Ethnic violence in China worst in decades

BEIJING | Clashes spread Monday in China’s restive Muslim-majority Xinjiang region, claiming more than 150 lives in what appeared to be China’s worst ethnic violence in decades.

Chinese authorities said at least 156 people were killed, nearly 1,000 injured and hundreds arrested in confrontations that began Sunday between ethnic Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese in Urumqi, the regional capital.

Xinhua, China’s state news agency, said police have arrested 1,434 suspects in connection with the violence, but it did not immediately give any further details Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

In Urumqi, hundreds of paramilitary police in green camouflage uniforms marched Monday with shields, rifles, clubs and long bamboo poles and took control of the streets. Mobile-phone service and the social-networking site Twitter have been blocked, and Internet links have been cut or slowed down.

Reached by phone late Monday, a Han Chinese graduate student who would not give her name said the violence had stopped in the northern part of Urumqi, but still was going on in the south of the capital, where most of the rioting had occurred.

“I don’t feel safe going outside,” she said. “It was a mess [on Sunday], people running on the streets, shouting for everyone to hide.”

Omer Kanat, a Washington, D.C.-based vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, said there were unconfirmed reports that the violence has spread to three other cities in Xinjiang - Kashgar, Hotan and Aksu.

He said the death toll has reached 400.

Xinhua news agency said police dispersed several hundred people trying to gather at a mosque in Kashgar on Monday evening.

Uighurs, Muslim Turkic people, make up about 10 million of the 20 million people in Xinjiang, an oil- and mineral-rich autonomous region in China’s northwest. However, Urumqi, a city of 2.3 million, is now dominated by Han Chinese.

While China says its economic policies have brought new prosperity to ethnic minorities, some Uighurs claim that Chinese government policies are marginalizing their religion and culture and that Han Chinese are being encouraged to settle in Xinjiang in an effort to squeeze out natives.

Chinese state-run media portrayed the riots as foreign-orchestrated, planned by what it called the “separatist World Uyghur Congress,” which is based in Germany.

“The violence is … organized violent crime. It is instigated and directed from abroad and carried out by outlaws in the country,”said a government statement.

One possible catalyst was an earlier clash, on June 26, between Han Chinese and Uighurs at a toy factory in Guangdong province in which two Uighurs were killed.

The World Uyghur Congress issued a statement Monday saying that security forces had “used lethal force” to break up what it called a peaceful protest in response to the violence in Guangdong and rejected China’s claim that it had masterminded the riots.

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