ABSTRACT
NATURE OF THE FLASHPOINT In the summer of 2002, both the United States and the United Nations supported China's claim that an organization known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) should be recognized as an international terrorist organization and that China deserved international support for fighting a war against terrorism that had been going on in the region known as Xinjiang for some time.1 Despite widespread incidents of Uyghur-related violence in the late 1990s, this announcement took many by surprise, as there had been no documented incidents of violence or large-scale civil unrest in Xinjiang since 2000.
