10 July 2009, there was an article about the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, describing the events in Xīnjiāng (新疆, شىنجاڭ) as a kind of genocide.
11 July, there was another article, stating that three quarters of the victims were Han (汉) Chinese and not Uighur.
Does that mean that mr. Erdoğan denounced an Uighur genocide of innocent Han Chinese?
Considering that the Uighur are a Turkish people, that is unlikely. It is more likely that he either did not know the official numbers or did not trust them.
Global Times also gives a gender breakdown: 26 Han Chinese women were killed. Only one Uighur woman was killed.
We do not need to trust Chinese official figures - as little as we need to trust figures from any other source which has interests at stake. However, neither do we have to pretend that they do not exist.
Analysing this kind of events is usually very difficult, considering the complexity and how little facts are available. To ignore some claims but not others does not make it easier.
1 comment:
You may certainly have a point. But as a side note, this is the situation so many dictatorships have put them in: because of their lying behavior, they have become considered pure institutions of lies in the very conflicts they are involved in, so they are completely written off as sources of information. Not always rightfully, as you point out.
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