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| China said ringleaders of the separatist “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM) who trained in Pakistan orchestrated the assault on Sunday that killed six in Kashgar city, Xinjiang region, where many Muslim Uighurs resent the presence of Han Chinese people. |
BEIJING: The biggest threat to China’s grip on its ethnically divided far western frontier comes from homegrown anger exploding in violence, not from Pakistan-based terrorists officials have blamed for the latest bloodshed.
China said ringleaders of the separatist “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM) who trained in Pakistan orchestrated the assault on Sunday that killed six in Kashgar city, Xinjiang region, where many Muslim Uighurs resent the presence of Han Chinese people.
The Uighur (pronounced “Wee-gur”) are a Turkic-speaking people who form a minority in Xinjiang, and are culturally closer to ethnic groups across central Asia and Turkey than the Han Chinese who make the vast majority of China’s population.
Still, many observers doubt the attack was a blow from abroad by ETIM, which they said was struggling, in disarray, and even outright defunct.
Instead, the causes of – and possibly the cure for – ethnic conflict lie mainly within China, they said.
“All conversations I have had with people from China and Pakistan suggests a high degree of skepticism about the real viability of ETIM,” said Andrew Small, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund think tank in Brussels who studies China’s ties with
