Urumqi (AsiaNews)
- The government of the northern province of Xinjiang this morning sentenced to
death two members of Uyghur ethnicity arrested in the aftermath of clashes
in April in the prefecture of Kashgar, during which 21 people died. The
courts ruled that Musa Hesen and Rehman Hupur are guilty of
"terrorism" and "murder." Musa
also has been accused of having founded a group "that has carried on illegal
religious activities for years with the aim of promoting extremism."
The
province is one of the most turbulent in all of China: It is home to the ethnic
Uyghur, Turkic speaking peoples of the Islamic religion, who have always sought
to gain independence from Beijing. The
central government has sent hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese to the region
to try to make them the dominant ethnic group. It
also imposes serious restrictions on freedom of religion, Muslim practices, the
teaching of the language and the local culture.
Since
2009 a special system of Chinese police and army control is in place, imposed
by Beijing after the riots
in which nearly 200 people lost their lives. As
a result of the violence hundreds of custodial sentences and dozens of death
sentences were meted out. The
Chinese authorities believe that the perpetrators of violence are Muslim
extremists, but exiles claim that Beijing is "exaggerating" the
threat of Islamic terrorism to justify the repression against the Uyghur
population. Even
the latest violence (in chronological order) was reported in different ways.
According
to police, the clashes were born after an investigation carried out in the home
of one of the convicts who "hid explosives that could have been used to
make 10 bombs." The
alleged terrorists reportedly kidnapped agents by deception, then set fire to
the house to kill them. The
population however claims that the clashes were sparked by the police insisted
that the men "shave their beards and women take off their veils" in
the town of Selibuya.