6 theSun | MONDAY JULY 13 2009

news without borders

URUMQI (China): Soldiers main-

Urumqi tense one week

The government has not said if
tained firm control of China’s Urumqi anyone died in clashes after the initial
city yesterday, one week after unrest July 5 unrest.
between Muslim Uighurs and Han The People’s Square in central
Chinese left more than 180 people Urumqi that has been a magnet for
dead. protesters from both sides remained
An explosion yesterday morning closed yesterday, with riot police sur-

after deadly unrest

at a factory belonging to China’s big-
gest energy producer on the outskirts
of the city raised tensions but the
company quickly said there was no
foul play involved.
“We have ruled out terrorism,”
said Liu Jiyuan, the vice manager of
the China National Petroleum Corpo-
ration plant at the factory.
An earlier company statement said
the fire had been quickly extinguished
and there were no casualties, and that
“human causes” had been ruled as a
reason for the blast.
It said the company was still in-
vestigating the exact reason for the
explosion.
Meanwhile, many businesses had
re-opened in Urumqi, but the mood
among both Uighurs and Han, China’s
dominant ethnic group, remained one
of deep distrust.
“No, no, no. It’s still dangerous,”
said a Han supermarket owner sur-
named Lin when asked if he would
venture into the Uighur district of the
city of 2.3 million people.
“I had friends who went there
yesterday who were threatened by
Uighurs and they had to run out of
there.”
The government said 184 people
died in Urumqi and more than 1,000
others were injured when protests by
Uighurs on July 5 turned violent.
Xinjiang’s eight million Uighurs
have long complained about repres-
sive Chinese rule, grievances the
government says are baseless.
Uighurs attacked Han Chinese
during the July 5 unrest and destroyed
their shops, according to victims and
witnesses AFP spoke with here, as
well as footage broadcast by China’s
state-run television.
However, exiled Uighur leaders
Chinese paramilitary police patrol on a street in the Uighur district of Urumqi in China’s Xinjiang region.
countered that yesterday’s protests
were peaceful until security forces
over-reacted with deadly force, and
that further deaths have occurred
across all across Xinjiang since then.
Han Chinese took to the streets of
Urumqi early in the week wielding
machetes, poles, chains and other
makeshift weapons vowing venge-
ance against the Uighurs.
AFP witnessed Han Chinese mobs
assaulting two Uighurs in separate
attacks, and Uighurs alleged many
other beatings took place, despite a
huge security presence.
rounding it.
Security forces – some armed with
batons and others with guns – have
also continued to patrol Urumqi’s
streets.
Fear and distrust persists on both
sides of the ethnic divide.
“We are also scared. We don’t want
to go to the train station or other areas
where there are a lot of Han,” said a
college-educated Uighur man who
did not want his named published.
“It’s going to be pretty tense for
a while. I think you are going to see
people spending more time indoors
watching TV.”
Residents in other cities and towns
across Xinjiang, a sparsely populated
region of deserts and mountains that
makes up a sixth of China’s territory,
also reported intense security and a
sense of trepidation yesterday.
“There are more policemen
patrolling the streets. The shops are
closing maybe one or two hours
earlier than normal,” a Han Chinese
shopowner in Kashgar told AFP by
telephone.
Foreign reporters have been
banned from reporting in Kashgar,
the famous Old Silk Road city, with
authorities citing safety concerns.
Kashgar has also seen deadly un-
rest in recent times, with two Uighur
men killing 17 policemen in August
last year just ahead of the Olympics.
The Xinhua news agency reported
police had quelled a protest by 200
“rioters” outside the main Id Kah
mosque in Kashgar on Monday.
Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya
Kadeer has said security forces may
have killed many people in Kashgar
over the past week, although Chinese
officials have denied this via the state-
run media. – AFP

Ragtag rebels vow to fight on in Myanmar

THAILAND/MYANMAR BORDER: They prowl
their jungle battleground in sneakers and have to
steal their weapons, but Myanmar’s ethnic Karen
rebels say they will never quit their struggle
against the junta.
The ragtag Karen National Liberation Army
(KNLA) has been fighting Myanmar’s military
government for 60 years – marking the country’s
eastern border as the stage for one of the world’s
longest running conflicts.
But a renewed crackdown by government
forces in early June caused 4,000 of the mainly
Christian Karen to flee to neighbouring Thailand,
the largest group of refugees to cross in more than
a decade, aid groups say.
The offensive comes as Myanmar’s generals
try to stamp out the last of the more than two
dozen ethnic uprisings that have riven the coun-
try since shortly after independence in time for
elections due next year.
Despite the overwhelming firepower against
them, the KNLA say they will not quit.
“We never give up,” said David Tharckabaw,
a former soldier with the KNLA and now a leader
of the political wing, the Karen National Union
(KNU), based in a secret location on the Thai-
Myanmar border.
“Yes, this is an asymmetric conflict, but overall
we can still carry on.”
In video footage AFP received from the Demo-
cratic Voice of Burma, a multimedia agency run
by Myanmar expatriates that uses the country’s
former name, KNLA soldiers are seen fighting in
rolled-up jeans and t-shirts.
A small guerilla group rearms their rocket-
propelled grenade launchers in the dense scrub
– Tharckabaw said most these weapons are
stolen from government forces in raids because
the KNLA obtains only sparse funds from logging
and by levying cross-border trade taxes.
“We are operating on a shoestring so we rely
heavily on guerilla tactics and we have to be
mobile and cause as many casualties as possible
on the enemy,” Tharckabaw told AFP.
“That’s through ambushes ... what we call
‘battle of annihilation’,” he said.
The struggling fighters are often forced to carry
a week’s worth of food, he said, as they attempt
to take advantage of their superior knowledge of
the tough terrain.
Some are based in their home villages while
others are in camps for people internally dis-
placed by the fighting, like one at Ler Per Her in
eastern Myanmar’s Karen state, where several
mortars fell last month as it became the focus of
the most recent offensive by the junta. – AFP

Aso’s job at risk underground by licking water

briefs
Italian hostage
freed in Philippines
MANILA: An Italian Red Cross
official held hostage by Muslim
rebels for nearly six months in
southern Philippines was freed
yesterday, saying the thought
of seeing his family again
kept him alive throughout his
captivity.
Eugenio Vagni, 61, was
abandoned by his captors at a
remote village in Jolo island early
yesterday and was fetched by
soldiers and Nur-Ana Sahidulla,
vice governor of Sulu province
in the south Philippines, the
military said.
He was taken to an army
base for a medical check up
and later flown to an air base in
Zamboanga, where colleagues
from the Red Cross were wait-
ing for him. – Reuters
after Tokyo vote
TOKYO: Moves to oust
unpopular Japanese Prime
Minister Taro Aso are likely
to intensify after media
projections showed his rul-
ing bloc lost its majority in
a Tokyo assembly election
yesterday seen as a bell-
wether for a national poll.
NHK TV said the opposi-
tion Democratic Party would
become the biggest party
in the Tokyo assembly, and
that Aso’s Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) and its junior part-
ner had lost their majority in
the local legislature.
A Democratic Party vic-
tory in the national poll, due
by October, would end half a
century of nearly unbroken
rule by the LDP. – Reuters.
Miners safe after 25
days underground
BEIJING: Three Chinese miners
survived for 25 days trapped
off the walls of their coal mine,
state media said yesterday. The
buried miners eventually caught
sight of a rescuer’s flashlight and
shouted, enabling searchers to
follow the sound to the pit where
they lay, CCTV said. The Xinqiao
mine, in southwestern China’s
Guizhou province, was flooded
on June 17. At least one miner’s
body was found on June 25, but
12 are still missing. – AFP
Honduras caretaker
govt lifts curfew
TEGUCIGALPA: The interim
government in Honduras
announced yesterday it had
lifted the overnight curfew
imposed since June 28 when
President Manuel Zelaya was
ousted in a military-backed
coup. “By virtue of having
reached the objectives of
this regulation, the govern-
ment announces that from
July 12, the curfew is lifted
across the entire country,” it
said in a statement.– AFP