Tania Branigan in Urumqi
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 July 2009 05.42 BST
Article history
Uighur people take to the streets in Urumqi. Photograph: Guang Niu/Getty Images
Chinese armed police and Uighurs clashed in extraordinary scenes in the capital of the north-western region of Xinjiang this morning – two days after at least 156 people were killed in vicious ethnic violence.
Uighur residents erupted into protests during an official media tour of the riot zone in the face of hundreds of officers. Thousands of riot and armed paramilitary police have flooded the southern part of the capital.
Women in the market place burst into wailing and chanting as foreign reporters arrived, complaining that police had taken away Uighur men. Authorities have arrested 1,434 people in connection with Sunday's unrest.
"The policemen took away my husband last night. I don't know why and I don't know where he is," said Abdurajit.
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China protests: 'It's a huge wave of violence' Link to this audio
"Mine was taken too. They still have him," broke in another woman.
As they streamed out on to the main street, the crowd swelled to about 200, with Uighur men and more women joining them, shouting and waving their fists.
And then a single old woman, propped on a crutch, forced armoured personnel carriers and massed paramilitary ranks into a slow – if temporary – retreat.
No one noticed her at first. She emerged from the crowd and moved slowly down the street.
A Uighur police officer came forward to escort her away. She could not be persuaded.
As older residents stepped forward and attempted to calm the crowd, she advanced steadily towards the line of armoured vehicles. She halted inches in front of one. The driver started its engine.
For a long moment they faced each other.
Then the carrier slowly began to roll backwards and the line of officers inched away, back down the road.
She walked forward. They inched back. She continued while the officer pleaded with her to step away.
Suddenly, he turned to me and grabbed my notebook, ripped out a page and scribbled a note for her; apparently his name and identity number. He thrust it at her. Reluctantly, she agreed to leave.
For now, it seemed, tensions had ebbed in this riven city.
Earlier, the Guardian watched as the crowd surrounded a police van and smashed the windscreen. A woman thrust photographs of her family at a helmeted officer, screaming at him to look at them, but the mood soon turned nasty and hands in the crowd reached out to hit and punch him. He had to be pulled out by fellow officers.
Suddenly, the massed might of the Chinese authorities looked very much like one scared and vulnerable man – like many of the young officers stationed around the city.
As the crowd grew, paramilitaries began to move down the street and push them back. Officers lashed out with batons and shields, but were restrained by their superiors.
Then the old woman stepped forward. By the time she turned aside, about 30 minutes after the protests burst out, numbers had dwindled to just a few dozen, sandwiched between the paramilitaries and a second line of armed riot police who had emerged behind them.
Officials attempted to remove reporters – telling them that it was not safe and did not fit in with media arrangements – as the stand-off continued.
"You see old women and children now. But on Sunday night it was men – you should go to the hospital and see the victims," said one.
Most of those injured on Sunday night appear to have been Han Chinese, although Uighurs and other ethnic minorities were also injured and a full breakdown of casualties is not yet available. Witnesses described brutal, apparently random attacks on Han people.
Uighur Muslims make up almost half of the population of Xinjiang – an area three times the size of France. Many resent controls on their religion and growing Han immigration and accuse the government of eroding their culture. The region has seen sporadic eruptions of violence, but the scale of this weekend's mass killings staggered everyone.
The Guardian and other media left today's confrontation only when protesters had left the road, a few at a time, returning to the market area.
Before the confrontation, many residents in the mainly Uighur area had been reluctant to talk about what happened on Sunday night.
"Not too clear," or "I'm not really sure," several said.
But one young Uighur man said it began because Uighur men were killed in mass violence at a factory in Guangdong last month and said there were other resentments.
"People just wanted to protest peacefully," he said.
"The Chinese want to keep us down. They will not let us have our own country."
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