A life in forgotten exile
AS CHIEF SECRETARY for Administration Donald Tsang Yam-kuen prepares to lead a 200-strong Hong Kong delegation on a visit to Xinjiang starting this Sunday, in a modest apartment on the second floor of a busy street in Istanbul an exile from the western Chinese province waits for the day when he still believes his homeland will gain its independence.
Arslan Alptekin last saw Xinjiang 52 years ago, before fleeing over the Himalayas to India at the age of eight. Now he is the leader of 50,000 Uygur exiles, who speak a language closely related to Turkish, live in Turkey and call their homeland 'East Turkestan'.
'No one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union,' he said. 'All empires collapse, like the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman, especially those which have mistreated their people by violence. The Chinese empire will collapse from within. The workers and farmers who brought Mao Zedong to power are unhappy with the enormous wealth gap.'
Some exile groups are raising the spectre of violence in an effort to bring about their goal of independence. A spokesman for the Swedish-based Eastern Turkestan Muslim information centre was yesterday quoted by Apple Daily as warning the SAR delegation - which also includes Financial Secretary Antony Leung Kam-chung, Pacific Century CyberWorks chairman Richard Li Tzar-kai and other local business leaders - that it could not rule out the possibility of armed unrest during the group's nine-day visit.
But Mr Alptekin said his Istanbul-based group was opposed to violence. Time is running out for him and the estimated three million Uygurs who live in exile and want an independent homeland, similar to that now enjoyed by the other peoples of central Asia - the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks and Turkmen - since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Since the communists took power in 1949, they have forced and encouraged Han Chinese to migrate to Xinjiang, the largest region of China, covering one sixth of its total land area and bordering eight countries.