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 very least populated province while it covers near to a sixth from the country's area. Having resisted during hundreds of years the chinese control, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or Old Turkestan, fell into within the Chinese Han control in 1949. From then, its population is generally Uyghurs and Turkic - speaking System.

Muslim mainly, the Uyghurs have a solid religious identity that, in specific, permitted them to protect a solid big difference towards the Chinese invader. Really, the Uyghur Kingdom of Mongolia knew a excellent civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.

While in their 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 starting the way to the Islamization of the whole Central Asia.

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

The arrival of Islam was a great change mainly because it was supported by the assimilation of the Uyghur areas in the enormous Turco-Mongolian and Muslim Kingdom. Thus, the descendants of Genghis Khan slowly replaced their writing by a Arabo-Persan alphabet, still used nowadays.

If their own writing, their own language and their religion mark a real difference with the tradition of Chinese Han, Uyghur People also differ from their characteristic, so characteristic 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 inhabitants - a little for this kind of immense land. Thus, the Uyghurs are now part of the fifty six racial minority groups having been recognized in an official way by China.

This particular law will allow these people a few privileges in a land exactly where their difference is very often repressed. Thus, Uyghur people escape the "single child policy" and their language is known as the second official language in Xinjiang.

The integration of the Uyghur people and their culture in China, however, looks really illusory. The presence of all natural resources in Xinjiang, and its area with countries acknowledged as very sensitive, clearly motivated the government to increase the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the higher responsibility job opportunities.

In response 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 area Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The events 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 Uyghurs population continues today to proudly keep their identity and their ethnic heritage , even though they become a minority on their own territory.

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