It’s summer again, and that means it’s time for confusing reports about violence in Xinjiang.
Xinhua reports that, around noon Beijing Time (10:00 AM Xinjiang time) on 18 July, Khotan City sustained a bombing attack that ended in a hostage rescue. The attack seems to have centered on a bazaar in the Narbagh (Na’erbage) area, near a police station and several government offices. Xinhua reports, and now so have international media, that four people were killed in the incident. Casualties include two of the hostages, one member of the People’s Armed Police, and one member of the “security defense teams,” ad hoc militias formed by the Party apparatus and police forces. One more member of the security defense teams was injured and hospitalized. Six people were eventually recovered successfully from the police station where they had been held as hostages by the attackers.
Initial reports suggested that 14 attackers had been killed. World Uyghur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit, reached for comment shortly after the incident, asserted that the incident was actually an attack by police on unarmed, peaceful protestors demonstrating in the bazaar over land rights. Shortly thereafter, the WUC’s narrative changed: A riot broke out, Dilxat said, when a group of Uyghurs had gone peacefully to the police station to demand the release of several prisoners.
Later, the Chair of the Press Office of the Xinjiang Regional People’s Government, Hou Hanmin 侯汉敏, provided a rather different narrative to the Huanqiu Shibao. According to Hou, Western media had rushed to link the Khotan incident to the Xinjiang or Uyghur independence movement. Yet, he proceeded to do just the same in recounting the following: First, the attackers, wielding bombs and Molotov cocktails, assaulted the Commerce Office and the Tax Office, located next to the police station, injuring two. Then, they burst into the police station and rushed to the second floor to hoist the “flag of separatism,” by which I presume he means the old baby blue moon-and-star. The attackers took control of the police station and held hostages until they were defeated in a clever attack by security forces. Hou provided no new numbers.
Note, please, that the map provided by the Epoch Times may be misleading. Indeed, the place they indicate at the site of the incident is what you get when you put “Khotan Narbagh Police Station” into Google Maps. However, that spot is not in Narbagh Village, nor is it near a tax office or a commerce office. The following map indicates a commerce office (yellow) and a tax office (blue) in Narbagh Village, though I cannot determine their proximity to a police station, nor to a bazaar. It has been reported that the incident took place in a heavily Uyghur part of the city, as well, which we might not be able to reconcile with the neighborhood of these offices.
View 18 July 2011 Khotan Incident in a larger map
I was suspicious of Dilxat Raxit’s initial account, which has now disappeared from BBC News’ website, in large part because it fit too neatly into popular contemporary notions of political repression in the West. Specifically, I recall the phrase “fired into the crowd.” Perhaps this was an embellishment by a journalist, but the narrative remains the same: Police shoot civilians demonstrating for freedom. It sounds too conveniently similar to what has actually happened every day for several months, now, across the Middle East. RFA has produced no news, and major Western media is regurgitating Xinhua, so that brings me to the official Chinese account.
The mention of the “flag of independence” makes me suspicious. Mostly, it reminds me of similar claims made about a protest in Khotan four years ago, which turned out to be, as far as anyone can tell, a demonstration about local issues and concerns about religious freedoms. Like most such events in Xinjiang and all over China, this probably has to do with some intractable local conflict or gross violation of basic human rights or dignity that has stirred up rage against the authorities. Did someone really fling a few Molotov cocktails just to go and raise a flag in the middle of the neighborhood police station? If so, it was a sad and futile gesture. If someone actually committed such a suicidal act, I suspect that it was motivated not by a dream of an independent state, but rather by the same sorts of problems that led Mohamed Bouazizi to immolate himself in Tunisia all the way back in January.
We don’t know much, what we do know smells funny, and everyone’s scrambling for a master narrative. As usual, it’s the news from Xinjiang.
