The ancient city of Kashgar, commercial crossroads of the medieval Silk Road and home to the world's largest and most exotic Sunday market, seems an unlikely site for a terrorist atrocity. The western-most city in China, cut off from the rest of the country by the sand dunes of the Taklamakan desert, could scarcely be further from the politics and propaganda of theOlympics in Beijing.
It is a Uighur city, whose inhabitants speak a Turkic language and are overwhelmingly Muslim. Yet this is where the Chinese say that two suspected terrorists - a taxi-driver and a vegetable-seller - rammed a garbage truck into a column of border police on Monday morning, then threw home-made grenades and attacked them with knives, leaving 16 dead and as many wounded. Many questions remain about the attack. Chinese officials blame a terrorist group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, supposedly campaigning for independence of the Xinjiang province, home to China's Uighur minority. ETIM is said to have links to Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But in the city itself, few Uighurs seem to recognise the name.
By the time any independent journalists arrived at the scene, a few hours after the attack, it had been cleaned up, leaving only a couple of missing trees beside the avenue where the truck was said to have crashed. It hardly looked like the scene of a mass killing. Yet behind its atmosphere of provincial lethargy, there is tension in Kashgar.
Overlaid
Today the ancient character of the city is becoming increasingly overlaid with the bright modern brashness of China, as assertive Han Chinese businessmen open bright chrome- and glass-fronted stores in new shopping malls, selling mobile phones and cheap western-style clothes, leaving their Uighur rivals to sell meat and vegetables, carpets and spices in the old bazaars. Most Uighur residents seem resigned to their role as a second-class ethnic minority on the fringes of the mightyChinese empire.
But there is a more outspoken younger generation that blames a deliberate policy by Beijing to settle the region with Han Chinese and gradually undermine Uighur culture.
"We suffer more than the Tibetans but we have no organisation and no leaders," said one Uighur teacher, who was only prepared to speak anonymously. "We have no Dalai Lama to tell the world about us."
Heavy investment in new roads, rail links and energy supplies had brought an influx of Chinese migrant workers, he said. Teaching of the Quran in Arabic was strenuously discouraged in schools.
The authorities are threatening to demolish the old town at the heart of Kashgar - a maze of ancient streets that are home to at least 100,000 people - on the grounds that it cannot withstand earthquakes.
Kashgar residents claim the Chinese government has deported thousands of Uighurs from Beijing to protect the Olympics and ordered all members of the minority carrying passports to surrender them to local police stations. Outside the city, there is ample evidence of the Chinese authorities worrying about security.
Police road blocks halt traffic to inspect both documents and passengers. Such measures have been reinforced since the Monday attack. On this occasion, the Chinese authorities are determined that they will decide on the facts.
