[“Knife-wielding mobs
attacked the township’s police stations, the local government building and a
construction site, stabbing at people and setting fire to police cars,” the
English-language report said. In the initial outburst of bloodshed, seventeen
people were killed, including nine police officers and security guards, and the
police then fatally shot 10 rioters, it said.]
By Chris Buckley
HONG KONG —
At least 27 people died in rioting in far western China on Wednesday, when
protesters attacked a police station and government offices and the police
fired on the crowd, state media said. It was the worst spasm of violence for
years in Xinjiang, a region beset with tensions between Uighurs, an
overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minority, and China’s Han majority.
The Xinhua report gave
no explanation of what triggered the confrontation; nor did it give the ethnic
background or other details of the rioters. Uighur, also spelled Uyghur, people
predominate in Turpan.
The confrontation broke
out in the morning in Lukqun, a township in Turpan Prefecture, the state-run
news agency, Xinhua, reported, citing unnamed officials.
“Knife-wielding mobs
attacked the township’s police stations, the local government building and a
construction site, stabbing at people and setting fire to police cars,” the
English-language report said. In the initial outburst of bloodshed, seventeen
people were killed, including nine police officers and security guards, and the
police then fatally shot 10 rioters, it said.
In the past, Uighur
residents have often given accounts of unrest sharply at odds with those given
by Chinese government officials.
Repeated attempts to
contact residents, and a spokesperson for the Xinjiang regional government,
were unsuccessful.
A spokesman for the
World Uyghur Congress, an exiled group that advocates independence for the
region, said the bloodshed had been stoked by a burst of detentions of Uighurs
in the area over recent months.
“This clash did not
happen by chance,” said the spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, who lives in Sweden.
“There have been sweeps and crackdowns in the area, leading to many Uighur men
disappearing, and the authorities have refused to give information about their
whereabouts,” he said, citing recent phone conversations with residents.
Images circulated on
Chinese Internet sites, which could not be verified, showed a body, apparently
dead, splayed on the road, next to an abandoned and smashed police car. Other
pictures showed burned out vehicles near a fire-gutted police station and a
puddle apparently red with blood.
“It’s inconvenient to
talk,” said an official in the propaganda office of Shanshan County, which
includes Lukqun Township in its jurisdiction. “Leaders are all out, it’s
inconvenient to take interviews.”
Many members of the
Uighur minority, a Turkic-speaking group, resent the growing presence in
Xinjiang of Han Chinese people, whom they say get the better jobs and land.
Government restrictions on religion have also become a growing source of
tensions with Uighurs, who have embraced more conservative currents of Sunni
Islam.
The government has
blamed past violence in Xinjiang on groups it accuses of using terror to seek
independence for the region, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But
advocates of Uighur self-determination and some foreign scholars say the
discontent has local causes and is not orchestrated from abroad.
In July 2009, Urumqi,
the regional capital of Xinjiang, was beset by the worst ethnic violence in
China in many years, when Uighurs attacked Han Chinese after the police broke
up a protest by Uighurs. At least 197 people were killed, most of them Han
Chinese, according to the Chinese government. Crowds of Han Chinese residents
then marched through Uighur neighborhoods, demanding vengeance and attacking
residents with rocks and cleavers.
Chinese news Web sites
initially featured the Xinhua report on the latest violence. But later in the
day, those reports disappeared, in what appeared to be a government effort to
stifle alarm or volatile anger about the deaths.
In April, at least 21 people died in
fighting in Xinjiang between security forces and a group of what a government
spokesman called “gangsters.” In March, two courts
convicted and sentenced 20 people accused of militant
separatism in the region.
Uighurs once formed the
vast majority of residents in Xinjiang, which neighbors on Central Asia and
came under the control of Chinese Communist forces in 1949. In recent decades,
the number of Han Chinese residents has grown, aided by migration. Uighurs now
make up 46 percent of Xinjiang’s civilian population of 22 million, and Han
Chinese account for 40 percent, according to government estimates.
Lukqun Township, where
the rioting erupted, is perched on the edge of desert and has about 30,000
residents, 90 percent of them Uighur, according to a report in the Xinjiang
Daily last year.
Jiang Zhaoyong, a
Chinese former journalist who has written extensively about Xinjiang, said
police stations have been a target of ethnic violence there before, including
in 2008. “This appears to be the act of a local group,” he said of the latest
attack.
Patrick Zuo and Mia Li contributed research from
Beijing.
[On Monday morning, after dense fog reduced visibility and heavy rains continued, Air Chief Marshal N. A. K. Browne, the head of the Indian Air Force, addressed the stranded through reporters in the area: “Our helicopter rotors will not stop churning till such time we get each one of you out. Do not lose hope, and hang in there.”]
By Hari Kumar
As of
Tuesday, the operation had rescued more than 12,000 people, many of them Hindu
pilgrims visiting holy shrines in the state of Uttarakhand, one of the worst-hit
areas. The flooding, which began June 16, triggered by monsoons, has killed at
least 1,000 and possibly many hundreds more.
The
rescue operation is not without hazards of its own. On Tuesday afternoon, a
Russian-made Mi-17 air force helicopter crashed into a mountain, killing 19
aboard — 5 airmen and 14 paramilitary members — while returning from a mission
in the Kedarnath Valley, a major pilgrimage center more than 11,000 feet above
sea level, a spokesman for one of India’s paramilitary groups said. Last week,
another helicopter crashed in the same area, although no one died.
Pilots
say the difficult terrain, adverse winds and absence of landing pads are
testing their will and courage. “It is a warlike situation for us,” said one
pilot, Capt. Sandeep Soti. “We have been pushing our men and our machines
beyond our capacities.”
The
paramilitary men on the Mi-17 had been building helipads, helping stranded
people and digging bodies from the debris in the submerged town of Kedarnath
for the past week. “These boys were among the first to land at Kedarnath to
help pilgrims,” said Deepak Pandey, a spokesman for one of the groups, the
Indo-Tibetan Border Police. “They were coming home now.”
Indian
Air Force pilots had flown 1,400 times and evacuated more than 12,000 people
since the flooding began, an air force spokeswoman, Squadron Leader Priya
Joshi, said.
Many of
the rescued are brought to Jolly Grant Airport in Dehradun, where the thumping
of helicopter rotors has become the sound of hope for hundreds of relatives of
the missing. On Monday afternoon, several men and women rushed toward the
passengers alighting from a rescue helicopter. A few minutes later, they walked
back, their faces a mix of resignation and disappointment, to wait for the next
arrival.
Outside
the airport, several relatives of the missing have been camping in tents.
Vinayak Sonkar, a government employee from the western Indian state of
Maharashtra, said he had been camping there for two days, hoping for news of
his brother-in-law and his wife, who were stranded near the Kedarnath shrine
after the flooding began.
“What
can we do?” he said. “So many have died. They may be buried under the rubble. I
am still hopeful, and that is why I am here.”
Relatives
have pasted the photos, names and addresses of the missing on the walls of the
airport compound. They surround reporters and cameramen with photographs.
“The
government should put up the photographs of the dead on its Web site,” said
Krishna Shah, a businessman from the western state of Gujarat who was looking
for a cousin. “At least we would know who is dead and who might be alive.”
The
authorities prepared on Tuesday to cremate the bodies of hundreds of victims of
the floods, The Associated Press reported. Wooden logs were loaded onto air
force transport planes and flown to Kedarnath to be used in a mass funeral and
cremation.
According
to Indian officials, around 90,000 people had been rescued, but 5,000 were
still waiting to get home. “We hope to rescue all stranded pilgrims by Friday,”
said V. K. Duggal, a member of the National
Disaster Management Authority who
is coordinating the rescue operation.
In an
interview, Lt. Gen. N. S. Baba, who has been supervising 8,500 Indian Army soldiers
in the operation, described one of the more difficult rescues, carried out in a
very narrow valley on the trekking route to the Kedarnath shrine.
A pilot
noticed around 100 people on the steep, forested upper slope of a hill, he
said. Below, a river was overflowing. “There was no landing place,” General
Baba said. “The pilot negotiated the narrow valley and dropped four soldiers of
Special Forces on the upper slope.”
The
soldiers prepared a landing space for a small chopper. As the stranded people noticed
a hovering chopper, around 1,000 gathered. “We got them out,” General Baba
said.
On
Monday morning, after dense fog reduced visibility and heavy rains continued,
Air Chief Marshal N. A. K. Browne, the head of the Indian Air Force, addressed
the stranded through reporters in the area: “Our helicopter rotors will not
stop churning till such time we get each one of you out. Do not lose hope, and
hang in there.”
An
investigation into the crash has been announced. “The pilots have been pushing
themselves hourly beyond the normal flying limits,” said Josy Joseph, a defense
analyst and an editor with The Times of India. “If that turns out to be the
reason for the crash today, it is a question that would hang for a long time on
future operations.”
