Andrew Higgins meets the Uighurs, a nation battling to gain statehoodThey call themselves the Uighuristan Liberation Front. The reality is rather less menacing than the name – a group of doddery old men far more interested in history than waging guerilla warfare.
They meet around a heavy wooden table in the house of their 70-year-old leader, Ashir Vakhidov, to discuss what happened more than 40 years ago. Their memories, though, could prove the most powerful weapon of all.
Al of them are Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people forever caught between the competing imperial ambitions of Moscow and Peking. And all share one obsession: to find out what really happened on 27 August 1949, the day their country’s leaders – and so their country – died in a plane crash en route to Peking.
At least that was the official story. But did the east Turkestan Republic die, or was it murdered? After decades of silence, witnesses to one of the murkiest episodes of Central Asian skulduggery are slowly beginning to talk.
Suspicion has long surrounded the whole saga. If the plane crashed, why did it take weeks to announce the news, and months to return the bodies? Why was a second delegation sent to Peking in absolute secrecy, and why did it agree so readily to cede control of East Turkestan to Mao Tse-tung?
Only now has the fear that kept people quiet so long finally gone, banished with the rest of the communist apparatus of the former Soviet Union. In few places is the desire to talk quite so strong as in Central Asia, where silence has been replaced by a torrent of rumour, half remembered fact and possibly solid truth.
Mr Vakhidov and his colleagues insist they have found at least part of the answer to what happened on the way to Peking: there was no plane crash; there was not even a plane. Leaders of the East Turkestan Republic, they say, died in Moscow, their bodies dumped in a disused imperial stable. They base the account on the tape-recorded testimony of Akim Jarulabekov, one of the last people to see the East Turkestan leadership alive. A former doctor and Soviet agent in East Turkestan, he never saw the bodies himself but claims to have been told of their whereabouts by the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB.
The East Turkestan Republic may be dead but its post-mortem has only just begun. The result promises far more than the answer to a historian’s riddle. It could help decide whether Peking hangs on to what is rapidly becoming the most restive outpost of the world’s last great empire.
“Our patience is running out,” says Mr Vakhidov, who was born in China but has lived in exile in Kazakhstan for 30 years. “Uighurs see what has happened in Soviet Central Asia. Our country was stolen. Young people are ready to act.” Before they can act, though, they must be thought their history.
The country Mr Vakhidov and his followers dream of one day recovering was first established in 1944 in a spasm of anti-Chinese Muslim militancy along the ancient Silk Road. In its heyday, it controlled vast tracts of what is today the Chinese region of Xinjiang. It had its own army and civil service. Stalin, while no friend of Islam, encouraged the republic’s conquests, hoping to extend Moscow’s interests at the expense of the crumbling Chinese regime of Chiang Kai-shek. But then, in 1949, the sands shifted. With communism triumphant in Peking, Stalin changed direction. The East, as Mao Tse-tung declared, was Red. East Turkestan was finished.
But there was a problem: its leaders refused to surrender. To try and negotiate a settlement, Mao invited them to Peking. They left their capital of Kulja (now the Chinese town of Yining) and travelled to Alma Ata, the capital of the neighbouring Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. It was the last time they were seen alive.
“Stalin betrayed us,” says Mr Vakhidov, a robust man with a mouth full of metal teeth and a head full of bitter memories of the short-lived nation he had served in his youth. No less bitter is Yusupek Muhlisi, another East Turkestan veteran also exiled to Kazakhstan. “Stalin sold us out to China. Now is the time to take back what is ours.”
The proof of Stalin’s treachery, they say, is the plane crash they believe never happened. So far there is little independent evidence to confirm their belief that Stalin had his former allies in East Turkestan killed. That both Stalin and Mao wanted them out of the way, however seems certain.
When the East Turkestan leaders arrived in Alma Ata for what was supposed to be the start of their journey to Peking, they were met by Soviet officials and a delegation sent by Chairman Mao. According to Akim Jarulabekov, who claims to have witnessed the meeting, discussions quickly broke down. The principal leader of East Turkestan, a Uighur called Ahmet Jan Kassimi, refused to cede control to China. It was then, many Uighurs now believe, that the NKVD decided to take delegation to Moscow and to recruit more pliable members for the mission to Peking.
Whether they died in a crash or were murdered in a Moscow stable does little to alter the end result – the arrival six weeks later of the People’s Liberation Army into Xinjiang. But it does challenge the legitimacy of Peking’s conquest. “Now is the time for us to be independent,” says Mr Vakhidov. “Our aim is to liberate our historic motherland from China.”
THE INDEPENDENT, 19 April 1992
