AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! in Exile’s War and Peace Report. This is Resistance Radio, broadcasting just blocks from where the towers of the World Trade Center once stood. Emergency workers continue to clear the hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble.

As President Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin today declared themselves partners in the war on terrorism and called for international peace and security, the U.S. continued heavy bombing of Kabul and Kandahar, continuing to kill civilians, and China executed three Muslim ethnic minorities for political crimes. The two presidents, in Shanghai for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Forum, known as APEC, face the tricky task of achieving their own political ends while attempting to save face from critics.

President Bush is in Shanghai in an attempt to shore up support for the U.S. War in Afghanistan. At a joint news conference, President Jiang said the U.S. air war in Afghanistan must be aimed at clearly defined targets to “avoid innocent casualties.” Bush said afterwards, “President Jiang and the government stand side by side with the American people as we fight this evil force.”

Meanwhile, Jiang is trying to use the so-called war on terrorism to justify its crackdown on a Muslim minority, the Uyghurs, in the northwest province of Xinjiang. According to a human rights group, the East Turkestan Information Center, Chinese authorities executed three Uyghurs convicted of political crimes just days ago. And before that, authorities tore down a mosque and arrested 180 people who tried to protest against its destruction.

We’re going to turn now to Steve Clemons — he’s with the New America Foundation — to talk about the significance of the meeting between the two leaders, President Bush and Chinese President Jiang.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

STEVE CLEMONS: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, what about this APEC summit and what these leaders are accomplishing in front of the cameras and behind the scenes?

STEVE CLEMONS: Well, we have to realize that this is the first summit of world leaders that President Bush has attended since September 11th, and so the grand theater of this meeting is very important. And I think that the critical question that we should be asking is not necessarily what they’re achieving, but, you know, what an incredible lost opportunity this is. You know, the membership nations of APEC include most of the — almost all of the developed nations on the Pacific Rim, as well as developing nations on the Pacific Rim. And they decided to make this a punctuation point in the fight against terror, and George Bush is going and essentially requiring loyalty oaths from much of the world.

And China essentially is using this to shore up its own leadership, as well, and is supporting the United States in this, but the price of that, just as you pointed out in your comments before, is requiring the United States to turn a blind eye to the kind of human rights agenda that we’ve had with China in the past. This is happening with Russia in Chechnya. It’s happening with the many countries that — in our new coalition to fight the kind of terrorism that we’re having. We’re saying — and other countries are expecting the United States to understand that these governments are not going to want criticism when they take a firm hand against people protesting their own regime. So, I find it troubling, actually, that we haven’t used the APEC meeting as the first punctuation point in a kind of new commitment to the problems that are out there in the developing world. It really is a lost opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about China’s increasing power right now, where it stands with India and Pakistan, which is extremely significant and volatile, and what exactly the U.S. wants from China, and sanctions being lifted in this area?

STEVE CLEMONS: Yeah, I think we all need to remember that one — that there are lots of agendas out there right now. And one of the things that worries me most about the Chinese, you talked about the Chinese crackdown on the Muslims. You know, we’re talking about what Russia’s agenda has been with Chechnya and that it’s not now going to get criticism here. We’ve got agendas here that are geostrategic ambitions.

Most people who are classical defense intellectuals believe that great powers rise and fall because of the interaction with other great powers — in other words, peers. And China is at the forefront of those nations that these people feel will either challenge America’s dominance in world affairs or at least fit into where we go. And many people are looking at — some people are looking at the activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan as an awfully convenient excuse to begin thinking two or three moves forward, that, boy, that would certainly create an awfully interesting opportunity for the United States to develop some kind of presence in Pakistan, not just because of the terrorism issues but because it’s right on the Chinese border. It allows us to encircle China and at the same time really strengthens and broadens our reach into the Caspian oil region.

So we need to be careful of such an incredible focus on the bin Laden, the terrorism, the anthrax issues and the bombings, and not asking important questions of what are the other agendas driving our behaviors and decisions. And while the Chinese are supporting the U.S. stand on terrorism, I think Jiang Zemin and the Chinese leadership are moving very cautiously, because the last thing they want is to have the United States with a presence in Pakistan on their border. We already see India acting up and reminding the United States that it’s very important in this calculus, too. It just lobbed all sorts of missile strikes into Pakistan three days ago, received very little coverage in the United States, but this is incredibly important, and it happened on the eve of Bush’s visit to Shanghai. And I would remind people that the Indian nuclear tests several years ago happened nine days before Bill Clinton’s trip to China, almost as a reminder to the United States that, “Hey, don’t forget us. We’re important, too.” And I think the United States has got to figure out a more comprehensive way quickly to basically deal with this competition, that’s regional and very serious, between not only Pakistan and India, but between India and China.

AMY GOODMAN: Wang Dan and Wang Juntao, jailed for leading the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, wrote a letter to President Bush today saying the U.S. should not “succumb to fear of terrorism and abandon its efforts to promote human rights and freedom.” And you have the East Turkestan Information Center urging Bush to draw attention to the “long-standing state-sponsored terrorism” against the Uyghurs. We are joined on the phone right now by Nicholas Bequelin, who is in Paris at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Science. Can you tell us who they Uyghurs are?

NICHOLAS BEQUELIN: Well, the Uyghurs are one of the people of Central Asia. You have the Kazakh, the Uzbek, the Tajiks, and the Uyghurs are just one of those people. They’re numbering about 8 million. They’re Turkish-speaking Muslims, a mild version of Islam, and have been living there for a few centuries now. And it has remained a very indigenous territory, with the Chinese coming to Xinjiang very late in the 20th century, around the ’50s. So, those people are really living very differently from most Chinese, have their own culture and religion and way of life, so those people have always been opposed to being dominated by China.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what is happening to them right now.

NICHOLAS BEQUELIN: Well, obviously, as you mentioned and Steve mentioned, as well, China is trying to seize this opportunity, this war on terrorism, to legitimate its crackdown against the Uyghurs, and in hope that the international community will turn a blind eye on the repressive policies that they implement in Xinjiang. And, obviously, we were not surprised, I mean, to hear China say that they need the international community to help them in the fight against international terrorism, because they’ve been labeling Uyghur independentist groups as terrorists or religious extremists for a very long time. Actually, the using the religious issue has a way to strictly control religious activities in Xinjiang. And so, by labeling some people religious extremists, they have proceeded to broaden and discriminate curbing of religious freedom and activities in Xinjiang for a very long time.

So, when you hear about the possibility of links between Uyghurs, independentists and the Taliban, or even now the al-Qaeda organization, we are very, very suspicious, because it remains to be proven. We have never had any case of positive elements showing that there was any link between the Uyghurs, extremists, even religious extremists, in Xinjiang, with other groups abroad. I mean, the reason for the unrest in Xinjiang is definitely domestic. It’s the fast pace of colonization, new Chinese settlers settling in Xinjiang, its repression against religious activities, against political and social rights. That’s the real reason for unrest in Xinjiang, and that’s definitely not under the influence of religious extremists abroad. And that’s what China has always tried to argue. So, now with the war on terrorism, of course it says, “Look, those people are terrorists, as well, and we have a legitimate right to suppress them.” It is very similar to what Russia is doing towards Chechnya. They’re trying to put everything, every activity, either peaceful or not, in the same basket.

AMY GOODMAN: Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, is what is happening to the Uyghurs in northwest China similar to Tibet? And what about the issue, Free Tibet campaign asking for assurance that the United States will not engage in horse trading on human rights abuses in Tibet in exchange for Chinese support for the war?

STEVE CLEMONS: I think, realistically, almost — I mean, I think the human rights agenda is suffering such a huge setback, not only in China but all throughout the world. I mean, there are — there’s been a very active and visible campaign in Egypt right now against homosexuals and others that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and others have tried to bring us, but given what’s going on in the world today and the importance of Egypt in trying to sort of deal with the growing instability in the Middle East, again, the United States is just simply backing off of that issue. So, certainly, the areas with Tibet in China and the self-determination and ethnic, religious, cultural determination movements that are trying to find a place out there in the world are going to meet incredible resistance from the governments that are attempting to crack down on these.

And the role that the United States was playing, and also, frankly, the European and Japanese leadership — it’s more than a U.S. case — is simply — the dynamic for attention on these issues is simply not going to be there, as long as every foreign policy decision now and all of the major gains in foreign policy that President Bush is seeking to get is going to be defined through this prism of how nations are responding, cooperatively or uncooperatively, in the commitment against — curtailing terrorism. And then we’ll see this against, you know, other bad guys in the world, as well. So, the idea to kind of keep this competency, the competencies that are developing and the collaborations that are developing between the great powers of the world, is very problematic for those people that have been asking the important questions about Tibet, about the Uyghurs, about anyone that essentially has been trying to deal with the problem with authoritarian regimes.

AMY GOODMAN: After the Soviet Union fell, China stepped up the colonization process, really cracking down on the Uyghurs in northwest China. Nicholas Bequelin, as we end, how many people have died? How many people has the Chinese military killed in the last year in this area?

NICHOLAS BEQUELIN: Well, that’s very difficult to say, because obviously the Chinese government doesn’t make much publicity about it. In February 1997, there was a major uprising in Yining, a city in the western part of Xinjiang. It started with a very peaceful demonstration, but of course unauthorized since no demonstration is authorized in China. And it was harshly cracked down and repressed by the Chinese security forces. And after that episode, where there were probably about 10 people dead and hundreds of casualties, they rounded up a huge number of people and have convicted many, many people to death penalty. Amnesty International has shown that between those — just after those riots in February 1997 and the end of ’99, almost 200 people, 200 Uyghurs, were sentenced and executed. We have, since then, many cases of people having been executed in Xinjiang. And that makes Xinjiang the only province in China where political prisoners are still executed. Last week, as you mentioned, three people were executed, three Uyghurs, still in relation with those 1997 events. And, of course, there is an absolutely — absolute lack of judicial processes and access to lawyers and absolutely no monitoring.

Many of those people are sentenced under the charge of endangering state security, which is a very, very loose legal provision. I mean, speaking against the government can be directly a charge leading to endangering state security, that the — spreading rumors or discrediting the government of the party is one of the activities that can lead to this charge of endangering state security.

So, probably we have about 100 people sentenced to death every year, and it’s not done in a nice way. Very often they round people in mass rallies, put them into stadiums, like they do in the rest of China. And so you have those people who arrive in trucks, in, you know, numbers ranging from 10 people to 20 people, their head down on the big poster of what is their crime. And then the crimes, or alleged crimes, and the sentence is announced to the public, the public usually being people working in state-controlled institutions, enterprise or administrations who are more or less forced to attend those meetings.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, as we continue to cover these issues of human rights around the world, focusing now on China, where President Bush is, as the Chinese leader, President Jiang, and President Bush talk about the war on terrorism. Nicholas Bequelin is with the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, Steve Clemons with the New America Foundation. If people want to find out more about the Uyghurs on the internet, just for your information, it is spelled U-I-G-H-U-R-S, U-I-G-H-U-R-S, in the northwest province of Xinjiang. You are listening to Democracy Now! in Exile. When we come back, we’re going to hear Afghani refugees speaking out. Stay with us.