As China tells it, police burst into the Happiness Garden apartments in Urumqi in a deadly raid that saved the Beijing Olympics from a terrorist attack.
But that’s news to residents of the quiet middle-class compound in the Xinjiang region.
“No, no, no. There was nothing like that. That’s nonsense,” said a local resident, a member of the Muslim ethnic Uighur minority, when asked about the dramatic official version of the Jan. 27 raid.
The man was one of more than a dozen residents to question Chinese reports that Beijing said proved a terror threat in vast, heavily Muslim Xinjiang.
According to the official accounts that emerged last month, police raided a fourth-floor flat where “terrorists” were holed up.
In an ensuing clash described by state-controlled press and Xinjiang’s top Chinese Communist Party official Wang Lequan (王樂泉), militants threw grenades at police, injuring seven officers.
Eventually, two militants were killed and another 15 captured.
Weapons, explosives and militant Islamic literature were allegedly seized in the raid, which made world headlines for its implications on Olympic security.
Strangely, however, it went largely unnoticed at Happiness Garden, whose apartments are so tightly packed it would be difficult to keep anything from the neighbors.
The Uighur resident said he watched a van pull up, from which several men in plain clothes emerged, later escorting two people from the building into the van.
There was no gunfire or explosions, he said.
His account was backed by at least one other resident, an ethnic Han Chinese woman. More than a dozen neighbors who were eager to discuss the case said they heard and saw nothing.
“It’s very quiet here. Everybody would have heard something like that,” the Chinese woman said.
China has released only bare details of the raid — and of separate allegations of a failed attempt by a Uighur woman to blow up a Chinese airliner flying from Urumqi to Beijing on March 7.
Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer last month called both plots fabrications.
“The real goal of the Chinese government is to organize a terrorist attack so that it can increase its crackdown on the Uighur people,” said Kadeer, 61, the head of the Uyghur American Association, now in the US after serving a jail term in China.
Uighurs, a central Asian, Turkic language-speaking people, have long bridled under nearly six decades of Chinese rule.
Nicolas Bequelin, a China researcher with Human Rights Watch, said he doubted Xinjiang authorities would completely fabricate a terror cell, but added there was pressure from Beijing for local results on terrorism with the August Olympics approaching.
“Certainly the government is keen to emphasize the terror risk in Xinjiang and paint everything with the same brush. Criminal activity is often crudely conflated with terrorism,” he said. “China has muddied the waters on this so much that it is impossible to know the truth.”
Also See: EDITORIAL:Beijing’s other crackdowns
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS