10,000 missing after ethnic riots in China, activist claims

ALMOST 10,000 Uighurs involved in deadly riots in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region went missing in one night, an exiled Uighur activist has said yesterday, calling for an international investigation.

In the area’s worst ethnic violence in decades, Uighurs attacked Han Chinese in the capital Urumqi on July 5, after police tried to break up a protest against fatal attacks on Uighur workers at a factory in south China.

Han Chinese in Urumqi launched revenge attacks later that week.

The official death toll now stands at 197, mostly Han Chinese, who form the majority of China’s 1.3 billion population.

Almost all the others were Uighurs, a Muslim people native to Xinjiang and culturally tied to Central Asia and Turkey.

More than 1,000 people were detained following the riots, and more than 200 more in recent days, state media said. None has been publicly charged.

China has accused the Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer of triggering the riots and of spreading misinformation and took great glee in pointing out that pictures she said were taken in Urumqi actually came from another part of the country. It has also condemned Japan for allowing Kadeer to visit.

Kadeer, who rejects the Chinese accusations, said she thought the death toll was much higher after learning that there was random gunfire one night when electricity in the city was shut down.

“The nearly 10,000 [Uighur] people who were at the protest, they disappeared from Urumqi in one night,” she told a news conference in Tokyo through an interpreter. “If they are dead, where are their bodies? If they are detained, where are they?”

She called on the international community to send an independent investigative team to Urumqi to uncover details of what had taken place.