China Official Threatens Death Penalty After Riots In Uighur Autonomous Region

8 July 2009

As northwest China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region settled into tense stillness on Wednesday after three days of deadly ethnic violence, a Communist Party leader from the region pledged to seek the death penalty for anyone behind the strife that state news reports say claimed at least 156 lives.

Li Zhi, the party boss in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital where the violence was centered, said that many suspected instigators of the riots had been arrested and that most were students. His promise to seek the death sentence for those responsible came as China’s president, Hu Jintao, cut short a stay in Italy to deal with aftermath of the riots, the worst ethnic violence in China in decades. Mr. Hu had planned to meet with President Obama and other leaders of the Group of 8 to discuss climate change and other issues, a gathering organized around the G-8 conference in L’Aquila.

China’s Foreign Ministry said in a written statement that Mr. Hu was returning to Beijing, “given the current situation in Xinjiang,” where Sunday’s riots by ethnic Uighurs were followed Monday and Tuesday by reprisal attacks on the part of ethnic Han Chinese.

The Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group, once were a large majority in Xinjiang but now make up only about half of the province’s 20 million people. In Urumqi, the city of more than two million where the violence has been centered, Uighurs are greatly outnumbered by the Han, who make up about 90 percent of China’s population.

News reports from Urumqi said up to 1,000 Han Chinese protesters gathered there on Wednesday, but Mr. Li said squads of riot police and military troops had imposed calm on the city. The police and military presence on Urumqi streets was visibly beefed up on Wednesday, and helicopters clattered overhead, looking for evidence of unrest.

The state news agency, Xinhua, reported that many neighborhood stores were closed, their food and bottled water sold out. A heavy paramilitary police presence enforced an overnight traffic curfew, putting the city into virtual lockdown.

At a news conference, Mr. Li said that 9 of the 156 known dead remained unidentified, their bodies burned too badly for families to recognize them. He did not specify the ethnicity of those who died, but one Han family member who reviewed photos of the dead, seeking to identify a relative, said in an interview that the great majority of the photographs were of Han victims.

In the Uighur neighborhoods of central Urumqi, where the bulk of the violence took place, the women whose husbands and brothers had been taken away by police spoke of mounting frustration after decades of being marginalized in their own land by a Han-dominated government and an ever-growing Han population.

“They don’t respect our lifestyle,” said one woman, a 26-year-old who gave her name as Guli. “We want our dignity. We just want fairness, and we want equality.”

A wide variety of government policies here in the western desert region of Xinjiang, a lightly populated area that covers about a sixth of China’s total landmass, has for years led many of the area’s 10 million Uighurs to believe their culture and livelihoods were under assault by the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China, according to local residents, foreign scholars and recent studies of the area.

The policies include limits on religious practice, the phasing out of Uighur-language instruction in schools and the reinforcement of better economic opportunities for the Han, from businesspeople to migrant workers.

Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, but Han migration, encouraged in part by government incentives, is quickly changing the demographics here: census figures show that the Han made up 40 percent of the population in 2000, a huge leap over the 6 percent in 1949. Under the Chinese Communist Party, Han Chinese have always held the power in Xinjiang. Wang Lequan, the party secretary of the region, is a Han whose hard-line policies have inspired systems of control in other ethnic minority regions of China, including Tibet.

“Fundamentally, the relationship between Uighur and Han is one of colonized to colonizer,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch who has written about policies in Xinjiang.

That dynamic may have laid the foundation for the riot on Sunday, when angry Uighurs attacked Han civilians and battled with security forces across the city. Government officials declined Tuesday to give an ethnic breakdown of the dead. The riot, in which more than 1,000 people were wounded, began as a protest over government handling of a brawl between Uighur and Han factory workers in southern China.

On Tuesday afternoon, thousands of Han Chinese armed with sticks, shovels, pipes and meat cleavers tried to march to the Uighur quarter to exact revenge for the Han civilians who were killed on Sunday. Paramilitary troops fired tear gas at the mob, but not before the first wave got into a brick-throwing battle with Uighurs perched on rooftops near Erdaoqiao Market, where the rioting had begun on Sunday.

Many Han Chinese say the Uighurs, like China’s 54 other ethnic minorities, actually enjoy generous advantages under government policies. Uighur women, for example, can give birth to more than one child without having to pay a fine, unlike the Han. Uighur students have extra points added to their scores when taking the standardized tests that determine university placement.

But on issues that go to the heart of Uighur identity, the government takes a strict line, many Uighurs say.

The vast majority of Uighurs are Sunni Muslims, but the practice of Islam is tightly circumscribed. Government workers are not allowed to practice the religion. Imams cannot teach the Koran in private, and study of Arabic is allowed only at designated government schools. Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj — are also closely managed: students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and passports of Uighurs have been confiscated to force them to join official hajj tours.

Three years ago, in its annual report on international religious freedom, the State Department singled out Xinjiang for criticism in a section on China: “Officials in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region tightly controlled religious activity, while elsewhere in the country, Muslims enjoyed greater religious freedom,” the report said.

On Tuesday, Abudurehepu, a religious leader in Xinjiang who supports the government, said at a news conference here that “our religious freedom is respected,” noting that Xinjiang had more than 2,000 mosques.

He also said that “the party and the government have been doing very well on ethnic policy, like having Uighur kids going to Uighur-language schools.”

In fact, the government is phasing out the use of the Uighur language in schools. Many Uighur parents know the importance of having their children learn Mandarin Chinese, but they are upset over the disappearance of their native language from the education system. There are some bilingual schools, but those generally relegate the Uighur language to a marginal role.

A 2009 Amnesty International report on threats to Uighur identity charts the recent history of the erosion of the Uighur language in education, beginning with a policy in the 1990s that eliminated Uighur as a language of instruction at the university level. Today, at Xinjiang University in Urumqi, only Uighur poetry classes are taught in Uighur, the report says. In 2006, the government began carrying out policies that make Chinese the main language of preschool instruction.

Since the central government adopted a “develop the west” campaign in the past decade, Xinjiang’s economy has grown quickly, and living standards on the whole have risen. But many Uighurs complain about high unemployment and the growing income gap with Han Chinese, who control the largest industries in Xinjiang: oil, agriculture and construction. They give many more contracts and jobs to other Han.

“Uighurs feel cut out of this process,” said a former resident of Kashgar, an oasis town near China’s western border where more than 200 protesters gathered on Monday.

The bingtuan, vast farms started by the military in the 1950s to employ demobilized troops, are among Xinjiang’s biggest moneymakers. But Mr. Bequelin, the human rights researcher, said more than 90 percent of employees at bingtuan were Han.

Chinese officials deny that government policies contribute to ethnic unrest. They place blame for the tensions on outside figures like the Dalai Lama or, in the case of the latest Xinjiang riots, Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman and former political prisoner who lives in Washington.

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