China arrests more than 1,400 after ethnic riots

China arrests more than 1,400 after ethnic riots



More than 150 people reported killed, hundreds hurt in Xinjiang region
Image: Chinese soldiers wearing riot gear prepare to march in formation as they patrol streets of Urumqi, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, in China
David Gray / Reuters
Chinese soldiers wearing riot gear prepare to march in formation as they patrol the streets of Urumqi, Xinjiang region, in China on Monday.
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July 6: ITV's Neil Connery reports on the deadliest outbreak of violence in years between Muslim separatists and Han Chinese.

Nightly News
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 1 hour, 56 minutes ago

URUMQI, China - Ethnic Uighurs scuffled with armed police Tuesday in a fresh protest in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where at least 156 people have been killed and more than 1,400 people arrested in western China's worst ethnic violence in decades.

Most of the group of about 200 Uighurs were women protesting the arrests of their husbands in the massive crackdown on members of the Muslim minority by Chinese authorities since the violence was sparked Sunday in the Xinjiang provincial capital.
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The incident played out in front of reporters who were being taken around Urumqi to see the aftermath of Sunday's riots, when hundreds of vehicles and shops were attacked.

The women, wearing ornate flowered headscarves, blocked a road. Some screamed that their husbands and children had been arrested. Riot police were at one end of the road and paramilitary police were at the other.

One woman said her husband was taken away and she would rather die than live without him.

As they marched down the street, paramilitary police in green camouflage fatigues with sticks marched toward them and pushed the crowd back. A woman fell. The brief scuffle ended when the police retreated. Police in black uniforms with assault rifles and tear gas guns took up positions on the other side of the crowd.

The women, however, stayed in the street, pumping their fists in the air and wailing. Meanwhile, police tried to weed the men out of the crowd, herding them down a side street. Two boys ran out of a side alley, and a policeman barked at them, "Go home" and grabbed one around the neck, pushing him.

The 90-minute protest ended when the women walked back into a market area without any resistance.

Suspects rounded up
The new protest came after state media said Tuesday that police had arrested 1,434 suspects for their roles in Sunday's riot.

The violence does not bode well for China's efforts to mollify 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, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries.

"We haven't had anything like this, really, ever," said Dru Gladney, a Uighur expert at the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California. "It really gives strong evidence of widespread unrest and discontentment."

Mobile-phone service and the social-networking site Twitter have been blocked, and Internet links also were cut or slowed down.

A nonviolent protest by 200 people was broken up in a second city, Kashgar, and the official Xinhua News Agency said police had evidence that demonstrators were trying to organize more unrest in Kashgar, Yili and Aksu.


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Ethnic rioting erupts in China
July 6: Urumqi's main hospital struggle to treat the wounded, who claimed they were targeted because they were Han Chinese. Meanwhile, exile groups blamed a police crackdown against a peaceful protest by Uighurs. NBC's Ian Williams reports.

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It said police had raided several groups plotting unrest in Dawan township in Urumqi, as well as at a former race course that is home to a transient population.

Hans inundate region
The unrest in Urumqi began Sunday after 1,000 to 3,000 people gathered at the People's Square to protest the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers killed in a riot in southern China. Xinhua said two died; other sources put the figure higher.

Many Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) haven't been wooed by the rapid economic development. Some want independence, while others feel they're being marginalized in their homeland. The Han — China's ethnic majority — have been flooding into Xinjiang as the region becomes more developed.

The government often says the Uighurs should be grateful for the roads, railways, schools, hospitals and oil fields it has been building in Xinjiang, a region known for scorching deserts and snowy mountain ranges.

'One big family'
A similar situation exists in Tibet, where a violent protest last year left many Tibetan communities living under clamped-down security ever since.

"The Han Chinese say we all belong to the same country. We're all part of one big family," said Memet, a restaurant worker who like other Uighurs declined to give his full name because he feared the police. "But the Han always treat us separately."

A Han Chinese shopkeeper, who only gave his surname Wang because the ethnic issue is so sensitive, disagreed. "Those who cause such trouble are criminals," he said. "They're never happy with what they have."

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Sunday's violence was notable because it happened in Urumqi, which has been relatively peaceful and hasn't been a hotbed of religious or political agitation. In other restive Xinjiang cities, red propaganda banners are filled with slogans encouraging ethnic harmony. But most of the banners in Urumqi touted anti-drug and fire prevention campaigns.

The population of 2.3 million is also overwhelmingly Han Chinese in the city, a mixture of drab concrete apartment blocks and gleaming new office towers.

It is not clear how the violence started, as police confronted the protesters. Rioters began flipping over barricades, smashing shop windows and burning cars, according to media and witness accounts.

State television video showed protesters attacking and kicking people on the ground, and the government said many Han Chinese were injured by rampaging Uighurs.

Leader singled out
There were no independent figures on the ethnic breakdown of the casualties. Xinhua quoted Li Yi, head of the publicity department of the Communist Party in Xinjiang, as saying Tuesday that 129 men and 27 women died. Li said 1,080 people were hurt in the rioting.

Chinese officials have singled out the leader of the U.S.-based Uyghur American Association — Rebiya Kadeer, a former prominent Xinjiang businesswoman now living in Washington — for inciting the violence.

"Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China on July 5 in order to incite, and Web sites ... were used to orchestrate the incitement and spread propaganda," Xinjiang Gov. Nur Bekri said Monday on television.

Kadeer said Monday that she had learned through Web sites of the planned protests and called her brother to urge him and other family members to stay away.

"The Chinese government always blames me and the World Uyghur Congress for problems over there," Kadeer said in Washington, D.C. "Any Uighur who dares to express the slightest protest, however peaceful, is dealt with by brutal force."

While she blamed the government for the recent violence, she also condemned "the violent actions of some of the Uighur demonstrators" and said her organization supports only peaceful protests.

The government has accused Kadeer of having a hand in many of Xinjiang's problems since her release from prison into U.S. exile in 2005. The Foreign Ministry has publicly accused the 62-year-old of having links to the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a group the U.S. put on its terrorist blacklist.