Published by: THE WORLD UYGHUR NETWORK NEWS November 5, 1997

From a newspaper in Sydney Australia,

Forwarded to ETIC on 11/04/97

Elizabeth Tadic presents an exclusive report for this week's Dateline - the first television footage to emerge for many years and filmed secretly in China's remote, oil-rich north western province of Xinjiang, strategically bordering eight countries, including Kazakstan, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan - highly sensitive borders China is desperate to secure.

The ABC's Foreign Correspondent recently screened a BBC report by Julie Flynn, forced to retreat to Kazakstan after being expelled from Xinjiang and her footage confiscated. The BBC maintains that no film has been brought out of Xinjiang for several years.

Tadic's story begins in the oasis town of Kashgar, where she was first arrested for straying into an area forbidden to tourists, let along the foreign media. Kashgar is home to the ancient Uighur people - Turkic speaking Muslims of the Old Silk Road,the original inhabitants of this land.

In 1949, as part of China's communist takeover, what was formerly Eastern Turkistan became Xinjiang, an annexed province of China. Like the Tibetans, the Uighur people have been systematically oppressed by the Chinese government, whose brutal policies threaten to wipe them out. In the past year alone, human right groups have reported more than 10,000 political arrests and 1000 executions. But far from suppressing the Uighurs, Beijing's crackdown is creating the very militancy it seeks to prevent. This year, the Uighur separatist movement took their fight for independence to the capital, bombing a bus in the heart of Beijing.

Xinjiang has long been a dumping ground for people deemed undesirable by Beijing. In the last three years, 40,000 convicted Chinese criminals have been sent to Xinjiang's labour camps and forbidden to return to the East. As well, Akhmet Igemberdi, President of the Eastern Turkistan Association in Adelaide, who was incarcerated in a Chinese prison for 10 years before coming to Australia in 1985 , says"...Every day 5000 settlers ( the majority of whom are Han Chinese) come to Eastern Turkistan... and now the demographic has changed... the Chinese government puts our position (the Uighurs) in the minority..." A million Chinese troops are now stationed in Xinjiang to control the resistance movement which authorities fear may become an Islamic uprising. Akhmet.."More than 10,000 mosques closed, 20,000 religious schools closed.. Chinese government aren't allowing people to go to the mosques".

But something else is making the government's push West vital, Oil. Even though many Uighurs live below the poverty line, 10 millions tons of oil were produced in Xinjiang in 1993. Shortly after Tadic managed to film the control center in Korla City - "the oil capital of Xinjiang" - she was arrested by the politics, interrogated and ordered to erase all footages of the oil facilities. She returned the next day and continued to film secretly. The sensitivity of the authorities about the oil deposits has increased since a deal has been struck with neighboring Kazakstan to build pipelines connection West Kazakstan with China's East pipelines which will run through Chine's trouble spot - Xinjiang.