China Sentences Four Uighurs to Death Over Unrest
The New York Times, 16 September 2011
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — Four men accused by the government of being behind the bloodshed this summer that claimed dozens of lives in the far western region of Xinjiang have been sentenced to death, the state news media reported on Thursday. Two other men were given 19-year prison terms.
Scores of people were detained after a series of violent outbursts in Kashgar and Hotan, two Silk Road outposts whose large Uighur populations have chafed under Chinese rule for years.
The condemned men — Abdugheni Yusup, Ablikim Hasan, Muhtar Hasan and Memetniyaz Tursun — are all Uighurs. They were convicted of homicide, leading a terror group, manufacturing illegal explosives, arson and “other crimes.” A report in the state-run Xinjiang Legal Daily said the trials, which took place on Tuesday in Kashgar and Hotan, were “open and fully protected the suspects’ legal rights.”
Uighur exile groups, however, said that the defendants were tortured into giving confessions and were denied adequate legal representation. “This was not a fair legal process by any means,” said Dolkun Isa, secretary general of the World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group that is based in Germany. “These sentences are political decisions, not legal ones.”
The Communist Party has struggled for years to quell ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, a vast and thinly populated area of desert and snowcapped peaks that has extensive oil and gas reserves. Making up one-sixth of China’s land area, it is considered a strategic buffer between the Chinese heartland and its eight South and Central Asian neighbors, including Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.
Uighurs are Sunni Muslims who speak Turkic and were once the majority in Xinjiang, but years of government-encouraged migration of Han Chinese to the region have diluted their dominance, and they now make up less than half of Xinjiang’s 22 million people.
For many Uighurs, six decades of Chinese rule have been marked by heavy-handed policies that they say marginalize their language, culture and religion. Their resentment of Beijing, which is apparent even to a casual visitor, is also fed by a widespread perception that Beijing’s economic policies unfairly favor the Han.
That anger helped fuel violence three years ago in the regional capital of Urumqi that left nearly 200 people dead, many of them Han. The government responded with a “strike hard” campaign against dissent that sent many Uighurs to jail.
Like much of what occurs in Xinjiang, the most recent violence is clouded by conflicting accounts. The first episode, on July 18, has officially been called a premeditated attack on a police station in the ancient desert oasis of Hotan in which a police officer and two hostages were killed. Exile groups, however, say that nearly two dozen people died, most of them unarmed Uighurs who had peacefully gathered outside the station house seeking information about previously detained young men.
There is less dispute about the pair of bloody attacks that rocked Kashgar 12 days later. On July 30 and 31, assailants wielding knives and homemade explosives rampaged through a street lined with food stalls and a restaurant, slashing and stabbing bystanders. According to the state news media, 18 people died, including six attackers shot by the police.
Reached by telephone on Thursday, officials at the Communist Party headquarters in Hotan and Kashgar declined to comment on the violence.
The Chinese authorities are quick to paint each episode as a sophisticated act of terrorism, rather than a violent outburst of ethnic discontent. This month, a murky group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for the violence and suggested that the attackers had trained at camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
Although those claims appeared to lend credence to government assertions that the violence in Xinjiang was orchestrated by “outside separatists,” many experts say the low-tech nature of the attacks cast doubts on such contentions.
On the same day that the death sentences were announced, the Chinese news media trumpeted a doubling of state-directed investment in Xinjiang, to a total of $155 billion over the next four years.
Mia Li contributed research.