More than 450 people were killed in China’s restive mainly Muslim Xinjiang region last year, a rights group said — with three times as many deaths among members of the Uighur minority than ethnic Han Chinese.
Xinjiang has seen a wave of unrest, labeled by authorities as “terrorism” and blamed on “separatists,” which has sometimes spread to other parts of China.
Information in the area is strictly controlled by authorities, and the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) used data from Chinese and overseas media reports for its analysis, giving ranges for most of its figures.
Between 457 and 478 people died last year, it said, adding it had been able to identify between 235 and 240 as Uighur and between 80 and 86 as Han, China’s ethnic majority.
The total was more than double that for 2013, when it put deaths between 199 and 237, specifying between 116 and 151 as Uighur and between 32 and 38 as Han.
The rising toll highlights the “excessive force” used by China and a “deterioration in the security environment” since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took office two years ago, the report said.
The findings were “alarming in a number of aspects,” project director Alim Seytoff said.
“It tells us that China’s crackdown on Uighurs is only exacerbating the violence ... and killing more Uighurs,” he said.
The report did not include incidents outside Xinjiang, such as a mass stabbing at a railway station in Kunming in March last year, when 31 people were killed and four attackers died.
Chinese authorities usually differentiate between state personnel, civilian victims and attackers in their statements.
The report found that over the two-year period, more alleged assailants — between 229 and 333 — were killed than official employees (between 53 and 108) and civilians (between 125 and 194) combined.
“In a troubling number of incidents police killed all alleged ‘perpetrators,’” the project said in a statement late on Tuesday. “The possibility exists that excessive force and extrajudicial killings are a feature of the Chinese state’s security approach to incidents.”
Almost half the Xinjiang deaths over the two-year period — 327 — were in Kashgar, the report said, with Shache, or Yarkand in the Uighur language, accounting for 199.
The next most violent prefectures were Aksu, with 79 fatalities, and Hotan, at 76. All three are in southeastern Xinjiang, where Uighurs are concentrated.
It was likely the number of fatalities “will never be known due to the lack of transparency the Chinese authorities employ when reporting violent incidents,” the report said.
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