【The Age】又见老相识Garnaut：Fear and loathing on China's Silk Road

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Fear and loathing on China's Silk Roadhttp://www.theage.com.au/world/fear-and-loathing-on-chinas-silk-road-20090708-dddk.html?page=-1

July 9, 2009

As violence between Uighur and Han Chinese continues, sorting fact from rumour is hard, reports John Garnaut in Urumqi.

IN SOUTH Gate, in downtown Urumqi, two teenage boys walk through crowds of Chinese bystanders and past lines of hundreds of riot police.

Then there is a shout: "UIGHUR! Hit him. Hit, hit, hit," and the two boys take flight, scared for their lives, with a throng of Chinese men attempting to beat them and throw water bottles and whatever objects they happen to have at hand.

They eventually get away — by hiding between police, who are too slow to protect them, and then scrambling out of sight — but scores of other Urumqi residents have not been so lucky.
Some of the worst violence happened close to here on Sunday night, especially around a Uighur area called Shanxi Lane.

Chen Xiang, a 20-year-old Han man who had joined in the pursuit of the two Uighur boys, explains why he was so angry. A close friend of his, surnamed Jiang, was on his way home from decorating his new house on Sunday night when Uighurs lobbed a petrol bomb onto his No. 3 bus as it reached Shanxi Lane. The bus caught fire and he jumped off.

Uighurs then beat him senseless.

"I just saw him at the Children's Hospital and he cannot move, and has only just managed to talk again," Chen says.
As the violence in the capital — and probably elsewhere in the sprawling Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region in China's north-west — entered its fourth day, everyone I talk to in downtown Urumqi can recite vivid details of how the other side has brutalised theirs. They say deadly violence has continued across the city despite the city being saturated with armed police.

Han witnesses say mobs of Uighurs were on Tuesday robbing and beating Han, including those who had just arrived in Urumqi at the main train station. Other violence occurred at Friendship Road and at Liberation Road, they said.
They said there were major confrontations at Liberation Road and at this place, South Gate.

Uighur witnesses say the South Gate incident on Tuesday involved thousands of Han vigilantes killing four Uighurs with poles and knives.

Few talk of brutality by their own side except to rationalise what went on.

"We Han Chinese are organising to protect ourselves," says Chen.

Some Han are willing to put their names to their words. But Uighurs only talk to me cautiously, in low voices, out of fear of police reprisals and also of Uighur informants lurking in the nearby crowds.

A quietly spoken young Uighur woman in Shanxi Lane confirms she saw her fellow Uighurs slaughtering Han people outside her window.

"But this does not mean they are animals," she says. "Do you know June 26?" referring to the murder of at least two Uighur workers by Han Chinese mobs in Guangdong province, the incident that sparked the current wave of violence.

Asked whether she personally saw Uighurs killed at Shanxi Lane, she switches to English and answers in code: "Those women are Muslims," she says nodding towards two women dressed in black with white headscarves. "Muslim women wear white scarves when they are in mourning."

A Han construction worker told us he watched Uighurs slaughtering Han — "slicing their throats like lambs" — in Shanxi Lane before armed police opened fire killing Uighurs.

Uighurs have claimed that "hundreds" of their own were massacred at various locations across Urumqi on Sunday night, but facts are thin on the ground.

Yesterday, in a Uighur restaurant in Shanxi Lane, we received detailed firsthand accounts of events on Sunday night.
Three young employees at the restaurant have been taken away.. One was shot in the leg and is recovering in the nearby Children's Hospital.

Two others — aged 14 and 16 — were arrested on their way home from work on Monday night.

"We still don't know where they are," says one young restaurant worker, whom we will call Yusuf.

Yusuf says the street was "full of shooting" when he watched out the restaurant window on Sunday night. "The Chinese have taken everything way and left us with nothing," he says. "So we throw rocks and whatever we have in our hands, and they have guns."

He says he personally saw a large number of Uighurs felled by gunfire from Chinese police early in the night.
"They were shooting at people, they were not shooting in the air," he says.

Yusuf says he later ventured outside and saw the street littered with bodies and carnage.

He claims hundreds were killed in this area, but concedes he did not personally see most of them.

An older restaurant worker says that police returned about 9pm (Xinjiang time, which is the same as Melbourne time or 11pm on official Chinese time) and took away about 200 Uighurs who had been shot. He says he could not distinguish between those who were injured and those who were dead as most of the wounded and arrested have not been accounted for.

We ask for evidence of gunshot fire and the group directs us around the corner to an internet cafe. The front glass of the cafe is fractured in the pattern of a cobweb, with a small bullet-sized hole in the middle.

The Chinese Government says 156 people were killed on Sunday night. It seems certain that number, if accurate at the time, has grown in the days since.

There have been no reports of deaths outside Urumqi but it seems unlikely that racial reprisals are not taking place all over the region.

The mother of the young Uighur woman in Shanxi Lane was beaten by "two Chinese sisters" in her home yesterday, in far away Turpan.

The Government has not said how many of the 156 officially killed were killed by rioters and how many were killed by police. The world, and Xinjiang's Chinese and Uighur communities, can only guess.

The cooler headed Uighurs and Han Chinese shake their heads and lament how their once cosmopolitan city is now broken.

"This is terrible, awful — nobody trusts anybody any more," says the young Uighur woman in Shanxi Lane.

Back at South Gate, the angry Chinese crowd has been urged to cool down.

One man, Ge Linghai, uses his body to make a barrier to allow a terrified Uighur family to pass through without physical harassment.

Ge was born to a Chinese family in Xinjiang and has lived here in Urumqi most of his life.

"This is the first time I've seen anything like this in more than 40 years," he says, shaking his head. "I am miserable."

He says there are rumours that Uighurs have poisoned the reservoir.

"I don't know if they are true or not — but we are all too scared to drink the water," he says.

And even he, who has plenty of Uighur friends and insists against the will of the crowd that only a small group of them are bad, can't escape the pull of defining his world in racial terms.

He can't understand why Uighurs are so angry when the Government helps them with affirmative action policies. And he explains that Han violence against Uighurs is not unreasonable because when Hans find them they only beat them, not kill them, and wait for the police.

It seems that the cycles of reprisals will roll on, Uighur against Han and Han against Uighur.

We ask the young Uighur restaurant worker how it should be stopped.

"Xinjiang was originally ours. We want our own country. We want independence."

John Garnaut is China correspondent.

WHO ARE THE UIGHURS?They are one of the biggest ethnic minorities in China and mainly Muslim. About 10 million Uighurs live in the Xinjiang autonomous region, an enormous oil-rich desert area to the north of Tibet. With a distinctively different appearance from the majority Han Chinese, Uighurs have their own Turkic language and a rich cultural and trading history, due in part to their position on the Silk Route.


WHY ARE THEY RIOTING?The spark appears to have been the death of two Uighur factory workers who were beaten to death during a riot by Han Chinese in southern China last month after a rumour, which later proved false, that Uighur boys had raped two Han Chinese girls.


But many Uighurs have long resented Chinese rule, which they say discriminates against them. The province's rich mineral resources have mostly been exploited by Han Chinese, drawing millions of them to the region. Han Chinese, who accounted for 6 per cent of Xinjiang's population in 1949, now comprise more than 40 per cent. Uighurs make up 47 per cent.

DOES XINJIANG WANT INDEPENDENCE FROM CHINA?Communist Party officials claim there is a serious threat from Uighur separatists. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, China pushed Washington to classify two little-known separatist groups, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation, as terrorist organisations.


Last year, a spate of bombings and attacks on police before the Olympics were blamed on the two groups, which were said to have been training fighters in Pakistan. However, there remains scant evidence of a serious separatist movement and activists have accused China of drumming up propaganda to justify a strict security presence.

IS THE UNREST LINKED TO RIOTS IN TIBET LAST YEAR?There has been no evidence to link the two events. However, there are parallels in Beijing's handling of them. Nicholas Bequelin, of Human Rights Watch, said the Government had claimed in both cases "that the cause of the event is a plot by foreign forces with an exile at their head, and that the blame is entirely apportioned on the demonstrators".


SOURCE: TELEGRAPH, WIRES

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