How real is the terrorism threat to the Olympics and the Chinese?

Last Modified: 29 Jul 2008
By: Lindsey Hilsum

So how big a threat is terrorism to the Beijing Olympic Games? Lindsey Hilsum blogs.

Over the weekend, a video emerged of an Osama bin Laden lookalike, with all the accoutrements (Arabic script behind him, blood-curdling graphicised bombing sequence leading into his statement). He called himself Commander Seyfullah and spoke Uighur, the language of the Muslim people in China's far western province of Xinjiang.

As one security expert I spoke to said, "Having a video camera and a web page doesn't mean you have the capability to be a terrorist." It's easier to master video graphics software than to outwit the security apparatus of a police state like China.

Human rights groups say that in order to justify extreme security measures, China exaggerates the threat from would-be terrorists who want independence or Islamic rule in Xinjiang. But I think what's interesting is the vulnerability of Chinese who go to work in countries where security is more lax.

'Having a video camera and a web page doesn't mean you have the capability to be a terrorist.'

Take Pakistan. Last year, someone - we don't know who - bombed a construction site employing Chinese in the town of Hub, north of Karachi. The Chinese escaped; 30 Pakistanis were not so lucky.

Then three Chinese engineers were murdered in Peshawar - the Islamic Party of Turkistan, the same group which put out the video, claimed they had done it. Earlier, radical Islamist students kidnapped several Chinese women who worked in a beauty parlour - the students said it was a brothel - in Islamabad.

Many, if not most, Uighurs resent Chinese rule. Very few, as far as one can tell, are radical Islamists. People I met in Xinjiang earlier this year said that many would like to wage some kind of war against the Chinese state, but there was no chance because of the heavy security.

Yet as the Chinese expand their presence overseas, winning contracts for construction projects and drilling for oil in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, they expose themselves to dangers they have never faced at home. Other radical groups sympathise with the Uighurs, seeing them as the Palestinians of Asia, denied a state.

I think - and fervently hope - that the Olympics will be safe. With 80 heads of state visiting, everyone understands that the Chinese have to impose security measures.

In the words of the Chinese Communist Party Security Chief, Zhou Yongkang, (which I am shamelessly lifting from the Economist): "We must give full play to the superiority of the socialist system and organise and mobilise the masses to wage a people's war for the protection of Olympic games security."

But such thinking does not apply outside of China, where the Chinese Communist Party has no sway.