Word: uighurs
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...Xinjiang is also China's most troubled region. The Uighurs, who are Muslim and of Turkic origin, are the single largest ethnic group. But over the years, their culture has undergone a whittling away, amid a steady influx of Han Chinese, who now dominate the local economy. Today, about 70% of Urumqi is Han. The result: resentment and unrest. The past decade has seen a string of bombings by suspected Uighur separatists - the U.S. has classified one organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, as a terrorist one - and stern crackdowns by the Chinese authorities. Around last year's Beijing Olympics...
...protests were peaceful enough at first. A crowd of some 1,000 Uighurs marched toward Urumqi's central People's Square chanting slogans about alleged police inaction after a Chinese mob recently beat to death two Uighur factory workers in the southern coastal province of Guangdong. What happened next at People's Square is unclear. Some reports have the police baton-charging or using more forceful means against the demonstrators. But the upshot was that hundreds of young Uighur men spilled onto Urumqi's streets, smashing vehicles, ransacking shops and attacking Han residents. One witness said that of more than...
...July 5 police cracked down on a demonstration by minority Muslim Uighurs in the city of Urumqi, capital of China's western Xinjiang region. Hundreds of Uighur young men rioted, attacking majority Han Chinese civilians with knives, clubs and bricks. In the end authorities say 137 Hans, 46 Uighurs and one member of the Chinese Muslim Hui ethnic group were killed. But, says Diaa Rashwan, a political analyst at the government-backed Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, "there is not a lot of interest or attention paid to these events in the Arab and Muslim world." (See pictures...
...pick up on it until days after the riots began, and opinion writers - who were especially prolific in defense of the headscarf martyr - had very little to say about the Muslims in China. An article over the weekend in Saudi Arabia's Arab Times likened the struggle of their Uighur "co-religionists" to that of the Palestinians and compared the Han Chinese to the Jews; and an editorial in Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper last week urged the international community to pay more attention to the crackdown. But calls for Muslim and Arab leaders to condemn the violence...
...Which isn't necessarily surprising. Most of the region's governments - and what is largely a state-sponsored press - have several reasons to ignore China's ethnically and religiously charged clashes. To some Arab regimes, the bloody images of riot police clashing with Uighur protesters in Xinjiang's capital last week were strikingly familiar, because the same thing happens at home. "They make the same systematic separation of opponents, of Islamic groups, of opposition groups, and they arrest many and they kill many," says Essam el-Erian, a leader of Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood, comparing Arab regimes...