China: Three children killed in the fight against terrorism

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has demanded an independent investigation into police operations in north-west China that cost the lives of three children. Chinese state news agency ‘Xinhua’ reported on Friday that a total of 28 members of a ‘terrorist group’ were killed by security forces in Xinjiang. ‘The fight against terrorism cannot justify security forces wiping out whole families,’ explained STP Asia consultant Hanno Schedler in Göttingen on Friday. „Declaring young children terrorists, and murdering them, is unacceptable.“

According to the Uyghur service of Radio Free Asia, three Uyghur families with 17 members, among whom were four women and three children, were blown up by Chinese police on November 12th. The explosion took place in a cave where the families had been hiding from security forces. The Chinese media claimed that all victims were killed during an exchange of fire with police. The victims are claimed to have belonged to an ‘extremist group’ controlled from abroad.

The incident occurred during a manhunt for men armed with knives that had killed eleven civilians and five police officers, and left 18 injured, in an attack on a coal mine in the Aksu Prefecture in Xinjiang province on September 18th 2015. The subsequent search for the suspected perpetrators was completed on November 12th, according to Xinhua. Only one member of this group surrendered to security forces.

The STP criticizes the Chinese government for tarring the Uyghur people’s religion, history and culture with the brush of ‘extremism and terrorism’. The regime uses terrorist attacks in other parts of the world to portray their persecution of Uyghur dissidents and human rights activists as part of a ‘fight against terror’. „It is to be feared that the Communist Party could use the attacks in Paris on November 13th 2015 to initiate a crack-down on unwanted persons, explained away as ’anti-terrorism’ actions. The ongoing tensions between the Uyghur and the Han Chinese can only be improved by the Chinese government finally relinquishing its censorship. The people in Xinjiang should know what really happened in the mine attack on September 18th and the subsequent manhunt.“

Header Photo: Le Priz via Flickr