As Soon As People With Guns Start Talking About Extermination, You Know There's A Serious Problem

Gun nuts will be in ecstasy when they read about civil unrest in western China's Xinjiang Province. The freedom fighters only had knives, axes and swords and were slaughtered by the governmental oppressors with automatic rifles. Many local Muslims want their own country but virtually all local Muslims don't want Beijing interfering with their faith. So they butchered 35 Han Chinese civilians with their knives and swords and then killed two Muslim Uighurs who collaborate with the Chinese as well as a prominent pro-government imam at a major mosque in the old Silk Road city of Kashgar.

This must be important because yesterday even the NY Times was reporting it. "It was a bloody week in China’s far west," the report, "with nearly 100 people killed in unrest that the authorities have characterized as terrorism but that Uighur advocacy groups have said is a consequence of a sweeping security crackdown aimed at silencing opposition to the government’s hard-line policies in the region."

The outbreak of violence in Xinjiang amid an overwhelming show of security appears to be the worst since 2009, when at least 200 people died during several days of ethnic rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi.

The state-run media on Sunday provided new details of the most serious episode, a clash on July 28 in Yarkand County, saying that 35 ethnic Han Chinese were killed and that 59 people described as terrorists were shot dead by the police.

The report, published by Tianshan, a news portal run by the Xinjiang regional government, said two Uighurs were also killed during what it described as a rampage by masked, knife-wielding assailants who attacked cars and passers-by in Yarkand, a predominantly Uighur municipality that sits astride the ancient Silk Road that once connected China to Central Asia and beyond.

In a separate episode, security forces in the nearby city of Hotan killed nine “terrorists” on July 27, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

It is unclear why the authorities waited nearly a week to disclose details of the confrontations in Hotan and Yarkand. The police have barred foreign journalists from the area, making it difficult to assess the government’s version of events.

Critics say that bloodshed, which included the assassination of a prominent Muslim cleric on Wednesday in the city of Kashgar, suggests that Beijing’s high-profile campaign to contain violence in the region may be aggravating tensions among the region’s Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority, some of whom complain of discrimination and restrictions on Islamic religious practices.

On Saturday, the region’s top Communist Party leaders convened a special meeting during which officials vowed to continue their yearlong security campaign, begun in May, that seeks to root out Islamic extremists who have been cast as the primary enemy of ethnic unity in Xinjiang.

During the meeting, Zhang Chunxian, the party secretary of Xinjiang, employed provocative language, vowing to “exterminate” what he said was a “savage and evil” army of separatists who the government contends are influenced, and in some cases directed, by overseas extremists. “We have to hit hard, hit accurately and hit with awe-inspiring force,” Tianshan quoted Mr. Zhang as saying. “To fight such evils we must aim at extermination; to cut weeds we must dig out the roots.”

The campaign includes a new identification card that Uighurs say restricts their ability to move freely through the region, and policies that discourage women from wearing veils.

Uighur exile groups have disputed Beijing’s version of the recent unrest, saying the government exaggerates the role of outside instigators and ignores the underlying issues that are fueling Uighur discontent. “China is distorting the real situation of the Uighur struggle,” Dilshat Rexit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress in Germany, said in an email. “This so-called charge of terrorism is a way for the government to avoid taking responsibility for the use of excessive force that causes so many casualties.”

So far, not even McCain, Graham and Ayotte have called for arming the Uighurs-- at least not publicly.