Reporting from Beijing — A rare public protest in the northwestern Chinese city of Urumqi turned violent today as thousands of Uighurs took to the streets to vent grievances about discrimination.
The official New China News Agency said rioters were "attacking passersby and setting fire to vehicles," but representatives for the Uighurs, a Muslim minority, described a peaceful demonstration that turned ugly because of government brutality.
Witnesses reported that riot police arrived on the scene in armored personnel carriers, dispersing the crowd with water cannons and tear gas, and firing warning shots into the air. At least 300 people were reported to be arrested. There were unconfirmed reports of deaths and injuries.
The rioting began shortly after 3 p.m., when a demonstration was held outside a market.
"Under Chinese law, we should have the right for a peaceful protest again what the Chinese government is doing to our people," Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, said in a telephone interview from his home in Sweden. He described the incident as the most serious unrest in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang region, where 8 million Uighurs live uneasily among the majority Han Chinese.
Video that circulated on the Internet for a few hours before being removed by Chinese censors showed thousands of protesters marching on the market. In another scene, a car fire burned out of control, sending billows of black smoke through the city.
The images bore an eerie resemblance to those that came out of Lhasa, the Tibetan region's capital, in March of last year when years of suppressed rage by Tibetans erupted in rioting. The Tibetan unrest dragged on through much of the year and threatened to mar the festivities around the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. It is unclear at this point whether the Uighurs' protests will have a similar effect during another sensitive year, in which Beijing is planning massive celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China.
The protests today were triggered by the June 26 killing of two young Uighur men at a toy factory in Guangdong province. According to Uighur sources, the men were beaten to death by a mob, enraged by false rumors that they had sexually harassed Han women.
"Uighurs have suffered for years under racial profiling and unjust government policies that have painted the entire Uighur population as criminals and terrorists," U.S.-based Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer said in a statement released last week.
China considers Uighur activists to be criminals and terrorists for their opposition to Beijing's rule over Xinjiang. The Obama administration has been struggling in recent months to resettle Uighur detainees who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba since they were captured in Pakistan in 2001.
barbara.demick@latimes.com
