The protests occurred in the northwest city of Urumqi in Xinjiang province and was staged by members of China's Uighur ethnic minority. Uighur groups called for a peaceful march in the city's market to protest the murder of two Uighur men at the hands of an angry mob who thought they had sexually harassed ethnic Han Chinese women (the Han are China's dominant ethnic group).
According to Uighur Rights groups, riot police in armored vehicles arrived soon after the rally started and began beating protesters and staging mass arrests. The Chinese government counters that the Uighur group were the ones who started trouble when they began assaulting people at the market and that the police only stepped in to preserve order.
I'm skeptical of the official story, let's keep in mind that the Chinese government also considers the Dalai Lama to be a sort of terrorist. Videos of the protests in Urumqi were quickly scrubbed from the Internet by Chinese censors, but some said that they looked a lot like protests in Tibet last year that were also brutally put down by Chinese authorities. And that begs the question, if the Chinese authorities were just responding to an unruly Uighur mob attacking people at the town market, then why not publicize the videos, since they seem to back up your official story?
We all can probably guess at the answer to that one.
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