Attack kills 16 police days before the Olympics
BEIJING (AP) - In an audacious and deadly attack just days ahead of the Beijing Olympics, two men from a mainly Muslim ethnic group rammed a truck and hurled explosives at jogging policemen in China's restive far west Monday, killing 16.
The attack in a city near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border brought an immediate response from China's Olympic organizers, who pronounced security precautions ready to ensure safety in Beijing and other Olympic venues when the games open Friday.
Yet the timing so close to opening day heightened the attack's shock value and bore the hallmarks of local Muslim militants, said Li Wei, a counterterrorism expert affiliated with the government.
It also came as athletes, Olympic dignitaries and journalists poured into Beijing for an Olympics that some Chinese want to leverage to get the government to address festering grievances. Migrant workers cheated on pay for construction, homeowners angry about pollution and other disgruntled residents believe the government would help them rather than see the Olympics disrupted.
On Monday, about 20 people evicted from their homes for urban renewal projects staged a small demonstration a few blocks from Tiananmen Square only to be surrounded by police.
"We don't oppose the Olympics. But it's wrong for them to demolish our house. It's wrong," said Liu Fumei, who scuffled with women from the government-backed neighborhood committee who pulled Liu and the other protesters away.
The risk for the communist government is that the ferment could disrupt an Olympics it spent more than $40 billion to make a perfect showcase for China. "Pursuing peace, progress, coexistence in harmony and harmonious development" was how Chinese President Hu Jintao described the Chinese people's Olympic hopes to foreign media last week.
Monday's attack in Xinjiang also underscored that with so much security focused on Beijing, areas far from game venues make tempting targets that could also diminish China's Olympic moment.
"We've made preparations for all possible threats," Beijing Olympic organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide told reporters when asked about the Xinjiang attack. "We believe, with the support of the government, with the help of the international community, we have the confidence and the ability to host a safe and secure Olympic Games."
Xinjiang has for decades seen a sporadically violent rebellion by a local Muslim Turkic ethnic group known as Uighurs against Chinese rule. An extremist Uighur group believed to be based across the mountainous border in Pakistan's tribal frontier threatened in a video tape last month to target the Olympics. And military and police commanders have said Uighurs fighting for what they call an independent East Turkistan pose the biggest threat to the games.
In Monday's attack, two Uighur men rammed a dump truck into 70 border patrol paramilitary police as they passed the Yiquan Hotel during a routine early morning jog in the city of Kashgar, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
After the truck hit an electrical pole, the pair jumped out, ignited the homemade explosives and "hacked the policemen with knives," Xinhua said. The assailants, ages 28 and 33, were arrested, the report said.
There were no civilian casualties as few people were on the streets so early in the day, state media and witnesses said. Though Xinhua put the time of the attack at 8 a.m., China officially has one time zone, geared toward Beijing, 2,200 miles to the east.
Fourteen officers were killed on the spot and two others died on the way to the hospital, while another 16 officers were wounded, Xinhua said.
Witnesses said police immediately closed off streets. The Nationalities Hospital, down the street from the explosion, was sealed off and people were ordered to stay inside, said a man answering phones at the hospital duty office. By early afternoon, unarmed uniformed police patrolled the area, stopping a few people to inspect their bags.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Gonzales Gallegos condemned the attack, saying the United States was "saddened at the loss of life and injuries caused by the attack and extend our condolences to the victims and their families."
Monday's attack was all the more surprising because it follows years of intensive security measures in Xinjiang. A wave of violence in the 1990s mainly targeted police, officials and Uighurs seen as collaborators. Separatists also staged nearly simultaneous explosions on three public buses in the provincial capital of Urumqi.
In response, the government stationed more paramilitary units in the region and shut unregistered mosques and religious schools seen as hotbeds of anti-government extremism.
Uighurs, however, complain that restrictions on religious practice - students are not allowed to go to mosques, for example - and a high police presence has further alienated people who already felt displaced by an influx of Chinese migrants they feel are taking the best jobs.
"In practice, Uighurs have lost all political rights," Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the Germany-based pro-independence World Uighur Congress, said in an e-mail. "Especially in the vast countryside heavily populated by Uighurs, the Chinese government has rolled out a political movement without end or reason that is unbearable to the Uighur peasantry. The entire Uighur people live in a blanket state of fear."
For the government, the security clampdown has largely succeeded in suppressing attacks, allowing security forces to disrupt plots before they are carried out, sometimes in violent raids. Li, the counterterrorism expert, said one raid recently broke up a terrorist cell in Xi'an, a city in central China. Police also shot and killed five people in an alleged cell in Urumqi last month.
Initial reports seemed to show that Monday's attack was carried out by separatists based in Xinjiang and not Uighurs from across the border, some of whom have received training from al-Qaida and Pakistan's Taliban, said Li, who works at China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a think-tank with ties to the government's main spy agency.
"This time they actually managed to carry out their plan, but it will not affect the Olympics greatly," said Li, who works at China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a think-tank affiliated with the government's main spy agency. "The threat from East Turkestan forces exist, but their capabilities are limited."
- Re: Attack kills 16 police days before the Olympicsposted on 08/05/2008
这是不是标志自杀攻击在大陆的开始? - posted on 08/06/2008
China's Uighurs Wary, Worried After Attack
By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 6, 2008; A12
KASHGAR, China, Aug. 5 -- Fear and caution pervaded the warren of mud-brick homes and shops of this northwestern city's ethnic Uighur neighborhood Tuesday, a day after an attack on a paramilitary police unit that killed 16 officers. Residents said they feared they would be blamed because the two assailants arrested at the scene were identified by police as Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority already subject to strict security measures.
Black-clad police officers carrying short clubs patrolled the Uighur neighborhood, entering several houses to check occupants' names against a government list of registered residents. Police presence at highway checkpoints and throughout the city was beefed up.
"Everyone is so scared," one woman said. "They don't want to open their mouths."
Local officials labeled the attack a terrorist act, timed to occur just ahead of the opening of the Summer Olympics in Beijing, 2,000 miles to the east. Shi Dagang, Kashgar's Communist Party secretary, said at a news conference that the two men had left wills saying that defending their religion was more precious than life and that they would launch a holy war against the Chinese.
Exile groups say hundreds of Uighurs have been detained in recent months while thousands of paramilitary forces have been dispatched to the Xinjiang region in response to what local officials have said are terrorist threats from extremist Uighurs who want to form an independent state. Some foreign experts say China has exaggerated the threat to justify its crackdown on Uighur dissent.
The heavy police and military presence gave this tourist city an uneasy edge Tuesday. When a taxi sideswiped another on a busy downtown street, the drivers, both Uighurs, began shouting at each other through their open windows. But when they slowed to pull off the road to continue their argument, a police van drove by. Both drivers immediately stopped shouting and eased back into traffic. "I'm not going to stop if the police are here," one said.
No Uighur interviewed would agree to be quoted by name, including those who expressed gratitude toward the Chinese and no sympathy with those pressing for independence.
"I prefer we stay with China. They can protect us. Without them, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan can bully us," a 21-year-old man said.
A man chatting with foreign visitors inside Id Kah mosque, the largest in China, pointed out that the wall radiators and thick carpeting had been paid for with Chinese government funds.
A devout Muslim who prays five times a day, the man recalled that when he was in school, his Chinese teachers refused to let him go to the mosque. "The teachers told us we had no time to pray," he said. "We had to concentrate on our examinations."
Still, he shrugged off the idea that his religion was being suppressed. "I can practice my religion the way I want," he said.
Tensions between Uighurs and the Chinese have existed for centuries in Kashgar, once an oasis on the fabled Silk Road. A series of bombings in the region in the 1990s sparked a crackdown by Chinese security forces. Although tensions continued to simmer, there had been little violence here for a decade, until recently.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, China pushed successfully to have a separatist group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement recognized internationally as a terrorist organization. Since then, the government has played up the threat posed by the group, including U.S. assertions that it is linked to al-Qaeda. Chinese officials said the group poses the single largest threat to security at the Olympics.
Others say most of the violence in Xinjiang, including bus bombings in the 1990s, was small-scale and localized, which would not indicate a large, well-funded group.
"The degree of organization of Uighur groups or East Turkestan separatist groups is a big question among many experts outside of China," said James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
Millward said the problem in Xinjiang is a civil rights problem, with Uighurs feeling discriminated against in terms of job opportunities and government resources, which they say flow more fully to Han Chinese.
Wang Lixiong, a dissident Chinese writer and expert on ethnic issues, said Xinjiang represents an even bigger problem for Beijing than Tibet, which was swept this spring with protests against Chinese rule. "The Tibetans have a great leader, the Dalai Lama. He is the leader of all the Tibetans. He has a solution for the Tibetan issue and he wants to solve the problem," Wang said. "But in Xinjiang, there's no such leader. Even the protesters are fighting as individuals, not as a group."
China has poured billions of dollars' worth of development funding into both regions. Kashgar is, indeed, developing quickly, but roughly along two separate axes. The Uighur area radiates out from the Id Kah mosque, built in 1460, and into the old city area. Women in head scarves and men in knitted prayer caps or square traditional hats crowd the streets. Donkeys pulling carts full of watermelons and onions fight with cars, motorcycles and bicycles on narrow lanes.
The Chinese area stretches out from the railway station, built in 1999. White-tiled stores typical of many provincial Chinese cities line a multi-lane thoroughfare called People's Road. The road passes a 59-foot-tall statue of Mao Zedong across from a plaza that resembles Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
A nearby theater that used to stage traditional Uighur dance and music performances is under renovation, soon to be reopened as a hotel. "Not enough people wanted to see it, so they couldn't make any money," one man explained.
Researcher Liu Songjie contributed to this report.
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