Outraged and shocked once again, China and the world witnessed the slaughter of innocent civilians in a crowded marketplace. Once again, terror has taken its toll.
Two vehicles without license plates break through roadside fences and plow into the crowd at an open air market in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is close to 8 a.m. and the market is at its most crowded. The bombs in the vehicles are detonated and at least 31 people are killed, while the death toll may rise. Almost 100 people are injured, many almost certain to die.
The blood and violence is the worst for years in Xinjiang, and the dead are housewives and mothers who dropped their children off at school and came to buy groceries, as on any other day; the dead are stall holders scraping a living from melons and apricots; the dead are innocent senior citizens, gossiping with lifelong friends. Such is terror.
This is a crime against humanity. This is not a gang fight in a back alley, not an mafia-style execution, not a drunken husband taking out his anger on his long-suffering wife. This is not a school yard brawl. This is the vile political murder of innocent people who know nothing and care less about the so-called "cause" their murderers wish to promulgate. Such crimes are not to be tolerated in any civilized country or ethnic group.
As Xinjiang develops, the separatists worry. As Xinjiang people unite , the separatists are filled with fear. As Xinjiang stabilizes, the separatists panic.
There is no room for terror in a stable, prosperous and united society. These terrorists, these murderers, are desperately scrabbling to maintain their influence and cause hatred. For the terrorists, stability, development and prosperity are the worst things that can happen.
On April 30, three people, two of them suspects, were killed and 79 injured in a terrorist attack on a railway station in Urumqi. On March 1, separatists from Xinjiang cut down over 150 innocent civilians at a train terminal in Kunming. The dead numbered 29, the injured over 130. In October of last year, Xinjiang separatists drove vehicle packed with combustibles into a crowd of tourists in Tian'anmen Square, Beijing, killing five and injuring 40.
These attacks, both inside and outside Xinjiang, achieve nothing, and show nothing but the evil of separatists who plot against and target civilians, who bring fear and, literally, terror into the lives of ordinary people on vacation, waiting for trains, haggling for cucumbers.
The terrorists have the naive belief that the more violent the attack, the closer they come to their abstruse objectives. But they are wrong.
Their vicious endeavors will prove in vain.
The determination of peace-loving people in Xinjiang, in China, and in the world, will be greater than ever to join hands against the terrorist, the separatist and forces of extremism.
Will the Chinese government stand idly by, mere observers of the violence and crime? Will the "social cancer" of terrorism be uprooted and banished, completely and resolutely? Will stability and peace reign in Xinjiang? The answers to these questions are clear, obvious and uncontroversial.
Justice will be done - not vengeance, not terror breeding terror: Justice. Justice for the dead and the living, the guilty and the innocent.
The war against the terrorists will be persistent and complicated, but it will be won. It will be ended. There will be only one winner, and that winner will be the people.
We must not let down our guard, never relax in our vigilance. We must fight with our iron fists. We must win.
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