Little about the Uyghur People

In the middle of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the northern-western part of China, the land of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a least populated land while it covers close to a sixth of the nation's area. Having resisted during hundreds of years the Han Chinese domination, Xinjiang, or Old Eastern Turkistan, fell under the Chinese Han domination in 1949. From then, its population is mainly Uyghurs and Turkic - speaking System.

Muslim most importantly, the Uyghur people have a deep religious identification which usually, in specific, enabled them to maintain a solid difference in opposition to the Chinese invader. Indeed, the Uyghur Kingdom of Mongolia knew a excellent civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.

During their background, the Uyghur People successively adopted Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before finally changing to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., as a result beginning the way to the Islamization of the entire Central Asia.

Under the effect of the beliefs which they taken on, Uyghur People used successively, and sometimes in a competing way, a great number of written forms (turco-runic, brahmi, tokharien, soghdien) before developing their own graphic system.

The coming of Islam was a great modification simply because it was followed by the assimilation of the Uyghur land in the enormous Turco-Mongolian and Muslim Kingdom. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan slowly replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used presently.

If their own writing, their language and their religion mark a real big difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, Uyghur People also are different from their aspect, so characteristic of Central Asia's people. A shiny skin, eyes representing a whole pallet of colors, from black to deep blue, features going out to the Mongolian, Turkish or Uzbek roots of these men and these women.

For a few years, China has integrated the proper identity of these remote people, though they represent only 8 million population - a little for this immense country. Thus, the Uyghurs are now part of the fifty six racial minority groups having been well known in an official way by China.

This statute will allow these people a few privileges in a land where their big difference is very often repressed. Therefore, Uyghur people escape the "single child policy" and their language is known as the second official language in Xinjiang.

The integration of the Uyghurs and their culture in the People's Republic of China, however, looks really illusory. The presence of all-natural sources in Xinjiang, and its proximity with nations known as sensitive, clearly urged the government to increase the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the higher responsibility jobs.

In response to this true will to assimilate the Uyghurs into the Chinese culture, an independent party like East Turkistan Islamic Movement(ETIM) was born in the early 1990.

Asserting more flexibility, but mainly the acceptance of their true identity, this movement was severely repressed by the power authorities in area Xinjiang.

The situations of September 11, 2001, were the perfect occasion for the Chinese government to justify true reprisals: they declared the "Uyghur freedom fighters" as dangerous terrorists linked to Al Quaida because of their Muslim origins and their proximity with Pakistan and Afghanistan... However, the terrible repression which followed did not calm down the anger. The Uyghur population continues today to proudly keep their identification and their ethnic heritage , even though they become a minority on their own land.

For additional information about the Uyghurs, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com