Condemning attacks as a dubious pretext for Muslims persecution, an international Uighur Muslim has condemned Wednesday\u2019s bomb attack in China\u2019s Xinjiang, accusing Beijing of escalating its crackdown on the Muslim minority.<\/p>\n
Thursday, 01 May 2014 00:00<\/p>\n
BEIJING \u2013 Condemning attacks as a dubious pretext for Muslims persecution, an international Uighur Muslim has condemned Wednesday\u2019s bomb attack in China\u2019s Xinjiang, accusing Beijing of escalating its crackdown on the Muslim minority.<\/p>\n
\u201cUighurs struggling between despair and survival expect [President] Xi Jinping to come to East Turkestan to give constructive suggestions on improving the turbulent situation,\u201d Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for exile group the World Uyghur Congress, said in an e-mail cited by Agence France Presse (AFP) on Thursday, May 1.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, the fact is Beijing continues encouraging armed suppression of Uighurs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u2019s explosion and knives attack at the southern railway station in Xinjiang\u2019s capital Urumqi left at least three killed and 79 injured, according to China\u2019s state media.<\/p>\n
Explosives went off at 7:10 pm Wednesday, \u201ccentered around luggage left on the ground between the station exit and a public bus stop,\u201d the official Xinhua news agency said citing witnesses.<\/p>\n
Following the attack, Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on the Muslim minority, arresting dozens of them.<\/p>\n
Blaming no particular group, Xinhua agency described the attack as a \u201cviolent terrorist attack\u201d.<\/p>\n
Last March, a similar knife-wielding assault shocked China’s southwest Kunming city, leaving at least 33 people killed and more than 140 injured.<\/p>\n
Chinese authorities rushed to blame Xinjiang people for the attacks amid Uighur Muslims\u2019 condemnations of the deadly attack.<\/p>\n
The spokesman of the World Uyghur Congress argued that the situation remained volatile, as \u201cany Chinese provocation would directly incite further turbulence\u201d.<\/p>\n
More than 100 Uighurs were arrested in the wake of Urumqi attacks, Raxit claimed.<\/p>\n
In October 2013, the government has accused Uighur Muslims of plotting Tiananmen Square attacks that left two killed.<\/p>\n
Uighur Muslims have dismissed China’s account of a Tiananmen Square \u201cterrorist attack\u201d as a dubious pretext for repression, amid signs of stepped-up security.<\/p>\n
‘Decisive actions’<\/strong><\/p>\n Wednesday’s attacks coincided with President Xi Jinping four-day visit to the resistive China’s far west.<\/p>\n During his inspection tour, Xi has called for crackdown on the area, urging \u201cdecisive actions\u201d against \u201cterrorist\u201d attacks in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n \u201cThe battle to combat violence and terrorism will not allow even a moment of slackness, and decisive actions must be taken to resolutely suppress the terrorists’ rampant momentum,\u201d Xi said in comments published early Thursday by Xinhua.<\/p>\n Touring a police station XI said: \u201cGrassroots police stations are our fists and daggers so we must manage the basic level work well, care for our policemen, and you should protect yourselves well.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI hope you can make excellent achievements in the future work of serving the people and maintaining social stability.\u201d<\/p>\n Analysts raised concerns over the soaring tension in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have seen attacks and problems in Urumqi before, but we haven’t seen anything on this scale in quite a while,\u201d Raffaello Pantucci, a senior research fellow with the military think-tank the Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the issue is that the problem [of attacks] in Xinjiang is getting worse,\u201d he said, adding that he believed incidents were becoming more professional and aimed at larger targets.<\/p>\n On the other hand, several social media users have criticized the Chinese authorities for failing to tackle terrorism.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) doesn’t improve people’s well-being and win support from the majority, then counter-terrorism is a mission impossible,\u201d a user of China’s Twitter-like microblog site Weibo posted.<\/p>\n Uighur Muslims are a Turkish-speaking minority of eight million in the northwestern Xinjiang region.<\/p>\n Xinjiang, which activists call East Turkestan, has been autonomous since 1955 but continues to be the subject of massive security crackdowns by Chinese authorities.<\/p>\n Rights groups accuse Chinese authorities of religious repression against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang in the name of counter terrorism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Condemning attacks as a dubious pretext for Muslims persecution, an international Uighur Muslim has condemned Wednesday\u2019s bomb attack in China\u2019s Xinjiang, accusing Beijing of escalating its crackdown on the Muslim minority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}