Tense western China looks for answers after week of chaos

After violence, western China looks for answers

URUMQI, China — It was about 8 p.m. when the mob descended on Zhongwan Road. The police didn’t arrive until six hours later. In the time between, most residents locked their doors and hid, peering out through windows and listening from basements as ethnic violence raged in China’s western Xinjiang province.

The next morning, residents in this multiethnic neighborhood emerged to find the road covered with remnants of mayhem: puddles of blood next to overturned vegetable carts, glass shards everywhere, bricks covered with blood, and a random shoe.

Ethnic minority Uighur rioters had burned down the local grocery store, owned by a majority Han Chinese family — one of many stores attacked across the regional capital, Urumqi. Four family members were killed, and a fifth woman was still missing. On Saturday, the rest of the family was grimly sifting through the store’s rubble, still looking for her body.

Nearly a week after western Xinjiang province was rocked by China’s worst ethnic violence in decades, residents of Zhongwan Road, both Han and Uighur, were still putting together the snippets of what they saw and heard. Many others are searching for answers about what really happened — especially how many died and who they were.

China’s government released a breakdown Saturday of the riots’ death toll, saying most of the 184 killed were from the Han Chinese majority. But many Uighurs disputed the new figures, citing persistent rumors that security forces fired on Uighurs during the July 5 protest and in following days during a police crackdown and retaliation by Han mobs.

On Sunday, a week after the unrest began, the center of Urumqi was tense but calm. The official Xinhua News Agency said the city’s Public Security Bureau had published a notice banning illegal assembly, marches and demonstrations, adding the situation was “basically under control” but that some “sporadic illegal assemblies and demonstrations” had continued.

It all started last Sunday, when a few hundred students and others gathered downtown at the People’s Square in the late afternoon to protest the deaths of Uighurs in fighting at a factory thousands of miles away in southern China. The police moved in to stop the demonstration from the square, and it was unclear who struck first or what triggered the violence.

The Uighur protesters started to scatter, toppling police barricades, smashing windows and torching cars and attacking Hans as they rampaged through the southeastern part of the city.

When the rioters turned up Zhongwan Road that night, at least one Han shop owner had an early warning about the brewing chaos.

“A customer told me there was trouble headed this way and that I should close my shop immediately and hide,” said the cement shop owner, who would only give his surname, Cheng.

Cheng brought in his motorcycle and barricaded his metal door from the inside with bags of cement. He knelt on the floor and peered out onto the street through a narrow vertical window.

He saw a group of Han residents came running down the street shouting, “Quick, hide!” They were quickly followed by a mob of 300 Uighurs armed with sticks and bricks, Cheng said.

The rioters grabbed sacks of cement outside Cheng’s store and set up a roadblock in front of his store to stop cars.

Aile Nur, 23, a Uighur man who worked at a restaurant two doors from Yu’s store, said he locked himself in his kitchen.

“I could hear them shouting ‘Are you Han or are you Uighur?’ to each car that stopped” at the roadblock, he said. “If they were Han, they were smashed.”

The rioters dragged some of the people out of their cars and beat them, said the residents. Then, they turned their attack on shops run by Han people. They pounded on Cheng’s door and hurled rocks into the window, sending Cheng fleeing into the basement storeroom.

Police weren’t showing up and emergency hotlines rang unanswered, residents said.

“I started calling the police from 8:30 p.m., but I didn’t get through until midnight,” said a beef noodle restaurant owner next to Cheng’s store who belongs to another Muslim minority called the Hui. He would only give his surname, Yu.

“I could hear glass being smashed, people screaming, tires exploding,” said the noodle shop owner, who estimated that at least 17 people were killed by rioters on that street alone. He looked at the rubble of the grocery store and sighed. “If the police had come on time, not so many people would have died. Their response was far too slow.”

Residents and relatives said the mob forced their way into the local grocery story owned by another family named Yu who supplied the area’s residents — both Uighurs and Hans — with cooking oil, flour and rice. Four in the family were killed, but it was unclear how they died. Some neighbors said they were beaten to death. Others said they were locked in the store and burned alive.

“I knew they set fire to the store when I heard the cooking gas canisters explode: ‘Bang, bang, bang!’” Cheng said.

It was 2 a.m. by the time the paramilitary police arrived, sirens blaring. The rioters fled, their footsteps pounding through the alleys, residents said. Sounds of sporadic gunfire followed, but no one in the neighborhood could say if any of the rioters had been shot.

Fire engines rolled in and put out the blaze at the grocery store, but even at dawn, most of the shop had crumbled and plumes of smoke were still rising from the debris. Dead chickens lay in coops, charred fish skeletons were scattered among piles of rice and flour.

Officials have said that 137 Han Chinese died in Urumqi, while the other victims included 46 Uighurs and one Hui.

Two days after the riot, there was a Han backlash, involving large groups of marauding men with clubs, meat cleavers and lead pipes who stormed into Uighur neighborhoods. It’s unclear how many Uighurs were injured or killed because the government and state-run media have downplayed the violence. Associated Press reporters were not allowed to interview the injured Uighurs in hospitals.

But Uighurs on the streets of Urumqi and from exile activist groups say they think many more of their own were killed.

“I’ve heard that more than 100 Uighurs have died, but nobody wants to talk about it in public,” said one Uighur man who did not want to give his name because the city remains tense and security forces are everywhere.

China has said its security forces exercised restraint in restoring stability but has not provided details nor explained why so many people died.

Rebiya Kadeer, president of the pro-independence World Uyghur Congress, has said at least 500 people were killed while other overseas groups have put the toll even higher, citing accounts from Uighurs in China.

China’s government blames Kadeer, a 62-year-old Uighur businesswoman activist who lives in exile in the U.S., for instigating the riots with anti-Beijing propaganda. She has denied any involvement and condemned the violence.

Many Uighurs in Urumqi said didn’t believe Kadeer was involved in the unrest. They said that the fighting was the result of pent-up frustrations about longstanding discrimination and government efforts to subvert their religion and culture — thouhg the government says Uighurs have benefited from Xinjiang’s rapid economic development.

“We don’t really know Rebiya that well. We don’t listen to her or follow her on the Internet,” said one Uighur woman, who only identified herself as Parizat. “We don’t need Rebiya to tell us what to be angry about. We live here. We know what’s wrong.”

On Zhongwan Road, people were tallying their losses and looking for answers. Many people are still consumed with anger and fear over the violence.

Yu Dongzhi’s family owned the burned-out grocery store, and the mob killed Yu’s brother-in-law, 13-year-old nephew, the boy’s cousin and grandmother — all found dead inside the shop. His sister is still missing

“I want all the terrorists executed by firing squad. I hate them,” said the 44-year-old, who works in the southern city of Shenzhen but rushed to Urumqi after hearing that his sister’s family had died.

Yu spoke as he leaned on his shovel in the remains of the store, where the family was searching the remains for the body of his sister, Xingzhi. He had already spent the week searching all of Urumqi’s hospitals to no avail.

“I haven’t told my mother yet,” he said. “So now I must find her, dead or alive.”

The group stopped digging by 6 p.m. but could not find a body. The next day, Yu decided, he would search the morgues.

Associated Press writer William Foreman in Urumqi contributed to this report.