Instability In The Middle Kingdom: Why Some Uyghurs Resort To Violence?
By Imtiyaz Razak and Habib Siddiqui -March 7, 2014
On Saturday, March 1, more than 10 assailants slashed scores of people with knives at the Kunming train station in Yunnan province in southern China in what state media said Sunday was a terrorist assault by ethnic Uyghur (also spelled as Uighur) separatists from the far west. Twenty-nine slash victims and four attackers were killed and 143 people wounded.
Most attacks blamed on Uyghur (a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people) separatists take place in China’s oil-rich and ethnically sensitive far-western Chinese province of Xinjiang (formerly known as East Turkestan), where clashes between ethnic Uighurs and members of China’s ethnic Han majority are frequent. But Saturday’s assault happened more than 1,000 kilometers to the southeast in Yunnan, which has not had a history of such unrest.
In July 2009, Xinjiang experienced violence between Uyghurs and Han Chinese (China’s ethno-national majority). Media reported that more than 100 people were killed and 800 injured from the disturbance which broke out in the provincial capital, Urumqi. The disturbances occurred after a year of rising tensions between the dominant Han Chinese authorities and the Uyghur ethnic minority – the historical ethnic majority in Xinjiang – who say they have been socially and economically marginalized by Beijing’s policies that introduce ‘domestication’ – or more properly Hanification (Sinicization) – of the region.
On August 4, 2008, four days before the start of the Beijing Olympics, two ethnic Uyghurs drove a stolen dump truck into a group of some 70 Chinese border police – accused of brutally repressing the indigenous people – in the town of Kashi in Xinjiang, killing at least 16 of the officers. The attackers carried knives and home-made explosive devices.[1]
