DRAFT Dissertation Proposal – 14 May, 2007 ‘ICT in Conflict: What is obscured by ICT4Peace?’

Every technological innovation is ambiguous, with the potential for both utopia and dystopia.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (1997:4)

Introduction

Take a moment to watch Ridley Scott’s commercial for the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh computer.
What is dramatically depicted is a technology which, in the right hands, promises to liberate humanity from Orwellian tyranny and oppression. The advertisement even explicitly promises that ‘On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”’ In 2007, we take for granted that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provides services unthinkable, even 20 years ago. Satellites improve our spatial awareness, cell phones encourage constant communication, and laptops with wireless access to the internet allow for uninterrupted access to the ‘Information Society.’ Conversely, advanced satellite technology allows state militaries to gather intrusive and private information, and terrorists can use cell phones as explosive detonators; such has been the Western experience with technological modernity. From this experience stems a particular rationality, a way of viewing the role of technology in our lives, one not unlike that depicted in the 1984 Apple ad as a strong, liberating and perfecting force, when combined with noble Western intentions. Avgerou (2002) refers to this as ‘techno-economic rationality’ and suggests that it is instrumental to how Western developed societies define problems and determine solutions (2). Consequently, Western ‘problems’ like global warming, interstate conflict, and international development, come to be viewed as problems of technology, thus their solutions are viewed as equally technological in nature. Of interest to this particular research proposal is the problem of ‘failed states’ and the twin challenges of peacekeeping and peace building in conflict areas. In the legacy of the Information Systems approach to development, and the more recent field of ICT for development (generally referred to as ICT4D), ICT4Peace is a growing field of academic, and political interest. ICT is generally understood to ‘encompasses the full range of the production, distribution and consumption of messages, across all media from radio and television, to satellite to Internet,’ (Wilson 1998: 6) however for the purposes of this dissertation, those forms of ICT that are the most relevant to the modern conflict community, specifically PCs (Personal Computers) including laptops, mobile phones and other communications devices that use the Internet, including VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) shall be highlighted. Sanjana Hattotuwa (2004) suggests that ICT4Peace ‘is the use of enabling technologies to augment existing stakeholder interventions, enable hitherto marginalised actors to participate more fully in peacebuilding processes, empower grassroots communities and bring cohesion to the incredible range of activities on multiple tiers that are an intrinsic part of full-field peacebuilding and conflict transformation’ (12).

ICT4Peace takes several instrumental forms; (i) operationally, ICTs are a tool and support mechanism for military, diplomatic and civil peace practitioners, allowing for the coordination of complex logistics and the management of relief operations, helping to control the rapid flow of information, supplies and people in the field of conflict zones; (ii) programmatically, ICTs are increasingly understood as specific tools that can help failed and developing states to ‘“leapfrog” over traditional barriers to development by enhancing governance, empowering citizens, facilitating regional development and national economic integration with the global economy, and offering new opportunities to combat poverty’ (Rohozinski 2003: 4); (iii) finally, the most recent application of ICT is its peace building application, it’s use ‘as a potential medium through which to link up the members of communities torn apart by war—to allow them to communicate and cooperate together, to thereby build bridges of peace’ (ibid). Certainly, the foundations of the discipline of ICT4Peace are heavily rooted in the West’s unique experience with technological modernity. Avegerou, in criticizing this approach to development has claimed that ‘[most] information systems professionals, indoctrinated in the rationality of modernity, have little capacity to recognise the clashes of rationality they encounter when they strive to emulate the effects that ICT has “enabled” in the western economies in the context of developing countries’ (Avgerou 2000: 12). This dissertation ventures to understand: in what ways the dominant discourse surrounding ICT4Peace possibly obscures alternative understandings of the effects of ICT in conflict zones? This research question, related to critical theories of rationality and modernity, hopes to employ a practical rather than theoretical appraisal. In his critique of ICT4D Heeks (2002) has lamented that ‘only a tiny fraction of theory-related papers focus on practical implications in their conclusions.’ This dissertation intends to validate Heeks' conclusion that ‘the ultimate purpose of theory must be not just to provide a better understanding of the world but also to provide the basis for better interventions in that world’ (Heeks 2002). Subsequently this dissertation hopes to discover the theoretical and ideological foundations of the ICT4Peace movement, as depicted in the dominant discourse, and suggest areas of where a practical critique indicates flaws. Such a critique begins with intensive analysis of the ICT4Peace discourse as presented in an extensive literature review, partitioned into the three primary applications of ICT4Peace previously mentioned: (i) operational applications, (ii) programmatic applications and (iii) peace building applications. Such a literature review will also examine the limited research to date on ICT4Peace, the most authoritative example being the United Nations ICT Task Force report, ‘Information and Communication Technology for Peace: The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict’ (Stauffacher, Drake, Curion, et al. 2005). The literature review is expected to demonstrate that the ICT4Peace discourse is overall unreflective of reality and based on what Rohozinski (2003) suggests are Western ‘neutral, liberal and positive’ assumptions about the potential of ICTs in conflict zones (8).

Once the literature review has demonstrated these assumptions, the critique that follows will be based on the practicalities of conflict zones which the dominant discourse fails to address or consider. This practical critique will address each of the dominant assumptions individually including: (i) the belief that ICTs encourage equality, (ii) that transparency and information flows are democratizing and conducive to peace, and (iii) that ICTs encourage peace building through grassroots involvement. Finally, this dissertation proposes to examine the Government out of the Box initiative (GooB)*, an ICT4Peace case study that is still in the development stages, to examine the extent to which the dominant ‘neutral, liberal and positive’ discourse is shaping its progress, and perhaps obscuring alternative understandings of its possible effects. By examining the GooB initiative, this essay proposes to highlight how overlooked institutional assumptions may affect the design of ICT4Peace initiatives and impact the social compatibility of Western products in conflict zones.

This paper hopes to steer clear of both Technological Determinism, which Feenberg (1999) has aptly described as ‘a cheerful doctrine of progress’ (3) as well as Technological Essentialism which suggests that ‘there is one and only one “essence” of technology and it is responsible for the chief problems of modern civilization’ (ibid). Ultimately the goal of this dissertation is not to discredit ICT4Peace, but rather to focus attention on alternate understandings of the possible impacts of ICTs in conflict zones, thus providing the basis for better understanding and better interventions. Western society has rarely found need to assess the social implications of technology, as ‘common sense instrumentalism treated technology as a neutral means, requiring no particular philosophical explanation or justification,’ (Feenberg 1999:1) but as ICT4Peace initiatives lay claim to ‘failed’ and ‘fragile’ states, it would be irresponsible not to consider the alternate implications of ICT in these countries. To appreciate the value of such a critique, it is useful to recall the hard lesson learned in the field of international development that, despite benign humanitarian intentions, food aid in the hands of local warlords can become a powerful and destructive weapon (Rohozinski 2003:8). This proposal began, by noting the possible utopic and dystopic features of every technological innovation, it is only by considering and tempering the two possibilities that responsible ICT4Peace interventions can proceed.


Dissertation Outline and Timeline


Chapter 1 – Introduction and Explanation of terms

Chapter 2 (June 15) – Critical Literature Review:

(a) The history of social theories of technology

(b) ICT4Peace current research

(c) ICT4Peace applications:

(i) operational applications

(ii) programmatic applications

(iii) peace building applications

Chapter 3 (June 15) – Discussion of findings, trends, and assumptions of the dominant discourse

Chapter 4 (June 30) –Practical critique of dominant discourse:

(i) ICT encourages equality?

(ii) transparency and information flows are democratizing and conducive to peace?

(iii) ICT encourages peace building through grassroots involvement?

Chapter 5 (July 15) – Case Study: Government out of the Box

Chapter 6 (July 30) – Conclusions


Month of August: Revisions and Formatting

September 1st: Submission


Preliminary Literature Review:


The Research Value of the Proposed Dissertation

Rigorous academic critiques of ICT4Peace are sparse, there is nonetheless a great tradition situated within the realm of critical development theory and social theories of technology that endeavour to problematise ‘the grand narratives that have defined development thinking, be that the entrenchment of markets, the progression of capitalism or […] the emergence of an information society’ (Wilson 2001: 2; see Escobar 1988 as an example). Previous to these critiques were the critical theorists of modernity and technology including Mumford and Marcuse who respectively warned of ‘authoritarian technics’ (Mumford 1964) and Western ‘scientific-technical rationality’ as political systems of domination (Marcuse 1964). Marcuse, adopting a Marxist perspective, suggested that the Western regard for science and technology served a particular hierarchical structure of power and class and reinforced the ‘rationality of the free market [… maintaining] the unequal relations fostered by capital accumulation’ (Avgerou 2000: 5). Thus, the historical critique of technological modernity suggests that the fundamental principal that has come to distinguish “modern” Western society from “traditional” societies is the belief that man can be improved by reason alone (Touraine 1995). This is the theoretical backbone in which the ICT4Peace movement is grounded. Emanating from the conviction that science and its technological products are beneficial to human progress and improvement, ‘children of both globalism and the computer age see themselves as creating a new world mediated by hi-tech, where access to the network is both a sort of post-modern liberation and the experience of a new democratic means’ (Ribeiro 1997: 3). In addition to its positivist theoretical foundations, ICT4Peace owes it’s genesis to the historical climate within which it evolved.

The end of the 20th Century witnessed unprecedented international interventions in conflict zones across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the southern borders of Europe, driven largely by the magnitude of human suffering in these areas and ‘in part by hope for the “peace dividend” that was to accrue with the end of the cold war’ (Rohozinski 2003:2). Mark Duffield (2005) suggests that this period experienced a ‘securitisation’ of international development, as the Cold War Era’s geopolitics (the security of the state) were replaced with the Humanitarian Era’s biopolitics (the security of populations). In other words, ‘international danger now equates with the unsecured circulatory flows and networked interconnections associated with the social, economic and political life of global populations’ (Duffield 2005: 143). Thus, this period witnessed a shift away from more traditional and limited interventions, intended to curb violence and provide humanitarian aid, towards a more comprehensive social transformation of these areas, applying the liberal levers of development, positivist notions of progress, and exercises of good governance and market reform. The stated goals of these ventures were to ‘transform conflict zones from nests of Hobbesian atavism and poverty into modern, liberal, market-oriented democracies’ (Rohozinski 2003:3). Based on the West’s own experiences with technological modernity, development and relief practitioners came to consider ICTs as neutral devices of communication and information transmission, while simultaneously ‘harboring strong expectations for the positive development and peace-building potential that they may enable’ (ibid: 4). Hence critical development theory views the premise and practice of ICT4Peace initiatives as a product of positivism, and the belief that by applying rational science and reason, desired and beneficial results may be achieved (ibid). This belief is understandable considering that Western experience with ICTs have largely conformed to the norms of liberal industrialized societies, which as Rohozinski (2003) is quick to add, are ‘the societies in which these technologies were first developed and who continue to predominate globally as core users’ (17). However, the question remains if this Western support for equating ICT with progress and peace is adequate substantiation for the large scale experimentation with ICT4Peace initiatives currently underway or proposed in conflict areas.

Proponents of ICT4Peace cite the Zapatista ‘Netwar’ in Chiapas, Mexico as conclusive evidence that ICTs are both changing the nature of social conflicts and making them more peaceful. By using fax machines, satellites communications, and the internet, ‘[what] began as a violent insurgency by a small indigenous force in an isolated region was thus transformed and expanded, within weeks, into a non-violent, less overtly destructive, but still highly disruptive movement that engaged the involvement of activists from far and wide and had both foreign and national repercussions for Mexico’ (Ronfeldt 1998: 4). Despite the tremendous coverage and analysis of the Zapatista uprising since the height of the conflict in the early 1990s**, it is unclear how relevant the event is to modern ICT4Peace initiatives. World internet use has increased by more than two hundred percent in the last seven years alone (Internet World Stat 2007), and was in only its nascent stages of acceptance at the height of the Zapatista uprising in 1993-1995. Much of the attention that the uprising was able to generate, and therefore the political concessions garnered, were linked to the novelty of the medium.

What the ICT4Peace literature lacks is an attempt to challenge its largely unsubstantiated assumptions, and discern the practical implications of its interventions. The suggestion that ICTs can unite and build bridges between warring parties in conflict areas, remains more of a theoretical intention that a practical reality. Rohozinski (2003) posits that ‘the liberal values that buttress this perspective […] may severely underestimate the various forms of structural violence that separate communities in conflict, and which often remain even after the cessation of physical violence (6). Western understanding of technology is intimately linked to the grand social transformations it is assumed to engender. These assumptions must be intensively deconstructed, and the practical realities of these interventions better understood before they can responsibly be applied to areas acknowledged to be ‘fragile.’

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*The GooB is ‘a concept for a ready-made public administration and management ICT based toolset for the purposes of state-building. The idea is to give a new national government an infrastructure to build a local civil service quickly, hence creating national ownership and a local capacity for delivering services. The GooB-concept is aimed to support the existing international state-building efforts by involving local administrations early on and building their capacity to handle basic administrative things, such as citizens registers, financial flows, etc’ (Stauffacher, Drake, Curion, et al. 2005).

** Scholar finds nearly 3000 entries containing the search term: Zapatista technology.

The Noble Lie: ethical considerations and the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War

The Noble Lie: ethical considerations and the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War

‘The 2003 war in Iraq is important because it represents the first

time a group of intervening states have justified their actions by referring to the humanitarian outcomes that were produced by acts primarily motivated by non-humanitarian concerns’ (Bellamy 2004)

Introduction

Although there can be no doubt of Saddam Hussein’s “vicious inhumanity,” in light of the quarter of a million murdered or “disappeared” Iraqis during his last twenty-five years of Ba’th Party rule, there is also little dispute that by March 2003 Hussein’s killings were waning (Roth 2004). As many critics of the war are increasingly eager to note, justifying the war in Iraq as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ is a difficult case to make¹. In fact, several of the most respected humanitarian organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticised the US administration’s humanitarian claims, suggesting that they threaten the legitimacy of future ‘valid’ humanitarian interventions (ibid). However, without casting judgement on whether the 2003 war in Iraq was a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the question remains as to why US officials ascribed such a prominent position to ethical considerations in the lead up to the war. The most prominent and critical explanation proposes that U.S. ethical claims were merely a ‘smokescreen created by Bush in order to camouflage other secret goals in Iraq,’ (Tunc 2005: 348) namely oil and imperial expansion.

Like all conflicts, a number of factors undoubtedly motivated the U.S. administration’s decision to go to war, and as Michael Ignatieff (2003) has judiciously suggested, ‘oil is not the whole story.’ As this essay contends, using ethical considerations to legitimise actual strategic motives is an important, but not complete, depiction of the Bush administration’s neoconservative agenda. While justifying intervention in Iraq on the basis of the democratic freedoms and human rights of Iraqis, may have been a means to obscure the U.S.’s bellicose ulterior motives, ethical considerations are also a primary goal and an intrinsic facet of the neoconservative theory reflected in the Bush doctrine (Mearsheimer 2005: 1). The 2002 National Security Strategy clearly promotes a foreign policy ‘that reflects the union of our values and our national interests’ (Bush 2002: 1). Thus the neoconservative idea that ‘effectively link[s] morality […]’ in the form of human rights and democracy, ‘to a strategic purpose (defeating terrorism)’ (Heinze 2006: 21) played an important role in the decision to intervene in Iraq. Consequently, ethical considerations are both a means and an end to assuring the promotion of the neoconservative concept of the ‘national interest.’

This paper begins with a depiction of the neoconservative understanding of the ‘national interest,’ including the stature bestowed upon ethical considerations such as democracy promotion and human rights. This description also elaborates upon why ethical considerations were an integral component of the neoconservative strategic rationale for war, insofar as they were believed to strengthen U.S. security interests. Additionally, while neoconservative theory does value ethical considerations as an end goal, ethical claims also represent a means of achieving the national interest, by legitimising what the administration expected to be a unilateral and illegal intervention. By obscuring its ulterior motives and lending legitimacy to the Bush doctrine’s pursuit of regime change, ethical considerations are reminiscent of Plato’s favoured concept among notable neoconservatives (Drury 2003), of the ‘noble lie.’ The ‘noble lie’ represents a story with perhaps misleading or fictitious details, at the heart of which lies a profound truth (ibid). Paraphrased by former Secretary of Defence, and renowned neoconservative Donald Rumsfeld, in regard to the Iraq war, ‘strategic truths sometimes need to be defended by a “bodyguard of lies”’ (Mason 2004:1). In this capacity ethical justifications were utilised by the Bush administration to deflect criticism, appeal to a domestic audience and legitimise an unsanctioned regime change. The profound truth of the Bush administration’s ‘noble lie’ is that ethical considerations are an important end goal of the neoconservative agenda, as well as the means used to legitimate their genuine, but ultimately misguided, motives.

Neoconservatism: Idealism with Teeth²

Ethical considerations were by no means the earliest or most prominent justifications for war given by the Bush administration. Although Saddam’s cruelty and tyranny were often mentioned, it was only in the absence of evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to Al Qaeda that ideological justifications came to the fore. This fact prompted speculation among scholars and the media alike, that the U.S.’s true motives were rooted in the selfish promotion of national interests, predominately understood as the wealth generated from control of Iraqi oil supplies. While assuring access to a reliable source of oil no doubt factored into the decision to go to war, Hakan Tunc (2005) is correct to point out that America could have both satisfied oil companies, and its long-term needs for oil by lifting sanctions on Iraq’s oil sales and cutting deals with Saddam (338). Instead, US foreign policy during this period is a reflection of the neoconservative understanding of the ‘national interest’ which combines realist demonstrations of American power and resolve, with idealist notions of democracy promotion and human rights (ibid: 350).

Francis Fukuyama (2006) describes three tenets of neoconservatism as: a concern with ideology and the internal politics of states; ‘a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes’; and scepticism towards the efficacy of international law and organisations. Such a calibration of beliefs necessarily results in a very particular understanding of the national interest. Neoconservatives pride themselves on going beyond its ‘narrow, too literal definition’ and looking towards a national interest ‘defined by a sense of national destiny…not a myopic national security’ (Kristol 1983: xii). As the “Godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol explains, that since the U.S. is a large, powerful nation whose identity is ideological in nature, the national interest must inevitably also be ideological, in addition to the more traditional material concerns of states (Kristol 2003: 25). Previous to the Iraq war his son William Kristol, in considering whether this posture would provoke animosity from the rest of the world, concluded that ‘[it] is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power’ (Fukuyama 2006). Thus, this pre-occupation with idealism is also believed by neoconservatives to confer specific strategic benefits to the U.S. ‘In other words, this was idealism not for its own sake, but was closely linked to a strategic imperative of reducing terrorist impulses associated with radical ideas. The neoconservatives believed that replacing the Saddam regime with a democratically elected government was central to a political transformation of the entire Middle East […]’ (Tunc 2005: 347).

The idealistic strategic rationale for war was expressed clearly by many members of the administration. Bush suggested that ‘I think a free Iraq is going to influence Iran . . . I think [war on terrorism] is a long-lasting ideological struggle,’ (Tunc 2005: 349) and Vice President Cheney declared that ‘[w]hen the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace […] Extremists in the region [will] have to rethink their strategy of Jihad’ (Cheney 2002). For neoconservatives, the greatest strategic advantage of ethical considerations is that, in the words of Congressman Newt Gingrich, ‘the advance of freedom is the surest strategy to undermine the appeal of terror in the world’ (Simes 2003). Beyond just striking a blow against international terrorism, neoconservative theory suggests that ethical considerations contribute to the strategic concept of “bandwagoning”, or “reverse-domino theory.” Hence, the strategic benefit of ideology is that other hostile states in the region, facing overt displays of American dominance, ‘will jump on the American bandwagon rather than risk death’ (Mearsheimer 2005: 2). The believed strategic benefits of the institutionalization of democracy and human rights, across the Middle East, as a result of bandwagoning are two-fold: first, neoconservative theory suggests that democracies are usually U.S.-friendly (Tunc 2005: 348), and second in free and democratic societies radicalism and Jihadism loose their appeal. Thus, ‘the goal of spreading democracy and freedom was then a strategic US interest, not only a moralistic policy’ (ibid).

Criticising such an approach to foreign policy Dimitri Simes (2003) posits that ‘the principal problem [with neoconservatism] is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world's ills, including terrorism, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote democratic government wherever in the world it is lacking.’ In suggesting that neoconservatives feel a need to intervene in the name of ethical considerations everywhere on earth, Simes has greatly misinterpreted the neoconservative attitude toward ethics and intervention; after all, neoconservatism is meant to be idealism with teeth. Answering the question of where to intervene and where to bring democracy, the noted neoconservative theorist Charles Krauthammer (2004a) has proposed a single criterion: where it counts. According to Krauthammer the neoconservative axiom is that, ‘[we] will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is strategic necessity’ (ibid). Therefore, although ethical considerations are of prime concern to the neoconservative agenda, they are only directly linked to foreign policy and intervention when they confer strategic advantage. The reason for this posture is that neoconservative theory surmises that ideological interventions will only succeed, when the strategic benefits are great and correctly perceived domestically as such. As examples, Krauthammer cites the unsuccessful interventions in Haiti and Somalia, insisting that ‘we failed because we correctly understood that nation-building is a huge task and that these places were not remotely worth the cost’ (Krauthammer 2004b: 23).

Thus, ethical considerations influenced the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, because in addition to the ideological strategic benefits wagered, there was a great deal of material reward at stake as well. Neoconservatism, seeks to use the U.S.’s vast military supremacy to support its security interests and ethical considerations simultaneously. Ultimately, regime change in Iraq looked, according to the neoconservatives, as having all the makings of a noble and successful intervention. Convinced of the rightness and strategic advantage of regime change, obtaining international approval ceased to be ‘a high priority for the White House, which believed that it would be vindicated by military success’ (Rubin 2003). In anticipation of a unilateral and possibly illegal intervention, ethical considerations also served as an important means to legitimise regime change, deflect criticism, and appeal to a domestic audience.

The Responsibility to Pre-empt

Much of the criticism that the U.S. faced before and after the war has been based on the concern that the U.S. was determined to go to war in Iraq, regardless of international sanctions or support in favour of the intervention. In fact, this is probably true given the strategic and military rewards of intervention promised by neoconservatives. As William Kristol declared in August of 2002, ‘[t]he debate in the administration is over. The time for action grows near.’ However the administration recognized that such bellicose determination would not be viewed favourably by the international community or the domestic electorate. Consequentially, the administration felt it necessary to use, in Paul Wolfowitz’s words, ‘murky’ evidence to justify force (Ignatieff 2003), and ethical claims to legitimise its actions. Similar to Plato’s concession that ‘noble lies’ are sometimes necessary to ‘help secure legitimacy for [the] Republic’ (Archard 1995: 473), there can be little debate that ‘in justifying his actions to the American people, the president was, at the least, economical with the truth’ (Ignatieff 2003).

Bush’s aggressively neoconservative doctrine as laid out in the 2002 National Security Strategy paved the way for the possibility of unprecedented pre-emptive action in the Middle East. Even in the absence of UN approval or international support, the administration understood that greater legitimacy would minimise resentment towards American forces in Iraq and the Middle East (Rubin 2003). Thus, although determined to depose the regime, the administration also sought to use ethical justifications to legitimise unsanctioned pre-emptive action. Ethical concerns are a highly viable justifaction for pre-emption considering the many recent humanitarian interventions which have proceeded without UN Security Council authorisation. Largely accepted without criticism as legitimate by international society, they include the 2001 South African intervention in Burundi, the 2002 multinational force in the Central African Republic, as well as the French intervention in Cote d'Ivoire. In fact in the same year as the 2003 war in Iraq, four other interventions were launched, without UN approval, in the name of ethical considerations: the African Union intervention in Burundi, the ECOWAS intervention in Liberia, the EU operation in Macedonia, and the Australian-led intervention in the Solomon Islands (Bellamy 2004). The U.S.’s own experience with Kosovo in 1999 suggested that UN approval was not essential to legitimately and violently intervene. In fact a commission of experts, reflecting on the legality and legitimacy of NATO’s war in Kosovo found the conflict to be ‘illegal but legitimate’ (ibid), a view that Alex Bellamy (2004) suggests ‘accurately reflects sentiment in international society.’

In Nicholas Wheeler’s seminal work on the subject, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (2000), he proposes that there is a legitimate ‘“humanitarian exception” to the non-intervention rule’ (162). The corollary to this suggestion, proposed by the UN is “The Responsibility to Protect.” This principal holds that ‘UN member states have a responsibility to protect the lives, liberty, and basic human rights of their citizens, and that if they fail or are unable to carry it out, the international community has a responsibility to step in’ (Feinstein & Slaughter 2004). The U.S. administration might reasonably have assumed that emphasising ethical considerations would legitimise their drive for war, even in the absence of direct UN endorsement. The Bush administration might also have concluded, based on the lessons of past interventions, that although their motives may be doubted prior to the intervention, vindication would follow their victory. Similar to this argument is Wheeler’s (2000) suggestion that the motives of interveners are less important, when judging the legitimacy of an intervention, than the positive humanitarian outcomes that are achieved (38). This principal, legitimises interventions where humanitarian outcomes where achieved despite the ulterior motives of the interveners. India’s intervention into East Pakistan during the Bangladesh war of 1971, Vietnam’s overthrow of Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1979, and Tanzania’s use of force, ostensibly to repel an invasion by Uganda in 1978-79, which ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the brutal dictator Idi Amin, are all relevant examples (Heinze 2006: 23). In this capacity, the US administration hoped that its declared ethical justifications would provide ex post facto international legitimacy to their intervention.

Although ethical considerations played a large part in the US’s attempt to justify intervention to the world, its nearly-unilateral actions, with little outright support from the international community demonstrate that international perception is not a pressing concern to the neoconservative agenda. On balance, neoconservatives are supicious of multilateralism, and the possibility of being constrained by outside states. However, this lack of concern does not extend to domestic audiences who, to paraphrase Krauthammer, must correctly perceive the magnitude of the stakes involved in the neoconservative agenda (2004b: 23). The American public found Bush’s warnings that their security was directly at risk to be the most compelling rationale for war; (Pfiffner 2004) however, suspecting that evidence of WMD or ties to Al Qaeda might not be forthcoming, the Bush administration relied on ethical considerations to bolster its support. Anatol Lieven (2004) notes that the years surrounding the Iraq war have witnessed an American people ‘more sharply and evenly divided along party lines than at any time in modern American history’ (3). Consequently, ethical concerns were an ideal means to unite support for the Bush administration’s efforts. Lieven further suggests that principles of human rights and democracy are the foundation of American civic nationalism, and are held with ‘almost religious fervour,’ having the special role of holding a disparate nation together (ibid). According to Kristol there is a strong revolutionary element to American patriotism that ‘arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness,’ and ‘a sense of national destiny’ (1983: xii). The American public is thus highly receptive to ethical considerations, and in the lead up to the Iraq war were willing to forgive the administration’s inability to produce direct evidence that their security was in jeopardy. Stated more critically, although the plan was ‘megalomaniac, completely impracticable […] and totally unacceptable to most of the world. Because, however, this programme was expressed in traditional American nationalist terms of self-defence and the messianic role of the US in spreading freedom, many Americans found it entirely acceptable, and indeed natural’ (Lieven 2004: 5).

Conclusion

‘History has not been kind to those nations which ignored or flouted the rights and aspirations of their people’ (Bush 2002: 3).

‘History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act’ (Bush 2002: ii).

The 2002 National Security Strategy speaks of history as a living, judging deity, and accordingly, the Bush administration believed that an intervention cloaked in ethical considerations, and based on the strategic value of democracy and human rights, would find vindication when viewed with the ‘distance of history’ (ibid: 5). Supporting this belief, Heinze has written in 2006 that, ‘what matters, then, is whether the intervention in fact promotes human rights, not whether the resort to force was motivated entirely out of a desire to do so’ (Heinze 2006: 24). Considering this, it is relevant to note a unique, but often over-looked feature of Plato’s ‘noble lie,’ that indicates that both the citizens and their rulers are meant to believe it. Plato was ‘looking for a way to give citizens a sense of unity, and Guardians a reason to care for the common people as if they were their brothers’ (Garner 1993: 88). In the case of ethical considerations, it seems clear that both American citizens believed the ethical justifications for war, and the neoconservative administration believed that ethics were a primary motive at the heart of the intervention.

Accordingly, such a conclusion paints a different picture of Bush’s neoconservative agenda, than the one depicted by his harshest critics. Rather than an intervention ‘excoriated as an imperial misadventure, justified in the language of freedom and democracy but actually prosecuted for venal motives: oil, power, revenge, political advantage at home and nefarious designs abroad,’ (Ignatieff 2003) this essay suggests that neoconservative theory led to a misguided, but genuine, belief that the imposition of American values in the Middle East would result in enhanced American security, newfound allies, U.S. material advantage as well as a greater standard of living for all Iraqis. This ‘morally right, but politically wrong’ (Brown 2006) interpretation is by no means meant to mitigate the Bush administration’s culpability for their actions. That, their ethical motives were genuine holds little value in light of the escalating civil war in Iraq and the Iraq Study Group’s recent report stating that ‘the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success’ (Baker & Hamilton 2006); even ‘noble’ failures must be accounted for. A noted historian has suggested that the tension we sense in U.S. foreign policy ‘is not one between idealism and realism at all, but between competing conceptions of what is both moral and realistic’ (McDougall 1997: 9). In accounting for the prominent position ascribed by US officials to ethical considerations in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, it seems clear that the neoconservative agenda was dominated heavily by American values, at the expense of what was realistic.

Ethical considerations were both a means and an end to achieving what the Bush administration believed to be ‘the national interest’ according to neoconservative theory. As Francis Fukuyama has asserted: ‘The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends […] but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them’ (Fukuyama 2006). The ‘distance of history’ (Bush 2002:5) that Bush spoke of prior to the war now reveals that violent deaths in Iraq occur at a rate three times of that previous to the invasion, (Bloomberg School of Public Health 2006) a consequence of a war justified with ethical considerations. It seems certain that the international community is not willing to vindicate the Bush administration’s ‘noble lie,’ and the question remains how history will judge a nation who’s conviction in the rightness of their beliefs resulted in a unilateral, and illegal invasion, costing the lives of more than half a million Iraqis, (ibid) twice as many as those directly linked to Saddam.

Bibliography

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Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. 2006. ‘Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates.’ Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html.

Brown, Carl. 2006. ‘The Dream Palace of the Empire: Is Iraq a "Noble Failure"?’ Foreign Affairs, 85(5), September/October.

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Cheney, Richard. 2002. ‘Vice President Cheney's Speech to the Veterans of Foreign wars.’ Project For the New American Century, August 26. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-082602.htm.

Cushman, Thomas. 2005a. ‘The Human Rights Case for the War in Iraq: A consequentialist view.’ In: Wilson, Richard Ashby ed. 2005. Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’. Cambridge University Press: London.

_____. 2005b. ‘The conflict of the rationalities: international law, human rights, and the war in Iraq.’ Deakin Law Review, 10(2).

Drury, Shadia. 2003. In: Postel, Danny. 2003. ‘Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neocons, and Iraq.’ openDemocracy.net, 16 October. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/ViewPopUpArticle.jsp?id=3&articleId=1542.

Duffield, John S. 2005. ‘Oil and the Iraq War: how the United States could have expected to benefit, and might still.’Middle East Review of International Affairs, 9(2), June.

Feinstein, Lee, and Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. ‘A Duty to Prevent.’ Foreign Affairs, 83(1), Jan/Feb: 136-150. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=11781843&site=ehost-live.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2004. ‘The neoconservative moment.(democratic globalism).’ The National Interest, 76, Summer. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A119572852&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=jrycal5&version=1.0.

_____. 2006. ‘After Neoconservatism.’ New York Times, February 19. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/undphil/collier/Chomsky/FF-After%20Neoconservatism%20-%20New%20York%20Times.pdf.

Garner, Richard. 1993. ‘Are Convenient Fictions Harmful to Your Health?’ Philosophy East and West, 43(1), Jan: 87- 106.

Heinze, Eric A. 2006. ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the War in Iraq: Norms, Discourse, and State Practice.’ Parameters, Spring.

Himes, Kenneth R. 2004. ‘Intervention, Just War and U.S. National Security.’ Theological Studies, 65.

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_____. 2004b. ‘In Defense of Democratic Realism.’ The National Interest, 77, Fall.

Kristol, Irving. 1983. Reflections of a Neoconservative. Basic Books: New York.

_____. 2003. ‘The Neoconservative Persuasion.’ The Weekly Standard, 25.

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Lieven, Anatol. 2004. ‘America right or wrong.’ openDemocracy.net, 08 September. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/trcor.htm.

Mason, John G. 2004. ‘Leo Strauss and the Noble Lie: The Neo-Cons at War.’ Logos, 3(2), Spring.

McDougall, Walter A. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, Mariner Books: New York.

Mearsheimer, John. 2005. ‘Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism.’ openDemocracy.net, 19 May. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0037.pdf.

Pfiffner, James P. 2004. ‘Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq?’ Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34(1): 25–46. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: www.blackwell-synergy.com.

Roth, Ken. 2004. ‘War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention.’ Human Rights Watch: World Report, January. Accessed Online 29 March 2007:http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm.

Rubin, James P. 2003. ‘Stumbling Into War.’ Foreign Affairs, 82(5), Sep/Oct: 46-66. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=10580750&site=ehost-live.

Simes, Dimitri K. 2003. ‘America's Imperial Dilemma.’ Foreign Affairs, 82(6), Nov/Dec: 91-102. Accessed Online 29 March 2007: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=11108411&site=ehost-live.

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Wheeler, Nicholas J. 2000. Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

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1 Although difficult, such a position is not impossible to make. For a convincing argument that the war in Iraq constitutes a humanitarian intervention see Cushman 2005a.

2 This title is in reference to Mearsheimer’s (2005) description of neoconservatism as ‘Wilsonianism with teeth’ (1).

Separatism, Splittism, Terrorism, Activism: What’s in a name in China’s ‘War on Terror’?

[China] also opposes unrestrained expansion of anti-terror war, believing that terrorism will not be eliminated by military means alone, but by consorted political, economic, cultural and diplomatic efforts. (Guang 2004: 527)

Intro

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the world has witnessed and cast measure upon the American response to terrorism and its efficacy. The same can be said of many large democratic states, whose actions remain heavily scrutinized. Less frequently mentioned or considered is China’s involvement in the International War on terror. Such an endeavour is no easy task considering China’s opaque political system, authoritarian control of the media, and often obscure leadership intentions. ‘That China is so large and complex that one can look there for proof of any thesis, and find it, complicates the situation’ (Johnson-Freese 2003: 52). To some, China’s support of the U.S.-led war on terror seemed to contradict its declared avoidance of state alliances, and jeopardise its obstinate position on protecting state sovereignty at all costs. Conversely, other analysts (Lai 2003) suggest that by aligning with the US after September 11, China has instead sought to strengthen its sovereignty and national unity by justifying its suppression of separatist movements in the North Western Xinjiang region (131). While China has a long history of often violent state control and equating independent religious activities and political dissent with the statutory crime of “separatism” (or more accurately translated, “splittism”), it wasn’t until it joined the war on terror that it unequivocally linked all dissenting voices in Xinjiang with terrorism. China now describes this once understated and secretive issue as an integral facet of the international war on terror. Despite a lack of media exposure in the West the “Xinjiang Problem” takes high precedence in China, and a recent internal security report concluded that ‘the independence movement in Xinjiang is the main threat to China’s stability, ranking concern over this above Tibet and unemployed workers’(Hyer 2006: 81). With an estimated one million troops stationed in Xinjiang (ibid), and no immediate external threat, their presence indicates the significance of ethnic unrest to China, and warns of the magnitude of violence that threatens the region.

The following paper addresses China’s approach to terrorism, specifically outlining how China’s position has changed after it’s involvement in the global war on terror. Beginning with a brief examination of the history and strategic importance of the Xinjiang region, this paper proceeds to describe China’s initial treatment of unrest as isolated crimes of separatism and splittism. This approach is contrasted starkly with China’s behaviour following the watershed event of 9-11, when it seized the opportunity to rally international support for its suppression of unrest in Xinjiang, deflect human rights criticisms, and counter U.S. influence in the region. China’s subsequent approach has been to broaden the definition of terrorism, exaggerate the threat that it poses, and violently confront opposition. Martin Wayne (2007) has recently suggested that China’s efforts have successfully kept the global jihad from spreading into its territory. As this paper counters, the lack of popular support for anti-government violence in Xinjiang is predicated not on China’s violent suppression, but rather on the moderate economic, social and political gains made in Xinjiang in the last 30 years. Consequently, unless China renews its efforts to address the valid social and political concerns in the region, viewing dissent as activism rather than terrorism, violence will invariably erupt in Xinjiang again.

History1

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as it is officially known to the Chinese, or as Uyghur nationalists call it “Uyghuristan” or “East Turkistan”2, is a vast region that occupies a sixth of China in the North West3. Despite its immense size, Xinjiang contains great expanses of inhospitable dessert and mountains and as a result holds little more than 1 percent of China’s population, of which over sixty percent of Xinjiang’s eighteen million citizens are Muslims4. Under the Chinese Communists, Muslims were divided among ten official nationalities, with the Uyghur5 comprising an ethnic majority in Xinjiang (Gladney 2005a). Despite the Uyghur majority, migration of Han Chinese started in the 1950s when the army sent troops to occupy Xinjiang, and has increased at a rapid pace as China has sought to develop the region. The Han population of Xinjiang has risen from nearly zero in 1950 to more than 40% of the current population (Forney 2002). Despite coexisting, the Han and the Uyghurs share very few demographic similarities, as the Han speak Putonghua (Mandarin) rather than Uyghur, and enjoy higher levels of economic development, employment and literacy rates.6 Certainly, the rapid growth of the Han has contributed to ethnic tensions in the region, especially amid Uyghur nationalist accusations that this growth has come at their expense.

From China’s perspective, the stability of Xinjiang is a high priority based on the strategic and economic value of the area7. Xinjiang is viewed as an important area to absorb high population growth from the Central and Coastal regions, and it is additionally home to several major nuclear testing facilities, due to rich reserves of uranium and copper. Also invaluable, is Xinjiang’s links to Central Asia,8 as it has the only major road to these countries. China ‘desperately want[s] to maintain hold of Xinjiang, fearing its loss would incite the [Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)] collapse and possibly the secession of Taiwan and Tibet’ (Dwyer 2005: 89). Despite China’s ambition of unity, Xinjiang has a history of independence movements and since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been three rebellions that resulted in independent Uyghur states9. Following the turmoil and austerity of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s was a period of liberalized cultural and political freedoms for the Uyghurs in Xinjiang10 (Dwyer 2005: 4). However, by the mid-1990s, China began to credit several isolated incidents of unrest in Xinjiang, as well as rising overt displays of Islam to the lax cultural and political freedoms of the 1980s. This initiated a wave of political and cultural crackdowns accompanied by ‘largely covert shifts in language and cultural policy aimed at further sinicizing the region’ (Dwyer 2005: 5).

Pre-9/11: Separatism/Splittism

China has been wary of ‘splittism’ since the 1950s, continually suggesting that it poses the greatest threat to national security (Dwyer 2005: 54). While the precise extent of the unrest in Xinjiang is obscured by unreliable and manipulated CCP data, internal official Chinese sources suggest that violent acts related to Xinjiang separatist movements numbered in the thousands in the 1990s and that ‘[i]n 1998 alone, more than seventy serious incidents occurred, causing more than 380 deaths’ (Lai 2003: 126). In response to this unrest the Chinese government implemented the ‘Strike Hard! Maximum Pressure!’ Campaign, aimed at eradicating the ‘three evils’ of separatism, terrorism, and religious extremism, although as Dwyer (2005) has noted, the campaign was primarily concerned with “splittists” rather than religious terrorists (54). As the name indicates, the campaign did indeed ‘Strike Hard,’ subjecting Uyghurs who expressed any government dissent to rapid, secretive, and summary trials, where the imposition of the death penalty was common. Vicziany (2003) has reported that Uyghurs executed for separatism was up to six times greater than their proportion of China’s population in the late 1990s (246). In addition to the covert policies which stifled cultural, religious and political freedoms for the Uyghurs, and the overt strong-handed policies of the ‘Strike Hard Campaign,’ the state also initiated the ‘Great Western Development Program.’ Recognizing the economic, social and political causes of unrest in Xinjiang, ‘Beijing hoped to lift the living standard of ethnic minorities, rid separatism of its economic catalysts, and minimize ethnic clashes and opportunities for the West to interfere’ (Lai 2003: 131), although the stated objectives of the program were limited to economic development11. In obvious contrast to China’s treatment of political unrest in Xinjiang after 9-11, both the threat and the state’s response to it were previously seen as a private domestic issue, rather than an international one. (Dwyer 2005: 54)

Appreciating that political unrest was not conducive to foreign investment in the region and fearful of Western intervention similar to NATO’s involvement in Kosovo, China principally downplayed and even denied the existence of ethnic conflict in Xinjiang. ‘Separatists were labelled as mentally ill and the whole problem was simply covered up’ (Luard 2003). Particularly when trying to raise foreign investment, Beijing portrayed any ethnic strife in the region as rare, implausible and criminal, rather than religious, or terrorist acts. Just four months before 9-11 CCP officials were declaring that the ‘[f]acts prove that Xinjiang is stable, security problems do not exist at all, and personal safety is completely guaranteed’ (Shicor 2006: 106).

Beijing’s approach to the conflict in Xinjiang of aggressive suppression and forced assimilation inevitably resulted in violent tension in the years prior to 9-11. Many Uyghurs, particularly young males from Xinjiang’s major cities, reacted to Beijing’s restrictive and oppressive policies with demonstrations of resistance. Although, as Gladney (2005a) has observed, this resistance showed little uniformity and while some groups supported violent separatist tactics, others promoted peaceful ecological causes, or greater religious freedoms, native language training, programs to prevent and treat AIDS, or even anti-alcohol campaigns. During this period the Western Development Project made marked industrial, and employment gains in the region, and as Sautman (1998) has noted, the ethnic minority affirmative action policies of the Chinese government, succeed to a degree in reducing tensions in the region (96). Despite limited resistance in the early 1990s, by all accounts, previous to 9-11 ‘terrorism’ in Xinjiang had been subsiding significantly (Shicor 2006: 106). Yet in the wake of 9-11, after years of denying the existence of ethnic tension in Xinjiang, the CCP abruptly changed tactics and ‘initiated an active diplomatic and propaganda campaign against “East Turkestan terrorist forces;”’ (Becquelin 2004: 39) a label that has since come to describe any Uyghur suspected of separatist or splittist activities.

Post-9/11: Terrorism

China’s ‘Strike Hard!’ campaign drew heavy criticism from human rights organisations as well as the International Community in the years preceding 9-11. Moreover, the Chinese leadership was acutely aware that increased unrest in the region could possibly provoke Western Intervention. China was particularly concerned with the implications of NATOs involvement in Kosovo in 1999 with the proclaimed goal of protecting an ethnic minority people from aggression and ethnic cleansing by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Thus, beyond its own concern with rebellion in the region, China also needed to address international accusations that its suppression of the Uyghurs was anti-Muslim. China, increasingly dependent on predominately Muslim nations for energy and export markets, could not risk alienating these nations with its violent campaign against ‘splittists’ who shared a language, culture and religion, with many of these nations. As early as 1997, an ethnic riot in the Xinjiang city of Yining that left no less than nine Uyghur Muslims dead and several hundreds arrested, brought condemnations from Turkey and warnings from Saudi Arabia about the ‘suffering of [its] Muslims whose human rights are violated’ (Gladney 2003: 459). Consequently 9-11, provided China with the opportunity to include Xinjiang in the international war on terror, elevating the conflict from minority suppression to an international counter-terrorism campaign.

A fundamental ambition of this international campaign has been to broaden the definition and criteria of terrorism to meet the current needs of China’s leadership. Dwyer (2005) has demonstrated a ‘clearly demarcated shift’ in Chinese rhetoric describing the Uyghur nationalists since 9-11 from ‘separatists’ to ‘Islamic terrorists’ (x). This research also indicates a distinct paucity of Chinese-language mention of the phrase ‘Uyghur Terrorism,’ suggesting ‘that this discourse on terrorism is actually intended for an international audience, not a domestic one’ (57). By all accounts, China’s relabelling of ‘separatists’ as ‘terrorists’ has had it’s intended effect in the West as ‘[m]ost Western media, which previously had paid little attention to [Xinjiang,] have followed suit, equating these fringe separatist groups with terrorists’ (ibid: x). For the first time ever, Chinese authorities provided specific details about the violence in Xinjiang in a January 2002 White Paper. The paper, describing the activities of alleged ‘East Turkestan’ Uyghur terrorist organizations, highlighted accused bombing and assassination campaigns ‘consisting of more than 200 incidents resulting in 162 deaths and 440 people injured, the most recent incident taking place in 1998’ (Becquelin 2004: 39). Any study of the conflict in Xinjiang finds these exact same statistics cited repeatedly throughout both Chinese and Western academic and official literature. However, Shicor’s (2006) research indicates that the credibility of these numbers is highly speculative. The White Paper also ‘asserted that Uyghur organizations had received training and funding from Pakistan and Afghanistan, including direct financing from Osama Bin Laden’ (Becquelin 2004: 39). The White Paper went as far as to include legally registered organizations12 in its list of terrorist organizations, asking for cooperation from the international community in their prosecution. Subsequently, in the US’s efforts to enlist international support for its own war on terror, it ‘agreed to cosponsor the inclusion of a little-known Uyghur organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), on the UN list of terrorist organizations linked to Al-Qaeda and subject to asset freezing’ (Becquelin 2004: 40). The U.S. and UN came under criticism for siding with China without any outside validation of the government’s claims, in addition to a ‘lack of evidence that these groups even continued to exist given that the last recorded incident was in 1998, and the glaringly opportunistic timing of the disclosure’ (ibid); the effect was to justify China’s actions, and bolster its counter-terrorism efforts.

As the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Zhu Bangzao has explained: ‘We think terrorism should be opposed no matter where it manifests itself, where it comes from - and no matter who the perpetrators and their targets are’ (Lam 2001). Clearly, such an approach allows the Chinese leadership a carte blanche in their domestic campaign against terrorism. Following the UN’s support of China’s anti-terror efforts, the government proceeded to categorise all pro-independence groups, and in fact all dissent in Xinjiang, under the label of “East Turkestan,” equating non-violent activists with Islamic terrorist organizations. However, China faced a distinct problem in its war on terror: despite its increased attention to terrorism in Xinjiang, actual violent terrorist acts had nearly ceased after the late 1990s. To account for this lack of activity, ‘the Chinese authorities simply argue that “separatist thought” is the new approach followed by the same terrorist organizations that previously used violent tactics. This allows a dissenting writer or a non-violent group advocating minority rights to be tarred with the terrorist brush’ (Becquelin 2004: 43). Progressively, China has begun to prosecute what it refers to as ‘spiritual terrorism’ (Marquand 2003) which largely consists of public dissent, expressions of dissatisfaction, or even chanted verse that is critical of the government, as was the case of a young Uyghur poet arrested at a concert hall during a performance in 2002. The Chinese Government asserts that the terrorists have changed strategy since 9-11 and are now ‘ideologically attacking’ China, instead of their ‘former frequent practice of engaging in violent terrorist operations’ (Becquelin 2004: 43). Having sufficiently broadened the scope and reach of its anti-terrorist campaign, China has also renewed its efforts to forcefully assimilate the Uyghurs.

This new and harsher regime forces Islamic clerics to undergo ‘patriotic education’ sessions, and Uyghur officials are barred from religious activities, as are all children. Attributed to China’s efforts to modernise and develop the West, the use of the Uyghur language has now been outlawed in schools and universities. The perception among some analysts is that ‘Sept. 11 gives hard-liners the excuse for the crackdown they want’ (Forney 2002). Since 9-11 the state has ‘has rounded up thousands of terrorist suspects, large weapons caches, and printed documents allegedly outlining future public acts of violence’ (Gladney 2005b). Xinjiang now has the highest number of executions per week in China (ibid).

The future in Xinjiang: Activism?

As China is remiss to admit, terrorist violence in Xinjiang has been subsiding significantly since the late 1990s. Of the supposed hundreds of Uyghur terrorists, who China suggested had collaborated with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, only twenty-two were ever detained by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay. Most of them were later released after a U.S. military tribunal declared that ‘they had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time’ (Shicor 2006: 107)13. Ultimately, only seven Uyghurs were ever identified by the U.S. as terrorists (ibid). Despite China’s claims that it is fighting a war in Xinjiang on Islamic terrorism there is little credible evidence to substantiate this. Though Uyghurs are indeed Muslims, it is more likely that they see their cause as anti-colonial, not Islamic. As Hyer (2006) has noted, extreme Uyghur nationalists can often be heard to chant ‘sha han mie hui (kill the Chinese and destroy the Hui [a Chinese Muslim minority]’; 80). Incidentally the Hui Muslims, who are China’s largest Muslim minority, have never seriously faced charges of terrorism or separatism (Gladney 2005b), possibly due to easier assimilation based on their Chinese ethnicity. Murat Auezov, the former Kazakh ambassador to Beijing, has proposed that the ‘Uyghurs are struggling to preserve their cultural identity against an officially sanctioned mass influx of Han Chinese into their region’ (Hyer 2006: 80). This indicates that the ‘Xinjiang Problem’ has less to do with Islamic terrorism than it does with China’s integration and development policies in the region. Consequently, China's rhetorical effort to combine all Uyghurs under the title of ‘Eastern Turkestan’ terrorists is misleading. ‘To be sure, a small minority of these organizations do endorse terrorism but they are small, marginal and—to judge by the outcome—not terribly effective’ (Shicor 2006: 103). Not only are these efforts misleading, but China’s related efforts to suppress Uyghur language, culture, and religion have the distinct possibility of reigniting violence in the region. Thus it is counterproductive to attribute the recent lack of violent terrorist activity in Xinjiang to China’s anti-terrorism campaign. What is more likely is that the stimulation of the local economy over the past thirty years is contributing to stability. Since the launch of the Western Development Program residents in Xinjiang, ‘especially those in northern parts, have witnessed a noticeable lift in their material lives, and consequently economic incentives for supporting separatists have been reduced’ (Lai 2003: 134); although, it is increasingly becoming clear to the Uyghurs that this limited development is coming at a tremendous cost. Xinjiang has begun to serve as a ‘dumping ground for the rest of the country,’ (Chen 1994) as well as hosting more than 40, 000 convicts from all over China in Xinjiang’s many Labour-reform camps, the region is also used to conduct nuclear-weapons testing. ‘Uyghurs morbidly joke that they have grown “blacker, shorter and stupider” since the tests began some 30 years ago’ (ibid).

Most noticeable to the Uyghurs has been the enormous influx of Han Chinese, mostly sponsored by the Chinese government, in an effort to Sinicize the region. This immigration has strained Xinjiang’s land and ecological resources, exerted a strong pressure on the Uyghur language and culture, as well as created competition for employment. Since the late 1980s Chinese oil companies have flocked to Xinjiang and currently employ more than 20,000 workers, virtually none of whom are Uyghur (Chen 1994). Islam has not made terrorists out of the Uyghurs, instead ‘Chinese encroachment on the region’s natural and cultural resources has made activists and nationalists out of formerly apolitical minority people’ (Dwyer 2005: 4). The ‘Xinjiang problem’ is not religious terrorism, rather it is ascertaining how to genuinely incorporate the Uyghurs into the region’s economic and political processes, as well as assure their right to cultural and religious freedom. Chinese immigration into the region cannot remain unchecked if the cultural and religious autonomy of the Uyghurs is to be guaranteed. Addressing the valid social and political concerns of the Uyghurs is not accommodating terrorists, but it may very well pre-empt the transformation of activists into terrorists. Erkin Alptekin, the 65-year-old leader of the World Uyghur Congress contends that the sporadic violence of the 1990s was the result of formerly peaceful activists who ‘lost patience’ with China. While condemning their response, he suggests that those ‘Uyghurs involved likely concluded that violence was the only way to “draw the attention of the international community” because “the international community only reacts when conflict breaks out” (Lawrence 2004).

Conclusions

Although the benefits of including Xinjiang in the larger war on terror may have been obvious to China’s leadership directly after 9-11, gradually the costs of this endeavour are weighing heavily on the security of the region. China’s mistaken perception that cultural accommodation was the cause of unrest in the 1990s, rather than the solution to it, will only heighten the possibility of a violent resurgence. ‘The lesson that history teaches us about using massive military force against terrorism is that it tends to create more terrorists’ (Light 2002). China’s war on terror, though different in many ways from the war on terror being fought in the West, is similarly torn between the compromise of human rights or national security, and likewise is failing to recognize that ‘human rights is the best guarantor of national security’ (Ignatieff 2002). Ultimately, China’s preoccupation with terrorism has obstructed any efforts to improve the livelihoods of the disenfranchised and impoverished in Xinjiang (Petersen 2006: 63). Even the U.S. has remained unwilling to allow China to obscure the reality that ‘[t]he legitimate economic and social issues that confront the people in Western China are not necessarily terrorist issues and should be resolved politically rather than using counterterrorism methods’ (Taylor 2001). Erkin Alptekin highlights the limited opportunities for engagement that face young dissatisfied Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s ‘Han World.’ He pragmatically explains that ‘if they rise up against their Chinese rulers, they will be “slaughtered and the world would just watch…Is it worth it just for publicity that we send our people to death?”’ (Lawrence 2004). China’s opportunity to engage the Uyghurs may nearly have passed, after which the possibility exists that Xinjiang’s assortment of activists, separatists, and splittists may be provoked and consolidated as genuine terrorists.


Appendix A14



























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1 Although a complete history of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and it’s ethnic majority, the Uighurs, is beyond the scope of this paper, Gladney 2003, Gladney 2005a and Lai 2003 offer insightful accounts. When possible footnotes are used to include further historical details.

2 A term that is outlawed under Chinese separatism laws.

3 See map, Appendix A.

4 ‘Recent demographic shifts suggest that there are more Muslims living in China today than there are in Malaysia, and more than in every Middle Eastern Muslim nation except Iran, Turkey, and Egypt (and about the same number as in Iraq)’ (Gladney 2005b)

5 The Uighur are often mistakenly referred to as ‘Chinese Muslims,’ when they are in fact ethnically Turkic. Ethnically Chinese or Han Muslims do, of course exist, and are predominantly referred to as Hui. Although they make up an ethnic minority in Xinjiang, the Hui are greater in numbers throughout China than the Uighur.

6 It is difficult to overstate the differences between the Han and the Uighurs and as Matthew Forney (2002) has noted they are so different that they “can't agree on what time the sun rises. Uighurs set their watches to Central Asian time; Chinese to Beijing's two hours earlier” (Forney 2002).

7 It is estimated that nearly 80% of the coal, gold, jade, and precious metal reserves in China are in Xinjiang, which accounts for one third of China’s production of petroleum and natural gas. (Wang 2003: 574).

8 Xinjiang borders eight countries: Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

9 The Kashgar Emirate in 1864-1877; the Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (TIRET) from 1933-1937; and the Eastern Turkestan Republic from 1944-1949, supported by the Soviet Union. Each independent state was eventually reclaimed by Chinese forces (Gates & Oresman 2003:17).

10 Officially, Chinese minority policies allowed for exemptions from the one-child birth program, special scholarships to secondary and higher educational institutions, tax relief, and bi-lingual education schools that teach in the local minority languages up through university. ‘In addition, minority government officials are actively recruited in order to promote a sense of participation in governance. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party, which has many fewer minorities and is generally the final authority in areas of governance, continues to exercise the greatest power in the region.’ (Gladney 2005a)

11 The Western Development Program had the stated economic aims of correcting regional inequality by generating domestic demand in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis, expanding domestic markets and pushing forward structural reforms in the interior regions. See Lai 2002 for a general description of the program and Lai 2003 for broader explanations of the program as it relates to the Xinjiang separatist movement.

12Included in the list was the East Turkestan Information Centre (ETIC), based in Munich, and the World Uighur Youth Congress (WUYC), an umbrella organization that unites various exiled Uighur organizations from around the world. ‘Both groups advocate non-violent and democratic change and have been documenting human rights abuses in Xinjiang’ (Becquelin 2004: 41-42).

13 The release of the Uighurs held in Guantanamo resulted in diplomatic tensions, as the U.S. ignored Chinese demands for extradition of the prisoners, releasing them to Albania instead, amid fears that they would face persecution if returned to China.

14 Map courtesy of Human Rights Watch.