【The Age】又见老相识Garnaut：Scores killed as China unrest flares

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Scores killed as China unrest flares
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/scores-killed-as-china-unrest-flares/2009/07/06/1246732284274.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

John Garnaut, China Correspondent, Beijing
July 7, 2009

AT LEAST 140 people have been killed and more than 800 injured in riots in China's far-western province, the deadliest officially acknowledged mass unrest in the country since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.

Street protests by ethnic Uighurs in Urumqi and elsewhere across Xinjiang province turned bloody when confronted by Chinese armed police on Sunday night.

Amateur footage posted on websites showed police and fire engines rushing to the scenes accompanied by the sounds of gunshots and explosives.

Authorities said the situation was "under control" by Monday morning but information remains tightly controlled and difficult to verify. Chinese propaganda and security authorities have cut normal channels of electronic communication.

Beijing immediately blamed outsiders for plotting separatist violence against China, echoing their handling of the bloody riots that rocked Tibet last year.

As of late yesterday, the official Chinese language media said only "a few" civilians had died, while the midday China Central Television news showed vehicles and buildings ablaze, rioters overturning police cars and ethnic Han Chinese civilians clustering in bloodied and dazed groups.

China's official English language services later upgraded the death toll from three to 140 and said the death toll was "still climbing".

A Xinjiang provincial propaganda official was quoted on Xinhua's English language news service as saying 140 people were dead, 828 injured, at least 260 vehicles attacked or set on fire and 203 houses damaged.

"The situation is very dangerous and I plan to leave for Beijing tomorrow night," a Uighur source in Urumqi told The Age before the mobile phone line was cut.

Internet services around Urumqi and other major towns were cut yesterday, according to messages posted on social message services including Twitter. By yesterday afternoon Twitter was also inaccessible.

The protesters appear to have been mainly Uighur, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group that once dominated the Xinjiang area until waves of Han Chinese internal migration over the past 60 years.

The Chinese Communist Party has ruled Xinjiang with an iron fist for much of the past two decades and especially since terrorist attacks in 1997.

Authorities have singled out Uighurs for special restrictions on travel, religion and education.

Those restrictions were again tightened after attempted terrorist attacks early last year and up until the Beijing Olympics in August, which Beijing has blamed on Uighur organisations such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.


Xinhua news agency said several hundred people had been arrested in connection with the riot and police were searching for about 90 other "key suspects".

The mass violence in Xinjiang is a blow to the Communist Party as it appears to confirm that tensions among large numbers of non-Han minorities are at boiling point.

Yesterday the Chinese Communist Party battled with Uighur political leaders in exile to control the story.

"We are extremely saddened by the heavy-handed use of force by the Chinese security forces against the peaceful demonstrators," said Alim Seytoff, vice-president of the Washington-based Uyghur American Association.

"We ask the international community to condemn China's killing of innocent Uighurs."

The association, led by a former prominent Xinjiang businesswoman, Rebiya Kadeer, estimated that 1000 to 3000 people took part in the protest.

But a Chinese security source told The Age the riots had been "orchestrated" by text messages from overseas exile groups, including the Uyghur American Association.

In a televised address yesterday, Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri blamed Uighur exiles led by Ms Kadeer of causing the violence, saying: "Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China on July 5 in order to incite and websites … were used to orchestrate the incitement and spread propaganda."

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