjiang.

PENULIS ialah Pensyarah Kanan, Jabatan Usuluddin dan Perbandingan Agama, Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia (UIAM)

Utusan Malaysia 18 Julai 2009.

Alhamdulillah, sekalipun menghadapi penderitaan oleh penindasan dan kekejaman berdekat lamanya, umat Islam di Xinjiang masih lagi bertahan. Sabar sungguh umat Islam di sana menghadapi ujian getir ini. Sekalipun tidak dibenarkan menjalani ibadah tetap juga mereka laksanakan. Semoga rahmat Allah sentiasa bersama mereka. Semoga mereka terus sabar, kuat dan tabah melaluinya. Amin.

Islam tidak pernah menggalakkan pertumpahan darah tanpa sebab. Islam bukan tersebar di pelusuk dunia ini dengan mata pedang. Islam tidak pernah menyeru kepada kebencian sesama umat manusia. Islam sentiasa menganjurkan berbuat baik sesama makhluk Allah, tidak hanya manusia. Islam tidak akan hilang dari muka bumi biar apa sekalipun yang cuba dilakukan. Itu janji Allah dan sesungguhnya janji itu adalah benar.