If George W. Bush wants to spread freedom across the globe, he couldn't find a corner more remote than a patch of western China where eight million Chinese Muslims are battling cultural extinction.
Few westerners have heard of the Uighurs, a proud, Turkic-speaking people descended from nomads, who today scratch out a living in the rugged mountains and deserts of landlocked Xinjiang Province.
But supporters see them as a prime example of a beleaguered population caught in the crunch between the US' vaunted worldwide drive for democracy and the realpolitik of its war on terror.
For since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US, China has billed a clampdown on Xinjiang's Muslims as a drive against al-Qaeda-linked terrorists. Uighurs and their friends vehemently dispute the claim.
"This is one of the pre-eminent fights for freedom on the planet," Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher told a congressional hearing here last week.
Rights groups have long raised the alarm about the situation in the oil and mineral-rich Uighur Autonomous Region, which has seen a huge influx of ethnic Chinese settlers and entrepreneurs in the last decade.
Human Rights Watch accused Beijing last month of waging "a crushing campaign of religious repression" against the relatively westernized Muslims that threatened to wipe out their religion, culture and way of life.
It said the Chinese were using the anti-terror war as cover to tighten surveillance and controls on Islamics and Uighur nationalists. Protesters faced arrest, torture and even execution.
The US State Department has been more muted, yet acknowledged in its latest human rights review that the authorities in Xinjiang "continued to restrict political, civil and religious freedoms."
But many Uighur activists complain that Washington, hungry for China's cooperation in the hunt for al-Qaeda, has given Beijing a virtual free hand in Xinjiang, which they still call East Turkestan.
They cite US support for designating an obscure group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), as a terrorist organization, allowing China to broadly brand Uighurs as potentially dangerous.
Nury Turkel, president of the Uighur American Association that claims 1,000 members across the US, insists Washington cut a deal on the ETIM to win Beijing's acquiescence in the Iraq war.
Others won't go that far but feel Washington needs to do more. Among them is businesswoman-activist Rebiya Kadeer, freed under pressure from a Chinese jail in March and now the Uighurs' most prominent exile here.
"We are pleased that the attention and the effort is on the rise but it's not enough yet," the genteel, soft-spoken Kadeer told reporters. "Having a clear policy on the Uighur issue would be helpful."
Some Uighurs grouse that the US pays only sporadic attention to their cause. They also fear Washington has been dragging its feet on asylum requests since 9-11.
One exiled Uighur has spent nearly four years trying to bring over his wife and a son, now seven. He has seen the boy only once in his life; when they converse by telephone, the child speaks Chinese not Uighur.
US officials deny abandoning the Uighurs and say they have warned the Chinese publicly and privately against using the war on terror to settle domestic scores with its minorities.
Washington has resisted persistent Chinese entreaties for the repatriation of nearly two dozen Uighurs captured while fighting alongside Taliban forces in the Afghan war and detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But one State Department official said "the jury is still out" whether the Chinese had stretched their efforts to safeguard the country from terrorists into a general move against Uighurs.
"We're certainly concerned that what they are doing goes beyond that point," said the official, who asked not to be named.
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