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Ethnic riots spread in China's west; 140 killed
By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press
Writer William Foreman, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 33 mins ago
URUMQI, China – Riots and street
battles killed at least 140 people in China's western Xinjiang province and
injured 828 others in the deadliest ethnic unrest to hit the region in decades.
Officials said Monday the death toll was expected to rise.
Police sealed off streets in parts
of the provincial capital, Urumqi, after discord between ethnic Muslim Uighur
people and China's Han majority erupted into violence. Witnesses reported a
new, smaller protest Monday in a second city, Kashgar.
The unrest is another troubling sign
for Beijing at how rapid economic development has failed to stem — and even has
exacerbated — resentment among ethnic minorities, who say they are being
marginalized in their homelands as Chinese migrants pour in.
Columns of paramilitary police in
green camouflage uniforms, helmets and flak vests marched Monday around Urumqi's
main bazaar — a largely Uighur neighborhood — carrying batons and shields.
Mobile phone service was blocked, and Internet links were also cut or slowed
down.
Rioters on Sunday overturned
barricades, attacked vehicles and houses, and clashed violently with police in
Urumqi, according to media and witness accounts. State television aired footage
showing protesters attacking and kicking people on the ground. Other people,
who appeared to be Han Chinese, sat dazed with blood pouring down their faces.
There was little immediate
explanation for how so many people died. The government accused a Uighur
businesswoman living in the U.S. of inciting the riots through phone calls and
"propaganda" spread on Web sites.
Exile groups said the violence
started only after police began cracking down on a peaceful protest demanding
justice for two Uighurs killed last month during a fight with Han co-workers at
a factory in southern China.
Thousands of people took part in
Sunday's disturbance, unlike recent sporadic separatist violence carried out by
small groups in Xinjiang. The clashes echoed the violent protest that rocked
Tibet
last year and left many Tibetan communities living under clamped-down security
ever since.
Tensions between Uighurs and the
majority Han Chinese are never far from the surface in Xinjiang, a sprawling
region rich in minerals and oil that borders eight Central Asian nations. Many
Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) yearn for independence and some militants have
waged a sporadic, violent separatist campaign.
Uighurs make up the largest ethnic
group in Xinjiang, but not in the capital of Urumqi, which has attracted large
numbers of Han Chinese migrants. The city of 2.3 million is now overwhelmingly
Chinese — a source of frustration for native Uighurs who say they are being
squeezed out.
Kakharman Khozamberdi — leader of a
Uighur political movement in Kazakhstan, where the Uighur minority has its
largest presence outside China — said machine gun fire was heard all night
long. One witness told Khozamberdi 10 bodies were seen near a bazaar, including
those of women and children.
In Geneva, U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon urged China and any country with violent protests to use extreme
care. He urged all government to "protect the life and safety of
civilians."
About 1,000 to 3,000 Uighur
demonstrators had gathered Sunday in the regional capital for a protest that
apparently spun out of control. Accounts differed over what happened, but the
violence seemed to have started when the crowd of protesters refused to
disperse.
The official Xinhua News Agency
reported hundreds of people were arrested and checkpoints ringed the city to
prevent rioters from escaping. Mobile phone service provided by at least one
company was cut Monday to stop people from organizing further action in
Xinjiang.
Internet access was blocked or
unusually slow in Urumqi on Monday. Videos and text updates about the riots
were removed from China-based social networking sites such as Youku, a
YouTube-like
video service, and Fanfou, a Chinese micro-blogging Web site similar to Twitter.
A Fanfou search for posts with the
key word Urumqi turned up zero results while Twitter, which is hosted overseas,
yielded hundreds of comments in Chinese and English. Major Chinese portals such
as Sina.com, Sohu.com and 163.com relied solely on Xinhua for news of the
event and turned off the comment function at the bottom of the stories so people
could not publicly react.
Witnesses said the protests spread
to Kashgar, a second city in Xinjiang, on Monday afternoon. A Uighur man there
said he was among more than 300 protesters who demonstrated outside the Id Kah
Mosque. He said they were surrounded by police, who asked them to calm down.
"We were yelling at each other
but there were no clashes, no physical contact," said the man, who gave
his name as Yagupu.
Calls to Kashgar's public security
bureau rang, then were disconnected.
Uighur activists and exiles say the
millions of Han Chinese who have settled here in recent years are gradually
squeezing the Turkic people out of their homeland.
But many Chinese believe the Uighurs
are backward and ungrateful for the economic development the Chinese have
brought to the poor region.
Wu Nong, director of the news office
of the Xinjiang provincial government, said more than 260 vehicles were
attacked or set on fire in Sunday's unrest and 203 shops were damaged. She said
140 people were killed and 828 injured in the violence.
She did not say how many of the
victims were Han or Uighurs.
Uighur exiles condemned the
crackdown.
"We ask the international
community to condemn China's killing of innocent Uighurs. This is a very dark
day in the history of the Uighur people," said Alim Seytoff, vice
president of the Washington, D.C.-based Uyghur American Association.
Chinese officials singled out the
leader of the association — Rebiya Kadeer, a former prominent Xinjiang
businesswoman now living in Washington — for inciting the violence.
"Rebiya had phone conversations
with people in China on July 5 in order to incite, and Web sites such as
Uighurbiz.cn and Diyarim.com were used to orchestrate the
incitement and spread propaganda," Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri said on
television early Monday.
Xinjiang's top Communist Party
official, Wang Lequan, called the incident "a profound lesson learned in
blood."
"We must tear away Rebiya's
mask and let the world see her true nature," Wang said.
Seytoff dimissed the accusations
against Kadeer. "It's common practice for the Chinese government to accuse
Ms. Kadeer for any unrest" in Xinjiang, he said.
The clashes in Urumqi echoed last
year's unrest in Tibet, when a peaceful demonstration by monks in the capital
of Lhasa erupted into riots that spread to surrounding areas, leaving at least
22 dead. The Chinese government accused Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the
Dalai
Lama, of orchestrating the violence — a charge he denied.
Seytoff said he had heard from two
sources that at least two dozen people had been killed by gunfire or crushed by
armored police vehicles just outside Xinjiang University.
Mamet, a 36-year-old restaurant
worker, said he saw People's Armed Police attack students outside Xinjiang
University.
"First they fired tear gas at
the students. Then they started beating them and shooting them with bullets.
Big trucks arrived, and students were rounded up and arrested," Mamet
said.
China labels some Uighur separatist
groups as terrorists.
Four Uighur detainees at the U.S.
prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were recently released and relocated to
Bermuda despite Beijing's objections because U.S. officials have said they fear
the men would be executed if they returned to China. Officials have also been
trying to transfer 13 others to the Pacific nation of Palau. The men were
captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001, but the U.S. later determined
they were not "enemy combatants."
Previous mass protests in Xinjiang
that were quelled by armed forces became signal events for the separatist
movement. In 1990, about 200 Uighurs shouting for holy war protested through
Baren, a town near the Afghan border, resulting in violence that left at least
two dozen people dead.
In 1997, amid a wave of bombings and
assassinations, a protest by several hundred Uighurs in the city of Yining
against religious restrictions turned into an anti-Chinese uprising that left
at least 10 dead.
In both cases pro-independence
groups said the death tolls were several times higher, and the government never
conducted a public investigation into the events.
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