IN CHINA'S FAR WEST, ETHNIC STRIFE CONTINUES
Global Spin (blog) - Time, July 19, 2011
The heat of the summer in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang has been punctuated once again by mass violence. In the oasis city of Hotan, authorities say rioters from the Uighur ethnic group attacked and set fire to a police station on Monday, killing four people including a paramilitary officer, a security guard and two hostages. Police "gunned down" several rioters, the state-run Xinhua news service reported, without providing details.
Exile Uighur groups have disputed the official version of events. The Munich-based World Uyghur Congress says that a group of about 100 Uighurs were protesting "illegal seizures of land and the forcible disappearances of relatives by Chinese security forces" when police opened fire, prompting the clash.
Outbursts of violence have been regular if relatively infrequent events in Xinjiang for the past two decades. In August 2010 a Uighur man who was targeting police and paramilitary officers set off a bomb rigged to a three-wheeled cart, killing seven people and injuring 14. Two years before in the city of Kashgar two Uighur men drove a truck into a group of border patrol officers who were out on an early morning run, then attacked the survivors with knives and homemade explosives. Seventeen guards were killed, and 15 injured.
(...) [artículo aquí]
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