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WORLD: The women invoking Tiananmen’s spirit
Ed Harris8 Jul 2009
Women fought with riot police as fresh protests broke out in China's volatile Xinjiang province today.
Many of the protesters said their husbands and children had been arrested in a massive security operation. At least 156 people have been killed and more than 1,400 arrested in the area's worst ethnic violence in decades.
About 200 Uighurs blocked a street in the regional capital of Urumqi in protest at the crackdown on members of the Muslim minority by Chinese authorities since the violence started on Sunday.
One woman said her husband was taken away and she would rather die than live without him. As the women marched down the street, paramilitary police with sticks and riot police marched toward them and pushed the crowd back.
More police with assault rifles and teargas guns took up positions on the other side of the crowd. The women stayed in the street, waving their fists and wailing as police tried to pick the men out of the crowd and herd them down a side street.
The violence does not bode well for China's efforts to calm long-simmering ethnic tensions between the minority Uighur people and the ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang — a sprawling region three times the size of Texas that shares borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
China's rapid economic development has attracted large numbers of Han — China's ethnic majority — into Xinjiang, but the Uighurs say they have been marginalised. Some want independence. There was further unrest today in Urumqi as police moved to disperse a group of angry Han Chinese who were throwing rocks at a crowd of Uighurs. Police fired tear gas as violence threatened to flare up.
There were no independent figures on the ethnic breakdown of the casualties in the rioting. Li Yi, head of the publicity department of the Communist Party in Xinjiang, said today that 129 men and 27 women died. A total of 1,080 people were said to have been hurt in the rioting.
The unrest in Urumqi began on Sunday after 3,000 Uighurs gathered at the People's Square to protest over the deaths last month of Uighur factory workers killed in a riot in southern China.
Internet and social networking reports on the incident had raised tensions in Xinjiang over the last two weeks. Mobile phone service and the social networking site Twitter have now been blocked, and internet links were cut or slowed down.
A non-violent protest by 200 people yesterday was broken up in a second city, Kashgar, and the official Xinhua news agency said police had evidence that demonstrators were trying to organise more unrest in Kashgar, Yili and Aksu. The government says the Uighurs should be grateful for the roads, railways, schools, hospitals and oil fields it has been building in Xinjiang, known for its scorching deserts and snowy mountain ranges.
But Uighurs have said the government limits their religious freedom. After a series of deadly attacks in the region during the Beijing Olympics last year, overseas Uighur rights groups accused the government of mass arrests, which police deny.
Several provincial governments also cracked down during the Muslim month of Ramadan, ordering government employees, teachers and students not to fast and increasing surveillance of mosques. Similar tensions exist in Tibet, where a violent protest last year has left many Tibetan communities living under heavy security.
Uighurs frequently compare their persecution to that imposed on Tibet but say their cause is not as well known because they lack a Dalai Lama to publicise their cause.
Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uighur Congress, speaking in Washington yesterday, blamed Beijing for the brutal repression of Uighurs. “Any Uighur who dares to express the slightest protest, however peaceful, is dealt with by brutal force,” she said.
