“The massacre in Urumqi demonstrates how little has changed,” says The Independent. According to official Chinese news sources, 140 people were killed and more than 800 injured in the capital of Xianjiang province on Sunday, but the toll could be much higher.
“Beijing says the local authorities suppressed an anti-Han Chinese pogrom. The rival Uighurs claim the police fired indiscriminately on peaceful protestors.” Whatever the truth, this constitutes the “bloodiest official crackdown” in China since Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
Beijing – which has long sought to portray the Muslim Uighurs as allied to Al-Qaeda – has accused Uighur groups based overseas of orchestrating the attacks as part of a separatist campaign of terror. But the protestors are neither separatists nor terrorists, says Nury Turkel, also in The Independent.
They simply wanted the criminals who beat up workers in a toy factory brought to justice. However, there are larger issues at stake; the Chinese have taken away Uighur language and religious freedom. So it is “incredibly disappointing” that the reaction of the international community has been so muted.
Riots in Xianjiang are nothing new, says Charles Cumming in The Guardian. The Communist regime is “anxious to the point of paranoia” that a coherent separatist movement will spearhead an independent Xianjiang. The province is the “jewel in the crown of the People’s Republic”.
It acts as a “strategic buffer between China and the former Soviet republics”, accounts for a sixth of China’s land mass and is rich in oil and gas deposits. That is why the Chinese will “stop at nothing to suppress Uighur dissent”. And “it can only be hoped that the continued suppression of Uighurs does not drive its more radical elements into the hands of ideologues and fanatics”.