BEIJING (Reuters) - In a Russian restaurant in Beijing, a young Chinese Muslim woman gaped in horror as the television over the bar flashed CNN's live pictures of the World Trade Center crumbling to the ground.
She brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. Later, recounting the rush of emotions that gripped her in those seconds, she said her first thought had been for the thousands of trapped office workers.
Then another chilling notion occurred to the ethnic Uighur woman from China's far northwestern region of Xinjiang.
"They will blame Muslims for this. They will think we are all terrorists," said the woman, who declined to be identified. "I worry for my friends and my family in Xinjiang."
Judging by China's response to U.S. calls for a global war on terrorism, her fears may be justified.
Beijing has backed the American-led war on terror but Chinese analysts say it wants support for a campaign against what it sees as its greatest militant threat -- Uighurs fighting for an independent homeland in Xinjiang.
Uighur militants have been blamed for sporadic attacks in China, including bus bombs in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, that killed nine people in 1997.
Western and Chinese analysts say some Uighurs have been trained in camps in Afghanistan linked to Osama bin Laden -- Washington's chief suspect for the attacks on the United States.
But Uighur leaders overseas and security experts say those links are minimal and there is little sympathy in Xinjiang for bin Laden, the Taliban or other Islamist groups.
"I don't think there's a strong ideological appeal in the Taliban and the Islamic shariah law for Uighurs in general," said Dru Gladney, an expert on Chinese Muslims and professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii.
"Very few of them would be attracted to radical Islam unless they were pushed in that direction by extreme government policies or ethnic tensions."
UIGHURS AGAINST BEIJING
China's roughly eight million Uighurs are mainly Sunni Muslims, like the Taliban, but many are Sufi, a tolerant form of Islamic mysticism which the Taliban opposes, experts say.
Uighur aggression is directed primarily at Beijing and driven by a desire for greater cultural, religious and economic freedom rather than the establishment of an Islamic state spanning Central Asia, they say.
And despite their faith, many Uighurs see the United States as a champion of their human rights and religious freedom.
U.S. attacks on Afghanistan alone would not unleash a "jihad" – holy struggle -- in Xinjiang, but a simultaneous crackdown on Chinese Muslims in the name of counter-terrorism could provoke a backlash, they said.
"There's a kind of transnational Islamic front in China that will be galvanized when Muslims feel they're being persecuted," said Gladney.
He cited two recent examples: Chinese Muslim support for Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and multiethnic Muslim protests in 1989 over publication of a Chinese book called "Sexual Customs" which compared Muslim architecture to sexual organs.
"My concern is that if there's a backlash against Muslims in China it could help unite them all," he said. "This has happened time and time again in Chinese history."
The Turkic-speaking Uighurs are China's second largest Muslim minority after the nine million-strong Hui, who are spread out over China, speak Chinese and have ethnic Chinese ancestry.
The vast majority of Uighurs live in Xinjiang and activists are fighting for an independent state of East Turkestan in the area they have inhabited for more than 1,250 years.
Incorporated as a province of China in 1884, the region enjoyed a brief period of virtual independence from 1938, during which it sought aid from the Soviet Union. China regained control of the region after the Communists came to power in 1949.
Beijing has since settled millions of ethnic Han Chinese in the resource-rich region and fought a prolonged low-intensity campaign against Uighur independence activists.
SNUFFING OUT SEPARATISM
Many in Beijing see a global war on terrorism as the perfect chance to snuff out Uighur separatism for good.
"This is a very good opportunity to intensify the fight against separatists in Xinjiang," said Zhu Feng, director of the International Security Program at Peking University. "China is also a victim of terrorism."
"There is a connection between Xinjiang separatists and terrorists in Afghanistan. Some separatists got training in Afghanistan and then were dispatched into China."
Security experts say such links may well exist.
"It is quite possible there would have been meetings between some of bin Laden's followers and militants in the Uighur movement," said Paul Wilkinson, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University in Scotland.
"I suspect it's very small scale and the links so far are modest, but I don't doubt the bin Laden network would be interested in making those connections," he said.
But they say China has already stifled the separatist movement through cooperation with Central Asian neighbors, zero-tolerance policing and relatively fast economic development in the region.
"The religious and ethnic threat within Xinjiang is limited and has at present very little likelihood of disrupting China's hold on the region," said Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor of Jane's Defense Weekly.
"What China is reacting to is trying to contain a potentially much greater problem while it's still at a containable stage."
NO ORGANIZATION
Unlike the bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the Uighur movement lacks organization, leadership and unity -- some want greater autonomy, some full independence.
A disparate and poorly funded group of Uighurs in Canada, Australia, the United States and northern Europe run a loose network of Web sites providing information about Xinjiang.
Perhaps the closest they have to a natural leader is Erkin Alptekin, whose father was the late Uighur leader Isa Yusuf Alptekin -- often compared to Tibet's Dalai Lama.
Alptekin, who lives in Germany and describes himself as a lobbyist rather than a leader, says he has little control over Uighurs in Xinjiang.
"The Tibetans are lucky because they have the Dalai Lama to pacify his people," he said. "We have difficulties pacifying our countrymen."
He espouses nonviolence and adamantly denies any links between Uighurs and the Taliban or bin Laden.
But he says ethnic discrimination and economic disparities between the Uighurs and the Han have made Xinjiang a fertile recruiting ground for extremists.
"They are hopeless, they are desperate and they are frustrated," he said. "If you are hopeless, you have nothing to lose."
"Young Uighurs say to me: 'In the coming decades, we will disappear from the historical scene. Do you want to see us just die like cowards sleeping in our beds?'."
09:42 10-04-01
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.