A Uighur scholar from China's far-western Xinjiang region has cast doubt over claims that last month's attacks were linked to camps in Pakistan, suggesting that locals, armed with grievances but no training, were likely behind the violence.
Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist in Beijing's Minzu University (Central University for Nationalities) who this week returned from a visit to Hotan and Kashgar, the sites of last month's violence, told The Hindu there was no evidence that any of the Uighurs involved in the attacks had visited Pakistan, and suggested there were “strict controls” and little support in Pakistan for Uighurs from China.
“I doubt that the attackers were trained in Pakistan,” he said. “They were all locals, from Hotan and Kashgar, and only armed with knives, and had no weapons.”
“The authorities have given no proof that they were trained in Pakistan,” he added. “There needs to be more details and transparency in the investigation.”
At least 20 people were killed in the attacks in Hotan, where two attackers drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians, and in the western Silk Road city of Kashgar, where a knife attack took place at a restaurant.
The regional government in Xinjiang said the attackers “had learned skills of making explosives and firearms in overseas camps of the terrorist group East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Pakistan.”
Mr. Tohti raised questions about the claims in the media that many Uighurs in Kashgar and Hotan, in southern Xinjiang, had travelled across the border to terrorist camps in Pakistan.
“There are tight controls on Uighurs in Pakistan,” he said. “I have a big doubt about these claims. The Pakistani government has never been a friend of Uighurs. Pakistan only likes to use the Uighur problem to get benefits from China.”
Mr. Tohti said there were increasing security controls on Uighurs in Pakistan. On Monday, five Uighurs, including two children and a woman, were arrested in different parts of Pakistan and deported to Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, the Dawn newspaper in Pakistan reported.
Another Uighur, Abduxur Ablmit, who was to be deported, was off-loaded from the China Southern Airlines flight “because the captain refused to accept him for unspecified reasons”.
The five Uighurs were “blindfolded and handcuffed”, the report said, adding that in the past, Pakistani authorities had extradited 14 “separatists” in 1997, seven in 2002 and nine others in 2009.
Members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) have however, been linked to a number of past attacks in China. The Chinese government says the ETIM has set up camps in Pakistan, near its border with Afghanistan.
A Pakistan-trained ETIM member was reportedly linked to an attempted suicide bombing in 2008 on a China Southern flight. The group also claimed to be behind bus bombings in Kunming in 2008, though Chinese officials said they found no evidence to suggest their involvement.
But knife attacks such as last month's, where the attackers appeared to have little training, were more likely carried out by disgruntled locals rather than Pakistan-trained terrorists, Mr. Tohti said.
“Most Uighurs are not even aware of the ETIM, and I doubt that the group even exists,” he said, suggesting that attributing the attacks to terrorist groups obscured local tensions.
Mr. Tohti, regarded as one of the country's foremost experts on Xinjiang's economy, said recent unrest in Hotan and Kashgar was sourced in high unemployment and rising inequalities between Uighurs and the increasing number of majority Han Chinese who have migrated to the region.
Tensions between the two groups erupted in July 2009 in ethnic riots that left at least 197 people dead.
The region's Communist Party chief, Zhang Chunxian, acknowledged last month that the employment problem concerned “ethnic unity and the balance of development.”
The government recently announced plans to raise the region's GDP per capita to the national average by 2015, as well as a $130-million package to tackle unemployment. Plans to set up a Special Economic Zone to boost development in Kashgar have also been unveiled.
But Mr. Tohti said growth that failed to address fundamental inequalities would not solve Xinjiang's problems. He said studies showed that as much as 80 per cent of the unemployed population came from the Uighur community, which makes up around 41 per cent of the region's population.
