URUMQI, CHINA, AND BEIJING — Hundreds of weeping Uighur women, enraged by the arrests of their husbands and sons, confronted armed Chinese police in the traditional market in Urumqi this morning as the worst ethnic violence here in years dragged on for a third day.
By the latest count of the Chinese media, 156 people are dead and 800 wounded, but the unrest seemed to be continuing despite an overwhelming security presence in China's northwesternmost Xinjiang region, the traditional homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic minority.
Chinese authorities accuse Uighur rioters of going on a savage rampage Sunday in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi in which civilians were pulled out of cars and shops, beaten and stabbed for no other reason that being Han, the ethnic majority in China.
The women protesting today said that thousands of males, some as young as 14, had been arbitrarily taken away by Chinese security forces, regardless of their involvement.
"We don't know where our brothers, sons and husbands are," cried 23-year-old Zai Nuran. Her husband, she said, had been out selling sheep all day and was in his underwear at home when police burst into the house. "There were over 20 riot police with batons, who started beating him," she said.
At about 11 a.m. today, there were roughly 300 Uighur demonstrators, mostly women, some with children, draped in bright head scarves, pumping their fists in the air. A few fainted, including one who was pregnant. In the narrow alleys of the bazaar, the protesters were hemmed in on all sides by a far larger showing of security personnel with dogs, guns and water cannons.
"Be calm and disperse," pleaded a Uighur-speaking policeman to no avail.
After a standoff that lasted about an hour, Chinese authorities who had been escorting Western journalists through the city ordered the reporters onto a bus to leave the market area. It is unclear what happened to the protesters.
The rioting was possibly the deadliest incident of social unrest in China since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Although Xinjiang has for years been prone to sporadic riots, bombings and gang violence, Urumqi itself -- a city of 2 million people -- had been held up by the Chinese as a showplace of ethnic harmony. That myth was punctured by the violence that erupted Sunday.
Tony Yu, a 26-year-old native of Urumqi, said this violence was far worse than any in the past.
