China targets Uighur after knife attacks
The Australian, 13 May 2014
CHINA has launched a major crackdown on the Muslim separatist Uighur community, arresting more than 200 people for allegedly distributing terrorist videos and inciting violence.
The Global Times, a newspaper linked to the Communist Party, said yesterday the arrests in the past six weeks showed the government would not tolerate the recent increase in Uighur-related violence.
The Uighurs have been responsible for at least four knife attacks in the past few months, mostly at train stations, in which almost 100 people have been killed.
The most recent attack happened last week when a man armed with a machete attacked people at a Guangzhou train station, in southern Guangdong province.
It is understood that police in Xinjiang, home city for most Uighur, had been covertly tracking the men who were arrested for obtaining and distributing “terrorist videos” online. A group of Uighur men was last week sentenced to between seven and 15 years in jail for buying a jihad-style video that they used to encourage violent outbursts.
The videos reportedly contained instructions on how to make explosives and homemade guns while others incited religious extremism.
The Global Times reported that 71 of the group were in criminal detention, 107 were under administrative detention and 17 have been prosecuted.
Some of the material produced by the group was posted on Chinese social media channels, which have hundreds of millions of users.
“The use of web pages, microblogs and internet chatrooms has become more prevalent in spreading extremist ideology that leads to terrorist actions,” the Global Times said.
The arrests came after Xinjiang authorities announced in March that “terror-related” videos could not be viewed or downloaded in a bid to stamp out the Uighur separatist violence.
Xinjiang Academy of Social Science professor Pan Zhiping said that it was likely that separatist groups would increasingly turn to social media to distribute their messages.
Additional reporting: Wang Yuanyuan