Natives Are Restless

A careful balance has to be struck by the United States in dealing with resistance groups and totalitarian regimes in the case when the resistors are in the camp of al Qaeda and the dictatorships happen to hold much of our debt. The Muslim region of Red China has undeniably been subjected to great oppression-but then so has Tibet, the Falun Gong, and any other freedom seeker in the world's largest Communist slave state. Not that bolstering or even giving tacit endorsement to tyranny can ever be American policy, but neither can we ever again have a situation where we destabilized Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, allowing the success of the Mujaheddin who would include Osama bin Laden and come to spawn Taliban takeover and failed state status creating a void in lawful governance that ultimately led to the September 11, 2001 attacks. So as the worst violence since Tiananmen grips Xianjiang with restive Muslims, not of Chinese but Turkish ancestry bringing an uprising to the streets, the US must tread carefully with a measured response by the administration and State Department, calling for calm and "an end to use of force by both sides" as is so often heard in relation to Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians in the inappropriately termed "cycle of violence". The Uighurs (Turkic minority but a majority in the area of the fighting) have legitimate grievance as do all Chinese who are not elites with privilege such as Politburo members, but the answer is not the murder of ethnic Chinese who mostly are just as deprived of human rights as the Muslim or Tibetan minorities. America has already angered Chinese authorities by sending Uighur terrorists caught by US forces training for Jihad in Afghanistan to a beach resort upon their release from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility rather than extraditing them to China to face justice (almost certain execution) as the Reds demanded. With China, along now incidentally, with Russia and India, demanding that a new currency replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and with ethnic Chinese who might themselves yearn for more freedom, righteously outraged at seeing their brethren butchered by Uighurs and though not especially supportive of the Communists, absolutely opposed to the lapse in law and order that permits ethnic cleansing, who will gladly rise to protect other ethnic Chinese-this is the time for the utmost discretion in US diplomacy to permit China to handle her internal affairs with just enough emphasis that there is scrutiny, that the world is watching and while it recognizes China must restore order, it will not countenance a bloodbath silently.