Respect China's aloofness
It would have been obtuse to miss the streak of smug satisfaction in the western response to the seizure by al-Qaeda's Pakistani allies of two Chinese engineers working on Pakistan's Gomal Zam dam project. Not that anyone wished harm to the captives. But the hope was that the incident would compel China to support US President George W. Bush in his war on terror.
If western expectations from the five-day impasse, which ended last Thursday, were misplaced, the kidnappers also miscalculated in imagining that the fate of Wang Ende and Wang Peng - employees of the Ministry of Water Resources' Sino Hydro Corporation - would persuade the US to end military operations in the South Waziristan tribal region, about 330km southwest of Islamabad.
British hostage Kenneth Bigley's brutal end, following the beheadings of some Americans, reconfirmed that nothing will stop Mr Bush in the countdown to the presidential election. Some 600 important al-Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding in the rugged hills straddling Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, and the prospect of a dazzling prize drives the American campaign which is as much political as military.
Western media reports linking the kidnapping with the troubled Xinjiang autonomous region exposed a glaring inconsistency. Like Kashmir and Chechnya, Xinjiang is another complex domestic political issue, and it is simplistic to try to force it into the straitjacket of America's black-and-white world view. On the one hand, we are told that China cannot afford to stand aloof from the Anglo-American war effort since it, too, faces a terrorist challenge. On the other, China is accused of repression in Xinjiang, of bombing, assassinations, restricting religious rights, arresting hundreds of separatist activists and executing local notabilities.
The charges include encouraging Han Chinese migration to swamp Xinjiang's 8 million Muslim Uygurs of Turkic descent, forbidding young Uygurs to pray in mosques and not allowing local imams to meet visiting foreign Muslims. The tone and substance of western allegations imply that the Uygurs are freedom-fighters and that China is wholly in the wrong in rejecting their demands. That might be an understandable strategy for China's adversaries; but they risk credibility by turning round and denouncing the Uygurs as al-Qaeda surrogates to enlist Chinese support.
China, like India, extends broad support to the US without becoming involved in hunting down al-Qaeda operatives. Both countries face problems of national integration that may display some characteristics of the general terrorist threat but are different and unique because of regional, religious and ethnic factors. True, there was a time when some Uygurs looked to Afghanistan's Pakistan-trained Taleban militants for help in their secessionist campaign. In turn, the latter tried to enlist Uygur support for an Islamist East Turkestan. But the game changed when Operation Enduring Freedom ousted the Taleban regime.
Even Abdullah Mehsud, the suspected mastermind behind the kidnappings - who was captured in 2001 and handed over to the Americans - did not connect his criminal act with Xinjiang. He demanded only that some of his jailed comrades be released and that the US stop operations in South Waziristan.
After incarcerating him in the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba for 21/2 years, the Americans released Mehsud in March, together with 26 other prisoners. The Pentagon held then that the men did not threaten the US and were of no intelligence value. Seven months down the road, it might have hailed Mehsud as an asset if his gamble had succeeded in roping in China. As it was, Wang Peng's death should warn the world against subordinating human lives to political expediency.
Sunanda Kisor Datta-Ray is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. The views expressed in this article are those of the author
