to these links; for example, when their relatives from Xinjiang come to visit, they obtain visas on the pretext of being cross-border traders. During perestroika and glasnost in the 1980s, the Kazakh SSR government encouraged Uyghurs to discuss and promote Xinjiang independence in a successful strategy to eradicate a popular movement for Uyghur autonomy within the Soviet Union. By 1990, the Uyghurs' shifting ethnic and political consciousness led them to build separate mosques and schools from the Dungan people (Hui people in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), with whom they had lived together in Kazakhstan since the 1950s. Following the independence of Kazakhstan, the Kazakhstani government leveraged its tolerance for anti-Chinese government activities among the Uyghurs in Kazakhstan to extract economic investment and cooperation from China. The Kazakhstani government remains a supporter and sponsor of many Uyghur cultural and political activities. It has sponsored 64 Uyghur schools teaching 21,000 Uyghur pupils in the country, and it has allowed the dissemination of Uyghur newspapers, despite their often having an anti-Chinese slant. On the other hand, some Uyghurs in Kazakhstan have found trouble with police and local gangsters, occasionally leading to deadly battles between Uyghurs and police, most famously in the Spring of 2000 in Almaty. In June 2011, a Uyghur schoolteacher fleeing Xinjiang police in Kazakhstan on terrorism charges was deported back to China, following a request from Interpol. Such incidents, and the Uyghurs' general orientation towards Xinjiang rather than Kazakhstan, have led some Kazakh political observers to argue that the Uyghurs "threaten the national security of Kazakhstan". Some young Kazakhstani Uyghurs note that when they had received their Kazakhstan citizen ID card, they were insistently recommended by officials to state that they are Kazakhs, in order to avoid problems in future (in Kazakhstan IDs and passports there is an ethnicity column). Culture Uyghurs who came to Kazakhstan in the 1950s and 1960s began in the 1970s to revive traditional Uyghur practises which had been lost by earlier Uyghur migrants. The revival of the meshrep movement in Kazakhstan, which aimed to reinforce religious mores and "to unite Uyghur men... under a common ideology", quickly spread to China and became so politically potent that it was banned by the Xinjiang authorities. The subsequent suppression of Uyghur nationalist demonstrations in the Ghulja Incident led to a renewed wave of Uyghur migration in Kazakhstan in 1997. Uyghurs in Kazakhstan continued to demonstrate against the Chinese government