World Uyghur Congress' Statement on July 5th Urumqi Incident

The World Uyghur Congress condemns in the strongest possible terms the brutal crackdown of a peaceful protest of young Uyghurs in Urumchi on Sunday, July 5th, by the Chinese security forces. According to Uyghur eyewitnesses, as many as 800 Uyghur peaceful protesters were killed and many more were injured by the Chinese security forces.

The peaceful protest began after 1,000 to 10,000 protesters - mostly students - went to the People's Square in central Urumqi at around 5:00PM on July 5. Hundreds of Chinese paramilitary police with shields, rifles and clubs were already in position and moved to disperse and arrest the protesters before they reached the People's Square, which indicates that the government has full knowledge about the upcoming protest as it was announced by some Uyghur students on the internet two days earlier. The main agenda of the Uyghur protesters is to show their disappointment at the government's handling of a mob attack on Uyghur workers a week earlier in Shaoguan city, Guangdong Province, in which 18 Uyghurs were killed and more than 300 were injured. The Uyghur protesters demanded a probe into the deadly fight in Shaoguan and wanted to get an answer why the police did not show up for hours to stop the Chinese attackers. The July 5 student protest started as a peaceful demonstration as several amateur videos posted on Youtube suggest (check the video links below). The student protesters were holding Chinese national flags in their hands at the time, and demanded justice for Uyghurs wounded and killed in Guangdong. They also protested against increased racial discrimination they face as Uyghurs across China. But, as before, the authorities did not choose to listen to the grievances of the students, and replied them with excessive forces instead. Paramilitary police initially used tear gas to disperse the student protesters but started to shoot at them when they refused to leave. According to several Uyghur eyewitnesses, paramilitary forces started to shoot at any protester on sight in the evening, chasing them around in alleyways, and killed estimated 800 young Uyghurs. However, the Chinese media showed yesterday only some wounded Chinese victims and scenes of Uyghurs' attacking on various vehicles, images that they carefully selected for the world and the Han Chinese audience to see, portraying Uyghurs as bad, troublemaking terrorists, a tactic that caused all this mess in the first place. They said 156 people died and 818 were wounded, but did not mention who they were and how they died or wounded. But the authorities are using all the means available to them to prevent the leakage of the facts on the ground to foreign or international reporters by disabling all of the internet and phone communications between the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the outside world. As the world already know, the Chinese government carefully crops out the news and images that it wants the world to see and hides the facts on the ground.

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