Uighur women in remote
Chinese province clash with family planning restrictions
From: Mavlan Yasin <MYasin@UniversalCare.com>
November 14, 2000/XINJIANG PROVINCE, China (CNN) -- Despite China's relaxed stand on birth
control, women who are Muslim Uighurs, an ethnic minority group in China's
Xingjiang province, are unhappy with family planning restrictions.
Most Chinese families are supposed to have one child -- a policy introduced in
the 1970s to limit the nation's population growth. But that is not the
case for the Uighurs, who are allowed by the government to have two or three
children.
Like women across China, Uighur women receive regular check-ups to make sure
their intra-uterine birth control devices are firmly in place. Any unplanned
pregnancies are terminated.
However, government family planning policies in Xinjiang have clashed with
Islamic beliefs.
"When I started doing family planning work, some people couldn't accept
it," said family planning official Amina Barat. "They said children
are a gift
from Allah." Resistance to policies may also be an issue of ethnic
survival. Since the communist revolution, ethnic Chinese have grown from 5
percent to 37 percent of Xinjiang's total population.
"There is a growing resentment to all kinds of issues and migration is one
of the largest," said Dru Gladney from the East-West Center, a
U.S.-sponsored education and research organization. "Uighurs
feel that China is trying to assimilate the region, integrate the
region through immigration," he said.
Xinjiang has been under Chinese control since its conquest by the Manchus in
the 18th century, but until the establishment of the People's Republic in
1949 its links with Beijing were very loose. A vast, partially uninhabited
region on China's western fringe once known as East Turkestan, Xingjiang has
been the scene of unrest in recent years. Human Rights groups have
reported incidents of forced abortions and violence in Xinjiang's
countryside. But officials in the area insist nothing like
that has ever happened there. In a new 92-page report released in 1999,
Amnesty International documented a pattern of what the organization
claimed are arbitrary and summary executions, torture, arbitrary detention and
unfair political trials in Xinjiang. The abuses, the group alleged, are
committed mainly against the
Uighurs. In Shamalbag Village, family planning officials point to positive
examples,
such as Razigul Tevekkul, a 36-year-old mother of two who says having fewer
children gives her more time to run a sewing business. "When you have
really large families, the level of children's health care and education
is much lower, " she said. "Having fewer but better births will make
our people more successful." CNN Beijing Bureau Chief Rebecca
MacKinnon contributed