AFP/Philippe Lopez

Chinese armed police march along a street in Urumqi, Sept. 5, 2009.

HONG KONG—Authorities in China’s remote and restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have detained two ethnic minority Uyghur men and are searching for a third for allegedly leaking information related to the death in police custody of a man from their village, sources said.

Police detained Haji Memet, 35, and Abdusalam Nasir, 33, early Sept. 23 in Lengger [in Chinese, Langan] village, Qorghas county  [in Chinese, Huocheng] county, Ili prefecture, according to two witnesses, who said a third man was also being sought for questioning.

Both spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government reprisals.

“Their families are so afraid,” one witness said. “They’re afraid the men will be tortured.”

Local police couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Standoff over burial

Memet is related to Shohret Tursun, whose badly bruised and disfigured body was released to his relatives Saturday—prompting a standoff between authorities who wanted him buried immediately and family members who refused and demanded an inquiry.

Abdusalam Nasir, a villager, helped wash Tursun’s body before the burial, which authorities forced the family to hold on Sunday.

Nasir gave his mobile phone to Tursun’s father, Tursun Ishan, who spoke to Radio Free Asia (RFA) about his son’s death and his family’s demand for an autopsy.

Both Memet and Nasir were arrested on Jan. 25, 1997, on charges of “splittism.” They served eight and six years in jail, respectively.

On Saturday, one villager said, eight trucks of soldiers and two other armed vehicles surrounded Tursun’s family home after the family refused to bury him as instructed without an inquiry.

“We locked the door of the room where we keep the body, but the police officers broke the lock,” Tursun Ishan said in an interview. “There were too many…”

“They told me that he had a heart attack. But it was a lie. It is a lie. My son never had a medical problem in his life,” Ishan said.

“His body was full of wounds and bruises—his legs, belly, and back were covered with wounds and scars. His chest was full of bruises.”

July clashes

Tursun, a member of the Uyghur ethnic minority and the father of a two-year-old, was among some 40 men from Qorghas detained around the time of deadly protests July 5 in the regional capital, Urumqi, villagers said.

The protests by Uyghurs, a largely Muslim Turkic people, followed alleged official mishandling of earlier ethnic clashes in far-away Guangdong province.

The July 5 protest sparked days of deadly rioting in Urumqi, pitting Uyghurs against majority Han Chinese and ending with a death toll of almost 200, by the government’s tally.

Tursun was detained July 6 in Urumqi. He was transferred to Ili on July 18 and Qorghas on July 23, his father said.

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China’s ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Xinjiang is a strategically crucial vast desert territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

The region has abundant oil reserves and is China’s largest natural gas-producing region.

www.rfa.org

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AFP/Philippe Lopez

Chinese armed police march along a street of Urumqi on September 5, 2009.

HONG KONG—The top Communist Party official in the city of Urumqi, Li Zhi, has been removed from his post after days of mass protests in which five people died, sparked by a bizarre series of syringe stabbings.

Authorities have meanwhile deployed thousands of riot police to the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where nearly 200 people were killed in July in fighting between Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs.

Unconfirmed reports said police used tear gas to disperse protesters, while other reports said the stabbings were continuing.

Protesters marched by the thousands Thursday and Friday demanding the resignation of Li and his boss, Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan, for failing to provide adequate public safety in the city.

No reasons were citing for the firings, but the rioting in July was the worst in Xinjiang in more than a decade. Uyghurs, who are ethnically distinct and largely Muslim, have long chafed under Beijing’s rule.

The director of Xinjiang’s public security department, Liu Yaohua, was also sacked and replaced with Aksu prefecture party chief Zhu Changjie.

“I think it’s saying to local officials: don’t allow anything like this to happen.  The implicit message is: do whatever you need to make sure there are not such events, meaning — use repression, use policing, use infiltration and so forth,” Gardner Bovingdon, a professor of Central Eurasian studies at the University of Indiana told RFA on Saturday.

“Hard-liners are in the ascendant.   The July 5 protests and this new round of protests and the firing […] all indicate that the government is going to go for still more rigorous political control,” he added.

An embarrassment to the Chinese government

“The riots and protests came as a huge embarrassment to the Chinese government,” Ying Chan, the director of journalism and media studies at the University of Hong Kong, told Al Jazeera.

“Because just last week President Hu Jintao spent four days in Xinjiang, his first visit there since July. And earlier this week, the state news agency said the situation was stabilising and tourism coming back.”

The firings could assuage protesters and quash alls to dismiss Wang, who is a member of China’s Politburo and an ally of President Hu Jintao.

Li, 58, took on a visible role during the July violence, climbing atop a car with a megaphone and urged an angry crowd of Han Chinese to show their patriotism by fighting separatists but not ordinary Uyghurs.

On Thursday, when more than 10,000 people protested through the city, Li and Wang separately waded into crowds to meet with protesters to defuse tensions, only to be greeted with shouts to “step down.”

Urumqi’s prosecutor said meanwhile that of the 21 suspects in custody, all of them Uyghurs, two jabbed a taxi driver with a heroin-filled syringe to steal 710 yuan (U.S. $105) to buy drugs.

500 seek treatment; 100 pricked

More than 500 people have sought treatment for stabbings, official media said, although only about 100 showed signs of having been pricked.

A People’s Liberation Army medical team, visiting Urumqi, said they conducted checks on 22 patients who showed clear signs of having been stabbed and found no indication that radioactive or biochemical substances had been used in any of the attacks.

The Uyghur overseas community and some earlier Xinhua reports said that other ethnic groups were victims of the attacks as well, although the majority of them were Han Chinese.

On National Television, Meng Jianzhu, Beijing’s public security minister, said: “The needle stabbing incident is a continuation of the ‘7-5′ incident, and it’s plotted by unlawful elements and instigated by ethnic separatist forces. Their purpose is to damage ethnic unity.”

Uyghurs in Xinjiang have long complained of  economic inequality, religious controls, and lack of freedom of expression under Chinese rule–notably since Han Chinese began migrating to Xinjiang in the 1960s.

Written for the Web in English by Sarah Jackson-Han. Additional reporting by newswires.

Radio Free Asia

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