MCLC: Kunming attack blamed on Xinjiang separatists

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Kunming attack blamed on Xinjiang separatists
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Source: NYT (3/2/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/world/asia/china.html

China Blames Xinjiang Separatists for Stabbing Rampage at Train Station
By ANDREW JACOBS

KUNMING, China — The group of about 10 attackers, dressed in black and
wearing cloth masks, arrived in front of Kunming Railway Station in
southwest China on Saturday night and began slashing at employees and
commuters, sometimes repeatedly plunging their long knives and daggers
into people too stunned or slow to flee.

By the time the police shot dead four assailants and ended the slaughter,
the square and ticket sales hall at the station were strewn with bodies
and moaning survivors in pools of blood. According to the state news
media, 29 people were killed and 143 wounded. The police captured one of
the assailants but several others were said to be still at large.
Witnesses said that at least one of the attackers was a woman.

The rampage, which the authorities said was carried out by assailants from
the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, was an alarming rebuff to the
government’s vows to bring stability to the ethnically divided region that
has been convulsed by mounting violence.

Although no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, officials on
Sunday described the killings as an act of terrorism planned and
perpetrated by separatists from Xinjiang, where members of the Uighur
minority are increasingly at odds with the government. According to the
official Xinhua news service, President Xi Jinping deplored the attack and
called for “an all-out effort to punish the terrorists.”

Residents in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, said they were
stunned that the city, best known as a warm, leafy tourist destination,
could suffer such a spasm of bloodshed.

“It happened too suddenly,” Du Zhenwu, a 48-year-old resident who lives
near the train station, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think
anybody saw it coming.”

The widespread revulsion and fear unleashed by the attack are likely to
intensify the government’s crackdown in the region, which has led to a
series of bloody clashes in recent months that have claimed more than 100
lives, nearly all of them ethnic Uighurs.

The killings have alarmed human rights advocates and Uighur exiles who say
security forces have been using excessive force, sometimes against unarmed
protesters.

The rampage in Kunming transfixed the nation, with television broadcasts,
websites and newspapers offering gruesome pictures and harrowing
descriptions. On Sunday, China’s Communist Party leadership vowed to take
tougher measures against the perpetrators of such violence. “This gang of
terrorists was cruel without any humanity,” Meng Jianzhu, the party leader
who oversees domestic policing and security, told Phoenix Television, a
Hong Kong-based broadcaster. “They completely abandoned their conscience.
We must strike hard against them according to the law.”

But experts said that if the official accounts were correct, the attack
appeared to expose a serious security lapse and raises a troublesome
question for President Xi: Why have the government’s increasingly tough
policies so far failed to stanch the violence in Xinjiang, which has now
spilled over into a distant province with no recent history of major
ethnic unrest?

“As a single incident, you can say that this is the most brutal, cruel
incident we’ve seen from Xinjiang,” Rohan Gunaratna, a professor at
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who studies terrorism in
Asia, including China, said in a telephone interview. Over several days in
July 2009, at least 200 people, many from the Han majority, died in ethnic
bloodshed in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang. In the days that
followed the rioting, an unknown number of Uighurs are said to have died
in vigilante attacks.

“Absolutely, it’s an intelligence failure,” Professor Gunaratna said of
the Kunming attack. “But this is a natural progression of the developments
in Xinjiang, because I would estimate that in the last 12 months there
have been over 200 attacks there, maybe even more. It is getting worse.”

The Uighurs are a Turkic people who mostly follow moderate traditions of
Sunni Islam, and culturally have more in common with similar people across
Central Asia than with Han Chinese. In Xinjiang, Uighurs make up a little
under half of the population of 22 million, and Han Chinese, who have been
encouraged to migrate there, now account for 40 percent, according to
government data.

The attack is particularly alarming because it happened far from Xinjiang
and, like a smaller attack in Beijing in October, could augur more
attempts by alienated Uighurs to strike beyond their home region, said Pan
Zhiping, a professor at Xinjiang University who studies unrest in the
region. In October, a group of Uighurs drove a vehicle into a crowd near
Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, killing two people and injuring 40.

“The Tiananmen attack last year could be called a turning point, and
together with this incident indicates that more terror activities could
spread beyond Xinjiang, like violence spread out of Chechnya in Russia,”
Professor Pan said.

“There were intelligence problems here,” he added. “You can’t stamp out
these incidents before they happen unless you have reliable informers.”

But activists seeking greater Uighur autonomy and international human
rights groups have argued that China’s smothering controls and religious
restrictions in the region are exacerbating, not defusing, the tensions
underlying the violence.

Dilxat Rexit, a spokesman based in Sweden for the World Uyghur Congress,
which campaigns for self-determination for Uighurs, said the attack in
Beijing last year had prompted even more sweeping searches and detentions
of Uighurs, including in Kunming, which like many Chinese cities, has a
small but visible community of traders and peddlers from Xinjiang.

“We oppose any form of violence, and we also urge the Chinese government
to ease systematic repression,” Mr. Rexit said. “If this incident was
really the work of Uighurs, then I can only say that it may be an extreme
act by people who feel they cannot take it anymore.”

Throughout Sunday hundreds of people lined up at blood donation centers
across the city, and tales of tragedy and heroism were shared online. At
one tiny restaurant to the west of the railway station, the owner
reportedly shepherded 200 people to safety during the attack, according to
China News Service. There were so many people inside, the report said,
that people were standing on tables.

As night fell, hundreds of people flocked to the station to light candles
and lay out white chrysanthemums, a traditional symbol of mourning in
China. “I just can’t imagine who would want to kill innocent people in
such a cruel fashion,” said Yang Wei, a 50-year-old truck driver.

As he spoke, a group of workers carried the belongings of victims to a
police van. Among the items were backpacks, the overstuffed plastic duffle
bags typically carried by migrant workers, and a child’s bicycle.

Andrew Jacobs reported from Kunming, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Ye
Fanfei contributed research from Kunming, and Chen Jiehao from Beijing.