The Kashgar execution is the 1999 street execution John Kiriakou has said he watched from close range in the old city of Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region, during a trip that coincided with the height of what he calls the East Turkestan Independence Movement.
The scene
Kiriakou places himself in the traditional old-city quarter, “the traditional old Silk Road city of Kashgar.” He notes the setting, “probably all gone because the Chinese, the Han Chinese, were deliberately tearing it all down”, and the fabric: “squalid, no running water, no plumbing, foul. But on the other hand, really insanely charming and world heritage site.”[1][2]
Then the truck. “They brought in a flatbed truck with loudspeakers and these poor guys who allegedly Uighur guys, and they announced something, and, you know, I don’t understand Mandarin, but it was clear the people were horrified on the streets, and they [expletive] shot the dude right on the [expletive] street on the back of the truck. It was shocking, to say the least.”[2][3]
The distinction he draws
“But the Uyghur stuff, I mean, you know, are they genocidally killing millions of Uyghurs in like death camps? No, that’s not happening. But they are committing cultural genocide by importing Han Chinese into Xinjiang and supplanting them, turning them to a minority in their own homeland. They are propagandising them.”[3][4]
The Xinjiang time-zone tell
The other piece of Xinjiang canon Kiriakou attaches to the region is the one-time-zone rule. “China is bigger than the United States. But it only has one official time zone: Beijing, all the way out in the east. So at 7:00 in the morning, official national time, it’s 4:00 [expletive] in the morning in Xinjiang. People have to listen to some party cadre over a loudspeaker outside from the phone pole. It’s like, ‘Get up and build socialism, losers.’”[4][5]
The political tell: “If someone tells you in Xinjiang, ‘Oh, meet me for lunch, meet me at 1:00,’ you’ll be like, ‘Do you mean national time, Beijing time, or do you mean local time?’ If they use local time, they’re pro-independence for the Uyghurs. If they say national time, they’re loyal to the national government. Everything’s political there.”[5][6]
The Uyghurs in the al-Qaeda safe house
He tells one further Xinjiang story from his Pakistan tour. During a raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Islamabad, his team picked up “a whole bunch of guys, like a dozen and a half of them. And there were three that, you know that old song, ‘One of these things is not like the others’? These guys did not look like al-Qaeda people. They looked Chinese.” Kiriakou tried Arabic; the men stared blankly. His team ran through “a half a dozen other languages,” to no effect. When a colleague named Tim tried Chinese “they just lit up and they responded in Chinese. And he said they’re Uyghurs. I said, ‘What the heck were they doing in an al-Qaeda safe house?’ It turned out things were so bad in China for them that they went to Afghanistan looking for work, and they ran into somebody up” who steered them into the network.[7][8][9]