BEIJING, January 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – As China steps up its repression of Muslim Uighurs in its westernmost Xinjiang region (East Turkestan) and discontent mounts, independence seekers are starting to see military organization as “inevitable”, a leading freedom fighter warned in an overnight radio interview.

The military option is hard to avoid if East Turkestan (Xinjiang) is to win independence, according to Mehmet Emin Hazret, leader of the East Turkestan Liberation Organization.

“Our principal goal is to achieve independence for East Turkestan by peaceful means,” he said in the interview with Radio Free Asia.

“But to show our enemies and friends our determination on the East Turkestan issue, we view a military wing as inevitable.”

The crackdown by the Chinese government comes one month after U.S. officials visited China for human rights talks in December 2002 that had a heavy focus on the treatment of Muslim minorities.

The U.S. delegation led by Lorne Craner, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, spent two of the official program’s four days in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, AFP reported.

U.S. officials declined to elaborate at the end of the meetings, which overran by an hour. A U.S. diplomat said then: “Issues in Xinjiang are an important focus of these talks.”

The standoff between China’s Han majority and Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighurs has extended as far as Beijing, 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) from the vast desert area, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

In the northwestern part of Beijing, “Xinjiang Village” used to be home to hundreds of Uighur migrants seeking their fortune - until authorities started tearing down the neighborhood this month.

The dwellings have to make way for a department store, one member of the demolition team claimed, but local Uighurs suggested official fears of separatism spreading to Beijing could have played a bigger role.

“It’s possible they’ve torn this place down to make sure that Uighurs have no place to gather in the capital,” said one resident Thursday, January 30, standing amid the rubble.

In East Turkestan, Chinese officials have carried out widespread arbitrary arrests, shut down places of worship, restricted traditional religious activities and sentenced thousands of people to harsh prison terms or death after unfair and often summary trials, the Asian Wall Street Journal reported earlier December 2002.

Muslim religious activities are controlled by Chinese officials. Students at state schools and universities are not allowed to pray, fast during Ramadan or carry out other open religious activity.

Earlier 2002, officials ordered increased surveillance of Muslim weddings, funerals and circumcisions. Some have been arrested for translating the Koran into local languages. These actions are clearly counterproductive, increasing resentment of Chinese control, the Asian Wall Street Journal said.

China has faced accusations from rights groups that it is trying to stamp out nationalist and religious sentiment among Uighurs and discriminates against them in employment and education.

In March 2002, Amnesty International (AI) issued a report on human rights abuses in XUAR (Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region). In the report, AI said that ever since the September 11 attacks on the U.S., the “Chinese government has intensified its crackdown on Uighur opponents of Chinese rule and others branded as “ethnic separatists” in the west of China.

“The government has claimed that they are linked with international “terrorism” and has called for international support in its crackdown on domestic “terrorism”, AI reported.

According to the human rights group, thousands of people have been detained for “investigation” and at least scores “charged or sentenced”.

At the same time, AI also reported that the Chinese government has “further restricted the religious rights of the Muslim population in the XUAR, banning some religious practices during the holy month of Ramadan, closing mosques, increasing official controls over the Islamic clergy in the region, and detaining or arresting religious leaders deemed to be “unpatriotic” or subversive.”

AI said that the government “also launched a campaign to “clean up” cultural and media circles and some government departments to rid them of “undesirable elements”.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch organization (HRW) said that “Chinese authorities carrying out large scale arrests, trials, and executions” in the XUAR.

“Islamic and other forms of religious worship were effectively outlawed as “bourgeois” in nature; mosques throughout Xinjiang were closed; Muslim clerics were widely persecuted and jailed; Uighur families were forced to rear pigs in violation of religious prohibitions; and many mosques reportedly were used as pork warehouses,” HRW said in a press report.

U.N. High Commissioner Mary Robinson expressed her concern over the treatment of the Uighurs in a November 2001 visit to China.

The Chinese government, responded that “terrorism,” that ephemeral and much-abused term, is an infringement of human rights and is a threat to international peace and security.

Beijing is determined never to let go of Xinjiang, and the U.S.-led war on terror has emerged as a convenient excuse for harsh policies adopted years earlier, rights groups have said.

It is the only part of the country where political prisoners are still executed regularly, and hundreds are believed to have been put to death since the mid-1990s, they said.

In the old oasis town of Kashgar, near the Tajik border, even ordinary people with no separatist ties live in constant fear of China’s security apparatus, said an Uighur who recently arrived in Beijing.

“No one dares go out at night,” he said. “If you get caught in the streets after dark with no ID, the security forces will take you away.”

While much of China appears to become a more liberal place by the day, repression is growing in Xinjiang, he said.

“In Xinjiang, you can’t speak or even think freely,” he said. “Controls are getting tighter and tighter.”

Human Rights Watch reports that Xinjiang (a Chinese name meaning "New Frontier") has long been inhabited by a diverse mixture of Muslim peoples, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks as well as the majority Uighurs.

The region enjoyed independent statehood until 1759, when it was conquered by the imperial armies of China’s Manchu dynasty, and periodic attempts at armed insurrection against Chinese rule occurred well into the twentieth century, HRW said.

The most significant of these was in 1945, when local forces took advantage of the looming civil war between Communist and Nationalist Chinese to revive the independent republic of East Turkestan, which survived until 1949 when it was crushed and re-occupied by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to HRW.