Unrest far from over in China

I feel like singing “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting”

Obviously the Chinese muslims do not get along with non muslims any better than their more active Arab brothers. They will have the same old claims: stealing our land, do not respect islam, (yawn). Muslims are always the victim especially when they start something that quickly bites them in their pedophile worshiping butts.

Mark MacKinnon, 7 July 2009, Globe and Mail
An imposed calm hung over this angry city last night after China declared a dusk-until-dawn curfew and deployed thousands of soldiers into the streets in an effort to keep a lid on boiling ethnic tensions after two days of rioting.

Dozens of green-uniformed Chinese soldiers armed with clubs and riot shields blocked key intersections around the centre of this Silk Road city of 2.3 million that is suddenly the epicentre of the worst unrest the country has seen since pro-democracy demonstrations were crushed on Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Driving through Urumqi after the curfew descended was a surreal experience. Besides a pair of taxis shuttling journalists in from the airport, the only other vehicles on the dark streets were military trucks that drove in slow circles through the downtown core, and cars with smashed windshields that had been abandoned by their drivers during the ethnic rioting that began Sunday and has left 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured.

Whether the violence is over is an open question. Earlier Tuesday, anger again flared on both sides of this city that is now sharply divided along ethnic lines between the country’s predominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, and Uyghurs, a Muslim people of Turkic descent who have a long history in this far western corner of China and who harbour a host of grievances against the government in Beijing.
-It is not over, just wait till Friday prayers.

First, a crowd of several hundred weeping Uyghur women blocked a road and confronted armed Chinese police to demand the release of male relatives who were arrested in a police sweep that followed Sunday night’s violence. The official Xinhua news service reported that 1,434 people were detained after the original rioting.

“My husband was taken away yesterday by police. They didn’t say why. They just took him away,” one woman said. The entire scene unfolded as Chinese authorities were escorting a crowd of foreign journalists through the city’s traditional market.
-Gee lady do you think they spotted him during the riots?

As men joined the swelling crowd, Uyghur protesters smashed the window of a police van and attacked an officer who had to be pulled to safety by his colleagues. Several police struck at the crowd with batons and others drew guns before they were restrained by colleagues. The news media were eventually escorted away from the scene.

Later in the day, it was the turn of the Han Chinese, portrayed in the official news media as victims of a senseless rampage on Sunday, to take to the streets to vent their own escalating rage. Some 1,000 Han men, many of them clutching homemade weapons such as meat cleavers and wooden clubs spiked with nails, marched though the streets chanting slogans such as “Attack Uyghurs” and “Defend the country.” They smashed shops and businesses owned by Muslims.

The two sides threw rocks at each other, but were otherwise kept apart by riot police who eventually used tear gas to break up the mobs.

“How can we say this is over?” asked Chen Wei, a thick-necked, 22-year-old Han Chinese. “After the Uyghurs, now it’s the Hans’ turn.”
-Revenge, sweet revenge.

Besides the curfew, which was to last from 9 p.m. last night until 8 a.m. Wednesday, and the arrests, the authorities have also moved to restrict technology that could be used to organize further demonstrations. Internet service was blocked everywhere in the city except a single hotel where journalists were staying, and key social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter and their Chinese equivalents, appeared to be blocked throughout the country.

Mobile phone text messages were disabled on phones inside Urumqi, and international phone lines also appeared to be down. Wang Lequan, the head of Xinjiang’s Communist Party, defended the crackdown, saying they were required “to avoid further chaos.”

The situation is sufficiently serious that Chinese President Hu Jintao is flying back to Beijing and will miss this week’s G8 summit in Italy, the Italian news agency Ansa reported Wednesday.

Urumqi Mayor Jierla Yishamudin claimed that a “life and death” struggle was being waged in the city and that China’s unity was at stake.

“It is neither an ethnic issue nor a religious issue, but a battle of life and death to defend the unification of our motherland and to maintain the consolidation of all ethnic groups, a political battle that’s fierce and of blood and fire,” he told a news conference.
-Translation: we will beat the muslims until they learn to behave themselves.

Though they are a minority in Urumqi, the region’s capital, Uyghurs make up almost half of Xinjiang’s population of 20 million. Several exile groups have called for the establishment of an independent state of East Turkestan in the oil-rich region, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as the ex-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

The unrest also briefly spread to Kashgar, Xinjiang’s second-largest city, where several hundred protesters gathered Tuesday in front of the city’s Id Kah Mosque, the largest Muslim building in China, to chant “God is great” and “Release the people.” However, the crowd quickly broke up after police officers moved in and began arresting people.
-Lol Chinese muslims are also cowards. They do not mind attacking old people and women but will not face the military

Unlike ethnically mixed Urumqi, Kashgar – a famed stop on the ancient Silk Road – is majority Uyghur. The city was the site of a deadly attack last year that killed 17 Chinese soldiers just days before the start of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

The exact sequence of events that has plunged Urumqi into chaos this week remains unclear.

The trigger appears to have been a deadly brawl last month in the coastal city of Shaoguan in Guangdong province. There, Han factory workers, enraged by a rumour that Uyghur men had raped two Han women, rampaged through a dormitory housing migrant Uyghur workers, killing at least two and injuring many others.
-Muslims rape someone? Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Since then, photographs of the brawl that appeared to show many more dead began circulating on the Internet, along with calls for Uyghurs to protest. The government tried to squelch the online call to arms, but to no avail.

From there, accounts differ greatly. The government portrays Sunday’s violence as an anti-Han pogrom that ended only when security forces restored order. Uyghur groups outside China claim that police bloodily suppressed a peaceful protest. The same groups claim that most of the 156 dead were Uyghurs.

The government not yet released information on the ethnicity of those killed, although it has stated that 27 of the dead were women. According to Xinhua, one hospital took in 291 riot victims, 17 of whom died later. Of those treated, 233 were Han Chinese, 39 were Uyghurs and the rest were other ethnic minorities such as Huis and Kazakhs.
-I am betting that is only partially true but I do predict the numbers are going to go up.

In a sign Beijing is anxious to address communal grievances, Xinhua reported that 13 people had been arrested over the factory brawl, including three workers from Xinjiang. The violence comes at a sensitive time for Beijing, just three months before planned celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The same date is viewed by many in Xinjiang, which briefly experienced independence in 1945, as the beginning of harsh Communist occupation.

While China has had a presence in Xinjiang for centuries, Communist rule has brought with it restrictions on the practice of Islam as well as ethnic tensions as Beijing has encouraged Han Chinese to settle the region.

The unrest, and the government’s response to it, has drawn comparisons to riots last year in Tibet, which saw crowds of ethnic Tibetans – enraged by Han migration to the plateau and Beijing’s treatment of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama – attack Han residents of Lhasa and other cities, prompting a harsh security crackdown. Beijing says 19 people were killed in the unrest, while Tibetan exile groups claim the real number of dead was much higher.

But while foreign media organizations were, and are, banned from reporting in Tibet, Chinese authorities have welcomed journalists travelling to Urumqi, perhaps wagering that allowing the news media in will do less damage to Beijing’s reputation than keeping them out.

Part of the public relations strategy may also be a gamble that Muslim separatists will find less favour in the West than Tibetan monks did during their uprising a year ago. Beijing has long sought to portray Xinjiang’s separatists as in league with al-Qaeda, and its own efforts to keep control there as part of the same fight that the United States and its allies are waging in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the front line of China’s fight against terrorism,” read an editorial in Tuesday’s edition of the English-language Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Communist Party.
-Many Uyghurs are terrorists and they are protected by the people. No one has stepped up from the islamic community to point out any of them. As with the rest of the ummah the Chinese muslims consider their murderous thugs heroes. So called clerics preach hate not tolerance and the Chinese have had generations of practice controlling them. Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting (sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

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