Having not read the book myself yet, there’s little I can do except point to Veg’s thoughts on the topic. I can say that through the eyes of Veg, Wang’s work appears to be a fascinating read particularly because of Wang’s experience in a Xinjiang jail (he was imprisoned for copying XPCC documents, go figure) where apparently he covered a lot of ground with his Uyghur cellmate, Mukhtar, who was jailed for organizing protests. Such a scenario would provide an exceedingly rare opportunity for frank dialogue between a sympathetic Han and an outspoken Uyghur, because hey, once you’re in jail, what’s stopping you from being open?

Veg does criticize Wang for not fully fleshing out the political and philosophical underpinnings behind his conclusions on Xinjiang: greater autonomy that would flow from a more even-keeled application of representative democracy throughout China. Veg instead argues that a more practical approach would be to use the legal resources at hand, namely, the "Laws on Self-Autonomy in Minority Regions" which provides the political and legal structure for greater autonomy in areas like Xinjiang but remain, to quote Veg, a "political fiction." I share Veg’s frustration at the existence of laws that would provide greater equality and autonomy for Uyghurs if only they were actually applied.

Wang’s greatest merit, in Veg’s eyes, is his openness to dialogue and public discussion, as well as his ability to paint a "a sympathetic portrait of ‘ordinary Uyghurs,’ far removed from the usual clichés of official discourse, exoticism, or commonly repeated slurs — an important accomplishment that may act as bridge towards even-minded ordinary Han Chinese citizens." Indeed, it is refreshing to see that there are PRC intellectuals that are willing to hold discussions of Uyghurs outside the politically enforced norm – provided their publishing agent is in Taiwan.

Here’s a summary of the article:

Kurban Hemit and Abdurahman Azat were found guilty of illegally manufacturing firearms,  ammunition, and explosive devices, and of intentional homicide. For these crimes the two defendents were sentenced to death and permanent deprivation of legal rights.

According to case proceedings, Hemit and Azat were incited by extremist religious propaganda to carry out the attacks. In February and March of 2008 the two bought the materials necessary to manufacture guns, ammunition, and explosive devices. They also at this time began searching for targets and eventually settled on the officers of the Kashgar Frontier Defense Support Unit of the People’s Armed Police.

On August 4th, the two suspects used a stolen self-loading truck to transport all the materials they had created to a site near the police station. Then, at 8, when the police began their morning jog, Azat drove the truck into the soldiers, killing 15 and injuring 13. The vehicle lost control and crashed into the side of the road before flipping – as can be seen in this picture taken from the New York Times witness.

The official court account countinues: Azat then exited the truck, attempting to use the firearm he had created but to no effect – he then used oned of the explosives which successfully detonated and killed another individual. Hemit was not in the vehicle. Apparently, after the truck crashed, Hemit emerged from somewhere else wearing a summer uniform of the People’s Armed Police and began by throwing an explosive at the sentinel guarding the gate of the police station. Then he took out two knives and used them to hack at the soldiers injured from the truck collision, causing yet another death and two injuries. At this time, the surviving soldiers managed to apprehend both the perpetrators and a total of 17 people were killed and 12 injured.

Reading the Xinhua account immediately prompted me to go back and reread the only other existing account of events, the eyewitness testimony and pictures provided to the New York Times by a tourist who was across the street at the moment of the incident. The admittedly hot scoop hit the New York Times with a lot of fanfare, as indicated by the deliberately worded title “Doubt Arises in Account of Attack in China.” The point of the story, other than providing some amazing visuals and a surprising eyewitness account, was to sharply question the official version of events at the time, which then was still quite vague.

Among other discrepancies, the witnesses said that they heard no loud explosions and that the men wielding the machetes appeared to be paramilitary officers who were attacking other uniformed men.

That raises several questions: Why were the police wielding machetes? Were they retaliating against assailants who had managed to obtain official uniforms? Had the attackers infiltrated the police unit, or was this a conflict between police officers?

Quite interestingly I found that the terse yet nonetheless descriptive version of events put forward by Xinhua just yesterday meshes quite well with eyewitness testimony, which I believe is in one sense more reliable given the source (a bunch of tourists over a state run propaganda mouthpiece) but in a different way is more unreliable given the circumstances of the observation (unexpected, sudden eyewitness and reliance on human memory).

For example, the tourists noted that a non-uniformed individual staggered out of the truck after it crashed, greatly injured. This, we can postulate, was Azat. According to the Xinhua account most victims were indeed killed by the impact of the vehicle itself, and even if Azat were extremely incapacited on exiting the truck it is no stretch imagining him successfully using an explosive device after leaving.

The NYT account then says the scene turned even “more bizarre” when fighting started breaking out between uniformed officers. Should we look to the Xinhua account, this likely was when Hemit dashed into the scene wearing the same uniform as the other officers which would understandbly cause some confusion, both to the survivors and the eye witnesses. Enough confusion that the testimonies of the three eyewitnesses get a little muddled and contradictory at this point. The number of uniformed individuals doing the attacking is unclear among the eyewitnesses but is always “one or two,” which I would venture to say is within the margin of error for “one Kurbanjan Hemit wearing a police uniform plus the possibility of uniformed survivors retaliating.” I call attention to one of the eyewitness accounts in particular:

He said a man in a green uniform walked from the direction of the truck. “A policeman who wasn’t injured ran over and started hitting him with a machete,” the relative said. “He hit him a few times, then this guy started fighting him back.”After being hit several times by the machete, the uniformed man fell down, and at least one other police officer came over to kick him, the relative said.

An uninjured policemen suddenly appearing on the scene and attacking one officer with a machete until other policemen figure out what’s going on and take him down – it fits the Xinhua description. I feel that other discrepancies revealed by the New York Times account could also be explained by one of the perpetrators wearing a uniform – for example, why did officers carrying machetes freely mingle with other officers in the aftermath? Presumably after the attackers were subdued some of the surviving officers would be carrying the weapons of the perpetrators. Why were there uniformed officers hacking at bound individuals on the ground? Either they were seeing Hemit attacking prostrate, injured individuals, or possibly furious survivors using the perpetrators weapons against the suspects after they had been bound or detained. The bottom line is, if we take for granted that one of the attackers was indeed wearing a uniform, the ensuing chaos is enough to ensure that eyewitness testimonies would have their mental boundaries between “attackers and victims” quite mixed up.

I’ll take a moment to call out the New York Times on sloppy – or rather, greedy journalism. Interestingly, in the article written yesterday by the New York Times covering the sentencing was the only one that I saw that showed any evidence that they had someone look over the Chinese language press release. Unlike the AFP or Reuters, which simply mentions the whole deal in passing, the New York Times includes details from the press release. However, what they fail to mention at all is the Xinhua account’s claim that Hemit was wearing a police uniform.

At the same time, the Xinhua account said, Mr. Hemit tossed explosives toward the gate of the security compound and brandished a knife at the police officers who had been felled by the truck. Mr. Hemit killed one officer and wounded another, Xinhua said.

Shame on you, New York Times. By failing to mention that Xinhua at least alleges Hemit was wearing a uniform, the rather ungraciously decide not to acknowledge the state version of events steals some thunder from their exclusive eyewitness piece, which they in fact quite smugly link in yesterday’s article as still “at odds with aspects of the official version.” That may be true – the eyewitnesses didn’t hear explosions after the truck crash – but describing the press release while omitting the one major detail of the incident which would in many ways reconcile the eyewitness accounts with the state accounts was just bad journalism.

So, what of it? While the Xinhua version of events does mesh quite well with the only existing independent account of events, I still hesitate to go so far and say its the real deal. After all, if you want to ascribe really sinister motives to the PR machine of the CCP – and why wouldn’t we? – it’s completely possible that the story was fabricated precisely to be compatible with the one eyewitness account that “got away” and hit the Western press. Or, the Xinhua version, which was the product of a trial proceedings which probably included the interrogation of the suspects and a lengthy investigation, may indeed by exactly what happened on August 4th. Or it could be somewhere in between. I have to come to the conclusion that, sadly, as with most things Xinjiang, in spite of this extremely detailed account of events, independent observers still can’t make a solid call on what really went down, and why.

Regardless of how well the state version and the one independent testimony mesh together, there is still one magic ingredient missing, and that is transparency. A smoothly knit story does not a truthful one make. And again, the fault rests with the Chinese authorities. The fact of the matter is, if events occurred precisely as the authorities are now describing it, there is very little to lose, if not nothing at all, to be transparent with the global community about the evidence and the results of investigations related to the case itself. Coming forward with genuine evidence linking these two to greater Islamic extremism – after all, the article does mention the two to be victims of extremist propaganda – would provide more credibility to the PRC and their own domestic war on terror. By sharing with the Chinese public and the globe at large a 9/11 Commission report style document detailing all the relationships, preparations, and ideological motivations relevant to the attack, the authorities can finally provide a solid foundation to claims that they have been making for years – that the threat is real and must be dealt with. And while being open will assuredly draw in credibility, the opposite – jealously keeping all evidence and investigations under tight lock and only releasing court documents that must be accepted as truth – only damages credibility and causes critics, both domestic and abroad, what could possibly need hiding. Until the policy towards criminal investigations of terrorist incidents changes, people interesting in knowing what happened are only left with potentially compromised governmental accounts, and, if they’re lucky, a hapless tourist who ended up being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

A translation of the Xinhua article follows.

The Intermediate Level People’s Court of the Kashgar Prefecture in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region recently conducted, in accordance with the law, hearings regarding the August 4th violent terrorist attack against the police on in Kashgar, and has pronounced defendants Kurbanjan Hemit and Abdurahman Azat guilty of illegally manufacturing firearms, ammunition, and explosive devices, as well as first degree murder, sentencing them to death and lifelong deprivation of legal rights.

During proceedings at the Kashgar Prefecture Intermediate Level People’s Court it was revealed that the defendants Kurbanjan Hemit and Abdurahman Azat, over a long period of time, received religious extremist ideological propaganda and were incited to, on many occasions, premeditate and plan the theft of firearms, surprise attacks against military police forces, and violent terrorist activities such as explosions and assassinations.  On February and March of 2008, the two defendants purchased materials to produce firearms, ammunition, and explosives, illegally manufacturing 11 explosive devices, 2 firearms and much ammunition, and furthermore designated officers of the Kashgar Frontier Defense Support Unit of the People’s Armed Police as the target of their terrorist surprise attack. On August 4th, at around 6 in the morning, the two defendants used a stolen, heavy self-loading truck to bring their self-manufactured guns, ammunition, explosive devices and purchased knives and hatchets to an area near the Kashgar Prefecture Frontier Defense Support Unit station. At around 8, when the Armed Police officers were exiting the front gate of the Frontier Defense Support Unit station for their morning run, Abdurahman Azat, immediately drove in a mad dash towards the rear of the assembled soldiers, plowing into them and causing 15 deaths and 13 injuries before the truck lost control, collided into the side of the road, and flipped over. Abdurahman Azat exited the car and attempted to use his homemade firearm without success, and then proceeded to detonate one of the homemade explosive devices causing one death. Kurbanjan Hemit, wearing a People’s Armed Police summer uniform, first threw a homemade explosive device towards the sentinel posted at the front gate of the Frontier Defense Support Unit station, then went on to use two knives to hack at the soldiers injured by the truck, leading to one death and two injuries. The two defendants were arrested on the scene.

The Kashgar Prefecture Intermediate Level People’s Court maintains that the defendants Kurbanjan Hemit and Abdurahman Azat carried out violent terrorist activities, the illegal manufacture of 11 explosive devices, 2 firearms and ammunition, seriously harmed public security, and that the actions of these two individuals thus violate laws against the illegal production of firearms, ammunition, and explosives. The two defendants, with the aim of sabotaging the otherwise smooth opening of the Beijing Olympics and producing internationally felt adverse repercussions, carried out preparatory measures by observing several times when and where the Armed Police exercised, prepared the necessary criminal implements, using a vehicle, knives, and explosives to kill officers of the Armed Police, which is tantamount to the crime of intentional homicide. The actions of the two individuals resulted in 17 deaths and 15 injuries. It was a particularly vile plot, its methods particularly merciless, its harm on society extremely significant, and it ought to be punished according to the full extent of the law. The Kashgar Prefecture Intermediate Level People’s Court therefore passes the above described sentence in accordance with the law.

I point any passersby to a most excellent interview with Kelly Hammond by Micki McCoy hosted at The China Beat, about a Pepsi commercial filmed in Xinjiang that required a motley crew of various ethnicities and nationalities to pull off. At the most basic level, this was nothing more than a Hong Kong production crew pulling some extras together to make an advertisement. But for Kelly, a scholar doing research in Xinjiang  who happened to be lassoed to play a foreigner extra on the huge set, the shoot was so much more. With an incredible eye for detail, Kelly describes the commercial shoot as an unprecedented cultural exchange. Western educated Hong Kong artists, technicians, and movie makers come to Xinjiang speaking English better than Mandarin, and ally with Pepsi, an American conglomerate, to produce a narrative about Chinese rallying behind a foreign drink into a single “Chinese” identity thus overcoming a vague foreign opponent in a football match – an opponent whose fans ironically are portrayed mostly by actual fellow Chinese, namely, Uyghurs employed for their “exotic-looks value.” In the process, we also learn about Chinese (or at least Cantonese) conceptions of Mexicans (sombreros), Brazilians (carnivalesque outfits which the Uyghur women didn’t take kindly to, to the befuddlement of the liberated Hongkongers), and Americans (scantily clad cheerleaders played of course by Kazakhs). Not to mention the high schoolers who were delighted to see the pop culture icon starring in the commercial but were appropriately angsty when recruited to portray Japanese. But enough talking on my part, Kelly’s observations are insightful and inspiring enough on their own. Check it out.

P.S. Yes, I pretentiously typed smorgasborg with all the Swedish character markings, but I did it because the spellcheck installed in the browser recommended that as a proper spelling and I found that to awesome to decline. Thanks, spellcheck.

And so for now, I’d just like to share just a few links to some post-Olympic stories of note.

The biggest thing, of course, is the post-Olympic crackdown that is currently going down. It so far has taken the form of a religious clampdown, going so far as to put pressure on outward signs of religiosity like beards and the veil during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It goes beyond that, of course, but for analysis and discussion I direct you to Michahel’s Collective Punishment and Anti-Ramadan campaign posts. The Shanghaiist has done the great task of finding some of the original documents with the crackdown guidelines, such as this Huocheng County site and this blogger’s thoughts on the newly minhted regulations.

A story from the Shanghai Daily, less about Xinjiang itself, but nonetheless occured in Xinjiang and is of note: a shocking family tragedy comes to a violent close with the execution of Abduhalik Muzht on the 4th. Muzht went to his daughter’s school in December of 2006 wielding a knife, ultimately killing two students and injuring a teacher and two other students. Worse yet: the alleged motivation for Muzht’s attack was revenge for his daughter’s death – who was strangled by her brother, Muzht’s son, because he was embarassed by her poor grades. Now that is a lot to digest – something so tragic and convoluted it would be more likely in a soap opera than among a Xinjiang family. Again, I emphasize that on this information alone there is nothing particulary “Uyghur” or “Xinjiang” about this tragedy – given the stress one places on success in China, and the stresses the education system places on the children, this could’ve happened in Xinjiang, Guangdong, or anywhere in between. Still, who was this brother and why was he that obsessed over his sister’s grades (note that this was a younger brother still in primary school)? Why did the father kill his daughter’s classmates in revenge, when she was killed by her brother? Where was mom, and what will happen to the original murderer, Muzht’s son?The story is so bizarrely moving I’m compelled to look further into it when I have the time and I’ll post anything of note here.

The next story: the economic relationship between Xinjiang and the rest of China I feel is elegantly illustrated by the natural gas pipelines between the two. The first goes from Xinjiang to Shanghai. The second goes via Shanghai to Guangdong. Now, feasibility studies for the third pipeline have begun, according to the People’s Daily. One notices that poor Fujian, another economic titan of the East Coast, gets bypassed by both of the original routes. The solution, of course is another pipeline, and Fujian is the projected destination of the third pipeline should the plans go through. Railroads in, pipelines out. Does anyone know if the second pipeline passes through Zhejiang? If not, 浙江真可怜!

Finally, a fascinating report from Reuters on Nur Bekri, chairman of XUAR. Since Nur Bekri’s ascension to the Chairmanship back in December, I’ve been wondering who exactly Nur Bekri is and what he’s like – it was hard to find anything other than his official biography which unhelpfully lists all the positions he held. This Friday, however, in a speech to communist party officials, Bekri in no unclear terms stated his firm conviction that Western powers are directly supporting unrest in Xinjiang, likely alluding to the attacks that occurred back before the Olympics. From Reuters:

The region’s governor, Nuer Baikeli, said “Western hostile forces” unhappy with China’s rise were directly supporting groups opposed to Beijing’s rule in the region in the name of democracy and human rights.

“They all along have been direct behind-the-scenes backers and patrons of the ‘three forces’ at home and abroad,” Baikeli said, referring to terrorism, separatism and extremism.

“They are the most important external factor in the continuing rise of ethnic splittist, destructive activities in Xinjiang, and the large threat they pose from abroad to our national security and social stability will exist for a long time,” he added.

“Our struggle against ethnic splittism, in essence, is a struggle against Western hostile forces’ plots to ‘Westernise’ and ‘split’ our country, it is the continuation of the struggle the Chinese people have had for 100 years or more against imperialist plans to split China.”

I feel this is pretty significant, and can’t help but wonder how much of this is official party belief (either among officials in Xinjiang or national level officials) and how much of this is Bekri’s personal opinions, but the Reuters article does note some indirect sanction of Bekri’s words: his speech was hosted on the Central Government’s website on Friday. While unpersuasively accusing Xinjiang unrest to have backing from Muslim extremists in Central Asia and international terrorist networks is quite expected, claiming that the Western governments are directly supporting the same unrest Bin Laden himself is supposedly helping out is a very new development. Confidently accusing a foreign government of backing terrorism on one’s own soil is a profound thing, as anyone in the United States can tell you. The question, thus, is the one I asked before and I bring up again: as Chairman of the XUAR, how much respect should we ascribe to Bekri’s words? What does the Central leadership think about these statements? After all, VP candidate and governor of “America’s Xinjiang” (If I may take liberties to call Alaska that) Sarah Palin has been posturing quite aggressively towards Russia recently, but again, on the other hand, the democratically elected governor of a state in a Federal union is quite different from the de facto appointed mouthpiece in one of China’s “Autonomous Regions.”  Thoughts?

Interestingly, buried in the swelling posts on the anticipated post-Olympic crackdown was an AP article covering the same topic yet incredibly also included quite graphic pictures allegedly depicting the aftermath of the attack. While at this day and age a picture can no longer immediately count as evidence, these pictures are quite convincing. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

And there you have it. As can be seen in the second picture, this location is indeed in front of the Yiquan Hotel (see movie in this post), the place where the attack is said to have occurred, and the utter carnage is quite plain. In the second picture we apparently can see the dump truck used during the attack, burrowed into the entrance of the hotel which is now famously tarped over. Where these pictures came from (I’m guessing crime scene photographer or passerby with cellphone), how they became public (leaked), and why AP journalist William Foreman decided to tack them onto an article on a less relevant topic rather than making his own sensational article all about it, these are the questions of the moment.