China's Urumqi city in chaos as mobs vow revenge

07-07-2009 • RawStory.com

Police on Tuesday fired tear gas to disperse thousands of Han Chinese protesters armed with makeshift weapons and vowing revenge, as chaos gripped this flashpoint city riven by ethnic tensions. Authorities ordered a night curfew and thousands of heavily armed police deployed across Urumqi, the capital of China's remote northwest Xinjiang region. But tensions spiked dramatically following weekend clashes that claimed at least 156 lives. Authorities said they had arrested 1,434 suspects, accusing them of murder, assault, looting and burning during attacks by Muslim Uighurs against the Han, China's dominant ethnic group who are seen in Xinjiang as oppressors. But despite the security clampdown involving police with submachine guns, shotguns and batons, mobs of Han Chinese marched through Urumqi -- with many wielding bricks, chains and poles and bent on reprisals against Uighurs. "The Uighurs came to our area to smash things, now we are going to their area t