On China Beat, Liang Zheng asks whether Islamic fundamentalism may have played in the violent riots in July in Urumqi and points to the fact that many of the rioters appear to have been Uighurs from outside Urumqi:
July 5th shocked Urumqi, the most prosperous city in Central Asia. Organized riots broke out at the same time in 50 different places across the city, according to the Chinese police emergency 110. Local residents, who live in apartment buildings along the streets, recorded those bloody moments with their cell phones and cameras. Those images and videos have yet to make it to the world simply because all communications with the outside have been cut off since the riot, especially the Internet. Those who have witnessed violence or watched the video clips taken by surveillance/personal cameras are seriously traumatized and some had to seek counseling to get to sleep. People have to ask who could actually commit such horrific crimes.
One Uyghur interviewee on television suggested that people on the street that day sounded different because they spoke Uyghur with the accents of southern Xinjiang. This suggestion is confirmed by many of my Uyghur friends, who believe that the Uyghurs of Urumqi could never have committed acts like decapitation, throwing pregnant women off overpasses, or setting innocent people on fire, because the Uyghur and Han of Urumqi had lived together peacefully for decades. Another Uyghur interviewee told a reporter that rioters not only beat up and killed Han Chinese, they also behaved in a way that suggests their fundamentalist beliefs when they roughed up Uyghur women merely because those women were wearing skirts and sleeveless shirts.
