Violence mars Games' opening weekend

Bomb blasts leave 11 dead in western China; American tourist stabbed to death at Beijing landmark

GEOFFREY YORK

With a report from The Canadian Press

August 11, 2008

BEIJING -- It was the nightmare scenario that China had been struggling to prevent: bombings, stabbings and a weekend of tragic news that cast a shadow over the opening days of the Beijing Olympics.

A series of bomb blasts ripped through the Muslim province of Xinjiang yesterday, triggering gunfights and leaving 11 people dead. The explosions came just a day after a brutal stabbing attack at a famous Beijing tourist landmark that killed an American tourist and critically injured his wife.

The weekend of violence was acutely embarrassing to the Chinese government, which had clamped down with tight security measures for several months to prevent such attacks during the Olympics.

The news of the attacks was deliberately buried in the Chinese news media on the weekend, and scarcely mentioned on most major websites yesterday. The stabbing was not even included on the main Chinese television newscasts Saturday. But it was dramatic news in the foreign media, and it caused the kind of bad publicity that China has been anxious to avoid.

Todd Bachman, father-in-law of the U.S. men's volleyball coach and father of a former U.S. Olympian, was killed by a knife-wielding assailant Saturday at the 13th-century Drum Tower, a famous landmark and popular tourist site near the centre of Beijing.

His wife, Barbara, was critically injured, and their Chinese tour guide was also injured. The attacker, a Chinese man named Tang Yongming, then committed suicide by leaping to his death from a tower balcony. He was reported to be a twice-divorced loner from the city of Hangzhou who had become depressed when his son was arrested on theft and fraud allegations.

The attack was apparently random, with no political motive or direct connection to the Olympics. But it devastated the American volleyball team and cast a pall over the opening weekend of the Games.

In western China, meanwhile, a dozen bomb explosions hit the town of Kuqa yesterday, triggering clashes and further explosions that killed 11 people.

The homemade explosives blew up in hotels, supermarkets and government offices, according to China's Xinhua news agency. After the blasts, police found 15 of the attackers and shot dead eight of them, while two others blew themselves up, the news agency said. A security guard died in an explosion after the attackers drove a three-wheeled vehicle into the courtyard of the local police station.

Just a week ago, two attackers killed 16 border police at Kashgar, a major city in Xinjiang, near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The series of attacks in Xinjiang over the past week are the bloodiest clashes in the region in a decade.

The timing of the blasts, apparently linked to the Olympics, shows a degree of organization and sophistication that raises a new challenge to China's rule of the region. It will heighten the tensions between Xinjiang's two biggest ethnic groups, the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese.

The Uyghurs are a Muslim people who have often resisted China's dominance of Xinjiang. By launching their attacks on Chinese targets on the second day of the Olympics, the attackers captured the world's attention and inflicted damage on China's drive for internal stability during the Games.

"This is exactly what China wanted to prevent - the internationalization of the Uyghur question," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who closely follows developments in Xinjiang.

"I'm concerned that this could polarize the Uyghur and Chinese communities. It will make the situation more tense. It will confirm China in its belief that the Uyghurs are all somehow terrorists, while the Uyghurs will be angry that they are demonized and discriminated against."

Mr. Bequelin said he is worried that China could launch a broad crackdown on the Uyghurs as a result of the latest bombings. "China has a track record of using very broad repression, rather than a targeted one," he said. "Its security measures are too indiscriminate. They don't make a distinction between political agitation and terrorism. When you call everyone a terrorist, it's hard to identify the right people."

Meanwhile, the small, short-lived protests that have cropped up at the Olympics continue.

On Saturday, Chris Schwartz, a student at Montreal's Concordia University, was among a group of activists from Students for a Free Tibet who were deported after a brief protest at Tiananmen Square. Yesterday, five more activists, including a Tibetan woman from Germany, two Canadians and two Americans, faced deportation after demonstrating near the square.