By TIM JOHNSON
KASHGAR, China – China’s ethnic Uighurs don’t have a Dalai Lama or a slew of movie stars to present their cause to the world.
They fight some of the same battles for religious freedom and autonomy as Tibetans, but Uighur exile leaders say they can’t muster the same global sympathy.
“The world cares less about us Uighurs than about the Tibetans,” said Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the East Turkestan Information Center, an exile group in Sweden.
China’s Uighurs are moderate Muslims, while Tibetans are Buddhists.
Like the Kurds of Asia Minor and the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Uighurs are a dissatisfied transnational ethnic minority spread across several countries (mainly China, but also Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan), without an independent homeland or a strong leader.
They certainly have no one of the stature of the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 and set up a government in exile in India. Feted by presidents and pop stars alike, the Tibetan spiritual leader travels the globe in a campaign on behalf of Tibetan autonomy.
“The Uighurs never had the kind of Shangri-La treatment that the Tibetans have,” said Dru Gladney, an expert on China’s Muslims at the University of Hawaii.
Movie stars such as Richard Gere speak out and faxes fly around the world whenever Chinese security forces arrest Tibetan monks or nuns.
“The whole international community reacts. But when they do something like that to us, nobody cares,” said Alim Seytoff, a leader of the Uyghur American Association, a U.S.-based exile group.
While the Dalai Lama espouses nonviolence, Tibetans and Uighurs have, at times, resorted to bloodshed for their cause. The label “terrorist” sticks more easily to the Uighurs, though. “Tibetans don’t get labeled as terrorists,” Gladney said.
