Thousands of Han residents armed with clubs poured onto the streets of Urumqi Tuesday afternoon, raising the risk of further racial violence in this western Chinese city. Just two days ago, the Xinjiang capital was thrown into chaos when protests by more than 1000 members of the Uighur minority turned into a riot. Sunday’s events left 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, the deadliest outburst of public violence in China since People’s Liberation Army soldiers killed several hundred people during the 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The club-wielding Han groups said they were responding to the threat of further Uighur violence. Sunday’s outburst targeted Han Chinese who make up 75% of Urumqi’s population.
Earlier in the day, the Chinese government efforts at media management backfired dramatically, as a large group of women besieged an official tour of visiting journalists to protest the arrests of their husbands, sons and brothers. Six buses full of foreign and Chinese reporters were taken to a neighborhood southeast of Urumqi’s Grand Bazaar to see an auto dealership that was burned by rioters Sunday.
As reporters interviewed residents of the area, a Uighur woman with two children stumbled past sobbing. The woman said she was bereft over
the disappearance of her husband. Soon after, a dozen Uighur women emerged from a market, marching down a four-lane road and chanting slogans. The journalists and cameras followed, and soon the protesters — mostly women and children but some men as well — swelled to
about 300 as Foreign Ministry minders stood aside, watching helplessly.
Several women said their family members had been detained in mass
police arrests the previous day. “Free my husband! Free my husband!” a
group of headscarf clad women cried. “He has heart disease,” one
woman said of her arrested husband. “He didn’t go out yesterday or the
day before, but still they took him.” The women estimated that
thousands of men had been arrested. They dumped out plastic bags that
held more than 100 pairs of footwear and trousers, which they say
police forced the detainees to take off when they were arrested.
Urumqi Party Secretary Li Zhi had said earler at a press conference that more than
1,000 people had been arrested, but they were all taken while actively
rioting.
As the women continued their protest in the road, they were met by several hundred
military police carrying riot shields and truncheons. The police stood
alongside four armored personnel carriers, and attempted to push the
demonstrators back. The protesters retreated, then advanced on the
military police, who eventually stepped back about 100 yards as a
group of black-clad riot police advanced from the other direction.
After about an hour the protest faded down back alleys, and Foreign
Ministry officials pushed reporters back on buses. “It is hard for you to understand what it is like to be a Uighur,” said a 25-year-old Uighur man named Musa, watching the women protest. “Uighur people can’t get jobs.”
The outburst punctured a tightly orchestrated effort to show the media
the extent of the destruction wrought by the city’s small Uighur community on Sunday. Reporters were given a
CD that showed several minutes of footage of the mostly Uighur rioters
attacking civilians and destroying property. Unlike the official
response to the deadly unrest in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa last
year, when the region was closed to outsiders for several months, journalists in Urumqi
were given relatively free reign.
Before the women’s march, the Xinjiang capital had been
eerily quiet in the wake of Sunday’s riots. Large groups of military police were stationed at key
intersections on Monday, and only police vehicles, some of them with smashed
windows, moved on the streets. Riot police stood outside the Hoi Tak
Hotel as buses full of Hong Kong tourists were loaded in, their visit cut
short by the unrest.
Sunday’s Urumqi riot was triggered by unrest in the southern coastal
province of Guangdong, where a disgruntled former factory worker
started a rumor that a group of Uighur workers had raped two Han
women. That touched off a riot on June 26 that left two Uighur workers
dead. Police later arrested the man who started the rumor. This week’s
protest began as a peaceful demonstration by a group of about 1,000
Uighurs angered by the Guangdong riot. Witnesses said they shouted
slogans in Uighur and Mandarin denouncing discrimination.
The Chinese government says the Xinjiang demonstrations and ensuing violence were provoked by
Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur activist and businesswoman who lives in exile
in the U.S., and the World Uyghur Congress, the Munich-based exile
group she heads. Kadeer was imprisoned for nearly six years in China
on a national security-related conviction, a charge she says was
politically motivated. The WUC denied this week that it had any role in the
violence, and says that security forces used heavy-handed methods to
confront demonstrators who were attempting to peacefully protest for
equal rights under the law.
On Tuesday afternoon, hotel staff were seen taping up windows and businesses were locking their employees inside in fear of further violence. A 38-year-old
Han man surnamed Fu who has lived in Xinjiang all his life said he was
accustomed to the discord. “We’re used to it already,” he said, then
pointed to a scar on his arm he says was the result of a fight with a
Uighur man. “They’re uncivilized.”
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