MCLC: 27 die in Xinjiang rioting

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: 27 die in Xinjiang rioting
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/26/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/world/asia/ethnic-violence-in-western-chi
na.html

27 Die in Rioting in Ethnically Divided Western China
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — At least 27 people died in rioting in far western China on
Wednesday, when protesters attacked a police station and government
offices and the police fired on the crowd, state media said. It was the
worst spasm of violence for years in Xinjiang, a region troubled by
tensions between Uighurs, an overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minority, and
China’s Han majority.

The confrontation broke out in the morning in Lukqun, a township in Turpan
Prefecture, the state-run news agency, Xinhua, reported, citing unnamed
officials.

“Knife-wielding mobs attacked the township’s police stations, the local
government building and a construction site, stabbing at people and
setting fire to police cars,” the English-language report said. In the
initial outburst of bloodshed, 17 people were killed, including nine
police officers and security guards, and the police then fatally shot 10
rioters, it said.

The Xinhua report gave no explanation of what triggered the confrontation;
nor did it give the ethnic background or other details of the rioters.
Uighur people predominate in Turpan.

In the past, Uighur residents have often given accounts of unrest sharply
at odds with those given by Chinese government officials.

Repeated efforts to contact residents, and a spokesperson for the Xinjiang
regional government, were unsuccessful.

A spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, an exiled group that advocates
independence for the region, said the bloodshed had been stoked by a burst
of detentions of Uighurs in the area over recent months.

“This clash did not happen by chance,” said the spokesman, Dilxat Raxit,
who lives in Sweden. “There have been sweeps and crackdowns in the area,
leading to many Uighur men disappearing, and the authorities have refused
to give information about their whereabouts,” he said, citing recent phone
conversations with residents.

Images circulated on Chinese Internet sites, which could not be verified,
showed a body, apparently dead, splayed on the road, next to an abandoned
and smashed police car. Other pictures showed burned out vehicles near a
fire-gutted police station and a puddle apparently red with blood.

“It’s inconvenient to talk,” said an official in the propaganda office of
Shanshan County, which includes Lukqun Township in its jurisdiction.
“Leaders are all out, it’s inconvenient to take interviews.”

Many members of the Uighur minority, a Turkic-speaking group, resent the
growing presence in Xinjiang of Han Chinese people, whom they say get the
better jobs and land. Government restrictions on religion have also become
a growing source of tensions with Uighurs, who have embraced more
conservative currents of Sunni Islam.

The bloodshed struck a part of Xinjiang where relations between Uighur and
Han people have traditionally been relatively untroubled, said Nicholas
Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, an
advocacy organization based in New York.

“But the tensions been escalating in recent years,” said Mr. Bequelin, who
takes a particular interest in Xinjiang. “The tensions are linked to the
introduction of policies that call for much finer control and monitoring
of local Uighur affairs by officials. You have a lot of rehousing and
relocation there, too.”

The government has blamed past violence in Xinjiang on groups it accuses
of using terror to seek independence for the region, including the East
Turkestan Islamic Movement. But advocates of Uighur self-determination and
some foreign scholars say the discontent has local causes and is not
orchestrated from abroad.

In July 2009, Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, was troubled by
the worst ethnic violence in China in many years, when Uighurs attacked
Han Chinese after the police broke up a protest by Uighurs. At least 197
people were killed, most of them Han Chinese, according to the Chinese
government. Crowds of Han Chinese residents then marched through Uighur
neighborhoods, demanding vengeance and attacking residents with rocks and
cleavers.

Chinese news Web sites initially featured the Xinhua report on the latest
violence. But later in the day, those reports disappeared, in what
appeared to be a government effort to stifle alarm or volatile anger about
the deaths.

In April, at least 21 people died in fighting in Xinjiang between security
forces and a group of what a government spokesman called “gangsters.” In
March, two courts convicted and sentenced 20 people accused of militant
separatism in the region.

Uighurs once formed the vast majority of residents in Xinjiang, which
neighbors Central Asia and came under the control of Chinese Communist
forces in 1949. In recent decades, the number of Han Chinese residents has
grown, aided by migration. Uighurs now make up 46 percent of Xinjiang’s
civilian population of 22 million, and Han Chinese account for 40 percent,
according to government estimates.

Lukqun Township, where the rioting erupted, is perched on the edge of
desert and has about 30,000 residents, 90 percent of them Uighur,
according to a report in the Xinjiang Daily last year.

Jiang Zhaoyong, a Chinese former journalist who has written extensively
about Xinjiang, said police stations had been a target of ethnic violence
there before, including in 2008. “This appears to be the act of a local
group,” he said of the latest attack.

Last year, Mr. Jiang visited the area where the rioting broke out on
Wednesday. “In the past, that area wasn’t one where tensions were
especially acute.”

Patrick Zuo and Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.