Internal Divisions among Uyghur Separatist Organisations Revealed by a Recent Petition Letter

On 9th December 2021, An Uyghur named Dilyar Musabey published a petition letter on a special website “Change. org” calling for resistance against the World Uyghur Congress. The petition letter is titled “World Uyghur Congress does not represent the collective interests of the Uyghur people”. The Chairman of the so-called “East Turkestan Exiled Government” Ghulam O. Yaghma and an Uyghur separatist organisation based in Japan both reposted this message to their Twitter accounts.

Later, on 26th December 2021, a Twitter account called “Eastern Turki” posted a petition website (https://xelqimzaherikiti.net/) to draw more support to their cause. According to the website, 17 Uyghur and East Turkestan separatist organisations collectively published a petition against the World Uyghur Congress. (abbreviated as WUC in the following paragraphs) They claimed there is not an organisation that can brand itself as the “sole legitimate organisation of East Turkestan and oversea Uyghurs. The WUC has damaged the collective goal of the Uyghur nation, which is to restore an independent East Turkestan. Thus, WUC compromised the self-determination rights of the Uyghur people through the way of exterminating the voice of other Uyghur political organisations.

The organisations that participated in this petition included: Association des Ouïghours de France, Australians for Free East Turkistan Association, Belgium Uyghur Youth Union, East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, East Turkistan Republican Party, East Turkistan Uyghuristan independence movement, East Turkistan Youth Congress, New Generation for Free East Turkistan, Oost Turkistan, Uyghurse Vereniging in Nederland, Organization of East Turkistan Youth in Germany, Pidaiylar Ikrani, Stichting Uyghur Omroep, Svenska Uyghur Kommittén, Uigurischer Kultur Verein E.V., Uyghur Information Center, Uyghur youth association Sweden, Uyghuristan Liberation Organization, and Vereniging Free Uyghur Nederland. The petition lasted for about a month, obtaining 10266 signatures. This peculiar activity against the WUC achieved its aims and won a certain degree of victory.

The World Uyghur Congress has up till now often been thought of as a united political organisation. This is a myth long overdue. The rift between Dolkun Isa, the current leader, and Rebiya Kadeer, the former leader, is a public secret. This rift has led to serious polarisation inside the organization. Different factions exist inside the so-called “East Turkestan Independence Movement”. The internal power struggles have now even overshadowed their fight for Uyghur political rights. The mutual hatred between Dolkun Isa and Rebiya is now clearly inextinguishable. There is even a rumour that Rebiya Kadeer is in fact an agent sent by the Communist Party of China into the East Turkestan Independence Movement deliberately to split the movement apart. Ridiculous and quite absurd as this rumour is, it has gained wide popularity among many Uyghurs both in China and abroad, since the faction of Dolkun Isa and the faction of Rebiya Kadeer did indeed fight each other like irreconcilable enemies. After all, what else can explain this intense infighting among the so-called “freedom fighters” themselves unless one faction of the two is a “fifth column”? Now that Dolkun Isa is the chairman of the World Uyghur Congress, he is no doubt the man in power. People who owe their allegiance to Dolkun Isa would naturally make up rumours and gossip against Rebiya.

These rumours may as well be true, but there is currently no substantial evidence to support them. So, while it is widely believed that the World Uyghur Congress is a legal and peaceful political organization, even inside this peaceful organization, very violent things can happen, both verbally and physically. Now and again, some political figures inside the organisation who were once very popular simply vanished. People may assume that they gave up their beliefs and activities. Yet one cannot be blamed in considering the possibility that some of them were assassinated. After all, the Chinese government has always claimed that there is a connection between the infamous terrorist organisation “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” and the World Uyghur Congress. It is also well known that some of the Uyghur political organisations seeking to separate Xinjiang from China do not shy away from taking violent measures. One cannot rule out the possibility that the World Uyghur Congress is not as peaceful as it purports itself to be. The recent 7th World Uyghur Congress Meeting has strengthened the ground of this argument. The Rebiya faction inside the World Uyghur Congress is now waging a “propaganda war” against Dolkun Isa. After years of fruitless political activities led by Dolkun Isa, the Rebiya faction finally sniffed a certain degree of discontent in the air. What happened in the recent 7th World Uyghur Congress Meeting might be interpreted as an attempt by the Rebiya faction to dethrone Dolkun Isa and reinstate Rebiya as the leader. It has to be noted here that the leadership of the World Uyghur Congress, and further the Uyghur separatist political movements, is a profitable matter. The generous endowments from the U.S. government, the CIA, in the form of NED assistance (National Endowment for Democracy), have definitely enriched the wallets of some of the Uyghur separatists, Dolkun and Rebiya included. Now the problem lies in regard to who should take the largest share of all these endowments. Rebiya, marginalised as she is now a days, is quite unwilling to surrender the political influence she once enjoyed. So she instated some of her confidantes as nominal leaders of many newly established Uyghur separatist organisations in the past few years, chief among them the East Turkestan Culture and Mutual Aid Organisation (Doğu Türkistan Kültür ve Dayanışma Derneği) based in Turkey. The leader of this organization, Seyit Tümtürk, is known to have kept an intimate relationship with Rebiya Kadeer. In the meantime, another prominent leader of an Uyghur separatist movement in Turkey, Hidayet Oğuzhan, leading the East Turkistan Education and Solidarity Organisation, is a close confidante of Dolkun Isa. This is simply one case among many to illustrate the conflicts and struggles among different factions of the overseas Uyghur political organisations.

However, besides this power struggle, there is another division that is more fundamental and decisive. The division is centred around the quintessential issue about the ultimate aims and ideals of Uyghur political movements. Is it final independence or political autonomy that they want? The purported aim of the World Uyghur Congress is to win more political and cultural autonomy, hence their propaganda is not completely nationalistic. Inside the ideological span of the WUC, apart from nationalism, liberalism also plays an important part. It can be claimed that the WUC is working very hard to adapt itself to Western political ideologies. Yet admittedly, ordinary Uyghur Muslims would find these ideas very foreign and unacceptable. The WUC realized that to win more support from the international community, they had to soften their political stance. It would be a blatant challenge against international law to directly demand “freedom and independence” from China. After all, international law respects the inalienable sovereign rights of China. To win legal independence requires the impossible task of asking the Chinese government to permit them a free and transparent referendum concerning whether the people in Xinjiang want independence or not.

This is obviously out of the question. Consequently, the WUC has to seek a goal that is accomplishable and realistic. This goal is “the political and cultural rights of the Uyghur nation”. This goal, in the meantime, is very abstract and ambiguous. The WUC can always accuse the Chinese government of not respecting the rights due to the Uyghur people for various reasons, whether the reasons are sound or not. Of course, one could venture to guess that deep in the minds of the political leaders of the WUC, or to put it simply, in the mind of Dolkun Isa, what the WUC really wants is actually independence. Still, one has to admit the fact that, for the time being, political independence is not what the WUC is asking for in their official agenda and propaganda. The fact that the WUC is not asking for freedom is not welcomed warmly among many Uyghur political activists. Lacking the political shrewdness that the WUC possesses, some Uyghur political organizations blatantly accused the WUC of “betraying the national cause of the Uyghurs” and “compromising with the Chinese government”. In their eyes, the WUC has already surrendered to China and should not be considered the representative of the Uyghur people.

Consequently, as we can see in the petition letter, these political organizations accused the WUC of “viewing the East Turkestan issue as a Chinese domestic issue”, “considering the Uyghurs as a minority in China”, “ignoring the choices made by the Uyghur people”, “rejecting the possibility of Uyghur independence”, and “collaborating with the overseas Chinese democracy movements”. These accusations raised against the WUC may sound like compliments from a Chinese perspective.

The 17 organisations that collectively signed the petition letter to resist the WUC belong to a radical faction inside the Uyghur political movements. These radicals want a complete severing of any relationship they ever had and now have with China. They would even raise objections to the word “Xinjiang” being used, because it is a Chinese name and may justify Chinese rule in the region, favouring East Turkestan instead. Any cooperation between an Uyghur and a Chinese is seen as treachery by them. They demand independence and no less. Political autonomy is not an option. They have no interest, none whatsoever, in struggling for political and cultural rights step by step under the Chinese state framework. Their political stances are radicalising day by day because of the fact that they cannot return to their homeland. They may thus harbour some fanciful and wishful ideas about the political reality in Xinjiang. Without any doubt, the political conflicts and struggles among different Uyghur political organisations would play into the hands of the Chinese government. In the predictable future, however, this internal division is expected to last a long time, until one day either Dolkun Isa or Rebiya Kadeer finally win the day.