"China says militant plots foiled"

The BBC report that "The authorities in China say they have foiled two plots - one to crash an airliner, and another targeting the Beijing Olympic Games.

Officials said a plane crew prevented an attempt to crash a flight from Xinjiang province to Beijing on Friday. Two passengers are being questioned.

Another official said a raid that saw two people killed in Xinjiang in January foiled a plot on the Games.

Uighur separatists in Xinjiang have waged an insurgency for many years.

The Chinese authorities accuse them of having links to international terror networks"


Now most people only read the top of the BBC news articles and so probably won't go any further than this. I wonder if many would wonder who the "separatists are and what "international terror networks" they have links to. The BBC do add a little information near the end of the article:

"China has been struggling for years to contain separatist sentiment among the ethnic Uighur minority in Xinjiang.

Some Uighurs have campaigned for the mainly Muslim province to become an independent republic."

Ah so it is a Muslim separatist issue, what a surprise.


"The Xinjiang governor, himself an ethnic Uighur, said only a "very small number of people" in the region support the separatists.

"They don't represent the Uighur people," he added."

They never do, they never do.


In fact according to Wikipedia, "Xinjiang borders the Tibet Autonomous Region to the south and Qinghai and Gansu provinces to the southeast, Mongolia to the east, Russia to the north, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and the Pakistan- and India-controlled parts of Kashmir to the west...The region is often referred to in older English references as Chinese Turkestan, or sometimes East Turkestan."


One key factor in the tensions may be found in another part of the Wikipedia article on Xinjiang "The percentage of ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang has grown from 6 percent in 1949 to an official tally of over 40 percent at present. This figure does not include military personnel or their families, or the many unregistered migrant workers. Much of this transformation can be attributed to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a semi-military organization of settlers that has built farms, towns, and cities over scattered parts of Xinjiang. The demographic transformation is held by Uyghur independence advocates as a threat to Uyghurs and other non-Han ethnicities in maintaining their culture, similar to the case of Tibet."

An increase of the non-native Han Chinese population from 6% to over 40%, do I hear the phrase ethnic cleansing or at least population control.


Of course the western media nobody will not make too much fuss because this is the Chinese and they are the new world power, replacing the hated USA. It is odd how many world conflicts seem to involve Muslims and/or China.



For more on this subject, I recommend this site, this site, this article and Amnesty International's report which appears to have disappeared, presumably to make way fr another report on Guantanamo Bay or Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.