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.

All the the reports agree that 7 were killed and 14 were injured in the attack. The incident took place outside on the streets, with the BBC, quoting, Hou, saying it occurred at an intersection while the New York Times states that the attack actually occurred on a bridge. Hou has emphasized that the victims were all local residents and belonged to several ethnicities, and, quote, innocent civilians. The Guardian, talking to an unnamed local police official, said that victims included a group of Uyghur residents who were working with local security forces in patrolling the streets and “reporting crimes.”

More valuable information can be gleaned from this Mandarin coverage from ifeng (h/t @henrykszad at Twitter). Interestingly, this article states that one person who was aiding police (Mandarin: 1名协警员) was about to lead fifteen border patrol officers (Mandarin: 带15名联防队员) in a patrol at the T-intersection of Kalatale and Wuka roads. While they were lined up on the side of the road the attacker drove his tricycle by the group and threw (抛出) an explosive at them, instantly killing 5, with 2 dying later at the hospital, 14 injured, and several vehicles at the scene, some police vehicles, some civilian vehicles damaged or destroyed. This information supplements, clarifies, and even challenges some of the information that has been divulged in the Western reports. With the information from the ifeng report when can almost pinpoint exactly where the incident occurred: not precisely in Aksu city proper, but in a suburb, Yiganqi, at the intersection mentioned above which is 50 meters West of the river dividing Aksu from Yiganqi (this explains why the earlier NYT report mentioned a bridge – if not exactly on the bridge, then the incident occurred very close to it). This is about as accurate as we can get for now:

A few things of note, the intersection that I’ve marked is on Wuka Road, but the smaller road off it is not labeled, but I’m fairly confident it is Kalatale Road as it’s a T intersection and it’s almost exactly 50 meters west of the bridge over the river. It’s very clear from the satellite imagery that this intersection leads into a Uyghur area of Aksu (the short, squat buildings and unorganized layout almost certainly makes it a Uyghur neighborhood as opposed to a Chinese neighborhood with apartment buildings arranged in roads – see Kashgar satellite imagery for another contrast), and so it does seem that the attack occurred as a patrol was about to enter or inspect a Uyghur area.

All the reports agree that the perpetrator was caught at the scene of the attack.

What will happen in the wake of this attack

If previous attacks of this nature are anything to go by, I predict that there will be a trial very soon, perhaps within the next one or two months. At the trial, the suspect will most likely “admit” connections to organized “East Turkestan” terrorist networks and may perhaps even be linked to the two alleged ETIM terrorist masterminds that were caught and implicated two months ago. Again, if the government goes by its usual playbook, after the guilty verdict and the death penalty go up and are approved by the Supreme Court the suspect will be quietly executed without much media fanfare about a year after the verdict. This Aksu incident – which will probably be immortalized in Chinese records as the “8-19 incident” （八·十九事件 or maybe 八·十九爆炸事件 or something like that) – will triumphantly be added to the litany of “terrorist attacks” that local authorities have and will refer to to make a case to both domestic and global audiences that China is a victim of international terrorism.

What should we make of it

Well. Was it terrorism?

Before we answer that, it’s important to observe the uncanny similarities between this attack and the attack that occurred in Kashgar in August of 2008. Both were attacks carried out against border patrol units that were out on the streets, patrolling. Both involved young, local males (yes, this hasn’t been established from the Aksu case, but I’m almost certain that’s what it will be) using improvised explosive devices which were tossed, used, or thrown as the attackers approached the patrol in some sort of vehicle. In spite of these explosives, both were emphatically not suicide bombings. And in both cases, the perpetrators were caught alive after killing and injuring several of their intended victims.

The methods of these two attacks, their apparent spontaneity, and their choice of target to me indicate that rather than being carefully supplied, supported, and planned strikes against targets of imminent political value, both of these attacks were on-the-spot decisions carried out by disgruntled individuals against context-specific targets using the most readily available and obvious devices. Without intending to downplay the tragic loss of life in this attack, the explosives employed by the perpetrator clearly did not require the level of pre-planning required for the Oklahoma City bombing or the level of coordination and organization required for the 9/11 hijackings. Given the importance of the farming and mining industries in the area around Aksu and Uyghurs’ participation in those industries, procuring chemically volatile materials that could harm a group of people on the street is just as feasible for a disgruntled malcontent as it is for a terrorist with transnational financial support.

But more revealing in this case are the targets of this attack, where, according to the Chinese report, one individual was leading a group of public security officers into an inspection of an obviously Uyghur neighborhood. Anything ranging from a hatred of someone perceived as a race traitor (if the informant, put mildly in Chinese as “an individual assisting the police,” was Uyghur, which seems to be the case) to something specific – perhaps the informant was specifically about to turn in or inform on the attacker for any sort of crime – could have been motivation for the attacker to grab the nearest volatile devices and attack the patrol before it could arrive. In which case, we see incidents all over the world, very frequently in the United States, where “snitches” are murdered for their collaboration with the authorities, or armed holdouts with “You’ll never catch me coppers” attitudes engage in gunfights or hostage-taking situations with the authorities. Is this terrorism? No. And so I contend that, lacking accurate and trustworthy information, which is almost always the case with incidents in Xinjiang, we cannot unilaterally consider this incident a terrorist attack. However, I anticipate that this is exactly how this incident will be portrayed given the usefulness of such an incident to the government’s ongoing efforts to depict the area as a terrorism-plagued region. That being said, we will look closely at what information gets revealed – and what information doesn’t – in the coming weeks and months.

The last time Xinjiang had an incident involving a an airplane was March 2008, when Xinhua reported that a young Uyghur woman, apparently in the company of an older man and under the direction of a Pakistani national, attempted to bomb an airplane with a soda can full of gasoline in order to sabotage the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.  The fate of the accused girl is still in question, as is the veracity of the state’s narrative of that event.  (For the best blogging on this, see Mutant Palm here and here.)

Is it normal for the police to fire warning shots of live ammunition inside of a city? Moreover, why are the Chinese police not equipped with less-lethal weapons as means of detainment, such as Tasers?

Update: The Jakarta Post reports disconcerting details about the events:

Photos taken at the time show one policeman raising his rifle to strike a man. Beaten, the man in a blue shirt with blood on his right leg lay on the ground. Police formed a ring around him, pointing their guns up at surrounding buildings.

If what the Daily Mail reports is true, then it sounds possible that these men were shot at point blank range.

Police said the three men attacked them when they tried to pull them off a fourth Uighur, whom they had attacked with knives and rods. (Emphasis added)

One witness, Zhang Ming, a construction worker at a building site near the incident, said he saw three men with knives come out of a mosque and attack a group of paramilitary police standing in a cluster along the road. Riot police then chased them, beat them and fired shots, he said. (Emphasis added)

If this claim is true, and that the men were armed when exiting the mosques, then we can only expect more crackdowns on Islamic institutions in Urumqi and the whole of Xinjiang. Unfortunately, this man’s statement is impossible to verify, and given the current situation, there are numerous reasons why such a statement could be fabricated for propaganda purposes, or distorted for international media consumption.

Tuesday morning, hundreds of Uyghurs staged a protest in downtown Urumqi just as Chinese authorities were taking journalists on a “tour” of the Uyghur neighborhood. Many claimed to be the mothers, wives, and sisters of the detained young Uyghurs, and they wailed for their kin. They waved the ID cards of the detained men. In the end, around a hundred found themselves cornered in a burned-out part of south Urumqi, surrounded by riot police with clubs and guns drawn.

The footage and photographs of this event have produced what will doubtless be enduring images of the most violent public conflict in the PRC since the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations in 1989. A young woman with a ponytail and a soccer jersey, a member of a proud generation of Uyghur girls, waved her finger in the helmeted faces of the People’s Armed Police. The “Tian’anmen” photograph of this event, however, is this picture, which has appeared in various forms on the front pages of Al Jazeera and Hürriyet and in the galleries of The New York Times, The Guardian, and goodness knows where else:

The same woman appears in a video clip from The Guardian, in which the Armed Police tanks before her… actually seem to be backing away.

This is not the quiet stillness with which an anonymous man stood before a tank on Tian’anmen Square, though the photographs make it look like it is. This is a different image, one that speaks of a hidden fury, a constant authority and power in the hands of tradition. This is an image that will appeal powerfully to the Muslim world. This picture tells a story of brave boys who righteously stood up, as young men do, and who were punished by non-Muslim occupiers. The image is a mother, the keeper of tradition, the one who educates religious and ethnic values and traditions into her children, looking out for those children, missing them, coming to find them when they have lost their way. Here, she chides and scolds the men who have taken her son away, and, in their stillness, they seem to fear her.

In reality, their commander certainly told them to hold their fire, to contain, not to attack. With media cameras all around, with tensions already extremely high, this was no time even to make arrests.

Furthermore, cracking down on a crowd of women, children, and old men would delegitimize police action. Anyone familiar with the politics of ethnic representation in Xinjiang will tell you: Minority groups are overwhelmingly represented in the media by women, children, and old men. Minority men are threatening to the majority, which can easily accept them as perpetrators of murder and mass destruction.

Politically, this seems extremely auspicious for the world’s awareness of Uyghur political, legal, and cultural issues. The initial riots could be dismissed as action by only a thousand or so people fitting a slim demographic in Urumqi: under 30, male, educated. Now we see everyone else: over 30, female, uneducated, religious, etc. If someone planned this entire event, then it was certainly very, very well staged. In the media, Uyghurs look unified, with the exception of the many Uyghur police officers working to halt the action. (I am not precluding, by the way, the possibility that this is more than a Uyghur protest! I have not seen any mention to the contrary, though I would be unsurprised to find at least Uzbeks and Tatars in the mix.)

I would note that the people in the videos of today’s Uyghur protests, especially the women, were almost all wearing headscarves. Uyghur women in Urumqi do not generally wear headscarves, though they almost universally own one or two for certain religious and social occasions. Those women who did not had their hair up, generally in pigtails, a modest style for young Uyghur women, à la Rebiya Kadeer. There are several possible reasons for this.

First, it could be that, in the aftermath of Sunday’s protest, the police rounded up not only many suspected participants, but any religious men they could find. That was the demographic that participated in the mäshräp groups, the government’s repression of which helped spark the Ghulja riots in 1997. This is the group that the government feels least able to co-opt, that it most wants to “educate,” as Urumqi Party Chairman Li Zhi threatened to do to demonstrators. As such, the women may be wearing headscarves anyway. The size of the demonstration also suggests that this was organized through preexisting social ties, as through the more religiously observant Uyghur community. Even if the participants were not necessarily religious, they would still identify as Muslims, making the headscarf a very visible symbol of unity, as well as difference from Han Chinese. I wonder if Uyghurs in Urumqi might begin more frequently to demonstrate their ethnicity and religion in their outward appearance.

Alternatively, if someone politically savvy planned this action, then they may have actually called on female participants to wear headscarves. The image of a crowd of apparently traditional Muslims facing down what looks like a faceless army of Chinese can draw on over a billion sympathizers. The concern here is that, while peaceful and charitable international Islamic organizations may pay more attention to the region, so will violent organizations that may see Xinjiang as a higher-profile arena than it previously was.

The last few days in Urumqi have produced a startling amount of both imagery and coverage from media outlets around the world. This is the moment, it seems, when Xinjiang may cease to be a journalistic oddity and exoticism and join, for better or for worse, the stock list of “restive” regions.

This piece was co-written with New Dominion author Sherin.

Selected sources:

Hürriyet: Sincan’da dehşet fotoğrafları

7 July 2009, Al Jazeera: Troops deployed in Uighur city

7 July 2009, The Guardian: Riots in Urumqi, China

7 July 2009, The New York Times: New Protests in Western China After Deadly Clashes

7 July 2009, The New York Times: Another Media Tour Goes Very, Very Badly for Chinese Authorities

Melissa K. Chan, Al Jazeera reporter in Urumqi

According to Xinhua, yesterday’s riots in Urumqi resulted in 140 deaths and 828 injured. The death toll is “expected to rise.” When Americans went to bed last night, the death toll was three, including two bystanders and one member of the riot police. Xinhua reports that the rapid rise is due to the recovery of some 57 bodies from the streets of Urumqi and the death of many of the injured at area hospitals. The Wall Street Journal reports a more conservative 20 to 30, but it is unclear when they received that figure.

The international Uyghur community has offered an alternative explanation, suggesting that Chinese riot police were shooting into the crowds.

It is difficult to judge the truth of the situation at this time. I would note that last year’s Lhasa riots, which went on for days, resulted in an official death toll of 22.

Xinhua reports that hundreds of suspected demonstrators have been arrested. It is not unreasonable to suggest that some have died in police custody.

Travel restrictions imposed last night have continued through several parts of southern Urumqi, as well as the nearby cities of Changji and Turpan.

The map below shows where riots and destruction have been reported, as well as two of the streets where travel restrictions have still been imposed. This should give a sense of where the actions occurred.

View Urumchi Protests, 5 July 2009 in a larger map

The official response to these incidents has been trite and out of touch. Xinjiang Chairman Nur Bekri’s speech yesterday blamed the riots on the “three forces” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism and on the influence of outside organizations, in particular Rebiya Kadeer and the Uyghur World Congress. While the government seems to acknowledge the role of the 26 June incident in Shaoguan, Guangdong in inciting Uyghurs to action, it has refused once again to publicly face up to real social, economic, and political problems that face Xinjiang and its people. Instead, Nur Bekri, who just three days ago announced the first cellular phone capable of texting in Uyghur, provided a panicked public with a polemic about “ethnic unity” and “development” reminiscent of Hu Jintao’s “Eight Goods and Eight Bads” or perhaps Bobby Jindal’s response to the State of the Union Address. Informing people that “doing ethnic unity well” will lead to “development” and that this is “good” – and that “when ethnic unity is destroyed,” it will “not lead to development” and that this is “bad” – presents the poor, hungry, scared, and angry with an abstract ideological syllogism stocked with several variable and abstract concepts. You can’t eat ethnic unity.

The moment a protest turns violent, it loses its ability to affect institutional change. It is very unfortunate for the rights of Uyghurs and others that this protest, which appears to have begun peacefully, ended in this much destruction. To me, this demonstrates once again that Uyghurs have no voice of their own in the Chinese government. Nur Bekri is the head of a region, not of a people, and very loyal to the PRC. There is a large body of Uyghur intellectuals capable of articulating a mobilizing ideology, but no framework for their organization. This is partly due to preexisting conditions of Xinjiang’s history and social organization and partly due to the PRC government’s quashing of any independent social movements.

There is frequent coverage of this incident in the international media today.

Sources:

6 July 2009, Xinhua: 新疆维吾尔自治区主席努尔•白克力谈乌鲁木齐打砸抢烧严重暴力犯罪事件

6 July 2009, Xinhua: Commentary: Riot a catastrophe for Xinjiang

6 July 2009, Xinhua: Death toll in Xinjiang riot rises to 140

6 July 2009, Xinhua: Order partially restored in violence-plagued Urumqi, situation still tense

6 July 2009, BBC: Scores killed in China protests

6 July 2009, Wall Street Journal: Muslim Minority Riots Erupt in China’s West

Echoing the assertions made by Xinjiang Chairman Nur Bekri in a televised and delayed speech just an hour ago, the demonstrations were a criminal action organized by outside forces, in particular Rebiya Kadeer and the World Uyghur Congress. Nur Bekri went on to assert that QQ, social messaging software popular in China, and other forms of unrestricted on-line communication helped to organize the actions. He also discussed the clash in Shaoguan, suggesting that the incident is at the forefront of the leadership’s minds, right now, and that they want very much to control information about what happened there and convince Uyghurs that the government is on their side.

Unfortunately, the immediate media and official response to the clash in Shaoguan, in which Han workers attacked and killed Uyghur workers until riot police showed up several hours later, was surprisingly nationalistic and hostile to the Uyghur workers. Officials and the media began to show sympathy only after it was revealed that the riots were triggered in part by false rumors spread by a former employee.

Meanwhile, the Urumqi municipal government has issued a notice restricting traffic through unspecified parts of the city. Automobiles are not permitted in certain areas. I suspect that those areas are those in which rioting occurred and where workers will be cleaning up (or covering up) the damage.

Sources:

6 July 2009, Xinhua: 乌鲁木齐市人民政府关于维护社会正常秩序的紧急通告

6 July 2009, Xinhua: 乌鲁木齐发生打砸抢烧严重暴力犯罪事件