Baren Incident
In April 1990, a major disturbance broke out in a rural area of the XUAR called Baren township near the southern city of Kashgar. Although the details of the ‘Baren incident’ remain unclear, the event ended in the occupation of local government buildings for nearly three days until Chinese military and security forces were able to take back the buildings and either kill or arrest the Uyghurs who had occupied them. Some reports suggest that the violence that broke out in Baren was spontaneous, occurring after the Chinese military clashed with some 200 Uyghur demonstrators protesting against recently applied limits on the number of births allotted to minority families.1 Other reports, including official Chinese sources, maintain that the incident was a premeditated attempt to overthrow state control of this small rural area by a religiously oriented pro-independence group calling itself the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP) ( ETIP).2
See Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, pp. 327–328. ↩︎
See Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, pp. 325–327. Some reports supporting this view also note that the uprising was only ended by a substantial bombing campaign in the region, which killed scores of local people. See Marika Vicziany, ‘State Responses to Islamic Terrorism in Western China and their Impact on South Asia,’ Contemporary South Asia,12:2 (2003), 243–262, p. 249. ↩︎