Wild West Uyghurs

AP and Reuters report that violent street battles killed at least 140 people and injured 828 others in the deadliest ethnic unrest to hit China's volatile western Xinjiang region in decades. Chinese officials today said the death toll was expected to rise.

The cause of the "unrest" is the Communist government's policy of colonizing the hitherto sparsely populated province with millions of Han Chinese. (The Han comprise roughly 1.2 billion of China's population of 1.3 billion.) "Volunteers", prisoners and political exiles are forced to work in labour camps and encouraged to remain in Xinjiang forever. Muslim Uighurs make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, but not in the capital of Urumqi. The city of 2.3 million is now about overwhelmingly Chinese — a source of frustration for native Uighurs.

There has always been tension -- even before the Chinese occupation of what the Uighurs call East Turkistan -- between the Muslim Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. Militant Uighurs have waged a sporadic and often violent separatist campaign for centuries. A good history of the region can be found in Wild West China: the Untold Story of a Frontier Land, by Christian Tyler (2003, London, John Murray).

The Chinese government's Xinhua news agency quoted regional Police Chief Liu Yaohua as saying several hundred people had been arrested in connection with the riot and police were searching for about 90 other “key suspects.” Reports from Xinhua typically refer to agitators for independence and freedom from Chinese colonization as "splittists" and "separatists".

Uighurs living outside of China have condemned the crackdown and are organizing protests in a number of cities, including Toronto.

“We are extremely saddened by the heavy-handed use of force by the Chinese security forces against the peaceful demonstrators,” said Alim Seytoff, vice president of the Washington-based Uyghur American Association. “We ask the international community to condemn China's killing of innocent Uighurs. This is a very dark day in the history of the Uighur people.”

Here we see yet another example of the Communist Chinese contempt for human rights, even though their constitution purports to guarantee minority rights and freedom of religion. The pious statements of of their constitution are worse than meaningless. They are huge lies!

Yet western governments, including that of Canada, choose to look the other way, and believe the fiction that there is no oppression in China, that human rights is not an issue to be discussed in meetings with Chinese leaders. Why? Look at the trade statistics and you'll see the reasons. The devil offers us a huge Chinese banquet of cheap manufactured goods and investment in our struggling economy. We want to eat as much as we can (even though we might feel hungry again an hour later), but we should remember that he who sups with the devil had better bring a long spoon!

Note: Agent 88 in a city which is not Beijing reports that this blog has already been blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Apparently Communist Chinese censors don't like the phrase "human rights". It's not hard to understand why!