Democracy or terror
Historically, extremists’ rise in China was fostered by the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, when Moscow amassed troops on the Russian border with Xinjiang, bolstering “East Turkestan” separatist movements.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led the Reagan Administration to view Islamic extremists as “freedom fighters.” After several terrorist incidents in Xinjiang in the late 1990s, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), headquarters was moved to Kabul, where it was sheltered by Taliban. To coordinate actions, ETIM leaders met with Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leaders, Taliban and the extremists of Uzbekistan.
In fall 2002 – but only after ETIM’s attacks against US forces – the Bush Administration designated the movement as a terrorist organization. Chinese interrogators were allowed access to Uygur detainees at Guantanamo, but Beijing’s demand to take the detained 22 Uyghurs was rejected.
The ETIM is closely associated with the World Uygur Congress (WUC), which China has accused for orchestrating terror since the 2009 ethnic violence in Urumqi. The WUC was formed in Germany in 2004 and is led by Rebiya Kadeer, a Xinjiang Uygur who became a millionaire in the 1980s through real estate holdings and ownership of a multinational conglomerate.
Kadeer served in China’s parliament before her arrest in 1999 for sending confidential reports to her husband, who worked as a pro-Xinjiang independence broadcaster for the US radio stations Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, which have been active in Xinjiang and China’s regional neighborhood. After her 2005 discharge, she became WUC’s chief. Two years later, Kadeer, who lives near Washington, met privately President Bush, who praised her activities. In the Obama era, she has visited Asian countries that belong to the US security alliance – including Tokyo and its Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war criminals.
Ironically, Washington sustains WUC, which is partly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US non-profit organization founded in 1983 to promote democracy. In turn, the NED is funded by the US Congress, within the budget of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which reports to the State Department. The NED provides overtly political assistance that CIA had previously provided clandestinely.
NED’s financial sources are no secret. Already a decade ago, Ron Paul, a veteran politician, argued against NED funding because it had “very little to do with democracy. It is an organization that uses US tax money to actually subvert democracy. By showering funding on favored political parties or movements overseas, it underwrites color-coded ‘people’s revolutions’ overseas that look more like pages out of Lenin’s writings on stealing power than genuine indigenous democratic movements.”
NED has funded various NGOs in Iran, Latin America (Ecuador, Venezuela), Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Georgia). Most of its Asian NGOs focus on China.
Dark legacy of duplicity
In Xinjiang, China has fought separatism but poured substantial funds to raise living standards and boost the local economy, while launching affirmative-action style measures. And yet, in the West, terrorism in and beyond Xinjiang is today seen as associated with (or caused by) hard-line policy on dissent.
Accordingly, the WUC’s activities have been supported in the name of freedom, democracy and economic development. In China, such destabilization has been seen as reminiscent of the kind of ‘strategy of tension,’ which has a dark legacy from the clandestine support of the Greek junta in the 1960s to far-right terrorist groups in Italy and Turkey in the 1970s.
Efforts at counterterrorist cooperation between Washington and Beijing should not be overshadowed by such Cold War-style attempts to destabilize another nation. Nor should such cooperation be tarnished by efforts to target and scapegoat national, ethnic, racial or religious minorities.
What Washington and Beijing really need is multipolar counterterrorist cooperation. Duplicitous efforts – stated counterterrorism but de facto destabilization – will only pave way to negative scenarios in the future.
Dr. Dan Steinbock is Research Director of International Business at India China and America Institute (USA) and Visiting Fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).
This article was first published at chinausfocus.com To see the original version please visit http://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/destabilizing-terror-and-us-chinese-counterterrorism/