:: Farrukh Dhondy

Al Qaeda will force China into battle

Farrukh Dhondy

"Spare the foxes, the pheasants

The halt and the lame,

Liars, adulterers and busy-bodies?

Fair game!"

From Song of the Hunter

by Bachchoo

July.18 : Al Qaeda has declared war on China. Their branch or surrogate in Algeria, Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), has announced its determination to target the Chinese workers who come to Africa to run enterprises and aid projects or to work in Africa. Chinese government investment in Africa has in the past decades followed an aggressive policy in developing parts of Africa, making alliances and supplying expertise and hard cash for the exploitation of raw materials.

Chinese businessmen have recently been allowed free rein by their government to make deals all over the world and have been treated with an acceptance by these countries as natural allies whereas they would view American or European investment as capitalist exploitation. Some statistics:

China has invested $1 billion in a recently established China-Africa development fund.

In 2008, the Chinese trade with Africa was worth $107 billion.

China and Algeria have an agreement worth $5.67 billion to build roads across Algeria.

Sudan and China have a deal whereby 60 per cent of Sudan’s oil is bought by Chinese business and government.

The Chinese are constructing a "friendship bridge" in Mali worth $75 million. It is a "gift" to Mali, but the wiser amongst us know that there is no such thing as a free bridge.

Niger has a $5 billion oil export contract with China and plans for a pipeline will ensure the export of 20,000 barrels a day.

The list could go on.

Chinese workers in these countries are extremely vulnerable or have been till today. They are open to terrorist attack, murder and kidnap, the tested tactics of Al Qaeda and its affiliates. The protection given to them by the local governments is easy to penetrate as their security shields are weak, corrupt or directly in cooperation with terrorist outfits and mercenary anarchists.

Now Al Qaeda’s threat has been pronounced. After the riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in which the Han majority targeted and killed men, women and children from the Muslim Uighur community, Al Qaeda has taken it upon itself to declare war on the overseas Chinese. It won’t stop there. Al Qaeda may not have a central command but it certainly has little Qaedas all over the world and the over-arching ideology of claiming leadership of the world’s Muslims and the ambition of ridding the planet of infidels, idolators and atheists.

Apart from the AQIM, these other murdering outfits of Al Qaeda will accept the signal to get involved. The Chinese in Yemen, in Sudan, in Algeria may be the immediate targets, but of course the big prize will be Xinjiang itself.

The Chinese regime has always followed a ruthless policy of self-interest. When the US, after the attack in New York in 2001, began listing proscribed organisations in its "war" on terror, the Chinese contributed the profile of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (EITM) operating in the Xinjiang province of China.

The EITM has carried out terror attacks on the police in Urumqi and parts of the vast Xinjiang province which border Kazakhstan, Pakistan, a sliver of northern Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.

In recent weeks, after the riots in Urumqi, which the several spokesmen of the Chinese government, including the Chinese ambassador to the UK, have said can be traced to provocations and planning by the EITM, there has been a heavy paramilitary and police presence in the capital. The soft Chinese policy says it will address the grievances of the various ethnic groups and the Muslim minority who have lived for hundreds of years if not in peace, then side by side with the Han Chinese.

The "hard" policy which one does not expect China to declare in any detail, will entail striking back at the organisation and infrastructure of the EITM and inevitably of Al Qaeda itself.

China is not known for possessing a 007 unit of infiltrators, eliminators, terminators and secret agents. It must have a clandestine Mossad, Central Intelligence Agency, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Inter-Services Intelligence or Research & Analysis Wing but no such organisation has shown a strong hand in international affairs. Perhaps it can’t. Perhaps, Chinese Bonds will themselves be very easily identifiable, but there is no stopping such an organisation acting through surrogate recruits. My prediction is that we shall soon see the effects of such action.

The world knows that China deals ruthlessly with dissent in what it claims as its territory. Tibet is only in name an "autonomous" region. Hong Kong with all its liberalisation has been integrated into the mainland. China has not fought a major war or made any major military incursion outside its own territory since the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. Indians of a certain age will remember the names Se la and Bomdila and possibly the names of the generals who were recalled from the front when the Chinese overran our armies with what the newspapers called "wave tactics".

I recall reading Indian editorials which said that the Chinese command could afford to lose thousands if not millions of their brainwashed troops who would obey orders to form these "waves" like robots at the touch of a button. It was bad Indian propaganda but the truth behind it was that if Beijing (I think it was then called Peking) set itself a military objective, they didn’t flinch from fulfilling its tactical and strategic goals. They put in the men and equipment necessary to the task.

It is worth recalling all this on a day when the bodies of the latest British casualties in Afghanistan have been shipped home. The dead are paraded by the British Army in hearses through the streets of small military towns and are greeted as heroes while the government dithers about sending more troops and better equipment to "finish the job" in Afghanistan.

The "job", as defined by US-UK-Nato policy, is to root out the Taliban, stabilise Karzai’s government and thus deny a safe haven for global terrorism to Al Qaeda. It’s a fool’s game and the hearses will keep tumbling through the provincial towns of Britain mourning its dead.

But with Al Qaeda’s declaration of war on the Chinese and with the escalation of terror by the EITM or newly spawned Islamist groups in Xinjiang itself, China may take a military stand. It will be forced to actively enter the "war" against global terror and Al Qaeda though it may not wish to label its retaliation in such expansive terms.

If China is provoked into action to root out the training camps and the terrorist’s support systems and to cripple the will of the EITM and other threats to its security, the world can rest assured that it will do a thorough job without fear or favour. It will retaliate with a new version of those mythical "wave tactics".