Authorities say small protest broke out in China's troubled Xinjiang
By HENRY SANDERSON,
AP
Posted: 2008-04-02 02:12:15
BEIJING (AP) - Authorities confirmed that a protest broke out in
a troubled Muslim region in western China last month, with one
official Wednesday linking the incident to recent anti-government
riots in Tibet. No injuries were reported.
Rallies were first reported by the U.S.-government funded Radio
Free Asia, which said several hundred Uighurs were taken into
custody after demonstrating in Hotan and a neighboring county in
the Xinjiang region on March 23.
It said demonstrators were demanding that authorities not ban
headscarves in the predominantly Muslim region, and that they stop
torturing Uighurs and release all political prisoners.
Fu Chao, an official with the Hotan Regional Administrative
Office, confirmed Wednesday that a protest had taken place, but
said it was triggered by people who wanted to establish an Islamic
nation and separate Xinjiang from China - not the head scarf ban.
He said the government discourages Uighur women from wearing
scarves while they work because it is inconvenient, but that the
practice was otherwise accepted.
"The rioters were mainly Uighurs," he said, promising to
provide more information about the incident later. It had "nothing
to do with the ban on head scarves, but about responding to the
riots in Tibet."
A man who answered the phone at the municipal government office
but refused to give his name confirmed that a protest took place,
then referred all questions to the Politics and Law Committee of
the local Communist Party.
A man who answered the telephone there said police took several
dozen protesters into custody. Some were released after being
"educated," he said without providing his name, but authorities
have kept the "core splittists under custody."
The protest came as the government poured police and troops into
Tibet and other areas to contain unrest in the wake of violent
anti-government riots in Lhasa in mid-March. China has labeled the
riots an attempt by the "Dalai clique" to split Tibet from China.
The Hotan government said on its Web site Tuesday that there
were no reported injuries after last month's protest and that the
situation had returned to normal. It said a small number of people
- including "terrorists," "separatists" and "religious
extremists" - "stirred" things up but were stopped by police.
The Radio Free Asia report said the protests were also in
response to the death of a wealthy Uighur trader and philanthropist
who died after two months in police custody.
Xinjiang is a predominantly Muslim region with a culture that is
distinctly different from that of China's ethnic Han majority.
Uighurs have been sentenced to long prison terms or death on
separatism charges.
China's ethnic Han majority dominate the region's economy and
government.
Last month, state media reported that a woman had confessed to
attempting to hijack and crash a Chinese passenger plane from
Xinjiang in what officials said was part of a terror campaign by a
radical Islamic independence group, the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement. The reports said the woman was from China's Turkic Muslim
Uighur minority.
Human rights groups say China exaggerates the terrorist threat
in the region in order to increase its control over the Uighur
population.
The protests that took place in Tibet last month were the
longest and most-sustained challenge to Chinese rule in nearly two
decades. The government's subsequent crackdown has drawn
international attention to China's human rights policies in the run
up to this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing.
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04/02/08 02:10 EDT