Riot police battle protesters as China's Uighur crisis escalates
by Jane Macartney, Times Online
July 7th, 2009
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A
woman holds onto a Chinese policeman as a crowd of locals confront
security forces along a street in the city of Urumqi, in China's
Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Hundreds of Uighurs protesting
against the arrest of relatives clashed with police in the capital of
China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday two days after ethnic
unrest left 156 dead and 1,080 wounded. (REUTERS/David Gray)
Following
news that 1,434 people had been arrested for Sunday's riots, some 300
Muslim ethnic Uighurs confronted heavily-armed riot police in the city
of Urumqi demanding the release of family members they said had been
arbitrarily arrested in the crackdown following the weekend bloodshed,
which left 156 dead and more than 800 wounded.
One woman,
Maliya, said: “My husband was taken away yesterday by police. They
didn't say why. They just took him away." Another girl described how
her teenage brother was grabbed from his bed in a midnight police raid.
Abdul
Ali, a Uighur man in his twenties who had taken off his shirt, held up
his clenched fist. "They've been arresting us for no reason and it's
time for us to fight back." He said three of his brothers as well as a
sister had been among the suspects taken into police custody for
questioning over the riots. Local residents complained police were
making indiscriminate sweeps of Uighur areas.
A
Han Chinese crowd walk holding sticks and other items as they gather in
the street in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region July 7, 2009.
Uighur protesters clashed with Chinese riot police in the capital of
China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic
violence broke out leaving 156 people dead and more than 800
injured.(REUTERS/Nir Elias)
Scuffles and fights broke
out when the Uighurs advanced on the police carrying clubs, just as
journalists were being escorted to the area to see the damage inflicted
on the city in the rampage by angry Uighurs protesting Beijing rule at
the weekend.
The police backed away, apparently to prevent an escalation of violence, and the crowd gradually dispersed.
Just
hours earlier, Wang Lequan, the Communist Party boss of Xinjiang, the
only Muslim majority region in China, said the unrest had been quelled.
However, he warned "this struggle is far from over".
The streets
of Urumqi, a city closer to Tehran than to Beijing, were almost
deserted except for mobs of Han Chinese carrying wooden sticks or iron
staves who swaggered past shuttered shop fronts. At one point the
ethnic tensions spilled over with Han eager to take revenge for the
dozens of deaths – mainly of Han stabbed by marauding gangs of Uighurs
– at the weekend.
In front of one bank on a street near the
city’s main People’s Square, paramilitary police in bulletproof vests
had forced two Uighurs face down on the ground, their hands behind
their necks.
Angry crowds of Han men shouted and tried to reach
the two men. The police bundled them into a small van. At once, several
Han attacked the bus with their sticks, trying to beat the two men with
their staves through the open windows. They were pulled back by the
police who then drove the two Uighur men to safety.
A
local woman on a crutch shouts at Chinese armoured personnel carriers
and soldiers wearing riot gear as a crowd of angry locals confront
security forces on a street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang
Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Hundreds of Uighur protesters clashed
with riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on
Tuesday, two days after ethnic unrest left 156 dead and more than 800
injured. (REUTERS/David Gray)
“We will stand united. We Han are together in this,” the crowd chanted.
Two
young women outside a closed department store suddenly turned and ran
as they saw a group of about seven Uighur men strolling down the
opposite side of the road. One man shouted: “Let’s get together to
defend ourselves.”
The Government has declared a three-day
holiday since the riot on Sunday, the deadliest single day of social
violence in China since the 1989 crackdown on student demonstrators in
Tiananmen Square.
Some Xinjiang newspapers also carried graphic
pictures of the violence, including corpses, at least one of which
showed a woman whose throat had been slashed. Those reports may have
fomented the ethnic anger in the volatile region of some 20 million
people, about half of them Muslim Uighurs.
Despite the
heightened security, some unrest appeared to be spreading. Police
dispersed around 200 people at the Id Kah mosque in the Silk Road city
of Kashgar on Monday evening.
Chinese officials have already
blamed the unrest on separatist groups abroad, who it says want to
create an independent homeland of East Turkestan for the Uighurs.
Exiled Uighur businesswoman and activist Rebiya Kadeer, blamed by
Chinese state media for being behind the violence, denied having
anything to do with it. She said: "These accusations are completely
false." |
