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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.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
04/02/08 02:10 EDT
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