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Ethnic Unrest in Xinjiang

Uighurs Lament their Lost Homeland

By Andreas Lorenz

As it did in Tibet, the Chinese leadership is cracking down harshly on unrest in Xinjiang. The region's Muslim Uighurs feel degraded and robbed of their culture while they suffer in their homeland under the dominance of the Han Chinese.

Hairegul is wearing a pink T-shirt with the word "Sunshine" printed on the front. Her fingernails are the same shade of pink, her eyelashes are heavy with mascara, and she is adept at flipping her long black hair back and forth. Meanwhile, Wang Xiaomei's hair is pinned up and five rhinestone studs sparkle in her left ear. She is wearing a striped sweater and clunky, brightly colored plastic bracelets around her wrist.

Hairegul is a Uighur and Wang Xiaomei is Han Chinese. They are both daughters of affluent parents, 21 and in the middle of their semester exams at a teacher training college in Urumqi. The two women live in the same dormitory and are sitting in the same classroom. They are both studying music and want to be teachers. They have the same dream.

A light summer rainstorm is about to descend on Urumqi, the capital of China's western Xinjiang province. A few days earlier, clashes between Uighur and ethnic Chinese students resulted in bloodshed. "We don't dare go out into the streets," say Hairegul and Wang . "We don't know how we'll get home after the exams."

When a group of Uighur students tried to stage a protest march on Sunday, July 5, police broke up the gathering. Uighurs then began attacking Han Chinese in the streets, and some set fire to and looted shops. The ensuing massacre has since shaken the country and horrified the world. At least 184 people are believed to have been killed, including women and children, and more than 1,000 were injured. It is not yet known how many of the casualties could be attributed to beatings and how many to police bullets. President Hu Jintao took the unrest so seriously that he left last week's G-8 summit in Italy and quickly flew home.

Wang became caught up in the chaos by accident. "It was so horrible, the way they were beating people. I couldn't watch, and so I fled to a police station," she says, fighting back tears.

A Booming Economy

Xinjiang -- "New Border" in Chinese -- is an enormous region that connects China with Central Asia. Of Xinjiang's roughly 20 million inhabitants, about nine million are Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group many of whom are Muslim. They want to hold onto their region and their culture, and they feel that the Han Chinese dominate them and treat them with contempt.

The name Xinjiang evokes images of the ancient caravans that once passed through the region along the Silk Road. Even today, the landscape is dotted with oases surrounding earth-colored mosques, where old men in long beards, wearing traditional "dopa" hats on their bald heads, sit in front.

The central government in Beijing pumps billions into Xinjiang each year, transporting the abundant oil and natural gas into its booming eastern provinces. As a result, the economy in Xinjiang has grown faster than in many other Chinese provinces for many years.

Urumqi, the focus of the unrest, is a city that has plunged headlong into a new era. High-rise buildings dominate the downtown area and Western influences are evident in the city's Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, Max Mara boutiques and Adidas shops. Yet the romance of the Orient still exists alongside Urumqi's more contemporary elements. Uighurs can be seen selling melons and raisins in bazaars and vendors barbecue shish kebabs on street corners. Uighurs and Chinese normally live and work in relative harmony in Urumqi, even if relations between the two groups are not necessarily friendly.

But then unrest broke out. At the beginning of last week, a crowd of Han Chinese suddenly appeared in the streets, seemingly out of nowhere. Wielding clubs, iron bars and spades, they were intent on avenging the Chinese who had died on that violent Sunday. "Kill, kill!" some of them, including young women, shouted. The crowd smashed the windows of Muslim shops and upended a car in front of a mosque across the street from the bus terminal.

"They killed four of us at the bazaar, just an hour ago," says a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf. She pulls out her mobile phone to show us photos of a man streaming with blood. "He is dead," she says.

'They Will Kill Us All Tonight'

Others fetch a video camera to show footage they filmed from a window, when police officers attempted to push away Han Chinese zealots who were throwing stones at the Uighurs. One of them was waving a Chinese flag. A large puddle of blood appears on the video. "A dead man was lying there. The government is not protecting us. They have announced that they will kill us all tonight," says a slender student.

In Urumqi's old Muslim neighborhood, in the shadow of the skyscrapers, people live in old apartment buildings and poorly constructed huts. The government is trying to renovate the district, and it has built hospitals, mosques and a new bazaar there in recent years. On one wall, there is even a drawing of Mao Zedong shaking hands with a bearded Uighur.

Residents look on with suspicion as a column of policemen dressed in black, wearing helmets and wielding batons, passes by. Armed policemen squat on the sidewalk in front of a bank, next to their shields and helmets. An officer is reading out loud from the People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, in which the lead article mentions "terrorists" and "separatists" -- the official account of the turmoil.

The Communist Party leadership is trying to regain control over the city through sheer force of numbers. A kilometer-long convoy of the Armed People's Police enters the city from the south, along New China Street. The men stand in the trucks, their shields and guns at the ready. Following behind are water canons, armored personnel carriers, command centers, ambulances and SUVs.

Many are still wondering how this could have happened and why Uighurs and Han Chinese who, until now, have gotten along as neighbors, coworkers and fellow students, would suddenly start attacking each other with clubs, knives, spades and axes.

In an echo of its reaction to last year's unrest in Tibet, the Communist Party is once again looking abroad to assign the blame. This time it is not the Dalai Lama Beijing is blaming, but a relatively unknown Uighur businesswoman who wears her hair in long braids: Rebiya Kadeer, 62, who was imprisoned for six years "for leaking state secrets" before being permitted to leave the country and travel to the United States.

Journalists and academics appearing on state-controlled television are quick to offer conspiracy theories. As in the case of the Tibetans, they say, the Uighurs are backed by "certain" governments seeking to split China and stand in the way of its becoming a peaceful major power. They deliberately decline to mention which governments they are referring to.