China denies Supporting Taliban

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China denies Supporting Taliban

BEIJING (APP): The government of People Republic of China has strongly rejected the news reports as were published in certain newspapers about its policy towards terrorism and the campaign against its abolition, a Foreign ministry Spokesman Sun Yuxi said on Monday.When asked to comment on reports by some foreign media that the Chinese government has sent Muslim soldiers of the People's Liberation Army to Afghanistan to give aid to the Taliban armed forces and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, Sun said China's anti-terrorism stance in clear and steadfast, and such reports air utterly groundless.

The media spreading such rumours in the current circumstances must have uttering motives for doing so, the spokesman added.

http://frontierpost.com.pk/PrintPage.asp?id=9&date1=10/16/2001&news2=afghan

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 16, 2001

Answers

After tracing most of the articles I could find, it seems the source for this claim started with DEBKA.

The articles take several forms and the actors named have switched back and forth from Muslim members of the PLA to Chinese Muslim peasants in the provences of China bordering Afghanistan.

The latter seems more possible, but I doubt they were "sent" by the PRC. The Chinese Muslim peasants, the Uighurs, are very poor, and constitute a large itinerant short term working population that do everything from construction to petty crime.

China neglected the people in these remote provinces economically, and -- like all other minorities --did not let them into even the local government positions (e.g., all regional governors, etc., were sent there from the Han population) and consequently, the people are very disaffected. There is some indications that Bin Laden has some level of ties here, but I seriously doubt they are "sent by China"

IMO -- DEBKA is not a reliable source of information...even if you just look closely on the details they screw up.

IF my take on where the information started is correct, I would tend to believe the Chinese on this one.

JB

-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 16, 2001.


JB,

Thanks for checking on this article. The misinformation floating around out there is tremendous and I just don't have time to check all of these articles before I post them. Debka has never been one of my sources for articles.

Martin

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 16, 2001.


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