15 years of Urumqi Riots: Uyghur struggle against Chinese yoke refuses to die

The shocking killing of hundreds of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, on July 5, 2009, reminds the world community every year since then about the Chinese excesses against its citizens that have continued unabated. A Uyghur doctoral scholar (name withheld on request) described the Urumqi incident as a “massacre” and one of the darkest chapters in the history of Uyghurs that demonstrated China’s decades-long colonial policies against the Uyghurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang.

To mark the anniversary of the Urumqi massacre every year since 2010, Uyghur people and their organisations across the world have been peacefully demonstrating against the Chinese in addition to organising other political and cultural activities, he added. According to him, on this occasion, the Uyghurs across the globe honour and remember the Uyghurs who lost their lives in the Urumqi incident and the countless Uyghurs who continue to bear the Chinese wrath in Xinjiang. Restoring Xinjiang’s independence is the only way to ensure freedom, human rights, and the very existence of the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, he added.

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While expressing happiness that the Uyghurs have not given up their lawful struggle to be free from the Chinese yoke and to regain sovereignty, the scholar concluded that it is high time for the world to stand with the Uyghurs to uphold the principles of justice, freedom, and human dignity.

Four years after the Urumqi incident, in July 2013, this author visited the very place in Urumqi, where several Uyghurs had demonstrated against the Chinese atrocities after the news of harassment of a few Uyghur workers in Guangdong province broke out. It subsequently took an ugly turn when the Chinese security personnel resorted to strong and harsh tactics that led to the killing of nearly 160 and the wounding of thousands.

According to a local Uyghur guide, who was keeping a safe distance from me while walking on the streets of Urumqi’s downtown area for fear of being hounded out by the local police, the Chinese defence personnel were at their ruthless best while dealing with the Uyghur demonstrators after the July 5, 2009 incident. The incident evoked a strong response from the international community. Even the then-prime minister and present president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, went to the extent of dubbing it “genocide” and threatened China to raise this issue in the UN General Assembly.

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As many as 15 years after the Urumqi incident, the oppressive and suppressive policies of the Chinese government against Uyghurs and other minorities have yet to stop. In the post-5 July 2009 period, the Chinese emphasised taking stern action (against Uyghurs), surveillance, and securitisation in Urumqi city, which later spread all across Xinjiang. For example, by the first anniversary of this incident (5 July 2010), as one Uyghur told this author, the Chinese authorities had installed over 30,000 close-circuit cameras in Urumqi city alone to step up surveillance over Uyghurs. Since then, anything on earth in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has come under surveillance.

The most important phase of the state-sponsored military campaign (Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure), which began in the mid-1990s after a series of violent attacks in and around Xinjiang, had stepped up following China joining the US-led Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in 2001 as one of the first countries. China cashed in on this golden opportunity and played the victim-of-terrorism card. This phase of the Strike Hard campaign was undertaken by the Chinese authorities with a missionary zeal to stamp out the three evil forces: separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism.

In this process, the Uyghurs and Tibetans suffered the most. The Chinese government gave the pretext of the country’s endangered national unity, territorial integrity, and shattered security following back-to-back incidents—the Tibetan uprising (March 2008) and the Urumqi riots (July 2009)—to launch the next phase of the Strike Hard campaign.

During the Xi Jinping era, Chinese government measures against the Uyghurs underwent a radical change. For example, in 2016, Chen Quanquo, Xi’s partner in crimes against minorities (Uyghurs and Tibetans), unleashed a reign of terror in Xinjiang after completing the Sinicisation task in Tibet. In a piece published in 2022, this author summarised how Chen, the most trusted lieutenant of the President of China (Xi Jinping), undertook “grid-style social management”, a technology-intensive approach to urban governance and intelligence-led policing (as seen in cities in China’s eastern part since the mid-to-late 2000s), and the establishment of some 7,500 “convenience police stations (gangpeng)” in early 2017 to inspect and monitor the wireless and digital activities of the Uyghurs.

A systematic process of digital securitisation was launched in Xinjiang through a surveillance network using facial recognition, the collection of citizens’ biometric data, GPS tracking of private vehicles, and installing spyware in the smartphones of Uyghurs.

Even though the Chinese have had an upper hand while dealing with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, perhaps the biggest gain the Uyghurs have achieved is a new form of nationalism among them in Xinjiang and worldwide. Now the Uyghurs’ plight has reached every nook and cranny of the world. Particularly since the news of the incarceration of millions of Uyghurs in the so-called re-education camps has aired through different sources of media, various governments, international agencies such as the UN, think tanks, human rights organisations, individual scholars and academics, freelancers, media professionals, etc have expressed serious concerns about the basic human rights of the Uyghurs.

Not only reams of materials are published, both online and offline, but also various programmes are organised to educate the world community about the barbaric acts of Chinese governments against their citizens, be they Uyghurs or Tibetans. Even these heinous Chinese acts are taken up on many international platforms. The US government, for instance, brought the Uyghur Act, otherwise known as the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. China may have succeeded in mobilising international opinion in its favour as far as the Uyghur issue is concerned, but it should not forget that one day it will reap the consequences for its follies.

Dr Mahesh Ranjan Debata teaches at the Centre for Inner Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.