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China seals off Muslim town after deadly riot
February 11, 1997
Web posted at: 12:00 p.m. EST (1700 GMT)In this story:
BEIJING (CNN) -- Chinese authorities sealed off Yining, a town in northwestern Xinjiang province, and police searched Tuesday for members of an illegal Islamic sect following the worst ethnic violence to hit the predominantly Muslim region in 50 years.
Officials and residents contacted in Yining, near China's border with Kazakstan, maintained that all was calm, six days after about 1,000 Muslim separatists of the Uighur ethnic minority rampaged through the town to protest against Beijing rule.
CNN Correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon Reports 
213K/18 sec. AIFF or WAV sound Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who live alongside other Muslim groups and ethnic Chinese, form about half of the local population. Ethnic Han Chinese make up roughly 40 percent of the population. Many more Uighurs live across the border in Kazakhstan and other neighboring central Asian countries formed after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Chinese police dispersed the crowd with tear gas and arrested hundreds, but the number of people killed in last week's rioting is still in dispute. The accounts range from no deaths, according to a Chinese official, to an estimate of 300 given by exile groups.
How trouble started
A Yining police officer said on Monday that the Uighurs, demanding independence, beat people to death and burned three cars. However, a Chinese source said the rioting began after a Uighur criminal suspect resisted arrest by Chinese police.
In Kazakhstan's capital, Almaty, a leader of the United National Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan said Wednesday's riot was sparked by the execution of 30 Uighurs by the authorities last week. But an official of the bureau in charge of directing the cleanup operation after the riot denied that report.
Last year, separatist groups held running gunbattles with police and tried to assassinate an Islamic leader seen as pro-Chinese. Beijing in turn ordered the Xinjiang government to wipe out the separatists and illegal religious groups that support them.
Ethnic unrest
"(Police) have arrested several counter-revolutionaries and they are catching more," one Han woman resident said.
"The Uighurs ... look happy because the streets are full of them," she said in a sign of the region's ethnic divisions. "It's just them in the streets. It's all their people."
However, Han residents said they were not afraid.
"We are not nervous because the armed police and police are here," the woman said.
Correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon and Reuters contributed to this report.
Related story:
- 10 killed in ethnic clash in western China - February 10, 1997
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