China Executes 9 Over Ethnic Riots

November 10, 2009

China Executes 9 Over Ethnic Riots

By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Nine people have been executed for taking part in ethnic rioting that convulsed a western regional capital in July and left nearly 200 people dead, a state news agency reported Monday.

The report by the China News Service did not give any further details of the executions, except to say that the cases had all been reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court, a legally mandated step in death penalty cases in China. The report did not say when the executions occurred.

The ethnicity of those executed was unclear. The report simply called them “criminals.” The rioting that broke out in the regional capital of Urumqi on July 5 was largely carried out by Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who mostly follow Sunni Islam and who are the biggest ethnic group in the vast Central Asian border region of Xinjiang. Many Uighurs resent what they call discrimination by Han, the dominant ethnicity in China; the Chinese government says that most of the 197 people killed and 1,600 people injured on July 5 were Han.

The rioting was the deadliest ethnic clash in China in decades, and brought into question the viability of China’s policies toward the Uighurs in Xinjiang. The Chinese government blamed Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur exile and former businesswoman living in a suburb of Washington, for the violence. Officials said Ms. Kadeer had urged Uighurs to take action, but Ms. Kadeer has denied the accusations.

Uighur exile groups say the Chinese government has underreported the number of Uighurs killed on July 5 and in the days afterward, when Han vigilantes took to the streets armed with sticks and knives to seek revenge.

In October, officials announced that 12 convicts had been sentenced to death in several separate trials. Three of the convicts had their sentences suspended for two years. Of the 12, all except one had Uighur names; the exception was a man with a Han name.

An appeals court in Urumqi announced on Oct. 30 that it had upheld the 9 immediate death sentences and the prison sentences of 12 other convicts. The death sentences were then to be reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court, the government said.

The news on Monday of the nine executions was buried at the end of the China News Service report, which led with an announcement that 20 more people had been indicted in a case that involved the deaths of 18 people, the injuries of 3 others and property damage amounting to 2.65 million renminbi, or nearly $400,000.

On Nov. 3, a Xinjiang newspaper announced that the local authorities had started a new “strike hard and punish” campaign to root out rioters and other so-called terrorist elements. The region has gone through cycles of “strike hard” campaigns, all carried out under the watch of Wang Lequan, the top-ranking official of the Communist Party in Xinjiang and a member of the elite Politburo. Mr. Wang is considered a hard-liner on ethnic minority policy and has ruled Xinjiang for more than 15 years, an unusually long tenure for the head of a region or province.

Human rights advocates have criticized the government’s handling of the aftermath of the rioting. In late October, Human Rights Watch released a report that said 43 Uighur men had disappeared after being seized by security forces. The number was probably higher, the report said, but investigators for Human Rights Watch could conclusively document only 43 cases while working secretly in the region. The cases were “serious violations of international human rights law,” the report said.

The rounding up of hundreds of men in Xinjiang and the recent executions there followed the pattern set by the government after ethnic rioting and protests by Tibetans in the spring of 2008. Tibetan exile groups said four Tibetans were executed on Oct. 20 in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, for their roles in the Tibetan uprising. The government says at least 19 people were killed during the outbreak of violence in Lhasa, most of them ethnic Han.

Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.