Beijing Says Chinese Muslims Were Trained With bin Laden Funds

BEIJING, Jan. 21 - Seeking to justify its harsh treatment of Muslims living in China's far western region of Xinjiang, Chinese officials asserted today that a small separatist movement there was being financed and supported by Osama bin Laden and that more than 100 terrorists who had trained at camps in Afghanistan had been arrested in China.

In a new report, the government asserted that Mr. bin Laden himself had met with radical Chinese Muslims and that "bin Laden terrorists and Taliban leaders" had allocated "a fabulous sum of money for the training of the `East Turkistan' terrorists."

East Turkistan is the name favored by some members of the Muslim Uighur minority for a separate homeland in Xinjiang.

Adopting the vocabulary of the United States-led war on terrorism, the report contends that, since 1998, East Turkistan terrorists have established more than a dozen training bases in China, which taught skills like making bombs.

Most of the allegations in the report, released today by China's State Council Information Office, were being made public for the first time. It was by far the most direct attempt by the Chinese government to link - and thereby justify - its crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang, with the American campaign against Mr. bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, Chinese officials have repeatedly defended the government's surveillance and arrests of Muslims as part of the international effort against terrorists. While they have said that Chinese citizens fought with the Taliban, they have never before suggested that Al Qaeda helped organize and finance terrorism within China.

Since last fall, human rights groups and some diplomats have criticized China for seizing on the war on terror as an excuse to curtail religious freedom and the voice of a restive ethnic minority. Arrests of Muslims in Xinjiang, mostly Uighurs, have increased in the last six months, said a Western diplomat who monitors the situation.

Today, Uighur exile groups criticized the report.

"I can totally deny the assertion by the Chinese government about assistance coming from bin Laden," said Dilixiadi Rasheed, the Swedish- based spokesman for the East Turkistan Information Center. "The reason why they're making it is because they want to crack down on anyone exercising freedom of speech to demand autonomy, by linking them to terrorist crimes.

Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking people who are Muslim but have generally shown little interest in Islamic fundamentalism. They have, however, shown intense devotion to preserving their language and culture - some to the extent of calling for an independent state. There is generally strong pro-Western sentiment among China's Uighurs, stemming from the belief that only foreign pressure will bring attention to their plight, academics who study Uighurs say.

Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, Chinese officials have at various times estimated that between 500 and 1,000 Uighurs were fighting with the Taliban. United States officials have acknowledged that a few Chinese passport-holders have been discovered among the fighters there.

But Chinese scholars estimate that only "dozens" of Uighurs have trained in Afghanistan's camps. And Mr. Rasheed said that even if a small number were found, it would not signify widespread Uighur radicalism or collusion with terrorists.

He pointed out that some Uighurs went to Afghanistan in the 1980's to support the resistance to the occupying Soviet forces - a cause that was generally supported by the Chinese government, as well as the United States. He said other Uighurs have fled across the border to Afghanistan to avoid religious repression, adding: "I'm not sure what the number is, but altogether it can't be many. And in any case they don't represent the Uighurs or their aspirations.

"To say that is like saying John Walker represents all Americans because he is a U.S. citizen," Mr. Rasheed said, referring to the young American who fought with the Taliban.