 It's my very great pleasure to welcome Shawn Roberts from George Washington University in Washington DC to present his paper on the narrative of Uyghur terrorism and the self-fulfilling prophecy of Uyghur militancy. It really is a great pleasure to have Shawn here and to share his wealth of knowledge on this particular issue and I'm really looking forward to his paper. So everyone, I'd like you to welcome Shawn. Thank you very much. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me here. This is a really unique opportunity. I think I can't think of any other workshop that has focused explicitly on this very sensitive issue and I think it's very important. I want to first start by just kind of laying out some things that I hope will become clear from my paper. I want to even I guess go out at a more wide-framed look at the problem and note that the experience of the Uyghurs since 2001 is really indicative of serious deficiencies in the way that the global war on terror has been framed. And I don't think the Uyghurs are the only example of this around the world. I think there's actually plenty of examples of this. But part of the problem is despite 15 years of much of the world combating terrorism, there still exists no universally accepted definition of what we're actually fighting. And that has allowed a lot of states to use their own interpretations and use accusations of terrorism as a means to suppress dissent and opposition, whether legitimate or illegitimate. And in many cases, such as the Uyghurs, I believe this has ultimately led to increased militancy. Whether that's expressed in terrorism, again, depending on our definition is a question, certainly militancy. And the Civil War in Syria is really full of such examples, including that of the Uyghurs. So in short, I think the problem we're seeing is that instead of reducing terrorism 15 years into the global war on terror, we've increased violent conflict around the world and perhaps terrorism as well. So who do I hope to get through to with my points today? That's policy makers engaged in issues related to the global war on terror, particularly in the US, but also Australia, obviously, since I'm here. Policy makers working on bilateral relations with China that came up in our last discussion that this is an important issue to consider. And Chinese policy makers focused on counterterrorism strategies because I think that there's a lot to be thought. There's a lot of opportunity for China to actually approach counterterrorism in a very different way. And I think that's something that also came up in our discussions before the tea break. So I'm just going to, I'll see how much I can get through in the allotted time. But I want to provide a brief historical overview of the tenuous relationship between the Uyghurs in states based in China with a particular emphasis on the 1990s because that's the period right before the introduction of the global war on terror into this situation. And I think that that is important because it provides some of the background in what is the problem that is creating the conflict between Uyghurs in the state. Then I want to talk about the origins of the narrative of Uyghur terrorism and how that's been spread. And then finally I want to, using the precise same facts that have gone into that narrative, perhaps provide an alternative narrative of how to interpret what has happened since 2001 in terms of Uyghur militancy. And then finally providing some conclusions and hopefully a few policy recommendations. But before I do that, I think if I'm going to critique the global war on terror's lack of definition, it's important that I provide what I think is a definition of terrorism. First of all, the major problem in the lack of definition is that it creates what I like to call the one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter problem. This is a quote from a 1975 thriller novel, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And there's reason to say that this is in fact the way people around the world do interpret terrorism, but it is a problem because there shouldn't be political relativism in terms of using this term if we think it's a serious problem facing our world today. The problem is that most states are satisfied with this imprecision in definition because it gives them latitude to either support non-state militant movements and protect them or to criticize militant non-state actors that they do not support. So I'm going to provide a slightly different definition than the one Michael presented. And I think, I don't pretend to say that this should be the definition of terrorism, but I think it's telling that already in two presentations into this workshop that we have two different definitions. The one that I have chosen to use comes from an Israeli scholar by the name of Boaz Garner. And he makes in his article, he makes this precise point that we really need a normative definition of terrorism as we're embarking on this global conflict. So according to Garner, terrorism must be a violent act, protests, propaganda, etc., should not be considered terrorism. It must have political goals, so personal vendettas. Random violence committed by mentally ill, spontaneous riots, etc., are not terrorism. This goes to actually some of this question about people who have gone to tax schools in China if it's over a personal issue, perhaps that should not be grouped in with terrorism. And then finally, it must target civilians. And this is probably the most controversial aspect of this particular definition. But I think this is a very useful way to define terrorism because this is really, I think, which is the most reprehensible part of terrorism is targeting innocent civilians. Now, if we have attacks on security forces in places where the population feel that they are essentially at war with security forces, should that be considered terrorism? I think that's open to debate and the same with attacks on military targets. So with that established, I want to talk about the history, the history of the Uyghur-Chinese relations. And I'm going to go through very quick the first probably 200 years of that. In the modern period, there's a strong case to be made that states based in China and I use that term states based in China because the Qing dynasty was not necessarily a Chinese state. So in the modern period, there can be a strong case made that states based in China, starting with the Qing dynasty, have ruled the region that has become the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, or XUAR as I'll refer to it, either as a colony or as a de facto internal colony distinctly separated from the rest of China. Throughout the almost 300 years since the Qing conquest of the region, there have been numerous armed resistances from the local population against that rule emanating from China and often the impetus for those resistance movements have been about a question of self-determination and a question of external rule. So I think this is important to note and it's important to understand when we're talking about this conflict that this is not something new and this is probably not just about Islamic extremism, but it has long roots in history. And just in a few bullet points talking about the history, two 1980, the Qing dynasty conquered this region in the 1750s and established and it is an imperial outpost. I think the dynamics then were very much colonial in characteristics. Things began to change with Republican China after 1911. There was an attempt, for example, to create the idea of Chinese nationalities, five nationalities, one of which were Muslims, which would have included the population of Xinjiang. But on the ground, there was not a large change because Nanjing did not really have that much control over what was happening in Xinjiang. And so we had Han warlords who were essentially controlling the region. And as Gardner Bogendon has noted, this was essentially colonial rule with nationalist characteristics. After the Revolution in 1949, the PRC established ethnic autonomy in 1955, and for a certain period, there was a lot of inclusion of Uighur intellectuals and elites, as well as intellectuals and elites from other Muslim population in Xinjiang, in the Communist Party and in government. However, that began to change in 1957, 58, with the anti-rightist campaign, which essentially purged local nationalists, and that was essentially most of the local intellectual. At the same time, subsequently, we saw a beginning of the large Han Chinese migration to this region, which increased the population of Han Chinese in Xinjiang fourfold from 1949 to 1967. And a lot of these people were brought to the region also to serve in administrative positions. So to a certain degree in the early era of the PRC, although we had a period of an attempt to create a multinational governance in the region and more inclusion, in the end, it still had some dimensions of kind of an internal colony. And this did not necessarily get better with the Cultural Revolution, which created a lot of chaos in the region, a lack of control from the center, an empowerment of local Red Guard groups, and also a lot of these Red Guard groups were attacking symbols of Uyghur culture. There were attacks on local Uyghur intellectuals, on the practice of Islam, and even on the Uyghur language as there was an attempt to dictate a Latin-based script for the Uyghur language. So if we look at that period as a tenuous relationship between the states based in China and the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, at the same time, we have to look at some of the violence that occurred during this period. There was frequent instances of armed resistance against the Qing dynasty. And in particular in the Republican era, there were two instances where there were short-term independent states established by Muslim leaders in the region. And these were kind of regional states. So I think if we look at the three most critical points where you had local armed resistance severing the control of China with regions of Xinjiang, first we had the Muslim rebellions of 1870s, which led the Qing dynasty to leave the region entirely for about a decade and resulted in establishment of lots of small Hanites locally that were ran by different Muslim leaders. And then we had the two Eastern Turkestan republics. The first one in 1933-34, which was established in the south of Xinjiang, and particularly in the regions around Kashgar, Yarkang, and Hutan. And although it's a very complicated history, there was certainly a lot of inspiration from the Jadidist Muslim reform movement that was popular at the time in the south. And then finally, the second Eastern Turkestan republic of 1944-49, which was established in three counties in the north of Xinjiang around the city of Kulje, and was very explicitly supported by the Soviet Union and was based rather in Muslim concepts of sovereignty, was very much based in a quasi-Marxist, secular, national liberation ideology. So just to give you kind of a picture of how different these two states were, these are the leaders of the first ETR in the south of the country, and about 10 years later, these are the leaders of the second ETR in the north, very much Soviet influenced by secular ideas, but still very much focused on idea of national liberation and independence. So I wanted to give that background because I think it's important as we enter the period when we begin to start talking about Uyghur terrorism. So first of all, I think that up until the 1980s, states based in China had not been able to integrate either the region of Xinjiang or its population very well into their own state system. And this was a point that Michael made, that integration and modernization has always been a critical problem to Chinese rule of these regions. However, in the 1980s, the PRC began to try to integrate the region and doing it by introducing a lot of very liberal reforms, as well as trying to increase ethnic autonomy. So during this time, you all of a sudden had a liberalization in terms of civic liberties locally. Uyghurs were allowed to open businesses and build mosques. There was a renaissance in Uyghur publishing culture. And even the government began sending back Han Chinese from Xinjiang to China proper and putting Uyghurs in positions of more authority in the administration. I think that this is important to mention because I think it's not too late to think about this kind of approach to the region again. And this may be something to discuss in our conversation later, whether if the PRC had continued to pursue these type of policies would we be in a different position today than we are. This began to change very quickly. And this is not really just about Xinjiang after the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent crackdown. Also the fall of the Soviet Union, China really started to rethink its approach to civic liberties. They continued to really push economic liberalization, but there was a sense that political expressions had to be controlled. So this really happened very explicitly in Xinjiang on the XUAR. We had economic liberalization and the opening up of the region to neighboring countries. You had all kinds of shuttle trading starting with the former Soviet states in Central Asia and with Pakistan. And Uyghurs were free to go over to these countries in trade and they were frequently doing that and coming back. And at the same time you had a scaling back of civic liberties. I think it would be deceptive to say that there was just a reversal back to the situation that was in the Cultural Revolution. You still had a lot of freedom to worship religion, to worship Islam, but the state really tried to begin to control what were the official institutions of Islam and try to prevent the use of unofficial means to practice religion. And at the same time you began to see a narrative about combating separatism and splitism in the region. I think the PRC rightfully understood that there is this long history of Uyghur discontent with Chinese rule. And there were lots of Uyghurs who were thinking, particularly in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union, looking across the border in Central Asia at all these new independent states, that there was maybe an opportunity for a Uyghur nation state in the XUAR in the future. Now, the economic liberalization, I think, was really a double edged sword for the PRC in terms of questions of stability worldwide. Uyghurs began going over to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where there was an extensive Uyghur diaspora that was very politically active. A lot of them were descendants of people who had served in the second ETR. They were vehemently anti-PRC and believed that the PRC had killed the leaders of the ETR. And so that provided a certain amount of inspiration to Uyghurs traveling from the XUAR to Central Asia at that time. At the same time, you had a lot of Uyghurs going to Pakistan. I think it would be deceptive to say that there was a lot of radicalization at this time. But you certainly had Uyghurs seeing in Islamic state, a state which did not intervene, for example, in religious practices, and where Islam was central to the ideology of the state. So that certainly produced one example of what a future Uyghur state might look like to aspiring separatists or splitists. At the same time, throughout the 1990s, you had this effort to control separatist ideas, to censor Uyghur media, to closely surveil Uyghur religious practices. And this created a lot of alienation among the Uyghur population and marginalization, as Michael noted in his presentation. And it also spawned several violent events in the XUAR. And again, at the same time, you continued to have increased Han-Chinese migration back to the region. So between 1967 and 2000, there was a four-fold increase in the number of Han in the region, making the Han population slightly above 40% of the entire population of the region, which was unprecedented in history. So now I just want to look briefly at some of the violent attacks during the 1990s, because these subsequently have all been claimed to be terrorist attacks. And I think that whether that's true or not depends on our definition of terrorism. So the decade began with its most violent incident, the so-called Bahrain uprising, which there's a lack of clarity to the exact events around this. One narrative that one hears is that after mosque, a lot of men, about 200 men, protested before a regional administration building about the Han Chinese migration to the region. And subsequently, there was a clash with security forces. And the protesters ended up grabbing weapons. And they actually took hostage the administration building for several days. This was eventually put down. The organizers were arrested. But this had a lasting effect, both on PRC policy and, I think, on the Uyghur population of the ex-UAR. In total, I've counted about 22 substantial violent disturbances during the 1990s that have been subsequently categorized as terrorism. At that time, usually characterized as splitism or separatism. And among these, we have protest turn violent, which are very obviously not terrorism. And then a lot of things that were less clear, arson's, assassinations, bombings in public spaces, the last one being the most, like, any definition I think you would find of terrorism. At the time, as I said, this was all characterized as splitism, not terrorism. Because although terrorism was occasionally used in the lexicon of PRC documents, it was not really established as the central problem facing the ex-UAR. All right, so just in general, I think, from history, what can we conclude? We can conclude that there's been a constant conflict for over 250 years between Uyghurs and states emanating from China. There's been different times where there's been more accommodation. There's been more interest in Uyghurs becoming a part of any one Chinese state. And I think one of the problems is, at no time in history do we really see any Chinese states fully accepting Uyghurs as equal citizens, or Uyghurs fully accepting a Chinese state as their own. And that leaves a lot of room for discontent and potential armed resistance, I think. It would be inaccurate to say that this has been a constant violent conflict. I'd say most of the time it's been very low-level violence. And in particular, since 1949, we've never seen an organized insurgency of Uyghurs inside the XUAR, not since the second Eastern Turkestan Republic. Instead, we've seen a lot of sporadic violence, some of which may have been political. And I think there's alternative narratives that could be woven about whether this is an organized terrorist threat, or on the complete other opposite side of the spectrum, just a group of random violent acts of people expressing frustration. Now this changes very quickly right after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. So while we had a narrative of separatism and splitism for at least a decade, all of a sudden after 2001, this becomes very explicitly a narrative about terrorism. And there's two documents that the Chinese government releases, one called terrorist activities perpetuated by Eastern Turkestan organizations, and their links with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. And then the second one is entitled Eastern Turkestan terrorist forces cannot get away with impunity. And the allegations in these two documents are very clear. First, they claim that virtually all legal or political organizations around the world were terrorist in orientation and had funding and support from al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This allegation, I think most international organizations and states did not take very seriously, because they knew a lot of these organizations, a lot of them were based in Australia, in the US, in Germany. They also made the case that all substantial violent acts during the 1990s that I just discussed were perpetrated by these terrorist organizations. This was questionable, because we hadn't heard any kind of claims of responsibility from any of these organizations. And certainly terrorist acts usually involve claims of responsibility if they want to evoke fear in a population, that there is something behind these violent acts that could continue to happen with time. And finally, the one accusation that raised, I think, a lot of interest in the international community in various states was that there was one group called the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement that had training camps in Afghanistan and had prepared Uighur terrorist undertake attacks in the XUAR throughout the 1990s and was fighting the US and Afghanistan. This seemed plausible. There had been Uighurs leaving, going through Pakistan. People knew about the discontent in the Uighur population with the Chinese rule. It would almost be likely that you would see a Uighur group latch onto international terrorist groups in Afghanistan. However, very few people had ever heard of this organization, I would say, among regional experts. Virtually nobody had ever heard of this organization. So there was a lot of questions about its capacity and whether it was a serious threat. But nonetheless, what you had come out of these documents and the specter of this organization in Afghanistan was a very kind of clean narrative about the Uighur terrorist threat, that it was something that had been active inside China since the early 1990s, that it came from Uighur Islamic extremists who had strong connections with international jihadist groups and that these organizations posed a threat both to China and to the world. And this narrative subsequently was something that could easily be taken by terrorism experts and security studies experts around the world and repeated because it made a lot of sense. And it was certainly plausible. However, the big boom to the reaffirmation of this narrative was that in 2002, the US and the United Nations placed ETIM, the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, on their terrorist watch lists, essentially confirming China's claims that this was a serious global terrorist threat. And the US captured 22 Uighurs in Pakistan who were alleged to be members of this organization in terms of the Guantanamo Bay. So this really lent a lot of clearance, credence to this narrative. And subsequently, we saw it spread throughout the counter terrorism industry, I would say, in the US at that time and to a certain degree around the world. So you had security studies, think tanks, basically just cutting and pasting this narrative onto their websites on a list of all kinds of different terrorist threats around the world. And it began to seep into academic studies, dissertations, there's an entire book about the ETIM, all based on primarily those originally two Chinese documents and a lot of suspecting information taken off the web. And a lot of people quoting each other, quoting those same sources. So you have this narrative that really developed and began, I think it's still something that's very much with us. And I think it's something that we should question. So what are the problems with this narrative? One, this organization had not been known previously. So I believe it certainly did exist, but I don't think it was an organization with much capacity. Two, the violent incidents that it describes as terrorism in the 1990s, certainly all of them can't really be characterized as terrorism. And as I said earlier, we don't have claims or responsibility from specific organizations. And very little was known about this organization, the extent of its membership, its capacity, or really anything about it. So what I want to propose with the rest of my time, I'll be very quick, is I think that we can actually take a completely different alternative narrative. We can create an alternative narrative to the one that's been accepted to date based in the same sources, but with some regional knowledge and some historical context. And this is, I believe, a narrative that is just as plausible or I believe actually more plausible. So first of all, I think it's important that we need to look at three phases in the development of these Uyghur militant groups. And actually I should call this three phases in the evolution of Uyghur militancy rather than terrorism, because what we're talking about here is tends to be more about militancy than terrorism. So we have the ETIM under Hassan Masoom, which is well documented in Chinese sources and subsequently in Uyghur sources, which was active in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1998 to 2003. 2003 Hassan Masoom was killed. Phase two happens after Masoom's death. The organization, interestingly, suddenly changes its name to the Turkestan Islamic Party. And it's mostly based in Waziristan, but eventually returns to Afghanistan. And then finally, phase three, which I think is the most important one and is the one that has the most, I think, controversy and lack of clarity to it is the Turkestan Islamic Party in Syria right now. And each of these phases, I think, offer a very different context in which we had Uyghur militancy. So this is Hassan Masoom, and he presumably founded the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement and established it in Afghanistan in 1998. There's not much evidence that this organization had the capacity to carry out attacks within China. In fact, subsequent interviews with the organization said that they had trained people to go back into China, but those people had never actually carried out any attacks. We do have pretty good evidence that they had training camps, possibly three in Afghanistan. And we also have the testimony of Guantanamo Bay detainees who were in these camps. And I did some follow-up interviews with some of those former detainees in Albania a few years back as well. And those, their accounts suggest that these camps were very poorly resourced, that they had virtually no weapons. They claimed that there was actually only one AK-47 in the camp that they got to occasionally shoot off. And a lot of their time was spent repairing a broken down building and running in the morning to get in shape. Most of these people, a large number of these people came to that camp, hoping that they would get trained in weapons to go back and fight a war of liberation in China. Some of them actually showed up there through a lot of different kind of machinations where they had ran out of visa time in various countries and people directed them that they could go to Afghanistan without a visa. And they had hopes to eventually go on to Turkey, which was well known for accepting Uighur refugees. We also have some fairly good evidence that this organization had very tense relationships with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They obviously had the tacit approval of these organizations to be in Afghanistan, but there were accounts that they had disagreements with the Taliban because they were not interested in global jihad and the overall goals of al-Qaeda, but really just interested in the situation of their people in China. And after 9-11, 2001, when all those people who had been in these camps began to flee to Pakistan, there's videos of Hassan Masoum actually saying that they were not supported by the Taliban or al-Qaeda and that they did not support those organizations. So later they moved to Pakistan, as I mentioned, and there's some evidence that later in Pakistan they had some more new recruits, but there's a lot of speculation that by this time the organization was almost dead and that by the time Hassan Masoum was killed in 2003, it was indeed dead. So that moves us to phase two in Pakistan under Abdul Haq. And Abdul Haq had worked with Masoum as a trainer in Afghanistan and he kind of, him and ETIM kind of disappeared after 2003 for a couple years, but began to reappear in 2005 through videos on YouTube and very slickly produced videos, by the way. And they also produced a magazine which was strangely only available in Arabic and on the internet. I think some people are aware of the dramatic videos showing TIP threatening to attack 2008 Olympics. There's no evidence that they were able to carry out those attacks. In fact, the one bombing in Kunming, the PRC, said that this had nothing to do with legalers. And my conjecture, I admit that it's completely conjectured, but looking at the facts, it seems to me more at this time that this organization had been appropriated by Al-Qaeda as a propaganda shell organization to maybe reach out to Uighurs and Muslims in China. Because they were really producing slick videos and a lot of propaganda material, but there wasn't much evidence of their activity. And then allegedly Abdul Haq was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan in 2010, although we later learned that he survived that. That brings me to the final point, which is phase three, the Turkestan Islamic Party in Syria. So about 2012, you started to see in Turkestan Islamic Party's propaganda materials discussion of Syria. And this aligned with Al-Qaeda's, as Al-Qaeda began to become interested in this particular conflict and the beginning of the al-Mursurah front's involvement in the conflict. However, we don't see until about 2013 the first Uighur fighters in Syria. There's one video and it's somewhat suspect because it has somebody speaking in Arabic in front of a line of allegedly Uighur fighters in masks who don't speak. However, by 2015, we definitely see videos of Uighurs in battle in Syria. And we start to hear reports that there are a lot of Uighurs in Syria in the North, not with ISIS, but with groups aligned with the al-Mursurah front near the border with Turkey. And we hear that there's whole communities of them, that there's children, families. And we see videos of these families and children. And they're very disturbing. So how did that happen? How do we go from a training camp to what may have been a shell propaganda organization to all of a sudden an expansive fighting force of families in Syria? So this is an interesting story, which I'll try to tell very quickly. And it begins going back to what Michael had mentioned about the 2009 riots in Arumchi and the increase of political suppression in the ex-UAR after that. We begin to see a massive exodus of Uighurs now not going over the border to Central Asia because the SCO has created a lot of obstacles to Uighurs going through that route through security relations with the Central Asian states. However, through Southeast Asia, and this has been well documented now, that Uighurs, particularly from rural areas, impoverished areas, particularly Kashgar, Houtan, Aksu, where there's been extensive counterterrorism measures taken, Uighurs have chosen to spend exuberant amount of money to give that to Han Chinese human traffickers to bring them down to the Yunnan province, a crossover into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and eventually Malaysia with the hopes of getting to Turkey. And we first heard about this with some extraditions from Cambodia right after 2009, later from Malaysia. But what really began to turn heads was in 2014 when they found a camp in Thailand with hundreds of Uighurs and families, including these young children. Subsequently, Uighur activists in Turkey worked to get a lot of these Uighurs to Turkey. I was told by some of the activists that as many as 10,000 were brought from Malaysia and Thailand, and that's by this one group alone. However, these activists also mentioned when they were in Southeast Asia trying to get Uighur's entry into Turkey that there was another Turkish Uighur who was recruiting for the Turkestan Islamic Party and telling people that they would bring them to Syria. There has subsequently been a lot of speculation. If you Google any of these issues on the internet, you will find a lot of conspiracy theories. But there's a lot of speculation in particular that Turkish government may have a role to play in this and that may or may not be true. But I think for us, what's most important is that as a result, we have presumably several thousand men, women and children, Uighurs in Syria working with the Turkestan Islamic Party and the men fighting with the Turkestan Islamic Party. Now, I spoke to a lot of Uighur refugees just this summer in Turkey about this, including at least one person who had admitted to fighting in Syria, and all of them said that the people going to Syria are really interested first and foremost in combat experience in possibly being able to eventually wage a war in China. Now, whether that actually ever happens is a big question. We certainly have massive, since June when I did these interviews, there's been massive bombing of that region of Syria by Russian and Syrian troops. It's very possible that this entire community no longer exists or has been depleted significantly. But I think the bigger problem is that there's nothing saying that this will not continue, that will not continue to see Uighurs leaving China and finding that they have to prepare for a militant battle in China itself. So what do we do with this? I think that the major problem is that these people could certainly become more radicalized. In regardless, I think we're gonna see an increased militant Uighur movement in the future. And is the response that China should take and the international community should take is to just further crack down on Islam and on political expression in Xinjiang? Or is it possible to think of an alternative universe where the Chinese government thought about returning to policies from the 1980s, thought about accommodation? And I think that there's a lot to be had from the international community on this. There's been a significant experience to date now in countering violent extremism. And a lot of the work being done has nothing to do with suppression and everything to do with empowerment and accommodation, trying to understand what are the core grievances that are driving people to militancy. And I think this is an important thing that the Chinese government should be considering. I think it's an important thing that the international community should be considering in terms of engaging with China. And I think finally it's something that all of us should be considering in terms of our reframing of the global war on terror and really trying to avoid future instances like this where we see oppressive policies essentially creating more militancy rather than reducing the possibility of terrorism. Apologize for going over. Thanks, Michael. And thanks for the invitation to join this discussion. Thanks, Sean, for the presentation. This is, I think, the best, certainly the most up-to-date survey of this issue that I've read. And when it's published, it will be a crucial reference point on this issue. Sean gives us, and he didn't go into all the detail, he gives us a very important stop-taking of incidents and narratives here. It's crucial on this issue not to simply catalog incidents and move on treating these as statistics, but to go back and keep going back and looking from different angles at these events because it's often, when you dig down, it is at bottom very difficult to get a handle on what is taking place inside Xinjiang. Sean also gives what I find a very welcome critique of the wider terrorism studies industry, not just for its lack of scholarly rigor, but for the real damage that these discourses can do to unfairly maligned minorities such as the Uighurs. There's a nice phrase in his paper, the chain of reproduced knowledge. You can go from article to article on the internet, looking for where this ultimate source is for this factoid and find that there's nothing there in the end. I think Sean largely gets it right in his narrative. The picture is quite ambiguous. Are we talking here about terrorist organizations or is this a more militant twist on a fairly traditional form of exile politics? We have to keep in mind that for the Uighurs, politics to a large extent, not exclusively, but to a large extent politics is exile politics. So Sean goes back to the Qing period where the centers of opposition to Qing rule in Xinjiang were outside of the Qing Empire. Certainly if we go back a hundred years, Turkey was the place to go. The wartime culture of Ottoman Turkey was very militant. Some of those people ended up fighting with the Basmachi in Central Asia. Some of those people in the 20s and 30s were running guns under supposed common-term auspices into Xinjiang. So that historical perspective does, I think, put a slight question mark next to the idea of a new transnationalist phase in this story. How new is this? Certainly what we're seeing looks new in terms of the history since 1949, but if we take a slightly wider lens, perhaps not particularly new. Sean's is also relatively de-ideologized account. He's not throwing around terms like Salafism, radical Islamism, so on. We might have the beginnings here of some kind of intellectual genealogy, but it's still very hard to talk about in anything approaching doctrinal or theological terms. Maybe this is obvious, but I do wanna just draw out the implications of Sean's framing of the issue. I mean, Sean's saying that China really doesn't have a problem with terrorism. It has a problem with Uyghur militancy. By Sean's definition of terrorism, instances of actual Uyghur terrorism are vanishingly rare. Certainly I think it's questionable whether there's anything that we could call a terrorist organization in this picture. Certainly Uyghur's fighting the Syrian army in Syria wouldn't count as such, which obviously sits slightly awkwardly, I think, with the framing of this conference and presumably the book that will result, which is very much in terms of counter-terrorism. China's problem with terrorism, talk of terrorist movements even. Sean's discussion presents, I think, a challenge to that, that language. Obviously in one sense this is an academic discussion about definitions of terrorism, but I think we all know that there's a lot at stake here. Just recently I had a journalist send me an article, a draft of an article asking for some comment on one of the things he said in the article was that the West used to be sympathetic to the Uyghurs, but since the incident in Kunming, the West has lost patience with the Uyghurs or lost sympathy with the Uyghurs or that kind of thing. The idea that one act that carries the taint of terrorism might sort of condemn an entire people. That's the sort of world that we're living in at the moment. I quite like Sean's framing of the issue. I think it's coherent. I think it fits contemporary usage. I would just note as a historian, and this I think is an academic point, that this contemporary usage of terrorism really has moved a very long way from talk of terrorism, for much of that concept's history as a political concept, when really it referred to political assassination. That was sort of the debate surrounding terrorism and that falls out of Sean's definition, but that's just an aside. So Sean, from this critical starting point, he then proceeds to reconstruct what we can actually say about this. And this raises the important question of sources, something that I perpetually ask myself in this discussion. What are our sources for these questions and what can they tell us? Sean, the paper draws a lot on the Guantanamo Bay paper trail, which is backed up by interviews that Sean has conducted with people who were in Guantanamo Bay. The newer material that is in this paper is the narratives that we're starting to get coming out of Syria. And it seems to be that that's where a lot of the discussion is heading as these narratives start to circulate. Where a lot of the interest lies. So I think that that'll be one challenge going forward for people interested in this question to deepen that analysis, but also think about what those narratives can and can't tell us how to use this material, what the pitfalls of that type of analysis might be. Got me thinking about what else is available for Uighur speakers such as Sean. There is now quite a lot of material online, podcasts, as well as print publications, which may be quite difficult, not very helpful in working out what's actually taking place inside Syria, but certainly I think can provide interesting leads on how these people are trying to frame the issue directed at an audience of Uighurs inside Xinjiang. Now, as someone who doesn't really work in this area at all, someone who is a historian, I'm thinking also as I'm listening to this about how 10, 15 years from now, historians writing a more general history of Xinjiang in this period might look back on this particular moment and how they would fit that into that history. I think that what we're talking about here, particularly in terms of Syria, fits quite nicely into a global narrative about terrorism today and so on, but it's actually harder, I think, to situate that back in the context of Xinjiang itself. We can do that in quite general terms in terms of a response to Chinese policy, Chinese priorities in this region and so on, but what about the view from within the Uighur community itself and the people who are presumably making political decisions to behave in certain ways? What sort of political choices do these developments represent? What does it tell us in terms of the options that people have seen inside Xinjiang or even outside Xinjiang up to this point and how those perceptions are changing? I'm struck by the fact that if we say that things started to go bad in the 2000s, let's say, that's about 50, 60 years from the revolution of 1949, it's about the same timeframe that the Qing had after its conquest of Xinjiang, about 60 years or so before things started to go wrong. Decade of the 2000s was the period in which the very last Uighur political leaders who had connections to the Communist Party, but also credibility as political actors from prior to the revolution, when they departed the scene, China seems really incapable of training up its own cohorts of respected political leaders that can work within the Chinese framework as it's been established. So, I mean, Sean, I think, makes some really valuable suggestions here in terms of thinking about what we might call the rank and file people who end up in Syria. It doesn't have a lot to do with these larger political questions. It's mostly about people seeking a livelihood for themselves. But there must still be some thinking involved at least among the leaders about the strategy here. And at a slightly more abstract level, then we have to deal with the historical narratives that these people are in the process of constructing about how they got to where they are today. And that'll be interesting in terms of thinking about what sort of timeframe this analysis requires. Do we go back to the 1990s? Do we go back even further? What, how will this shape the way that we as observers interested in Xinjiang, will it change in some way the way that we look at the past of this region where we attribute greater or less significance to particular moments in this period? And the other side, I guess, of this effort to embed this discussion into some wider picture of the Uyghur community. It's a question of, you know, Uyghur responses to events over the last couple of years and trends that have been going on. What's been the response, generally, of Uyghurs in Xinjiang to these types of attacks? Does the spike inside Xinjiang, and then the drop-off most recently, does that reflect in some way the reception within the Uyghur community of this type of strategy? Final question, I guess, just generally for discussion as an outsider here is this question of where this issue now resides. What are the mechanisms by which this issue actually gets defined at an international level? Is that changing? I'm particularly conscious here of the recent British decision to list the ETIM. Now, if you follow Sean's analysis, I mean, ETIM went out of the picture decades ago. And yet, just this month or last month, the British government decided to add the East Turkestan Islamic Movement to its list of terror organizations. So in terms of the actual dynamics by which this issue is framed internationally, where are we heading? Are we moving in a direction in which China will have greater say in how this issue is defined? China will have less say what are the trade-offs that might be involved in that process? And what might be the political preconditions for an actual reframing of this issue that Sean points to as very important? That's all I had to say. Thank you. Thanks so much, David, for that very, very thorough overview and comment on Sean's paper. Before I open up to the floor, I might just abuse my role as chair to ask a question to you, Sean, and it relates to David's point of saying, well, this issue of transnationalization, you know, how new is it in a wider historical setting? And in particular, if we think back, for example, as far back to the great rebellions of the 1860s and 1870s, the Yakubbeg state in Kashgar and its linkages into Central Asia and so forth. And then sort of fast forward to the TIP and the Syria, are we seeing this reintegration of Uighur militancy with more regional and globally oriented discourses rather than those factored specifically on Xinjiang itself? So again, a lot of these questions are going to require speculation. I have to admit, you know, the sources leave us with... My understanding is a little bit different that we don't have a significant Uighur population focused on the transnational questions. But what has maybe changed in my own field about the politics of transnationalism is that what used to be a matter of crossing a neighboring border can now involve huge expanses of land because people have planes and ways to go from Xinjiang to Malaysia to Turkey to Syria. So they're not necessarily fighting across the border in the Ferdinand Valley anymore. But my sense from what I've been able to gather so far about Syria, which is primarily a series of interviews I did only in June of this year in Turkey with a lot of the refugees who've interacted with people going to Syria and at least one person who had been there was they really frame it only with regards to Xinjiang. They talk about the one guy who fought in Syria said, well, you know, I'm getting combat experience. I couldn't get combat experience in the PRC. They won't let me in the army. At the same time, I'm making friends. I'm making friends with the Chechens and the Uzbeks and they're going to help us someday too. But the whole focus that I was getting from people was on Xinjiang. Now, admittedly, it's a small sample. Thanks. Andrew Small from the Gemma Marshal. It was a really micro question and a follow-up to the thing that you had just raised, which was an interesting point, the connections with the Chechens and Uzbeks. I mean, some of the analysis that I've heard of the state of TIP in Syria is that rather than being a sort of we go only organization, it has become more of a sort of umbrella group that include a number of other nationalities and particularly after basically the collapse of the IMU, that the TIP can function somewhat more as a kind of umbrella grouping that has a slightly broader agenda, perhaps. I'd be just interested from your interviews and analysis on this how, to what extent you see that developing, because I mean, that would be markedly different from the sort of entity that had been there in the past. And Syria seems to be the place in which this is playing out. Well, yeah. So one point is that the people I interviewed, I explicitly asked them about, so what is this group who you align with? And that's a question that for these kind of people who are going there, they don't completely understand. So they don't really seem to understand what is the agenda of TIP. They're going for combat experience. The way is interesting. The way is very Uighur way that this man described it. He said, oh, yeah, Al-Nursara, they're like a neighboring mahala, neighboring village. We interact with them. And then the Chechens are over there. And we're here. But yeah, we're all like fighting. So they don't really connect the dots very much in terms of. And so I think the bigger question that's inside your question is what is the TIP in Syria? If we presume that there is some participation of the Turkish government, which we can't necessarily assume, but if we suggest that that's a possibility, is it possible that the TIP in Syria actually has nothing to do with Abdul Haq's information being sent out or very little to do with that out of Pakistan or Afghanistan or wherever he is? Are there maybe some people on the ground in Syria sending images back for propaganda purposes? And then related to that question, if the original TIP is closely aligned with al-Qaeda, and there's been information that Abdul Haq is very closely aligned with al-Qaeda, and if it was an al-Qaeda shell propaganda organization for a long time, what happens when the al-Nursara front explains that they're no longer aligned with al-Qaeda? So I think there's a lot of uncertainty with this organization on the ground in Syria. And I think it's completely within the realm of possibility that there are multiple groups in Syria claiming to be the Turkish-San Islamic party that have nothing to do with each other, just to make things all the more complicated. My name's Tim Graham. I'm an analyst with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Groups like Islamic State have put out repeated calls for attacks targeting law enforcement, defense, government institutions. So considering your definition of terrorism that you've chosen to work with, how do those sorts of attacks that we've seen played out in Australia, the US, Canada, how do they fit into that definition? And how do you see policy and a legislative responses framed, if not in a terrorism perspective? Yeah, I think this is a major problem with the global war on terror. I mean, we kind of, and I say United States has been leading this in a lot of other countries have been pulled into it. We've declared that we're fighting a war, but we don't want to recognize that we're fighting a war when we're attacked. I mean, not to say that those attacks are legitimate or to justify them or to show any empathy for them, but there's a question is whether they're terrorism, whether they're an act of war, which would mean that you would treat them like you would treat capturing enemy combatants in a war, I would think. Now, that raises a lot of questions. I think a lot of things have to change in the way a lot of governments are dealing with this particular war for that to happen. And not being an expert in military law or anything. I don't even know what the ramifications of that are necessarily over the long term, but I mean, I think that to a certain extent those are acts of war, and you see this with, for example, in Turkey, the PKK, the Kurdish group, they make a point of never attacking civilians and attacking military installations, security installations, and that way they feel that they're not terrorists. But I think it's a quagmire that we've all gotten ourselves into. You're on National Security College. Sean, you mentioned that the Uighurs are not permitted into the PLA, is that correct? That's what I've been told is a good question. Maybe some of our Chinese colleagues could illuminate on that. So I'm thinking, wouldn't it be, what's the risk to the PRC if there was more inclusiveness of the Uighurs into Chinese institutions and providing a little bit more autonomy as they had previously? I mean, is the risk so great that that's not an option, path of least resistance? I mean, I had prepared too much material, so I kind of ran through that at the end, but that would be my actual recommendation. I really think that, and we've seen some of it, but China's taken a very complex and at times schizophrenic approach to this problem locally. They've tried to establish a lot of affirmative action programs to bring Uighurs into Chinese institutions more. And some of it's worked, but some of it hasn't, I think because of some of the things that they're doing on the local level in Xinjiang. So there's been some studies of these efforts to bring Uighur students into Chinese institutions, get them really fluent in Mandarin and kind of a PRC civic culture. And initially it has a lot of results while they're in school and then they go home and they feel alienated once again. So I mean, I think if they were really to look at these policies from a critical lens and try to think about what has been working and what hasn't, I mean my sense is that there's been a lot more positive development from the attempts to find ways to be inclusive. Because you're always going to have some dissidents. You're always going to have some people who are going to resist, but if you begin to have people find that there is a path for them to be equally taken seriously in the context of the PRC. I think that you're likely to have much less of a problem of relative resistance or any resistance. Thank you very much, Dr. Robs. And I'm from Beijing. I'm professor of Public Security University in Beijing. And your presentation in Canada is impressive and comprehensive, reducing and analysis of these issues in China. So I have several questions, but I want to raise two. First one is because you introduced a definition proposed by Barnes, Garner Barnes of Israel, IDC. So I think that definition of terrorism is in fact practical and a very simple one. But throughout your paper and presentation, I want to know how you use, how is this definition consistently applied in the whole analysis or in your paper? Because I give an impression, for example, you introduced that no terrorism will claim responsibility of those violent crimes. So I have a good impression that it seems that have a force requirement for terrorism. That means after terrorism attack, there should be some organization or somebody claim the responsibility for the violent act. But based on the Barnes definition, only three elements. So I mean how this definition consistently used in your paper. And another question is that because you introduced some kind of historical background of Xinjiang and then in China. So I want to know how the history background rationalized the activities use of violence. Thank you. All right, thank you very much. Two very good questions. Yes, I don't think claims of responsibility are necessarily to analyzing whether something's been terrorism. And unfortunately, because there wasn't enough time, I wasn't able to analyze specific events. But in analyzing all the events, particularly in the 1990s, which I went through of these 22 different events, I try to analyze them as this is definitely terrorist. This is definitely not terrorism. This might be terrorism. This is likely terrorist. And part of the problem is we don't have a lot of information. I imagine you may have more access to information in terms of this. But after these events, we don't get a lot of information out of China about some of the specifics. So the question of responsibility is not necessarily important, but it would be one thing that would point to a political motivation that it's being done on behalf of a group as opposed to a personal vendetta. So one example, and Raphael's done a very interesting analysis of this of the car crash in Beijing in 2013. That's one specific event where it very much looks like a terrorist attack, particularly in the context of some of the things we've seen in Europe this past year. On the other hand, there's a lot of questions we don't know the answer to. There were some reports that the person was beeping a horn and that it was more they were trying actively to avoid killing civilians and were instead trying to kill themselves such as the Tibetan self-immolation instances or some of the Chinese self-immolation instances of protests. And so that would not be terrorism if it was a protest where people are killing themselves to show displeasure with policies. On the other hand, if they were actively trying to kill civilians and trying to make a political point in doing so, it would be terrorism. But unfortunately, we don't have a lot of the details. And certainly, no, I mean, history is not a justification for violence. I don't think they're, you know, unfortunately, I'd like to say there's never any justification for violence, right? But we live in a world that is violent and there is a lot of violence in it. I think what's more important is to realize that this, I did kind of my historical sketch more to show that it's my impression that these movements don't come out of something, some sort of new religious extremism that's exported from abroad, but it comes from a long historical experience that, and I also believe that, you know, I don't believe in historical determinism in the, I don't mean necessarily just the Marxist sense, but I don't believe that you cannot change things that have happened in history. And as in my paper, I point out in particular, there's two periods where the PRC really were trying to reverse some of that relationship with rewards. The first being right after the revolution in the fifties, you know, there are a lot of Uyghur cadres brought into the government. And then the second time was in the eighties, I believe it was Hu Yao Bang had really proposed a lot of, I think very enlightened policies towards Xinjiang in particular, and also towards Tibet. And then that started to get cut back and he was purged. But anyways, that's my response. And maybe we can talk more offline and we'll talk about your other questions. Just a quick one, a definitional one in relation to your definition of terrorism. Does it include a declared goal, in other words, that the group, I think group or religious group has a declared goal and their actions are consistent with that declared goal? Even though their actions might include violence. Yeah, I think that would be part of the second principle of being politically motivated in having a clear political message that's trying to be sent. Which again, as David mentioned, historically, there's been very different, terrorism has come into the public discourse internationally in different periods. But if we look back to kind of the Russian anarchist period where it was, there was some assumption that actually, maybe it had no political goal, that it was just creating chaos. Unless creating chaos is a political goal. But I do believe that in terms of my definition, which I also don't claim to be the definition of terrorism, but I introduce it mostly to say that as an international community, it's really a worthwhile pursuit given our present geopolitical situation that the international community come together and say, okay, this is what we really consider terrorism. And when we're condemning it, this is what we really wanna prevent. And to me, the biggest tragedy of terrorist acts is the death of innocent civilians. And so that seems to me to be the primary thing that we should be focused on. I'm going to be a Dean Habley from the Australian Federal Police. I was just wondering, and I am cognizant that we've got a Southeast Asian session tomorrow, but in regards to the activities of the Uighurs in Indonesia, whether in your opinion, you consider that terrorism. And if so, or if not, where does that fit within this overall picture of the Uighurs and what's happening back in China? So you mean specifically which, maybe you can clarify which incident in Indonesia? Yeah, sure. I'll talk about probably two incidents because it's open source and that's the arrest of one Uighur in Jakarta last year, whether it's allegations that he was being prepared as a suicide bomber. And the second one, there's a group MIT, the Mujitin, yeah, I'm a bit aware of that. There's also reports which have been confirmed that there are Uighurs with this group in Indonesia and this group is allegedly affiliated with Islamic State. Yeah, well, you know, this is part of, I think, the definitional quagmire, right? So one of the questions, I guess, is association with an organization that carries out terrorist attacks targeting civilians on a regular basis? Is that just, does that mean somebody's guilty of terrorism? And that's a very difficult, I think, distinction in question because again, you know, we don't know much about what the motivations are of the people involved. I mean, and certainly, you know, individuals also making sure to separate individuals from necessarily entire ethnic groups and their specific goals, right? You know, we of course have a hodgepodge of alienated youth in ISIS from, you know, the UK and the US and probably from Australia as well and yet we don't necessarily identify that with Australians all being terrorists. So, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I guess training, somebody being trained to do, to explode a suicide vest, I guess in my definition of terrorism would depend on whether the intent was to blow up that vest in a public place and kill innocent civilians. And I don't know enough about the organization in Indonesia to know what its political goals are and then finally knowing what was the motivation of these Uighurs ending up there. I think just to maybe something I can provide a little bit more useful commentary on is it's a serious problem that we have this mass exodus of Uighurs going through Southeast Asia. These people are largely stateless people. They're endangered. A lot of them ended up in prisons in Malaysia and Thailand. A lot of people have died on the road. It's very dangerous conditions. They're dealing with all kinds of corrupt officials paying payoffs to get across borders and I think there's certainly one of the things we're seeing is these people, if somebody offers them a home, they might take it. Because I interviewed people who would spend a year in a safe house in Thailand or Malaysia who weren't able to go outside and they're just waiting for instructions how to get to the next place. So those type of people are very susceptible to recruitment by extremist organizations or by anybody. So I think that's a real danger.