Tursun Gul, a local Uighur woman on a crutch, shouts at Chinese armored personnel carriers and soldiers wearing riot gear as a crowd of angry locals confront security forces on a street in the city of Urumqi on July 7, 2009. Click on the image to access more pictures. Warning, some photos are shocking.

I found a testimony on a blog on Le Monde.fr, a French newspaper. Here is an excerpt.

I was in Urumqi on July 5th. The demonstration started at 5 pm. It had been announced on the web the day before. That was mainly students who were asking for justice after what had happened on June 26th at Shaogan. Rebiya Kadeer has nothing to do with that. Around 5 pm we started to gather on the People’s square, in front of the prefecture, with black t-shirts to show our message. I was with my girlfriend. We were around 200, 300 people, mostly students. Then some more came to support us. Ultimately we were more than 3000. Among us were even some Uyghurs officials working for the government.

Please follow the story here.

The Chinese propaganda goes “Develop the West for a harmonious society” or something like that. Part of this go west policy is to create an incentive for Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang…

Well we saw last Sunday that the Harmonious Society we hear about went to hell! From what I understood there was a group of Uighur student who were demonstrating. The police started insulting them, and then the mayhem started.

From the news about 150 people died. I have no idea what these number means, as what the state media’s truth is often quite different from otherpeople’s view on things… What I know is that a friend staying at the same hostel in Urumqi got stucked in the bazar on sunday night. (I was lucky enough to have left the place about 30min before the beginning of it all). This guy got almost killed and saw someone ’s skull being smashed open with the sharp edge of a shovel. Brain splashing everywhere.

Another friend was passing through the bazar by car on monday morning and saw piles of bodies on the street. I went on the afternoon and everything had been cleared. It seems to me that mostly Han Chinese died but I know from the guy who got stucked in the bazar that the Uighurs with him were just as terrified. So who knows. Of course the Chinese media shows only Han victims with a sad\romantic music in the background.

But then things started to become really messed up. On tuesday afternoon I went back to the bazar to try to get some eye witnessess’ stories with 2 friends of mine. We had barely finished our luch that people started running everywhere, so we ran also. 200m away was a big Hotel which staffs were telling us to get in and take refuge. In the same time tanks and special police forces were pouring in the bazar. We were sent to the roof, where about 20 people were already hiding. As I step on the roof everybody yell at me to seat down because my head was exposed to gun fire. And gun shots actually started just as I was seating… One of the most intense instent of my life. 

But as I was climbing up the stairs for the roof I had time to glimpse through the window and I saw hords of Han Chinese rushing to the heart of the Bazar with sticks, machete, shovels, baseball bats, and all kind of strange weapons. I even saw a saw (the big ones to cut trees…). They were passing in front of some army guys who just stood watching them going to war.

But I really got disgusted when I finally made it back down town some hours later. There the streets were crowded with Han Chinese walking around with huge sticks, making jokes between friends on who would be killing the most Uighurs. Some were organizing themselves in packs, yelling slogans such as “Xinjiang is Ours!, Xinjiang is China!”, brandishing Chinese flags, trying to get by the army who was preventing them to get to the bazar (area where almost all the Uighurs left in Urumqi live).

I really can’t see how Xinjiang will ever be harmonious, unless no more Uighur live there.

Bezeklik Caves around Turpan

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Recently I have excelled at being the good tourist! First this camel tour in sand dunes, and now a whole day in a tourist car going from different spots all day long (and ending up skipping half of them because they were tourist traps, expensive ones!). I arrived in Turpan, or Turfan, or Tulufan again, depending which map you are reading, on Wednesday the 1st of July. A historic date.

First impression: “The Great Disappointment”. The magic of Turpan, which is supposed to be the hottest place in China (and maybe on earth; after all China is ‘The Middle Kingdom’, so fuck the rest of the world), was diluted in an awful rain and sand storm alltogether. On top of it the city itself is quite ugly. OK maybe ‘ugly’ is a strong word, but I assume it. Really not nice, and worsen by the fact that big tourist buses are touring all over the place.

Yet I got to meet my first Uighur, and that was cool. I also got my first real nan bread with lamb kebab from Xinjiang: brilliant!

Apart from that the small villages surrounding Turpan are quite nice to go through, and I guess that’s how Turpan used to look like:
small canals with a refreshing water, grape trees used as roof in every houses, big beds outside people’s places for relaxing sport all day long in the nice shade… I really liked it! So hopefully as my journey goes on I will get to see some less touristy places which have kept their Uighurness…

Also impressive was the ruins of Jiahe, a town of 6500 inhabitans 2000 years old… They really had a nice life here, with the oasis-like valley on the town’s feet, and the irrigation Karez system. And they were Buddhist! There is a temple with some remnants of Buddha statues… That of course was before the invasion around 1000A.D from Central Asian people who were already converted to Islam. What a fascinating area! And you can still see the mix of Buddhism and Islam everywhere, as even some Buddhists paintings have typical persian images…

So that was for the cultural moment of the day. But as everything else, small quantity is always best, so I became bored of it and hated the end of my tour in Turpan…