Hugh Pope

The third section from my book on the Turks and the Turkic world that relates my experiences with and conditinos of the Uygurs in the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Hugh Pope, SONS OF THE CONQUERORS: The Rise of the Turkic World, pp. 13-19, 41-171 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005)

10. THE ANT AND THE ELEPHANT

THE UYGUR STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE CHINA

An elephant can crush an ant with one footstep. But an

ant inside an elephant’s trunk can madden it to death.

—Uygur proverb

ASLAN’S DAGGER BLADE GLINTED IN THE LATE AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT

streaming through the pointed archways of a bare room on the roof of

the Emin mosque. The young Uygur lovingly watched the knife turn in

his hand, and conversation came to a halt. Distant donkeys brayed as

they pulled carts back from the vineyards that carpeted the ancient oasis

town of Turfan with a luxuriant green. A tock-tock-tock of hammering

floated over from mud-brick towers in which desert winds dried grapes

into small grains of sweetness. From below came the squeak of wheelbarrows.

Chinese workers were ending a day’s work laying out an immaculate,

soulless socialist park right beside the 300-year-old place of prayer

where we sat.

Chinese communist ideologues had long brushed aside the Muslim

identity of the monument. The authorities have named it the “Sugong

Tower,” after its imposing minaret. British traveler Francis Younghusband

was no more respectful of its intricate brickwork when he passed by in

1887, saying it looked “much like a very fat factory chimney.” For me,

however, the minaret was a lighthouse that marked the easternmost

promontory of my journeys through the Turkic world. The Turfan oasis

is the last large Uygur settlement on the road eastward toward China’s

heartland. It lies about 500 miles west of the Great Wall. Abandoned

deep in the desert lie what are said to be the remains of the Jade Gate,

through which trading caravans once passed as they left the realm of

undisputed Chinese sovereignty. There are Turkic communities further

to the east, but here in Turfan, the Turkic world can be said to properly

begin. Wooden-collonaded architecture just like the Emin mosque can

be seen in medieval structures as far west as Turkey, a fragment of a

Central Asian style carried along the Silk Road during the many centuries

of Turkic migrations.

Aslan proudly showed the blue hilt of his knife: “Made in Kashgar,”

it said in English, with the S of Kashgar the wrong way around.

“Why do so many Uygurs carry knives?” I asked.

“When you go out in the dark, you feel safe with a knife,” he said.

“You hold it like this.” The thin 22-year-old wrapped the handle in his

fist, lifted the wickedly curved tip of the blade slightly upwards, and

gripped the lethal weapon close to his belly. A shadow crossed his face,

and the skin tightened on his high cheekbones. “If you pull out a gun,

people challenge you, ‘Go on, shoot.’ But a dagger, they’re frightened of

that.”

A dagger hangs in a scabbard from the waist of many Uygur men in

Xinjiang. Such knives are one reason why ethnic Han Chinese newcomers,

who prefer electronic pagers on their belts, steer clear of Uygur neighborhoods

at night. Most Uygurs, of course, only use the blades for cutting

open the melons they share with all comers throughout the summer.

Aslan resented Chinese rule. Ten years earlier, he said, the authorities

had shut down a religious school in the mosque. “Small groups of

students were saying bad things about the Chinese,” he recalled with

pride.

But daggers and the odd terrorist bomb have proven no match for

the world’s most populous superpower. In the lengthening shadow of the

Emin mosque’s minaret, the Chinese workers had finished their civilizing

mission for the day. A young architect wearing rimless glasses and

cargo-pocketed shorts inspected a new brick terrace. Blank-eyed workers

slaked their thirst with beer and plucked with chopsticks at their

dumplings. The skimpy shirts and trousers, the alcohol, the forbidden

pork meat in the mosque precinct would have horrified a devout Muslim

of the Middle East. Their behavior did not faze Aslan, however, who

quite liked the neat lines of the park. What bothered him was that there

was not one Uygur among them.

“Most of us here in Turfan are Uygurs, but not one of us can get

work in our own mosque,” he said.

Aslan invited me home. Once I picked up speed on my rented bicycle,

he jumped up onto the rear carrier frame. In the old Uygur quarter,

the centuries had worn smooth the remaining beaten-earth streets.

Across a wide new boulevard we walked through a rough, narrow passage

between brick walls that led to a gate in his garden wall. His family

came out to greet us in a dirt courtyard. Aslan’s father took me to pick

a bunch of small Turfan grapes from the tangle of vines on the trellis

overhead, and then his mother invited me to sit on a square platform in

a corner of their garden. Aslan cut open a melon. A conversation of sorts

got cautiously under way with his father Mohammed.

“How is it in Turfan?”

“It is good.”

“I see you have cotton, grapes, melons . . .”

“We have cotton, grapes and melons.”

“So life here is good?”

“Life is good.”

Silence fell. On one level, the common language and gestures made

me feel as though the Uygurs were close to other Turkic nations. On

another, they seemed to know remarkably little of the world outside their

almost medieval domain, or of the broad Turkic resurgence of the past

decade.

“Where are you from?” Mohammed asked.

“From Istanbul, in Turkey,” I responded.

“Oh, isn’t Turkey Muslim?” he asked, brightening considerably.

“Yes, Turks are Muslims,” I said. “But they are also Turks, like the

Uygurs. Aren’t Uygurs Turks as well?”

“Turks?”

The family group perched on and around the wooden platform

looked puzzled before they got my meaning. The name of Turkey had a

positive ring to it, but even though two of Aslan’s friends were studying

there, it seemed to these Uygurs to exist in another, unattainable uni-

verse. Uygurs who heard me speaking an approximation of their language

assumed it was because there were Uygurs where I lived. Few had heard

of Turkish republican founder Kemal Atatürk. Eighty years out of date,

many thought Istanbul was still the capital of Turkey.

My courage faltered in this increasingly political terrain.

“What do you think makes the Uygurs special?” I asked the assembled

company as the evening darkness softened the heat into a dry, blanketing

warmth.

“Once we were great,” volunteered Mohammed, flexing his forearms

and clenching his fist. Then, with a meaningful, silent look and a nod,

he added: “We are nothing now. I’ll leave it at that.”

Mohammed’s sense of a modern Turkic identity might have been weak,

but he was aware of the Turkic empires of the past. The Uygurs first

appeared in the eighth century AD in what is now Mongolia, taking over

leadership of a federation of Turkic tribes from the rulers of the first

explicitly “Turk” state, the Göktürks. They ruled a wide empire for a century

before themselves being forced to move southeast to the area now

known as Xinjiang. New leaders arose in Kashgar in the mid-tenth century,

known as the Karakhanids. The first Turkic encyclopedia, the Divan

ul-Lugat al-Turk, the Compendium of the Turkic Languages, was written

by a Karakhanid nobleman, Mahmut of Kashgar. Around the same time,

Yusuf Hass Hajib of Kashgar wrote his Kutadgu Bilig, a book of advice for

princes, whose 6,700 couplets are the first work of Turkic literature. Two

centuries later, when the Mongol leader Genghis Khan conquered most of

Asia, the educated, literate Uygur elite supplied the bureaucracy of his

empire. Later, I would meet educated Uygurs who noted with satisfaction

that the Mongol, or Yuan dynasty actually ruled the whole of China for

nearly a century from 1279. But the dynasty fell in 1368, and thereafter the

Uygurs and Chinese began to compete for territory and trade. The name

Uygur fell into disuse for centuries and was only revived by Soviet ethnic

planners in 1921.

“Where did the Uygurs go wrong?” I asked Aslan’s father delicately.

That question was answered with a heartfelt sigh. No one spoke. I

had touched on a subject that perplexes Turkic peoples everywhere:

their weakness, disunity and failures in the past century. The Uygurs

have a better excuse than most: their lands were a battlefield between

the far greater powers of the Soviet Union and China for the first half of

the 20th century. After being cast away by Moscow in the late 1940s,

Xinjiang was subjugated by China for the second half of the century.

I tried to compliment him on his bright and hardworking son, Aslan.

But Aslan complained that he could not speak or write proper Chinese,

which blocked his access to good work.

“I always wanted to be a mechanic,” he said bitterly. “Whenever I see

a broken bike, I want to fix it. TVs, watches, radios too. I’d like to open

a shop. But I can’t. I couldn’t get the parts. We’re not allowed permits to

get them. The Chinese don’t let us do anything. All we’re supposed to do

is pick our grapes.”

—

Even a half-century ago, there were clear signs that told travelers

they were passing westward from a Chinese to a Turkic domain. The

high-wheeled Turkic arba carts cut wider ruts into roadways than did the

trucks belonging to the Chinese. Bread appeared in roadside stalls, and

rice became rare. The ubiquitous children’s kites were thinner and flew

higher, and the flat faces of the ethnic Chinese gave way to high Turkic

cheekbones. The sing-song staccato of colloquial Chinese would switch

to the more guttural sounds of Turkic. Today, many of these signs have

vanished; the physical geography has been blurred as the Chinese

expand their settlement around roads and towns and push the Uygurs to

the margins. Although the main body of China is hundreds of miles to

the east of Turfan, it is largely the Chinese who benefit from new highway

connections like the one I followed westward to Urumqi, the capital

of Xinjiang. Uygurs are condemned to a parallel economic, social and

political system, their villages bypassed by the new main roads. China

clearly hopes such policies will lead their culture to dry up in a desert

dead-end.

I boarded an intercity bus in Turfan’s characterless new main square,

and soon we were skirting the edge of the Taklamakan desert. Once the

bed of a great sea, it is now a forbidding expanse of sand dunes whose

Turkic name means “place-where-one-gets-stuck.” Merchants used to

set their course by the bleached bones of dead animals. For the Chinese,

travel is far easier now. The driver of the bus careered around brand-new,

still-empty toll booths. The highway was even and smooth—and, I

learned later, partly financed by the World Bank. Gas stations built to

resemble great pyramids and cartoon fantasies whizzed past, as if in defiance

to the harsh desert haze that hung over us.

After an hour, the rocky east-west range of hills that divides Xinjiang

into two vast, shallow bowls loomed ahead. The bus climbed out of the

Tarim basin and up the rocky river gorge that leads to the northern

plateau. A howling wind lashed the river beside the highway into galloping

waves, whipping spray off the crests in long sheets that hung in the

air over the water for dozens of yards. As we emerged onto the plain at

the top of the gorge, a gigantic icon of China’s modernity stood before

us. With memories of the Uygurs in their shady, timeless Turfan oasis villages

still fresh in my mind, I was amazed to encounter among the barren

hills the swooping propellers of a vast complex of Chinese windmills,

purposefully feeding electricity into a network of high-tension powerlines.

With a new railway line shooting straight into the heart of distant

Kashgar, and new highways all over the territory, there is no doubting

Chinese determination to impose control. Reasons are not hard to find.

Apart from defending China’s northwestern frontier, officials believe

nearly 80 billion barrels of oil may lie under the province, nearly as much

as Iraq or Iran possesses, although so far only 2.5 billion barrels of those

reserves are proven. Gold, uranium, iron and coal are also abundant.

Showing a rare willingness to integrate, the Uygur bus conductress

wore an immaculate uniform and had adopted a no-nonsense, egalitarian

style. But a tacit apartheid otherwise divided our motley caravan. While

a cheerful group of young Chinese workers noisily joked and ate at the

front, Uygur families sat impassively toward the back. One couple jointly

studied a text on how to be good Muslims, and another man cradled a

cage with two canaries. Mildred Cable, a Christian missionary who

worked here in the 1920s, wrote that the “stream of Turki and Chinese

people in the bazaar only mingles superficially for, in fact, each keeps

separate from the other and follows his own way of life. The Chinese

buys at Chinese stalls, the Turki shops among his own people and the

food vendors serve men of their own race. The mentality and outlook of

each nation are profoundly different and neither trusts the other.”

By the time we pulled into the hubbub of the Urumqi bus station, it

was clear that the city had changed out of all recognition since Cable’s

day, when the Turki town and Chinese cantonment were wholly separate.

Urumqi had participated fully in China’s orgy of development in the

1990s, and a dozen tall glass-fronted buildings shimmered in the baking

July heat. The city’s skyline had become the most modern in the whole

of Central Asia. Still, on street level, I was constantly reminded of the

sharp divisions between Chinese and Uygurs. My first stop was to

change money at the regional headquarters of the Bank of China, set in

the shiny new city center. I pushed up the steps to the entrance. I had

not expected a crowd of Uygur wheeler-dealers to accompany me, each

of them waving a wad of currency. I asked them to let me through.

“Don’t go in there!” one scruffy fellow said, answering my Turkish.

“They give a lousy rate.”

The brassy Uygur surprised me by sticking to my shoulder throughout,

right up to the window inside, plastered with credit card and dollar

signs.

“I’d like to change dollars,” I said to the Chinese bank clerk.

The clerk typed out the numbers 80.7 on a calculator. My Uygur

companion coolly picked up the calculator and typed the figure 87.0. I

expected a quick-stepping troupe of Chinese police to come and drag us

both away at any moment. But they didn’t. I looked at the young clerk,

who watched me impassively. The Uygur’s devil-may-care attitude made

me more confident. I began to bargain.

“Give me 89,” I said.

“OK, 88,” he retorted.

“What about the police?” I asked.

He laughed. “Oh, they won’t do anything, those Chinese. But we

should step outside.”

I began to walk with him. The Chinese teller betrayed no sign of

interest. Outside, the moneychanger produced a fat bunch of notes

and began to count them into my hand. He didn’t appear to care

whether I had any money myself. My trust broadened. It seemed just

a small step from this pavement in China to my home street in Turkey.

Turks feel honor-bound to act as though the actual transfer of money

to complete a deal is a matter of supreme indifference to them. This

habit can infuriate foreign business partners. But it is a boon when I

step out to the shops in Istanbul and find I have forgotten my wallet.

Still, it was odd that the Urumqi bank tellers were almost exclusively

Chinese, while the black market was staffed entirely by Uygurs, hungrily

waiting for Chinese men in sleek cars to pull up to them and slide down

their electric windows.

“Why are the Uygurs the only ones who work the currency market?”

I asked as we shook hands warmly on concluding our transaction.

“There are no jobs for us,” he said.

Our exchange had probably netted him a day’s factory wage, but he

clearly didn’t regard what he did as a ‘real’ job. Throughout the Turkic

realm, paternalistic regimes make the local population believe that the

only jobs that matter are sinecures in the state bureaucracy, which often

come with lifelong access to housing, health benefits, privileges and

pensions. Yet official employment was hard to come by. A hard-working

Uygur teller in a bank in Kashgar told me that she was one of just four

Uygurs working among 25 employees in the branch, and had no hope of

becoming the boss. Xinjiang Airways in-flight magazine talked of a happy

family of minorities in the province. But no Uygurs were allowed to be

taxi drivers at the airports. Jazzy Central Asian silk neck-bows decorated

the collars of the air hostesses, but all of them appeared to be Chinese.

A kind of apartheid was in operation at Urumqi airport. The Chinese

restaurant above the departure hall came complete with attentive waitresses

and excellent food. The pokey little “Muslim Restaurant” could

only be reached through an ouside service door, where one might have

expected to find a public toilet.

The Chinese bank building was built on the edge of the Uygur quarter,

where it dwarfed what was left of the poor, untended, two-story

Uygur houses across the street. I wandered into the old neighborhood

over broken pavements and dusty roadways.

“Hey!” someone called.

I stopped in my tracks on a twisting street between the houses. A

neatly dressed figure squatting by a pile of melons was waving me over.

His arm’s urgent “come on” gesticulations were an exact pantomime of

an Istanbul traffic policeman. Choosing a melon, he flashed his dagger

through the yellow flesh, and we shared slice after slice of cool, succulent

sweetness. Erkin was his name, and he explained that he owned a

clothes shop in the old quarter. Ten yards behind where we squatted,

Chinese bulldozers had cut another great hole in the fabric of the Uygur

town. A colony of Chinese laborers was laying out the foundations of a

new mammoth structure. We exchanged looks.

“The Chinese,” he said flatly.

Erkin invited me back to his shop. We strolled on together through

the fragmented architectural battlefield in which modernity was visibly

crushing tradition as each day went by. Chinese women, scrupulously

clean and purposeful, cycled by in neat short skirts and straw hats made

of plastic. By contrast, the disenfranchised Uygurs of Urumqi generally

adopted a ragged, shambolic look.

Private Uygur gathering places were equally unprepossessing: at one

restaurant I passed with Erkin, kebabs sizzled on outdoor metal braziers,

the workhorse of Turkic restaurants from here to Europe. But the grubby

plates and stringy mutton seemed poor cousins to the marinated grills

that emerge from under the embossed and polished copper chimney

hoods of Turkish city restaurants. Here, a layer of grime seemed to coat

every surface, including chairs, tables and walls.

Erkin caught me looking disapprovingly at the street scene.

“You see?” he said. “The Chinese have done nothing for this street,

just because it’s Uygur.”

I disagreed. “Why don’t local people do anything to clear up this mess?”

“What can we do?” Erkin replied with a sigh of defeat. We reached

his shop, a corner of a cooperative where he had four trestle tables. The

priciest, fanciest dress cost $2.50.

“So the Chinese let you do business? Can you get rich?” I asked. I

hinted at the success of Uygur businesswoman Rebiya Kader. A mother

of 11, working from near this very spot, she had built up her Urumqi

laundry into a clothing and trading empire that did business with Central

Asia and Turkey. But she was already falling out of favor, accused of trying

to foster Uygur independence. The Chinese authorities jailed her

one month after my visit.

“They let you do business, as long as it’s just business,” Erkin replied.

To prosper under Chinese rule, Uygurs had to submit and work in

the small, undeveloped space allotted to them by the regime. While the

Chinese built with bulldozers, steamrollers, piledrivers and tall cranes,

pairs of Uygur men still solemnly swung great five-foot lengths of tree

trunk in an ancient rhythm to settle foundations and beat earth floors

flat. Erkin didn’t need to show me the way back to the Chinese new

town. A 40-story blue and silver hotel, built by the Chinese Ministry of

Communications, reared up overhead like a tidal wave about to engulf

the district. As I headed for it, I walked passed dwellings that had been

bulldozed that very morning. The era of separate, independent cantonments

for Uygurs and Chinese described by 19th century travelers

seemed to be over. Tall Chinese buildings were converging on the Uygur

quarter from all sides, gobbling it up, house by house. Grim-faced

Uygurs, who said they had been allocated new apartments in soulless

modern apartment blocks on the edge of town, picked their way through

the rubble to retrieve roofing beams, windows, doors and bed frames.

—

China is taking a risk by stoking up Uygur resentment while brushing

aside Isa Alptekin’s model of peaceful Uygur national development.

An old Turkish proverb has it that “you can hit a Turk a ten times, and

he’ll do nothing. The eleventh time, he’ll kill you.” I was to stumble onto

many signs of rising fear, stress and anger as I began my journey home

to Istanbul.

I had hoped to make my first stage through the mountains into the

Kyrgyz Republic.Like many a traveler before me, and the Uygurs themselves,

I found that the great mountain ranges that rise up round much

of Xinjiang are often its prison, cutting its people off from the outside

world. My car toiled up the foothills towards peaks wrapped in dark,

angry clouds. Wide riverbeds that lay dry for much of the year overflowed

with rushing brown waters that tossed boulders and splintered

tree branches like pebbles and twigs. I reached the Chinese customs

gate just as a minibus full of Chinese soldiers arrived from the passes

high above. The soldiers were streaked with mud and soaked to the skin.

The passport officer gleefully reported that the pass would remain closed

for weeks. The road had washed away.

To by-pass the mountains, I had to use Xinjiang’s far-flung border

with Kazakhstan. This gave me the excuse to visit Yining, known in

Uygur as Guldja, the capital of the province of Ili. It was off the tourist

trail, and was the scene in February 1997 of some of the worst clashes

between Uygurs and the Chinese security forces. After a crackdown on

Uygur traditional public discussion groups known as meshreps and a

bloody altercation during the detention of popular religious leaders, hundreds

of Uygurs had taken to the streets, shouting Islamic slogans,

demanding jobs and calling for equal treatment of Uygurs. Protests, knifings

of Chinese, attacks on government buildings and burnings of cars

continued for two days. Riot police sealed off the city for two weeks, during

which time up to 5,000 people were arrested and hundreds of

detainees treated with extreme brutality. At least nine people were killed

in the disturbances, including four policemen. Nine others were later

executed, mostly Uygurs.

I felt the continued raw tensions of this frontier town during my first

evening meal, at a pavement restaurant in the Chinese part of town. The

meal of stewed snake, cooked in a fiery sauce in a wok on my table, was

challenging enough. But as I sat gnawing on an unyielding cartilage, a

scuffle started outside a nearby nightclub. After much shouting and

brawling, a badly beaten Chinese man emerged from the scrum in the

half-darkness. His face streaked with blood, he galloped past my table to

the restaurant’s open-air kitchen. Grabbing a meat cleaver, he charged

back, hurling the knife past my head towards his assailants. The heavy

blade missed and clattered along the concrete. The combatants melted

away. I was frozen in surprise. My Chinese fellow-diners watched in rapt

passivity. Within seconds, it was as if nothing had happened. A chauffeur-

driven car pulled up, and a sharply made-up girl stepped out and

sauntered over to the nightclub doorway. She simply ignored the shadow

of at least one man beaten in the scuffle, who still lay unconscious on

the ground.

Back at the hotel, I asked a Chinese woman in the lobby why

nobody had intervened. Her answer exposed a Chinese weakness. “The

problem for us Chinese here in Xinjiang is that if an Uygur gets into a

fight, all the other Uygurs come to help him. But if a Chinese person

gets into a fight, all the other Chinese look the other way,” she

explained. When ethnic tension rose in Yining, she said, any Chinese

residents who could quickly found business in China proper. Indeed,

many of the Chinese I spoke to were required by law or jobs to stay in

Xinjiang, and longed to go back to the safer, developed, go-ahead east of

the country.

Most Chinese depended on the central government for work. About

one third of the Han Chinese population in the province, or 2.4 million

people, worked in the “Bingtuan,” or Xinjiang Production and

Construction Corps. This organization had its origins in settlers from

Mao’s disbanded Chinese army units, and since 1953 it has colonized

Xinjiang’s borderlands. It controls nearly half of the territory of Xinjiang

and works nearly one-third of its arable land. But its budget and politics

answer directly to the central government. It seems possible that if state

support collapses for some reason, this subsidized Chinese presence

might pour out again as fast as Chinese statistics show Han Chinese are

now flowing in. Something similar happened in neighboring Kazakhstan,

which was taken over by Russia at about the same time as China formally

annexed Xinjiang as the ‘New Borderland’ in 1884. When the

Soviet Union fell apart and Kazakhstan won independence in 1991, ethnic

Russians quickly haemorrhaged out, even though there were more

Russians than Kazakhs and they had grown much closer than Chinese

and Uygurs have ever done. For sure, Chinese garrisons have frequently

held sway over part or all of Xinjiang since ancient times, making one

name for the region “Chinese Turkestan.” Mao ordered he colonization

to rebalance the paradox that he himself articulated: “We say China is a

country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population; in fact,

it is the Han nationality whose population is large, and the minority

nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.” Still,

over the centuries, the region has spun out of Beijing’s control more

often than not.

The next morning in Yining, I discovered that the placid appearance

of an enchanting Uygur quarter was deceptive. The houses were large

and comfortable, and several owners were rebuilding their houses even

more grandly. In an exception to the aggrieved Uygur mainstream, the

border trade had been kind to the town’s Uygur entrepreneurial class. A

group of young men stood chatting at an intersection.

“How are you, well?” I asked.

“How are you, well?” one of them replied, the traditional Uygur

response.

“What a lovely area this is,” I went on. “How old are the houses

here?”

“About 70 or 100 years old. They’re real Uygur houses,” the man said

proudly.

“How many people live in each one?”

“Eight or nine.”

“How much does a house cost?”

“Oh, $4,000, $6,000, maybe $8,000 for a big one. The Chinese, you

know, they have to pay $8,000 for a much smaller house elsewhere in

the country.”

The Uygur houses were indeed palatial by Chinese standards. This

seemed to be a lovely place to live. Except for one thing. They were

Uygurs in China, and for them, threats lay everywhere.

“What’s that written on the wall?” I continued, pointing out the

Uygur Arabic lettering that was one of the only decorations on the

smooth mud plaster.

“It says, ‘Don’t make children,’” the man said, laughing and ruffling

his young son’s hair.

Sometimes one, sometimes three slogans were printed neatly across

the walls next to each doorway, spray-painted through stencils. The ones

I could read exhorted inhabitants to remember that “Family Planning is

Good,” “Making Few Babies is a Virtue” and “Few Babies is a Top

Government Policy.” Even though allowed one more child than Han

Chinese in China’s strict one-baby population control system, Central

Asian tradition pushed many to try to beat the system, registering new

babies with all manner of female relatives. I remembered other Uygurs

talking resentfully of Chinese officials coming into their houses to feel

the bellies of women, and their fear of forced abortions, carried out even

late in pregnancy.

Watching me puzzle through the anti-baby slogans, one of my interlocutor’s

friends whispered something in his ear. Apparently a warning

not to talk to me, he brushed it aside. I kept smiling.

“What happens if you have more than two children?” I asked.

“I just wouldn’t,” he said.

Another chipped in: “You’d have to pay a $2,000 fine.”

That was a huge amount of money.

“What job do you do?” I asked the boy’s father.

“None of us here has a job. We just sell shirts and socks in the market,”

he said.

The suspicious man intervened again. “What sort of questions are

these? You’d better be careful.”

“They’re normal questions,” the friendly man replied.

“But he asks about everything you’re doing!”

“So,” I said, trying to brazen it out. “It’s all very quiet here, then…”

“Quiet??” the friendly man shot back.

A liquid fear surged through his body. He looked at me with wideopen

eyes, went pale, and staggered back to squat at the base of a garden

wall. He took his head in his hands and started shaking it from side

to side. He plucked his shirt off his chest between his thumb and forefinger,

and flapped it back and forth, as if to fan himself with cooling air.

“Don’t ask me any more questions. I’m afraid,” he said in a small

voice.

Just watching him set my heart racing. It seemed so incongruous on

this delightful soft suburban morning.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand,” I started to say, backing away

to beat as dignified a retreat as possible. Only later did I learn that three

Uygurs who spoke to foreign reporters in Yining after the 1997 riots disappeared

into the Chinese gulag, and were rumored to have been sentenced

to more than 15 years in jail. The reporters were expelled.

“You should be sorry,” the man’s sharp-eyed comrade shouted. After

I’d put a dozen yards between us, he followed with a parting shot:

“Mister B.B.C.”

I walked hastily out of the Uygur quarter. Its edge was marked by a

squalid restaurant where a fat, sweating chef gyrated round a flaming

fire, hedged in by smoke-blackened walls. Somebody hustled up behind

me. I expected a policeman to grip my elbow. Instead I turned to see a

mad-eyed boy waiter rushing past. He disappeared into a gap in a wall

that passed as the restaurant’s doorway and popped up on the other side.

“You English?” he called out at me. “You want hashish? Good hashish?”

I did not need hashish to make my head spin as I made my way onto

the wide modern boulevard that marked the beginning of the “civilized”

Chinese part of town. I felt doubly guilty. I had no plans to betray

anyone. But I had put these Uygurs in danger simply by talking to them.

Then I had sought refuge in the part of town built by their Chinese

oppressors.

It was hard to predict the future for one of the Turkic world’s oldest

settled and urban cultures. Still, as recently as the 1980s, few would

have foreseen the emergence of an independent Kazakhstan or

Turkmenistan, countries dominated by Soviet methods of government

and whose indigenous pre-Soviet state traditions were often as fluid as

that of the Uygurs. Indeed, many of the more rural Turkic populations

are often barely a generation or two away from their nomad past.

President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan herded sheep in his youth, as did

Turkey’s former President Demirel. Some Kazakhs still make their way

by truck each summer to the high pastures of northwest China. My visit

to their camp was the moment on my journeys that I came closest to the

Turkic idyll, a glimpse of the pre-modern life of the Central Asian hills

and steppe.

Second posting of Uygur-related extracts from

Hugh Pope, SONS OF THE CONQUERORS: The Rise of the Turkic World, pp. 13-19, 41-171 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005)

9. THE GHOST OF ISA BEG

KNIGHT-ERRANT OF TURKESTAN

I was never carried away by the valuable Chinese gifts of gold,

silver, silk and sweet words. I did not forget how many Turks

who had been deceived by such things had died, how many

had been forced under the Chinese yoke.

—Stone inscription by Bilge Kagan, an 8th century AD

Turkic ruler in what is now Mongolia

FROM HIS SPARSELY FURNISHED APARTMENT IN AN OUTER SUBURB OF

Istanbul, Isa Alptekin, the late leader of the Uygur Turks of China, never

imagined that he could free his people by force. The grand old man of

this large but little-known Turkic minority always spoke the language of

passive resistance, as did his much better-known comrade in the struggle

with China for greater rights, the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Alptekin clearly

felt vindicated by the fact I had sought him out for a news agency

interview in 1988, a rare moment of recognition after an extraordinary

series of protests in China during which his name had been chanted by

Uygur crowds. Alptekin chuckled lightly when I asked him if he had

agents at work, as China alleged.

“Let’s just say I’m popular,” the nearly blind old gentleman said, his

tall frame motionless on a sofa. Although happy to be noticed, he was not

sanguine about the outcome of the unrest in Xinjiang. The Uygurs might

number eight million souls, but they were a drop in the ocean of 1.2 billion

Chinese. “We are few, and they are many,” he said. “They have the

guns; we don’t.”

In Chinese, Xinjiang means “new borderland.” In the hearts of the

Uygurs, who still number half of the population of this remote region

that makes up one-sixth of China’s landmass, it is still old East

Turkestan. They remember that two millennia ago China built the Great

Wall to keep their unruly ancestors out. They also know that 1,200 years

ago the Uygurs founded the first major Turkic state, and that Han

Chinese only started arriving in large numbers after the communist

takeover in the last half of the 20th century. The arrogance and highhandedness

of the Beijing authorities have made them as resented

among local people as they are in Tibet.

It wasn’t just Isa Alptekin’s archaic turns of phrase that told of his

origin in a distant corner of the constellation of Turkic peoples. The pre-

20th century links between western and eastern Turks were alive in his

memory, too. The Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz had sent advisers and arms

to the Uygurs in China in the 1860s. “My grandfather was trained by the

Ottoman officers and saw battle,” he recalled. They raised a substantial

army and won diplomatic recognition from both Russia and Britain in

what for thirteen years would prove to be the Uygurs’ most successful

rebellion. “When I was five years old, my grandfather used to tell us

about it, and when he got excited, he’d stand up and order us about in

Istanbul Turkish: ‘At ease! Attention! March! One, two, one, two!’’

The old man’s mood darkened as he recounted how China crushed

his experiment in Turkic nationalist government. This bloomed after the

nationalist group of which Alptekin was a leading member won the

region’s first and last free local election in 1947, part of the confused

interregnum as Russia began to disengage from Eastern Turkestan in the

1940s. It was snuffed out when the communist army of Mao-Tse Tung

re-established full control in September 1949. Subsequent resistance,

mainly from Uygurs and Kazakhs, was stamped out. Waves of Turkic

refugees scattered for safety. Isa, his family and 450 others fled in midwinter

to Pakistan over the 14,000-foot passes of the Karakorum mountain

range. One of Alptekin’s sons, Arslan, today living in Istanbul, was

five years old during the 10-week trek. The pain, cold and misery were

so intense, Arslan would later tell me, that he even saw a horse weep.

The frostbitten toes of one of his feet had to be amputated when they

arrived in Pakistan. His younger sister died.

In the ensuing years of exile, Alptekin traveled widely to drum up

international support for the Uygur cause. Like his ally, the Dalai Lama,

he preached against violence, terrorism, intolerance or Islamic fundamentalism.

But he died without seeing his native land again.

My first conversation with the elder Alptekin lasted all afternoon.

Little did I realize that our chat would lead me, more than a decade later,

to his birthplace in Yengisar, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in

northwestern China, nearly 2500 miles away from where I sat. Much

had changed by then. The old man had died in 1995. The last time I saw

him was on a chilly winter morning, and he was depressed. It was soon

after Azerbaijan’s “Black January” in 1990, and he believed the Soviet

government had crushed the Azeri Popular Front in order to send a warning

shot across the bow of all nationalist movements active in other

Turkic republics. I asked him whether the bravery of the Azeris would

inspire the Uygurs.

“There is a thrill going through the Turkic world,” he said. When I

asked what this meant for the Uygurs, he paused. He spoke of the need

for caution, remembering his own futile attempts to enlist international

help in the past. He correctly predicted that the Turkish state would do

nothing for his people. In the late 1990s, in order not to offend China,

it re-issued a ban on the public display of the blue-and-white star-andcrescent

of East Turkestan, even as Uygur youths were being sentenced

to death for hanging it on the vast statue of Mao in Kashgar.

“A little help would have meant a lot to us,” Isa sighed. “It would

have told us we were not alone, that we had a friend, that we could one

day be happy too.”

—

It was in Kashgar in 1999 that I boarded a crowded bus to reach Isa

Alptekin’s birthplace. The two-hour journey to Yengisar was a bumpy

ride. Chinese workers swarmed over the highway leading out of town.

They were busy knitting mats of steel reinforcing bars to turn it into a

vast concrete boulevard. The new carriageway looked able to carry

columns of tanks, which was probably the point. Alongside the raw

swathe that Chinese roadbuilders had cut through the ancient fabric of

the city, mudbrick Uygur houses and gardens lay ripped open and abandoned.

By the time we reached the outskirts, dust kicked up by this and

other engineering works had brought visibility down to a few dozen

yards. The leveling of the ancient city had been going on for decades.

Militants of Mao’s Cultural Revolution had started in the 1960s by cutting

down the trees that used to shade the roads. Next to go were the

cooling water channels that ran beside the streets. Now, apparently, it

was the turn of the streets themselves to be erased from memory.

Likewise, the wide tarmac highway that entered Yengisar bulldozed

right through the heart of the mud-brick town that Alptekin would have

known. It was a hot midday, and there was little traffic and few passersby

on the street. Over the road from the small, white-tiled bus-station,

however, people stirred among the shaded tables of the New Silk Road

Muslim Restaurant. I wandered over. It was a rough-and-ready Uygur

establishment where the chef, 19-year-old Suleyman, sweated over a

flaming wok on a stove made of an old oil drum.

Suleyman quickly whipped me up a standard Kashgar goulash—

strips of beef, green pepper, tomato, and lashings of chilli pepper—

served with steamed white bread dumplings. He and his family joined

me at the table, friendly and curious. They loved a joke. When I showed

off my tool-filled American knife, Suleyman pulled out his Uygur blade

and laughed hugely at the fear in my eyes as he played out a lightningquick

game of dagger slashing. The point flashed within fractions of an

inch from my chest and arms. Later, while I ate, I asked Suleyman tentatively

if anyone in Yengisar remembered someone called Isa Alptekin.

He shook his head; if he recognized the name, he didn’t show it. I tried

Isa Beg, the name by which he is known to generations of Turkic nationalists.

Suleyman seemed genuinely ignorant of it, so we went back to discussing

a topic he found of much more pressing importance: how he

would get the money he needed to wed.

Fortified by the hearty repast, I set out to determine whether

indeed Yengisar’s most famous son had become a non-person in his

hometown. Shady tree-lined paths wandered between earthen roads

flanked by water channels that brought a delightful coolness. Tanned

children splashed happily behind little dams. Stopping from time to

time at garden gates that stood ajar, I looked into the courtyards of

houses. Many sported small charcoal forges and piles of scrap car

parts, where craftsmen kept up a knife-making tradition that makes the

name of Yengisar famous among Uygurs. A group of brightly dressed

women observed my investigations and, giggling over my Turkish-style

Uygur, paused to chat.

The women, too, denied knowledge of Isa Beg. But after a few

whispers, they directed one of the girls, a pretty young teacher, to take

me to a man called Karim, who, they said, would be able to answer my

questions. As she and I headed back to the town center, she recognized

a man passing by on a moped as Karim’s relative. He stopped, flashing

us a big smile. We hailed a horse-drawn cart and he led the way to the

other side of town, past big plots of farmland fringed by tall poplar trees.

We stopped at a new, concrete house of unusually grand dimensions.

The relative led me through a big door and a tunnel, like the entrance

to a medieval English inn. Then we were suddenly out in the sun again.

Here in a courtyard oasis of greenery, sat Karim, a man in his 60s with

big, heavy spectacles, a diamond-studded gold watch and a goatee

beard.

Karim spoke fluent Turkish. After the usual pleasantries about my

journey, I came round to the subject of Isa Beg, delicately, I thought, by

talking of living in Turkey and the new park in Istanbul that had been

named in his honor.

“Ah, so you’re a journalist, I suppose?”

“No, no, well, perhaps a kind of writer,” I lied. I felt like an imposter.

China forbids foreign writers from touring Xinjiang without lengthy

arrangements for guides, interpreters and minders. I had come here on

a tourist visa, and all of us could be in deep trouble if my true purpose

were revealed. Human rights reports cite “political conversations” as a

reason that Uygurs are sentenced to many years in jail or “re-education

through labor.”

Karim patted me on the knee and smiled knowingly. I met his eyes

and we let the subject drop. But he gave away little about the story of his

life. In his childhood he had been a next-door neighbor of the Alptekin

family, and had joined the column of Uygur refugees who escaped over

the mountains with Isa Beg to Pakistan as the Chinese communists took

over. After exile in Pakistan and India, he moved, as did several hundred

Uygurs, to Saudi Arabia. Enriched by a restaurant business, he had

retired to Istanbul and taken a much younger Uygur wife, Fatima. But

seven years before he had given in to her entreaties that they return

home to Yengisar. He had let out his Istanbul flat, and his foreign income

made him a wealthy man here.

“We manage. Everything we need is smuggled between here and

Turkey,” Karim said.

“Are you free to travel?” I asked as he invited me to pick a peach

from one of the fruit trees in the courtyard of his two-story mansion. The

fruit’s flesh was white, juicy and exquisite.

“Coming back is easy. Going away again is hard. They won’t give us

our passports. I feel like one of my parrots,” Karim said, pointing to his

large collection of caged birds. One of them was in a pagoda-style cage,

which, paradoxically, had actually been made in Turkey.

“Is Isa Beg’s house still standing? Can I visit that?”

Relatives of Isa Beg lived in the old Alptekin family house, Karim

said, but his land was now buried under the asphalt of the new crossroads

in the center of town. He passed me some soft apricots and slices

of a watermelon brought over by Fatima. He spoke of the former delights

of wandering through old Kashgar’s orchards, now entombed under

Chinese urban development.

“Who remembers Isa Beg? What about The Cause of Eastern

Turkestan?” I asked, using the title of one of Isa Beg’s books.

“It’s finished. Oppression has buried it,” he said with conviction.

“There’s nothing left here. People don’t have enough money to think

about Eastern Turkestan. Everyone is afraid.”

—

Fear had not crushed Uygur resentment or the dreams of Isa Beg,

however. Back in Kashgar, one man dared to speak openly of the Uygurs’

burning ambitions. I was in the knife market, and my Turkic chatter with

the owner of a knife-sharpening stone—I was trying to get a respectable

edge on my personal blade, and he required me to spin it by pulling a

long strap—attracted the attention of a well-dressed Uygur gentleman.

He introduced himself. In his thirties and of middling height, he spoke

fluent Istanbul Turkish. After awhile, our increasingly intense conversation

began to draw stares in the bustling thoroughfare, and he invited me

to dinner at his house that evening.

Mahmut met me at the entrance of Kashgar’s great Idgah mosque. I

followed him through a maze of streets into a narrow alleyway, where he

suddenly ducked into a low doorway. The entrance gave no clue to what

lay inside, a fine, well-kept house. Built round a spacious courtyard, it

shared the comfortable privacy and the wooden-colonnaded verandah of

traditional Central Asian townhouses over the mountains in Tashkent,

Samarkand and Bokhara.

When we walked in, Mahmut’s family was sitting on carpets on the

verandah, watching television. The womenfolk looked up and were

about to scatter modestly, but Mahmut told them to stay since we were

going inside. Mahmut’s father and brother got up to greet me with a

warmth that put me at ease. My host poured water from an old, intricately

beaten copper pitcher to wash my hands, catching it afterwards in

a matching wide-rimmed bowl on the ground. Then I was led through to

the main reception room. Mirrors winked behind white stucco tracings

and intricate woodwork. After I took my seat on a floor cushion against

a wall, Mahmut pointed out brass and porcelain family treasures in little

onion-domed alcoves. A feast of dried nuts, fruits and melons lay on

the table waiting to be eaten. The political diet, however, would have

made a Chinese secret policeman choke.

“We can’t get a homeland without bloodshed,” Mahmut declared

matter-of-factly, when I asked him an innocuous question about the

Uygurs’ future. “Back in the 1980s, we might have succeeded with nonviolent

methods. But now it’s too late.”

I had stumbled onto an educated Uygur who could speak candidly

for the Turkic cause. It was a far cry from the caution of Isa Alptekin.

Mahmut had lived abroad for many years. His father began to send his

children to Turkey in the 1960s, just in case the Uygurs were driven

out of Xinjiang entirely. I supposed that it was this familiarity with another

world that made him comfortable confiding some of his more incendiary

thoughts with me. I revealed to him my identity as a writer and assured

him I would not reveal his true name. Our shared fluency in Turkish and

love of Turkey facilitated communication immeasurably.

“Our model should be a violent uprising, like that of the Chechens,”

he continued. I protested that the prospect of an endless, unspeakably

bloody civil war against a powerhouse like China was hardly an appealing

model for national liberation. He shook off my objections. “The

Chinese are frightened of us,” he insisted. “That’s why you can’t see one

of them on the streets after 9 p.m. They never come into our quarter

here. There’s no furniture in their houses! Just one incident, and they’ll

all run away. All the new building you see going on is just for show.”

He paused to allow his words to sink in, and then he proclaimed

gravely, “In fifteen years, either China or communism will have collapsed.

There will either be a democratic China, or we’ll have an independent

state.”

A knock on the door from Mahmut’s mother signaled the arrival of

hot food and gave me a moment to collect my thoughts. Mahmut stood

up and brought in the tray. I savored the scent rising from the deep bowls

of coriander-flavored mantı, a kind of ravioli, a dish served throughout

the Turkic world. As we began to eat, Mahmut continued his story. It

was in Turkey, he said, that his nationalist consciousness was born.

While living in Istanbul, he discovered that just a few hundred words

separated Uygur and Turkish. He also found that he felt completely at

home when visiting with other Turkic peoples, such as the Uzbeks. “The

Uzbeks are the same as us,” he maintained as he reached for another

spoonful of food, “The only difference is in the accent. They speak in the

back of the throat, we speak with our tongues.”

Mahmut’s profession as an importer and exporter of goods from

Turkic lands, a rare incarnation of trade along the full length of the “Silk

Road,” seemed to fulfill his dream of Turkish togetherness. From Turkey,

he ordered clothes, which are preferred in Central Asia for their quality

and stylishness over competing Chinese or Pakistani brands. These

arrived by truck and plane in the neighboring Kyrgyz Republic, where an

Uygur partner received them, packaged them and sent them down to

Kashgar over the high mountain passes. In return, appropriately enough,

Mahmut sent back scarves made of silk.

I asked if Mahmut’s trade with other Turkic countries-almost all of

which was conducted illegally-translated into outside support for the

nationalist cause.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Once we do something,” he said evasively,

“I’m sure we’ll get support. In the meantime, all we ask is that that

other Turkic countries don’t sell us out.”

The portents, though, were not auspicious. Support could once be

counted on from the main Uygur expatriate communities in nearby

Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. The latter was even home to what

may be the world’s only Institute of Uygur Studies, thanks to past Soviet

indulgence of the Uygurs as a tool against China. But the Soviet Union

was no more and the Central Asian states were vulnerable to pressure

from China. Any Uygurs there had to cease providing aid to the rebels.

Mahmut’s partner had been interrogated and harassed in the Kyrgyz

Republic for giving interviews to a separatist radio station.

Uygur exile groups also existed in Europe, Mahmut said, particularly

Germany, to where Uygur students who joined in China’s 1980s prodemocracy

movement had fled after the massacre in Tianammen Square

in 1989. The Eastern Turkistani Union of Europe claimed at one point

to have thousands of members. But amid accusations of Uygur Islamist

terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, a crackdown by the German authorities

curtailed the group’s ability to raise funds and remit them home.

I mentioned my meeting in Istanbul with Isa Alptekin, who had

complained bitterly at the attention the outside world lavishes on Tibet,

while ignoring the Uygurs. Uygurs are cold-shouldered by Muslims

because they are Turks, Alptekin had said to me, and by the West

because they are Muslims.

Mahmut nodded in solemn agreement, and began to recite the litany

of Uygur protest and Chinese repression. The modern protest movement

was born in 1985, he said, when students demonstrated against Chinese

nuclear testing at Lop Nor, deep in the Taklamakan Desert. Hardliners in

Beijing blamed the “open door” policy of the late 1970s-which liberalized

travel, economic enterprise and mosque-building-for awakening Uygur

national sentiment. Others pointed to the erosion of Russian control over

its Central Asian territories, culminating in the Soviet collapse and rise of

Turkic states. Whatever the cause, the violence in Xinjiang soon escalated.

Riots against discrimination broke out in the late 1980s. Some crowds

chanted the name of Isa Beg, prompting my colleague in Beijing to alert

me in Istanbul to this novel event. Chinese police met them with teargas,

bullets and mass arrests. In 1990, riot police killed up to 50 Uygur protestors

at Baran, south of Kashgar, after the entire town, angered by the

sudden closure of a mosque, had risen in rebellion against Chinese rule.

Uygur nationalists retaliated with attacks against government targets

throughout Xinjiang. The separatists even struck in Beijing, where they

carried out a series of bus bombings in the early and mid-1990s.

When China launched its ‘Strike Hard’ campaign to crush domestic

dissent in April 1996, Mahmut told me, it only strengthened Uygur

hatred of the Chinese. Ten months later, during the Muslim holy month

of Ramadan, Uygurs in the industrial city of Yining staged the largest

demonstrations yet. Though he opposed the murder of civilians,

Mahmut said he had no reservations about attacks on Chinese police or

military targets. The inevitable reprisals, he said, were justified by the

greater cause.

“A lot of young men are ready to die,” he added, abandoning his now

cold bowl of manti and calling to his mother for a new pot of pale green

tea.

I had certainly met Uygurs who seemed bitter enough to follow

the old Turkic proverb of suicidal rebellion: “Better to be a wolf for a

day than a mouse for a hundred.” But I doubted it was the case with

Mahmut. He’d had his own share of run-ins with the authorities, who

accused him of helping Uygur rebels. But he seemed far too pragmatic

to jeopardize his comfortable standing for an abstract cause. He couldn’t

even challenge his mother over her decision on a bride, while he preferred

his lover in Istanbul. In many ways, Mahmut seemed more of a

frustrated businessman than a revolutionary.

A distant muezzin sang out the call to prayer, and our conversation

drew to a close. Mahmut and his brother joined the family for prayers

in the courtyard. The father declaimed the Arabic cadences in a deep,

unaffected voice. It was moving to see such natural piety, passed on

from father to son for generations. I was asked to leave soon afterwards.

Mahmut said his mother, who had overheard snippets of our

conversation, was nervous that there might be another police raid on

their home.

“We don’t know whom to trust,” he said glumly as he led me to the

door, “There are spies on every corner.”

The Uygur cause could look doomed in perpetuity. It has almost no

foreign support, its diaspora is fractious and far-flung, and the best-

known local Uygur nationalist leader, businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer,

was thrown in jail by China in 1999. She was sentenced in 2001 to eight

years in prison, later reduced to seven, for “providing secret information

to foreigners”—namely, mailing two local newspapers to her husband

abroad. At a meeting in Germany in April 2004, most mainstream exile

opposition groups founded a World Uygur Congress that firmly backed

the late Isa Alptekin’s policy of peaceful struggle to free the people of

East Turkestan. But it still tussled with a rival and more aggressive East

Turkestan Government in Exile, set up a few months later in the United

States. It was small wonder that Isa Alptekin used to lament that the

Uygurs risk extinction, like panda bears.

Still, there was another way of looking at the Uygurs’ chances.

China’s jailing of Kadeer propelled her into Uygur public consciousness,

and the adoption of her cause by groups like Amnesty International gave

her international fame. Powerful outsiders were beginning to take

notice: in 2004, the Uygur Association of America received $75,000

from the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, a first such

grant for an Uygur exile group.

More importantly, China was not winning the hearts and minds of

the Uygurs. Their resistance was not just in the fervor of their prayers or

in gestures like keeping their clocks and watches two hours behind

Chinese standard time on an unofficial “Xinjiang time.” It was a broad

cultural rejection of China that reaches its most vivid and anarchic

apogee each week in the pageant of the Kashgar Sunday Market.

Streams of people begin arriving at dawn, with long queues of donkey

carts from Uygur villages jostling past the usual traffic of Chinese-driven

motor vehicles. Plunging through narrow, dusty alleyways into the

pushing crowds, I felt as if I’d landed in a different century, and, if not a

separate future country, certainly a region and people that showed no

sign of becoming a homogenous part of China.

In fact, I felt that as a Briton I might be culturally closer to the tidy,

westernized Chinese tourists in the market than to the Uygurs, who

were resolutely Central Asian. In a clearing between donkey-cart parks

and animal enclosures, a street circus re-enacted the entertainments of

a medieval Turkic court. An Uygur man with a reedy horn cajoled a boy

tightrope walker through faked stumbles and dramatically petulant

protests. The boy was slowly making his way up a thick cord strung at a

steeply ascending angle from the ground towards two long poles crossed

at their tips. Then came a flatter section of cord to the other end, a tall

mast hung with triangular pennants. It all looked like the rigging of a

sunken galleon. I later came across exactly the same set-up in an early

Ottoman Turkish miniature, portraying celebrations of the circimcision

of one of the sultan’s sons in Istanbul. Pushing deeper into the crowded

market’s amorphous maze of beaten earth streets and clearings, I passed

an eatery built almost entirely of smooth mud bricks. A man fed wooden

branches and old housing beams into blackened holes under cauldrons

cooking on a rough and ready range. Wielding an outsize colander

on a stick as a ladle, he dipped into bubbling mess to serve his customers

bowls of froth and bones. The scene could have been conjured to life

from a Bronze Age archaeological site.

My sense of cultural difference was underlined by the Uygur treatment

of animals. I visited an ill-defined forum where horses were traded,

and found it to be a latterday kind of slave market. Bearded men in

striped gowns and turbans inspected teeth and bargained implacably. I

dodged boy jockeys as they tore round a dusty clearing, testing mounts

for would-be buyers. At other times these boys poked and tormented

horses that were helplessly tethered up to wooden rails. Beside a ramshackle

cart stood a man surveying the scene and chewing slices of

melon. He occasionally passed the rinds on to his donkey to munch on.

But as often as not he followed the gesture with an absent-minded

punch on the animal’s nose. It was all as if the Uygurs wanted to punish

the animal world for the stress of their own lives. In return, a stallion

fixed me with a vengeful stare, then whacked me with a well-aimed kick.

Another horse made a dramatic bid for freedom while its owner was

washing it in the turgid waterway that ran beside the market. Running,

bucking and kicking, the horse valiantly fought for several minutes to

evade re-capture, but to no avail. Peter Fleming, a British traveler

through Xinjiang in the 1930s, was horrified by Uygur attitudes, especially

when he passed a donkey abandoned on the roadside to die of its

hideous sores. “The Turkis are completely heartless with their animals,

whose breakdown is accelerated by callous neglect,” he wrote. Even

today, there is so little trust between man and beast that in order for a

Uygur blacksmith to shoe a horse, he has to suspend it from a great

wooden frame, bound up with slings and rope bonds under its belly.

I retired for the afternoon to a one-room museum near a Muslim

shrine on the outskirts of town, and found that education did not patch

over that sense of Uygur-Chinese separateness. The diminutive Uygur

archaeologist in charge was determined to prove that Uygurs were a fundamentally

separate people as he showed me round the findings from

one of Xinjiang’s many 2,000-year-old tombs. All dated back long before

any putative arrival of Turkic peoples to these desert oases. The centerpiece

of the exhibition was a mummified corpse, which the curator

insisted proved that his homeland lay beyond the Chinese pale. With

growing excitement, he pointed out the Uygur-style leather soles on the

dead woman’s slippers—not Chinese-style layers of fabric, he declared

—and the way her chin and feet were bound with a fabric band, a tradition

that persists among the Uygurs to this day. The painted wooden coffin

also looked like nothing in China.

“Look at the onion-dome shapes! These ancient people were certainly

our ancestors, not the Chinese,” he concluded with a flourish. “We

Uygurs just don’t know our history well.”

But informed Uygurs like him were becoming more common, and

their story was getting out. The Uygur catastrophe of the past half-century

was partly because information about the Uygurs was so scarce, and

there was thus no check on China’s actions. The days are gone when the

Alptekin family’s great victories would be a report handed to a U.S. president

by the Dalai Lama or an invitation to discuss matters at a panel in

a university in Malta. China is opening up to inspection as it integrates

with the world, and, in intellectual circles at least, is becoming more

sensitive to domestic grievances. Both Chinese and international travelers

are visiting Xinjiang as never before. Quite a few of them, to judge by

some professional-looking camera equipment in the Kashgar Sunday

Market, are reporters posing as tourists.

“I used to pin up each article that was published about us and just

gaze at it. Now I can’t keep up. There are just hundreds,” Isa Beg’s eldest

son and political heir, Erkin Alptekin, told me in 2002. Two years

later, he was elected as the first president of the World Uygur Congress,

a stronger new platform that would build on his years as the General

Secretary of the Netherlands-based Unrepresented Nations and Peoples

Organisation.

I left Kashgar the next day convinced that rooting out the Turkic

identity of the Uygurs would not be so easy for China as it had been to

destroy the character of Xinjiang’s cities. The Uygurs had preserved their

culture through the worst of what China could do to them. But as I traveled

more widely in Xinjiang, I found that this isolated and embattled

history had left many Uygurs in a brittle, explosive mood.

The first of four Uygur-related extracts from my book on the Turks and the Turkic world.

Hugh Pope, SONS OF THE CONQUERORS: The Rise of the Turkic World, pp. 13-19

PROLOGUE

God Most High caused the Sun of Fortune to rise in the

Zodiac of the Turks; he called them ‘Turk’ and made them

Kings of the Age. Every man of reason must attach himself to

them, or else expose himself to their falling arrows.

—MAHMUT OF KASHGAR, author of the

first Turkish encyclopedia, 11th century

ONE SPRING DAY TOWARDS THE END OF THE COLD WAR, A TIME OF

surprises, my teleprinter shuddered into action at the Istanbul bureau of

Reuters news agency. A colleague in Beijing was sending a message:

members of an ethnic group called the Uygurs, of whom I had never

heard, were demonstrating in the streets of Urumqi, capital of the

northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang. The protesters were

denouncing the communist leadership in Beijing and chanting the name

of an exiled leader said to be living in Turkey, a man named “Isa.” My colleague

had a simple and urgent request: Could I track Isa down?

The strangeness of the message took a few moments to sink in: thousands

of miles from Turkey, in a place I believed to be firmly within the

pale of a monolithic China, demonstrators were risking their lives to

honor the name of a Turk. A quick check revealed that the Uygurs are a

people known as Turkic, an adjective also then unfamiliar to me. I lived

in Turkey, and its inhabitants were until then the only Turks or Turkic

people I knew of. It took several phone calls to lesser-known Turkish

journals and exile associations to track down Isa, the Uygur activist, to

an outer suburb of Istanbul by the Marmara Sea. His family name was

Alptekin, and when he opened the door to his modest apartment, I took

my first step into this new world. Then 87, the tall, dignified Alptekin

had, forty years earlier, led an explicitly Turkic nationalist uprising

against Chinese rule in Xinjiang. His Republic of Eastern Turkestan last-

ed just 14 months. The nearly-blind old gentleman impressed me not

only with his elegant bearing and sharpness of mind, but also by the oldfashioned

language he spoke. Certain turns of phrase hinted at a religious

education in Arabic. Others sounded strangely familiar, a living

echo of the Central Asian ancestors of the Turks of Turkey among whom

I lived.

It was 1989. The Soviet Union was showing its age, protests were

gathering pace in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall would

soon fall. Cold War-era Turkey was an isolated, lonely place, despite its

loyal membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was

shunned by co-religionists in the Islamic world for its alliance with the

Christian West, at daggers drawn with its neighbors Greece and Cyprus

and cut off to the north by a whole third of the iron curtain between

NATO and the Warsaw Pact. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,

all the political boundaries would be redrawn from Albania to the China

Sea. What I did not realize, like many at the time, was that this broad

buffer zone where Europe meets Asia was mostly straddled by Turkic

populations. As a century of restrictions fell away, Turkey suddenly felt

at the center of something, a more exciting and international place to be.

I was hooked, fascinated by this new dimension of the country where I

had chosen to live.

My conversation lasted all afternoon with Alptekin. But it was not

until ten years later that I found my way to his birthplace in Yengisar, on

the edge of the Taklamakan desert in northwestern China, nearly 2500

miles away from where we had talked. By then much had changed. For

one thing, Alptekin himself was dead. But he would not be forgotten; in

the intervening years, the Turks of Turkey became conscious of a new,

wider national identity, shared with more than a dozen Turkic peoples.

They rediscovered Alptekin and his history. A park was named after him

in the historic heart of Istanbul, next to the old Byzantine hippodrome.

When China officiously objected to this honor to a “separatist,” municipalities

all over the country named streets, bridges and monuments in

his honor.

By the time I reached Alptekin’s Uygurs in China I had spent a

decade criss-crossing the Turkic states and communities that emerged

from the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was my good fortune to experience

at first hand the breaking down of the frontiers that had divided

the Turkic peoples among the West, Russia, China and the Middle East.

Numerous journeys to the booming new capitals and remoter deserts of

Central Asia convinced me that from such roots a wider new Turkic consciousness

is putting up shoots. I listened as Turkic dialects once relegated

to second-class status became state languages, now confidently

dominant on the streets of Baku, Ashgabat and Tashkent.

Unlike their fellow Muslims, the Arabs, the Turkic peoples are lucky

that their interests have largely coincided with the policies of the United

States. Washington made its opening move quickly in February 1992,

when U.S. military flights were allowed for the first time over the airspace

of the former Soviet Union. I was one of a few journalists invited

to join for an inaugural American aid flight from Ankara, over the

Caucasus, the Caspian Sea and then to Tajikistan in the heart of Central

Asia. The U.S. had deliberately routed the flights of this “Operation

Provide Hope” through the Turkish capital in order to underline its wish

that the new states follow the Turkish model of secular government, pro-

Americanism and a market economy. Our plane bore a 26-ton gift of

medicine from Japan, raisins, sugar and cigarettes from Turkey and supplies

of cookies, pasta and vanilla puddings from the U.S. This token

offering was hardly likely to save the ailing and wary Central Asian

republic of Tajikistan where we landed. But aboard the plane’s flight

deck we all knew we were entering a new era, as the enthusiastic,

Russian-accented voices of air-traffic controllers crackled over the radio

to welcome our plane to long-forbidden airspace over Baku, Bokhara and

Samarkand.

These enlightened U.S. moves were mostly about preventing post-

Cold War chaos. But the U.S. also single-mindedly led Western nations

in pushing for access to the oil and gas of the Caspian basin—estimates

of proven reserves start at the equivalent of the Gulf of Mexico or the

North Sea—and to develop a strategic Turkic buffer zone between

Russia, China and Iran through which that oil and gas could flow to

Western markets. The European Union, with its own vision of opening

up new markets, offered a program of loans to replace the old Moscowcentric

lines of communication with east-west transit routes. Governments,

companies and international organizations began to treat parts or

all of the Turkic-speaking world as a coherent region of operations, if not

yet a strategically important bloc. And the need to export energy resources

to markets in the West may soon force more cooperation among the

often rival Turkic regimes themselves.

The longer I studied the Turkic peoples, the harder it was to account

for the fact that they had been overlooked for so long. Together, they

constitute one of the world’s ten largest linguistic families, numbering

more than 140 million people scattered through more than 20 modern

states in a great crescent across the Eurasian continents, starting at the

Great Wall of China, through Central Asia, the Caucasus, Iran, Turkey,

the Balkans, Europe and even a fledgling community in the United

States. The Turkish spoken by its biggest and most developed member,

Turkey, is widely spoken by significant ethnic minorities in European

states like France, Britain, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia

and Romania. They are most prominent in Europe’s most powerful state,

Germany, where Turkish can be heard on every other street corner of the

capital, Berlin. Having brushed against the language in my undergraduate

days at Oxford and having spoken it for nearly two decades, I found

that whether buying a carpet in a bazaar in Iraqi Kurdistan, interviewing

Kosovar refugees high in the mountains of Albania, or discovering a

common language at a conference in Tashkent, fluency in Turkish

offered an invaluable introduction to an exclusive and unusual club. As

a major in the British Army wrote to a fellow officer in 1835, while he

traveled near Merv in modern-day Turkmenistan: “A knowledge of

Persian will aid a traveler in these countries; but the Toorkey [Turkish]

is of infinitely greater consequence.”

—

The 19th century rise of the West now obscures the historic

prowess of Turkish dynasties, which dominated the Balkans, Middle

East and Central Asia for most of the past millennium. The extraordinary

scope of their success in history inspired me to name this book

evlad-ı fatihan, or sons of the conquerors, an honorific the Turks use for

the colonizer descendants of the Turkic nomad armies who forged one

of the greatest Turkic states, the Ottoman Empire. Turkish historians

trace this tradition back to the ancient armies of the Huns. Arab caliphs

hired tough Turk fighters as mercenaries for the armies of Islam from

the 7th century onwards, and soon afterwards Turkic warriors became

the military backbone of the Muslim world. From the tenth through the

fourteenth centuries, Turco-Mongolian horseback fighters and their

families spread westwards across the Middle East under conquerors

such as the Seljuks, Mamluks, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Then

came the Ottoman dynasty, Turkic raiders who captured Constantinople

in 1453 and who, within a century, had completed their conquest

of the Balkans and marched on to seize the holy cities of Mecca

and Medina, Egypt and most of Arabia. The Ottomans proclaimed

themselves caliphs of the Sunni Muslim world and spread Turkic settlers

far and wide. They ruled over this vast empire for five centuries.

Few people today realize that many other conquerors who seized the

thrones of Iran and India—Mahmud of Gazna, the Safavids, Nadir

Shah, the Qajars, the Moguls—were also of Turkic stock.

Turkic-populated lands have not drawn intense Western interest

since the time they were a chessboard for the rivalries of 19th century

empires. Turkic dominance had turned to weakness and defeat.

Diplomats and monarchs debated the “Eastern Question,” which

focused on whether the Ottoman Empire should be kept on life support

as “the sick man of Europe” or carved up. Moscow and London played a

“Great Game” for power and control over the Caucasus and Central

Asia. In today’s new Great Game, however, the major players and forces

have changed. The U.S., a newcomer, is at the height of its power, and

long-distracted China is now pushing forward. Formerly dominant

Russia is still influential, and Great Britain, once so strong, is marginal.

But another big change is that the Turkic actors, although still weak, are

back in the game, and have to be taken into account. As the U.S. discovered

in the Iraq war in 2003, the Turks cannot be taken for granted.

And the Turkic world stretches like a long bow over what the Pentagon

now describes as “arcs of instability,” its new strategic worry in the post-

Sept 11 world. “We will have to be out acting in the world in places that

are very unfamiliar to us,” a senior Pentagon planner told a colleague at

my newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, in 2003. “We will have to make

them familiar.”

—

This book is the fruit of more than a decade of travel through the

lands of the Turkic-speaking peoples, including extended expeditions

along the ancient tracks that became known in the 19th century as the

Silk Road. I visited communities in a belt of Turkic speakers which, if

one accepts evidence of a Turkic link to the native Indians of America,

literally girdles the globe. They took me from the edge of the Taklamakan

desert in China’s “Wild West” province of Xinjiang to mosques alongside

Dutch canals leading to the North Sea and onward to the Appalachian

Mountains in the western United States. I took many flights, of course,

but I also crossed all their borders in Eurasia overland. I returned to several

places repeatedly and was able to observe dramatic changes. I have

steamed across the Caspian Sea both ways by ship and paid no less than

four visits to the isolated Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan. I have

criss-crossed the Caucasus a dozen times by train, by bus and by car.

It was tempting to start my story in the east, following the great westward

movement of the Turks that started more than a millennium ago

and continues to this day. But having distilled my experiences from more

than 20 countries, of which a dozen merit extended treatment here, I

feared that a travelogue might prove confusing. Instead I have divided

my impressions into six sections that I believe reflect the collective qualities

of the Turkic peoples: their military vocation; their strong, quarrelling

leaders; their shared history and neighbors; their pragmatic experience

of the Muslim religion; their love-hate relationship with the West

over issues like oil, corruption and human rights; and their conviction

that the coming decades must bring better fortunes than the devastating

experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries.

My argument is that Turkic peoples can no longer be treated as marginal

players on the edge of Europe and the Middle East, or crushed

subjects of remote parts of the Russian and Chinese domains, or distant

allies taken for granted by the Europe Union and the United States.

They are becoming noteworthy peoples and prosperous states in their

own right, and are developing numerous new connections between each

other. I hope this book will give a broader context to those who know

Turkic peoples only in one guise: perhaps as minority immigrants in

Europe and America, as go-getting businessmen in Istanbul, as displaced

refugees in the Caucaus, as oil negotiators in Central Asia, or as dissident

rebels in China. I know of few other attempts to put the Turkic peoples

in the center of a narrative frame, and certainly none of this scope.

I believe it reflects the Turkic peoples’ attempts since the end of the

Cold War to set a course to a better future—sometimes breathtaking and

daring, often clumsy and controversial, but always with a passionate

determination to regain control of their fate.