BEIJING, 18 September 2004 — Emigrés from western China’s Xinjiang region have created a “government-in-exile,” saying they want to join the community of nations under the name of East Turkestan.
“The East Turkestani people ask to control their own fate,” Anwar Yusuf Turani, who described himself as the prime minister of the government, said in a statement posted on the Internet.
“We seek to join the international community of nations in openness and peace,” he said in the statement, which was datelined Washington D.C.
Xinjiang, a strategically important area bordering Central Asia, is home to a number of ethnic groups, of which the Uighurs, Muslim speakers of a Turkic language, form the largest.
However, the statement said the new “government-in-exile” represented not just Uighurs, but also other minorities such as the Kazakh and Kyrgyz groups who inhabit the area.
“As the name ‘Eastern Turkestan’ implies, this vast region has for centuries been the land of the Eastern Turks, who are Muslim by faith, Caucasian by race, and whose native language is not remotely related to Chinese,” it said.
The state-controlled China News Service said in a report that the establishment of the “government-in-exile” was announced at a recent press conference in Washington.
The news service quoted unnamed analysts as saying the East Turkestan issue was likely to become an irritant in Sino-US relations in the future.
Dissatisfaction is growing among Uighurs, given the Chinese government’s intensified crackdown against them after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Human rights groups have accused Beijing of using the global anti-terror campaign to persecute Uighurs.
