Portraits of Uyghur People

In the center of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the north-west part of China, the land of Xinjiang is a least populated province while it covers close to a sixth with the country's area. Having resisted while in hundreds of years the chinese domination, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or Old Turkistan, fell within the Chinese Han domination in 1949. From then, its population is mostly Uyghurs and Turkish - speaking System.

Islamic especially, the Uyghur people have a very good religious identity that, in particular, permitted them to protect a solid difference towards the Chinese invader. In fact, the Uyghur Kingdom of Mongolia knew a excellent civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.

While in their own background, the Uyghur People successively taken on Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before finally moving to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., as a result beginning the way to the Islamization of the whole Central Asia.

Under the effect of the religions which they taken on, the Uyghurs used successively, and sometimes in a competing way, a great number of written forms (turco-runic, brahmi, tokharien, soghdien) before developing their own graphic system.

The coming of Islam was a great change since it was supported by the assimilation of the Uyghur land in the enormous Turkic and Muslim Empire. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan slowly replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used these days.

If their own writing, their language and their religion mark a real difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, Uyghur People also are different from their characteristic, so aspect of Central Asia's people. A matt skin, eyes representing a whole pallet of colors, from black to deep blue, features pointing out to the Mongolian, Turkish or Uzbek roots of these men and these women.

For a few years, China has integrated the proper identity of these remote people, though they represent only eight million people - a trifle for this particular great land. Therefore, Uyghur people are now part of the 56 ethnic minority groups having been well-known in an official way by the People's Republic of China.

This particular statute allows them a few privileges in a country where their difference is very often repressed. Therefore, Uyghur people escape the "single child policy" and their language is accepted as the second official language in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The integration of the Uyghur people and their culture in China, however, looks really illusory. The presence of all-natural resources in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its distance with nations well-known as sensitive, clearly urged the government to increase the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the larger responsibility job opportunities.

In reaction to this true will to assimilate the Uyghur people into the Chinese culture, an independent party like East Turkistan Islamic Movement(ETIM) was born in the early 1990.

Asserting more freedom, but mainly the recognition of their true identity, this movement was seriously repressed by the power authorities in location Xinjiang.

The situations of September 11, 2001, were the perfect occasion for the Chinese government to justify true reprisals: they declared the "Uyghur freedom fighters" as dangerous terrorists linked to Al Quaida because of their Muslim origins and their proximity with Pakistan and Afghanistan... However, the terrible repression which followed did not calm down the anger. The Uyghur peoples population continues today to proudly hold their identification and their civilization , though they become a minority on their own territory.

For further information about Uyghur people, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com