Deadly Attacks in Xinjiang Go Unreported in China
New York Times, 3 March 2015
By Michael Forsythe – The reports of bloodshed are nonstop. On Feb. 13, a man grabbed a police officer and then set off explosives strapped to his body, killing as many as eight people. Three days later, a father and son were shot and killed in another clash with the police. The following day, four police officers were stabbed to death, nine suspects in the attack were shot dead, and four bystanders were killed.
Had these incidents taken place in the United States or Europe, they would have dominated the news for days, if not weeks, and prompted extensive nationwide discussions about how, and why, they happened. Had they occurred in Iraq, or Pakistan, or Syria, they might have been regarded — sadly — as routine.
But these events, all reported by Radio Free Asia, took place in China, and the country’s news outlets, controlled by the ruling Communist Party, have yet to acknowledge they even took place.
All three occurred in Xinjiang, the region in China’s far west where Beijing is waging a wide-ranging crackdown on the Uighur ethnic minority after an upsurge in violence. Some Uighurs, a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking group who make up more than 40 percent of Xinjiang’s 22 million people, want to break away from China and set up an independent East Turkestan. And some are increasingly attracted to the radical jihadists in the Middle East and are adopting some of their tactics.
Radio Free Asia, a United States government-financed news organization that operates a Uighur-language service, confirmed the reports, which often appear on Chinese social media platforms, by calling local officials, residents and hospitals. The New York Times was able to independently corroborate some of the details in the Radio Free Asia reports.
President Xi Jinping has placed a high priority on pacifying Xinjiang, a region rich in oil and coal reserves and one of the world’s top growers of cotton and tomatoes. Last year his government announced a “strike hard” campaign to root out people it suspected of plotting attacks or inciting separatism, with arrests almost doubling from the year before. The hard-line campaign can cast even moderate Uighurs, who have made a career working within the Chinese system, as criminals. In September, Ilham Tohti, a scholar who advocated better economic conditions for Uighurs, was sentenced to life in prison on charges of inciting separatism.
What is unclear is how successful the campaign has been, and whether its severity has been counterproductive. But the paucity of official reporting suggests that the violence stemming from the government’s crackdown, as well as the rising appeal of jihadism, may be far more serious than is generally known, posing a leadership test for Mr. Xi.
“The upsurge in violence really started back in 2013, and it’s been pretty much nonstop since then,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in the Asia division for Human Rights Watch. “You’ve got three significant incidents and no account of it in the official media. When someone blows himself up and attacks the police, usually that demands an official account.”
Shohret Hoshur, a reporter for the last eight years at Radio Free Asia’s Uighur service in Washington who interviewed local officials to confirm the three incidents, estimates that only about 5 percent of the clashes are ever reported in the state media, including the Xinhua news agency and Tianshan Net, a news portal of the Xinjiang government.
What does get reported, he said in a telephone interview, are usually events that are too big to contain that occur in densely populated urban areas or outside Xinjiang. Those have included a March 2014 attack by Uighurs on a train station in Kunming, a city in the southwestern province of Yunnan, which left 29 civilians and four attackers dead, a bombing last May in a crowded market in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, that killed more than 30 people, and an October 2013 incident in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in which a vehicle carrying three Uighurs plowed through a crowd of tourists and ignited near the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong.
The events in Xinjiang this month were similarly violent. On Feb. 13, in Hotan, a poor, predominantly Uighur area in southwestern Xinjiang, the suicide bombing was confirmed by Radio Free Asia by calling hospitals and local officials, after reports of the attack first appeared on WeChat, a Chinese mobile-phone-based messaging service, Mr. Hoshur said. Four days later, in Baicheng County in Aksu Prefecture, a police search of a house set off a knife and gun battle that led to at least 17 deaths, Radio Free Asia reported, in this case quoting the local deputy mayor by name, who said the local police chief was among the dead.
Two hospital employees — a doctor and a nurse — both said that an attack had occurred. “Yes, the incident did take place in Baicheng,” a Uighur nurse at the Baicheng County Benevolent Hospital said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “There were some victims who went to the hospitals, including one who came in here recently. The victim is still here on the second floor.”
As for officials, their telephones went unanswered, or they provided no information. “We don’t know anything about this, so don’t ask us about it,” a spokeswoman at the Yecheng County Public Security Bureau said, hanging up without identifying herself. In that county, known as Kargilik in the Uighur language, Mr. Hoshur reported that a father and son had been killed in a Feb. 16 clash with the police. At least two police officers were wounded, he said.
The nurse and the doctor did not give their names. Speaking to foreign reporters can bring retributions to Uighurs. Mr. Hoshur of Radio Free Asia has three brothers in jail in Xinjiang. One brother was imprisoned last year for five years on charges of violating state security laws, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote in January. After Mr. Hoshur spoke with two other brothers by phone to discuss the case, they were both imprisoned as well without formal charges.