Portraits of Uyghurs

In the middle of the desert landscapes of Taklamakan, in the north-west part of China, the province of Xinjiang is the very least populated land while it covers near to a sixth of the country's area. Getting resisted during generations the Han Chinese control, Xinjiang, or Old Turkistan, fell into under the Chinese Han domination in 1949. From then, its population is generally Uyghurs and Turkish - speaking System.

Muslim above all, the Uyghurs have a strong religious identity which usually, in specific, permitted them to maintain a solid big difference in opposition to the Chinese invader. Certainly, the Uyghur Kingdom of Mongolia knew a great civilization, until its absorption by the Mongolian Empire in the XIIIth century.

While in their history, the Uyghurs successively taken on Shamanism, Manicheism, Buddhism and the Nestorianism before lastly converting to Islam when the Arab conquerors beat the Chinese in year 751 BC., as a result opening the way to the Islamization of the entire Central Asia.

Under the effect of the religions which they taken, Uyghur People used successively, and at times 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 modification because it was followed 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 presently.

If their writing, their language and their religion mark a real difference with the culture 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 going out to the Mongolian, Turkish or Uzbek origins 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 specific immense region. Thus, Uyghur people are now part of the fifty six racial minority groups having been known in an official way by China.

This particular law allows these people a few rights in a land exactly 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 the People's Republic of China, however, appears pretty illusory. The presence of natural sources in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its area with locations acknowledged as sensitive, strongly urged the government to speed up the sinicization of this area. Million of Han thus came to settle in this new Chinese eldorado, monopolizing the larger responsibility jobs.

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

Saying more flexibility, but primarily the acceptance of their true identity, this movement was seriously repressed by the power authorities in location Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

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 Uyghurs population continues today to proudly continue to keep their identity and their ethnic heritage , despite the fact that they become a minority on their own territory.

To get more information about the Uyghurs, you can visit a Uyghur website called Uyghur News at http://www.uyghurnews.com