CHINA SENTENCED six men to death and one to life imprisonment yesterday for murder, arson and robbery during an ethnic riot in Urumqi on July 5th that left almost 200 people dead.
The harsh verdicts for the seven members of the Muslim Uighur minority are part of a government attempt to calm tensions in the restive far-western region of Xinjiang by demonstrating that it is severely punishing the perpetrators of the riots.
Xinhua, the official news agency, reported the verdicts just hours after state media had reported the opening of the trials.
The verdicts follow a death sentence late last week handed out to a member of the Han ethnic majority for instigating an ethnic brawl in a factory in southern China in which two Uighur workers died. Most Uighurs in Urumqi cite that incident as the trigger for the July 5th riot.
Beyond the seven men convicted yesterday, the fate of hundreds officially arrested since the riots, and even more detained without information of their whereabouts, remains unclear.
“They have handpicked these men to send a message that they have caught the worst offenders and are punishing them harshly,” said Nicholas Bequelin, of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong.
Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress, told Reuters that the trial was a sham, adding that he feared that those charged after the riots had been tortured. “The whole process lacked transparency and was unfair,” he said. “They were not given any kind of legal aid. Uighurs have no protection under the law.”
Claims last month about alleged syringe attacks by Uighurs against Han Chinese sparked more unrest in Urumqi, this time among the Han ethnic majority, which blamed the government for failing to guarantee their safety. They took the rare step of publicly demanding the resignation of the region’s Communist Party chief. Authorities responded by firing the Urumqi party chief and maintaining heavy security measures and an information blackout.
The convicts can appeal against the sentences. The authorities did not say whether any of the death sentences would be commuted to life imprisonment, as sometimes happens in China. But human rights campaigners said this was unlikely because the crimes the men were convicted of did not meet the criteria that China normally follows when commuting or suspending death sentences.
– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)