The Uighur are recently in the news:
Scores Die in Ethnic Clashes in Western China
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/05/AR2009070502423.html?hpid=topnewsBEIJING, July 6 -- At least 140 people were killed and more than 800 were injured Sunday in a violent clash between police and Muslim Uighur protesters in China's far western Xinjiang region that marks the most severe ethnic uprising since the riots in Tibet in spring 2008.
The regional capital of Urumqi was under marshal law on Monday after a crowd of rioters, estimated to number more than 1000 and armed with knives and sticks, fought with police and burned buses and cars in the city's main bazaar on Sunday.
The official New China News agency said the death toll "was still climbing."
Witnesses said the day had started relatively peacefully, with several hundred people staging a demonstration calling for a more thorough investigation into the June 25 deaths of two Uighurs who worked at a toy factory in southern China. The men had been killed in a fight between workers who are Han Chinese, the majority in China, and Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group, that broke out after false rumors spread that a Uighur man had assaulted a female Han worker at the company. The protesters on Sunday were calling for the arrest of the men's killers.
Ethnic tensions are high in the Xinjiang region. which has experienced sporadic outbreaks of violence in recent years. Last August, for instance, an attack on a police station in the border city of Kashgar, carried out by people who the Chinese government called "separatists," resulted in the deaths of 17 policemen just days before the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics.
Uighur leaders have expressed concerns similar to their Tibetan counterparts: that under Chinese rule the eight million Uighurs who live in China have experienced political, cultural and religious persecution
On Monday, Uighur activist groups accused Chinese security forces of shooting indiscriminately at the protesters in Xinjiang. "We are extremely saddened by the heavy-handed use of force by the Chinese security forces against the peaceful demonstrators," Alim Seytoff, vice president of the Washington-based Uyghur American Association, told the Associated Press.
The Chinese government, however, blamed separatist exile groups and individuals -- specifically Rebiya Kadeer, a leader who is living in exile in the Washington area -- for the bloodshed, and said those separatists are plotting against Chinese rule.
"The violence is a pre-empted, organized violent crime. It is instigated and directed from abroad, and carried out by outlaws in the country," the New China News Agency said.
On Monday, officials at hospitals in the Urumqi said they were struggling with the volume of injured and dying.
One female nurse in the emergency room of Urumqi No. 1 People's Hospital said that all the patients that had been brought in were Han Chinese. "They have injuries on head. They were hit on head by sticks," she said. A person who picked up the phone at the Xinjiang People's Hospital said "We have a lot of wounded people here. We are trying to save one person's life now. The person is dying!"
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Ao Simin, 60, who works at a retail shop near the south gate of the bazaar where the riots took place said that he saw thousands of "Uighur young people" walking past his store shouting slogans in Uighur that he didn't understand.
Ao said that he heard some horrible rumors about Han Chinese being beaten by Uighur protesters carrying sticks but "I saw them with empty hands . . . I witnessed a couple of Uighur people trying to climb up to the traffic light pole and tried to pull the traffic light down. But they didn't make it so they left," Ao said.
But another witness, Adam Grode, a 26-year-old American who is in Urumqi on a Fulbright Scholarship, said that around 6:30 p.m. he saw protesters throwing stones and vegetables at police officers and smashing windows. Soon afterwards, the police were "chasing them down with shields and fire hoses."
In general, Ao said, he feels that Uighur and Han relations in Urumqi are tense but "usually, there are no direct conflicts that happen between Han and Uighur. This is really very abnormal."
Certainly Uyghur people do not come from Uruguay !
