DDMA Headline Animator

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Death toll from China's ethnic riots hits 184

By WILLIAM FOREMAN and GILLIAN WONG, Associated Press Writers

URUMQI, China – China raised the death toll from riots in its Xinjiang region to 184, state media said Saturday, giving the first ethnic breakdown of the dead nearly a week after communal violence broke out in this far western city.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 137 of the victims belonged to the dominant Han ethnic group, 111 of them men. The rest included 45 men and one woman who were Uighurs, and one man of the Hui Muslim ethnic group, the report said, citing the information office of the regional government.

The previous death toll was 156. Xinhua gave no details on the newly reported deaths, including whether any were from Tuesday, when Han men seeking revenge for the original Uighur-led protest that turned violent marched through the streets with clubs and cleavers, trying to push past police guarding minority neighborhoods.

On Saturday, paramilitary police carrying automatic weapons and riot shields blocked some roads leading to the largely Muslim Uighur district of the city, and groups of 30 marched along the road chanting slogans encouraging ethnic unity.

Some shops were still closed, and a police van blared public announcements in the Uighur language urging residents to oppose activist Rebiya Kadeer, a 62-year-old Uighur businesswoman who lives in exile in the U.S., whom China says instigated the riots. She has denied it.

In an interview with AP Television News on Friday, Kadeer said China's death tolls at the time greatly understated the number of Uighurs killed.

Turkey's prime minister on Friday compared the violence to genocide. Uighurs share ethnic and cultural bonds with Turks, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's strong words came amid daily protests in Turkey. Hundreds of Turks prayed for the victims and set Chinese flags on fire in Ankara and Istanbul.

"These incidents in China are as if they are genocide," said Erdogan. "We ask the Chinese government not to remain a spectator to these incidents. There is clearly a savagery here."

Protests continued Friday after a Muslim woman began complaining that the public washrooms were closed at a crowded mosque — the most important day of the week for Islamic worship. Muslims perform required ablutions, or washing, before prayer.

When a group gathered around her on the sidewalk, Madina Ahtam then railed against communist rule in Xinjiang.

The 26-year-old businesswoman eventually led the crowd of mostly men in a fist-pumping street march that was quickly blocked by riot police, some with automatic rifles pointed at the protesters.

Women have been on the front-line in Urumqi partly because more than 1,400 men in the Muslim Uighur minority have been rounded up by police since ethnic rioting broke out July 5. As the communist government launches a sweeping security crackdown, the women have faced down troops, led protests and risked arrest by speaking out against police tactics they believe are excessive.

The violence came as the Uighurs were protesting the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers in a brawl in southern China. The crowd then scattered throughout Urumqi, attacking Han Chinese, burning cars and smashing windows.

Many Uighurs who are still free live in fear of being arrested for any act of dissent.

Thousands of Chinese troops have flooded into Urumqi to separate the feuding ethnic groups, and a senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting.

A report in the Urumqi Evening News on Friday said police caught 190 suspects in four raids the day before.

The government believes the Uighurs should be grateful for Xinjiang's rapid economic development, which has brought new schools, highways, airports, railways, natural gas fields and oil wells in the sprawling, rugged Central Asian region, three times the size of Texas.

But many of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, with a population of 9 million in Xinjiang, accuse the dominant Han ethnic group of discriminating against them and saving all the best jobs for themselves. Many also say the Communist Party is repressive and tries to snuff out their Islamic faith, language and culture.

Obama admin: No grounds to probe Afghan war crimes

By LARA JAKES, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Obama administration officials said Friday they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who human rights groups allege were killed by U.S.-backed forces.

The mass deaths were brought up anew Friday in a report by The New York Times on its Web site. It quoted government and human rights officials accusing the Bush administration of failing to investigate the executions of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of prisoners.

U.S. officials said Friday they did not have legal grounds to investigate the deaths because only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country.

The Times cited U.S. military and CIA ties to Afghan Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom human rights groups accuse of ordering the killings. The newspaper said the Defense Department and FBI never fully investigated the incident.

Asked about the report, Marine Corps Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said that since U.S. military forces were not involved in the killings, there is nothing the Defense Department could investigate.

"There is no indication that U.S. military forces were there, or involved, or had any knowledge of this," Lapan said. "So there was not a full investigation conducted because there was no evidence that there was anything from a DoD (Department of Defense) perspective to investigate."

A Justice Department official said the FBI had no jurisdiction to investigate. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Separately, Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller declined to comment.

A spokesman for former President George W. Bush did not have an immediate comment Friday night.

Reacting to the Times' report, human rights group Physicians for Human Rights called for the Justice Department to begin a criminal investigation into whether the Bush administration blocked inquiries into the Taliban deaths.

"For U.S. government officials to claim that there is no legal basis to investigate this well-documented mass atrocity is absurd," said the groups deputy director, Susannah Sirkin.

The allegations date back to November 2001, when as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners died in transit after surrendering during one of the regime's last stands, according to a State Department report from 2002.

Witnesses have claimed that forces with the U.S.-allied Northern Alliance placed the prisoners in sealed cargo containers over the two-day voyage to Sheberghan Prison, suffocating them and then burying them en masse using bulldozers to move the bodies, according to the State Department report. Some Northern Alliance soldiers have said that some of their troops opened fire on the containers, killing those within.

Dostum, the Northern Alliance general who is accused of overseeing the atrocities, has previously denied the allegations.

A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.

Dostum was suspended from his military post last year on suspicion of threatening a political rival, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently rehired him, the Times reported.