The New York Times International, Sunday, November 10, 1996

XIJI, CHINA - Guardedly at first, the young Muslim farmer recounted a story many tell here, of how a local Communist Party official skinned his victims alive as part of a campaign of terror to overthrow the leader of a long and rebellious line of Sufi Muslims who inhabit these hills in northwestern China. "One time, Ma Rucheng tied four people up and began slicing their skin like he was peeling a turnip, "The young farmed said, contorting his face to mimic the paroxysms of their pain. "And as he was slicing them, he would ask them, `What is your name?' and `Where are you from?' In this way, Ma Rucheng showed his power." The story of Ma Rucheng and the fighting that raged in 1992-93 among Muslims here in southern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has never fully been told and may never be. What is clear, from the sparse official account and interviews of local residents, is that there was a violent struggle over the leadership of a large Sufi Muslim order with hundreds of thousands of followers. What is not yet c

lear, but which many here suspect, is whether local Communist officials engineered the downfall of a popular religious chieftain, Ma Liesun, by backing a rival, Ma Rucheng, to be rid of a potential source of rebellion in the Muslim population of northwestern China. The account of Muslim fighting here is like many reports that reach outsiders from China's remote regions. About 20 million Muslims live here and at times they clash with China's security forces over grievances large and small, including issues of autonomy and self-rule. China garrisons hundreds f troops in these regions to enforce the unity and stability that Beijing demands, but also to muffle the sounds of dissent. A small war might begin, as it did here, but the screams of its victims are silenced by time, distance and the system. Today in China, foreign journalists remain all but barred from these regions, including Tibet, China's most restive frontier. And when a rare journalistic visit is arranged, it is carefully scripted to minimize conta

ct with ordinary Muslims from the Hui or Uighur minorities or with Tibetans, except those primed to discuss politically safe subjects, like how the bottled water business is doing in the Himalayas. Here in Ningxia, a recent trip through the hill country around Xiji found that in almost any village entered, the unresolved civil conflict and the bitterness over the military crackdown of 1993 remains an open wound. "The disputes among the minorities here are not well solved because our religious chief, Ma Liesun, is still in jail and we hope you will speak to the officials in Beijing to get him out," said He Demin, a farmer in a village not far from here.

"Ma Liesun is a good person and he is our religious leader and Ma Rucheng was a bandit who cheated and killed people," said Ma Xingui, 40, who, like many Muslims in this region, shares the family name Ma - Chinese for Mohammed.

He Demin said, "We appealed to the central Government, but they have not handled it." To date, the only official account of the violence that occurred here was published in February 1994 by the New China News Agency. Its lone dispatch said the People's Armed Police had been called in to quell "gang fighting" and "revenge killings" among rival Muslim factions and that several ringleaders, among them a farmer named Ma Rucheng and Ma Liesun, the leader of the Sufi Muslim order that is predominant here, were given long prison sentences for inciting the civil strife that took the lives of a least 50 people and wounded another 30.

Ma Liesun was sentenced to 12 years; Ma Rucheng to life. But a different story is told in village after village in this discontented region, where local elders like Ma Wanquan evoke a keenly felt sense of injustice as they freshly turned yellow earth that has given up a load of potatoes this fall and that now radiates the musk of the land. To many farmers here, Ma Rucheng was a minor Communist Party official who became a monstrous warlord and, with the backing of local party leaders, sought to overthrow the religious line long led by Ma Liesun's family. "Ma Rucheng originally was a party secretary of a production team," said Ma Wanquan, referring to the Moist communist structure that still exists here, even though the land has been divided among households. "And somehow he climbed up and wanted to be the religious leader, but we already had a leader, Ma Liesun."

"He had this Plum Flower Party and told people, `If you don't follow me, I will kill you or shin you alive.'" Using a campaign of violence described by a number of villagers, Ma Rucheng assembled a small army, occupied mosques and used homemade cannons to fortify the caves where he stored food and ammunition for his little army. "He had 350 to 400 followers and they would go down to the villages and threaten the people," Ma Wanquan said. He continued, "There was a mosque that Ma Rucheng wanted to take over, but the people would not allow him, and he gathered a group of more than 20 people who armed themselves and took it over and drove away the people." In the process, a 70-year-old man named Xi who resisted the takeover was murdered, he said. But what makes many farmers seethe is that Ma Rucheng apparently continued to receive support from local party officials even as he was terrorizing the countryside. "Even after he killed some people, truckloads of wheat flour - totaling more than 10 tons - came to him

from the government," said Ma Wanquan. "This was reported to the autonomous region government several times, but the government said it was a religious dispute and so they would not handle it."

"We didn't like it that the government seemed to be choosing Ma Rucheng as our religious leader," said He Demin. "They did this on purpose. The government chose him to provoke a fight." The significance of the farmers' complaint is that it raises questions about whether local Communist Party officials set out to divide and conquer this Muslim order by backing an upstart willing to use tactics of terror to overthrow its established religious leader. Still, no one is saying, fully, what happened here. Chinese authorities in Ningxia and Beijing declined to answer questions about the case, or address the current discontent that exists in southern Ningxia. Ma Liesun's followers feel that he was unjustly imprisoned for seeking to put and end to the terror. In the absence of government action against Ma Rucheng, the farmers said, Ma Liesun armed his own forces. Clashes between the two groups climaxed in a gun battle in May 1993 that left more than 30 dead. "That is when the central Government sent thousands of army

troops and arrested those who were fighting," said Ma Wanquan. "They army saw that we are ordinary farmers so they did not suppress all of us, but they came to the villages and seized all of our farm tools, like axes, hoes, pitchforks and long knives." Without tools, many peasants left their homes and land. Some went to the cities to beg. "We hope to win the release of Ma Liesun, our leader," he said. "We want the government to investigate this and overturn the verdict against our leader. The government wanted Ma Liesun to acknowledge his mistake, but he refused, saying he reported the killings by Ma Rucheng to the government many times, but it was not handled."

"what mistake have I made?" Ma Liesun was quoted as saying at his trial.