Ethnic Uyghur Muslims are more and more often associated with the term “terrorist” in China. Local authorities and media outlets often define violent incidents in border regions as terrorist activity. This official definition has turned random individual criminal acts into the collective responsibility of an ethnic minority and resulted in the labeling of its members as terrorist suspects.
By Oiwan Lam
The latest officially defined “terrorist case” happened on November 16 2013 in Xinjian Bachu county. Eleven people were killed in a police station, two were local police officers and nine were Muslim Uyghurs from Bachu county.
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| Uyghur elders with child. (Photo: Todenhoff) |
The Xinjiang local authorities quickly defined the incident as a violent terrorist attack and claimed that stability was effectively restored as the nine violent assaulters were shot dead. However according to Radio Free Asia, people who surrounded the police station had managed to capture the young attackers alive while the police officers chose to shoot them dead on the spot. As all the witnesses aside from the police are dead, it keeps people wondering what had exactly happened inside the police station.
Chinese dissident Hu Ping raises a number of questions about the incident:
