It is not as though the county of Bey (or Baicheng as it is known in Chinese) has been known as a center of “terrorism” for years. Like the rest of Southern Xinjiang, since the beginning of Xi Jinping’s and Zhang Chunxian’s “People’s War on Terror” in mid-2014, violence in this county has increased. At the outset of this new campaign thousands of Uyghur men and women were arrested and held behind the local “black gates” (Uy: qara derweze) where they began receiving political and religious reeducation. The police began entering the homes of villagers every night, looking for suspicious books, Uyghur men with facial hair or Uyghur women with veiled faces. Phones and computers were scanned regularly. Farmers were forced to assemble regularly in the local town squares and local homes for dances to patriotic and other songs. When I visited Bey in early 2015 I myself had my phone checked for “splitist” or “terrorist” materials by police and local militia (made up of local Uyghur farmers who had been conscripted by the armed police and joined in the house-to-house searches in order to prevent their own arrest).

In February of 2015 (http://bit.ly/1YOEteC) a man and several of his neighbors all of whom had had brothers and friends arrested, attempted to grab the gun of one of the police officers who regularly checked his home and threatened him with arrest. Fortunately he couldn’t figure out how to shoot the gun. But he and his neighbors used knives to cut the police officer and militia. Within minutes the armed police arrived and began shooting in the streets. All of the assailants were killed. The man’s wife and their elementary school-aged daughter and, as is often the case in these incidents, numerous other bystanders were shot. According to my contacts following the incident the police courtyard was “covered with bodies.” Over the next several months thousands of farmers were arrested. Five uncles of one of my contacts were arrested. Each of them were sentenced to 5 or more years in the work farm. Someone had reported that they had been seen with the man (their neighbor) in the years leading up to the attack. According to my contacts at least 8 people died during their interrogations. Everyone arrested suffered some degree of “enhanced interrogation.” Although we really don’t know enough to say with certainty, my sense is that the violence of Sept. 22 (which went unreported in the Chinese press until after the Paris attack) and the subsequent “manhunt” that killed the wives and children of the men involved, is quite directly related to the earlier violence.

Of course, attacking unarmed settlers, even those who are radically changing the social landscape of your home county, is never justified, but the grievances and fears felt by every Uyghur in Bey are by no-means abstract. Their homes and bodies are stopped and searched every day. They are not allowed to leave their home counties without a “green card” （Ch: Bianminka）which is issued by the local government. The situation is quite bleak.