Venkatesan Vembu
 
The video relates to the killing of three Chinese civilians in Peshawar in July 2007, at the height of a flashpoint in Pakistan over the army’s storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad.

Earlier this month, while trawling the Internet for jihadi websites as part of an Islamist media monitoring project, Liang Pingan, at the Shanghai office of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), stumbled on a chilling ‘execution’ video. 

The 105-second video, which DNA has since secured, depicts the killing of three Chinese men by a lone gunman. It appeared on the website of Al-Hesbah, a hitherto little-known organisation, and was purportedly produced by the “Islamic Party of Turkestan” (IPT).

The opening title, in Uyghur — the Turkic language spoken in the restive Xinjiang province in China’s northwest — says: “A blow to the Chinese ‘butchers’ in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan.” 

Surfacing as it did, at a time when China was facing an uprising in Tibet and street protests by Uyghur nationalists in Xinjiang, the video with the images of Chinese nationals being executed in the name of Uyghur Muslims “has the power to stir things up in China,” says a Beijing-based security analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The video, which has subsequently proliferated on Uyghur-language websites, “is evidently calculated to polarise Uyghurs and Han Chinese and whip up nationalistic sentiments on both sides.”

After a closer analysis  of the video, Liang established that it relates to  the killing of three Chinese civilians in Peshawar in July 2007, at the height of a flashpoint in Pakistan over the army’s storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad. 

That crisis, which followed the occupation of the mosque by radical Islamic students, ended in a bloodbath, recalls the Beijing-based security analyst. “But it was never clearly established why the Chinese nationals were killed in that connection.” 

“This is the first time this execution video has been released,” observes Liang, who tracks Islamist websites as part of a MEMRI project to unearth online jihadis. 

Other aspects of the video have intrigued observers familiar with the Uyghur movement. Eric Schluessel, a Xinjiang scholar at Indiana University’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies, points out that the language on the IPT seal graphic and on the organisation’s website “suggest that these were all produced by Xinjiang Uyghurs.”

In addition, the IPT site features several photos purportedly of Hasan Mahsum, the founder of the Shärqiy Türkistan Islam Härikiti (East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM), which is committed to creating an independent, Islamic state of “East Turkestan” in what is present-day Xinjiang. ETIM is listed, in China and elsewhere, as a terrorist organisation with links to the Al-Qaeda, a claim it denies. 

However, the Beijing-based security analyst says the fact that the seal and the video are labelled as from IPT rather than from the Islamic Party of East Turkestan or the ETIM implies that the video was likely produced “not by a Xinjiang-focussed group”, but rather, by a pan-Islamic -– “and possibly Pakistan-based” — jihadi group that is “looking to stir things up in Xinjiang”. 

Pakistan-based terror groups continue to be an irritant in the “all weather” friendship between China and Pakistan, and last week offered one of the most visible manifestations of the strains that are showing up.

China’s ambassador in Pakistan, Luo Zhaohui, publicly stated that the ETIM, was “still very active” in some areas of Pakistan. “Such forces,” he said, “are never happy about our brotherly relations,” and China wanted Pakistan to be aware of these “disruptive elements.”

This, says the Beijing-based analyst, “is perhaps the most vocal articulation of Chinese disenchantment for perceived support from within Pakistan for the Uyghur nationalist movement. In essence, China is putting the newly elected government in Pakistan on notice.”

Source : DNAIndia