BEIJING: Turning a blind eye to its nature as terrorist group and attempting to whitewash its ties with al-Qaeda, the US’ double standards on anti-terrorism will backfire, analysts warned in referring to CNN’s latest report on exonerating the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) terrorist group. By citing some former Uygur detainees from the US infamous human rights abuse center – the Guantanamo Prison, CNN claimed in a report released on Saturday that these Uygurs were released for not being “enemy combatants” in Washington’s war on terror and they have been “used as excuses” for China to crack down on Uygurs in its Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The CNN report said that the US’ previous move to add ETIM – an organization that used to be listed as terrorist group and the detained Uygurs were believed to belong to – was due to Chinese pressure, and that its ties with al-Qaeda were “a vast exaggeration.” ETIM was reportedly founded by Hesen Mexsum, a man from Xinjiang’s Kashi, in 1997. It has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in several Chinese cities, including the Tiananmen Square car bombing in 2013 in Beijing.
In 2002, the UN Security Council designated ETIM as a terrorist organization. The same year, the administration of former President George W. Bush designated ETIM as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. In July 2016, the UK also listed ETIM as a terrorist organization and in September 2002. However, in a major policy shift on November 5, US former secretary of state Mike Pompeo delisted ETIM.
The CNN report is the US latest move to whitewash ETIM to use it as a tool to contain China and it further betrays the global anti-terrorism effort, analysts criticized, saying that the siren of terrorist acts like the 9/11terror attacks is still sounding and the US should maintain its alert, lest its double-standards on anti-terrorism backfire.
One of the interviewees in the CNN report is Ahmet Adil, a man from China’s Xinjiang who claimed that he never thought to go to Afghanistan but left Xinjiang to Kazakhstan and Pakistan out of economic pressure. Under the suggestion of a man, Adil went to Afghanistan’s Jalalabad, where he and some other Uygurs lived and learned to use weapons.
– The Daily Mail-China Daily News exchange item
