By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 30, 2008

BEIJING, Aug. 30 -- Violent outbursts are continuing in the Xinjiang region of western China, with the latest resulting in the deaths of two policemen who were attacked Wednesday while searching a cornfield for a woman they believe is involved in a separatist cell.

State media reported Saturday morning that police found the alleged assailants and shot six of them dead after they tried to defend themselves with knives, wounding two security officials.

The attack and ensuing capture of suspects was the fourth incident this month in the area, bringing the total dead to 39 despite intense paramilitary police patrols since before Beijing's Summer Olympic Games.

In both Xinjiang and the nearby Tibetan regions, China has deployed thousands of security personnel in recent months to keep the peace and root out troublemakers. Now the government might consider keeping those forces in the regions indefinitely, experts said, because tensions remain high. Required affirmations of political loyalty and surveillance of telephone calls, Internet use and physical movement are also expected to continue.

"Three days ago, I called my mother back in Tibet," said Tenzin Losel, who fled Tibet for India in 1997 and had not spoken with his parents since this spring's riot in Lhasa and the ensuing wave of anti-government protests that swept the Tibetan plateau. He said he did not want his call to get them in trouble with police, but he wanted to hear his mother's voice. "She said hello and that she was okay. Then she asked if I was okay and after I said yes, she just put down the phone. I felt in that moment the tense division in Tibet."

Losel said he knew the attention paid to China during the Olympics would not resolve Tibetan issues with the government, but he said that "there is a feeling of desperation and helplessness" among exiled Tibetans after the Games because no foreign official spoke out in support of Tibet. "There is no justice when it comes to politics," he said.

The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim population. Like Tibetans, they have long chafed under Chinese rule and are pushing for more cultural and religious freedom and economic opportunity.

The Chinese government rejects calls from foreign governments and exile Tibetan and Uighur advocacy organizations that it discuss the groups' grievances against China's policies. July negotiations with envoys for the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, went nowhere.

Chinese media criticize the Dalai Lama as someone who cannot be trusted, while government officials insist their problems in Xinjiang are the work of terrorist forces attempting to split China. Indeed, a separatist group that calls itself the Turkestan Islamic Party has issued several threatening videos this year, urging Uighurs to attack police, government officials and Olympic targets to draw attention to their call for an independent Uighur nation.

Each of the four attacks this month in Xinjiang was directed at police or security forces. No group has asserted responsibility for the incidents, all of which used rudimentary weapons and explosives.

In Xinjiang's Jiashi county, eight police officials armed with clubs were searching for a suspect when six men wielding knives jumped out of a cornfield, said Kuerbanjiang, 24, a police officer who was there. "I heard my colleague yell to me, 'Run, run!' " he said in a telephone interview. "I saw one person carrying a knife pursuing me. I escaped very quickly, cutting through a field to get through to the village."

The village police chief and a police assistant both died of stab wounds in the abdomen, said a nurse at a local hospital who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A third officer was seriously injured. All of the officers attacked are Uighurs, not Han Chinese, police officials said.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 paramilitary police searched for the attackers, identified from photographs as being the same group that ambushed and killed three security officials in a nearby town on Aug. 12, Kuerbanjiang said. They found the suspects near Kashgar on Friday evening, apprehending and wounding three while killing six, according to an official report from China News.

Uighur advocacy groups say China's approach to the unrest exacerbates the problems. "I worry about the situation there very much because the Chinese policy of suppression makes the local situation more serious," said Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uighur Congress, an exile group based in Germany.

But Chinese academics say Xinjiang is a region where China needs to maintain a firm hand to prevent separatism and terrorism.

"The main and core issue in Xinjiang is separatism, although it combines with some farmers and land problems. . . . We cannot regard this case purely as citizens trying to protect their rights," said Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Institute of Rural Development in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "If you want peaceful life, you must have strong and forceful measures. If the government wants to keep Xinjiang inside Chinese territory, they must take measures to crack down on separatists without any softness."

Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the level of government control is already so high that it constitutes "a very broad denial of rights in both regions." He said he does not expect China to let up.

Rather, he expects the government to continue to encourage ethnic Han Chinese to move into the regions, eventually diluting the ethnic components into the Han majority. "China probably has the most efficient assimilation model in the world," he said. "It's the ultimate solution."

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.