Baren

On 3 April, Abudure Yimu and Aihaiti Alabai, backbone members of the counterrevolutionary armed rebellion in Baren Township, went to Aigusi Township in Yengisar County to buy horses for battle. They offered a price as high as 2,000 yuan to buy a good horse owned by Danixi in San Village. The horse won several champions during races in Yengisar County.

In the dusty bazaar streets of Kashi, also known as Kashgar, Uighur hatred of Chinese authorities runs deep. Many here believe that more than 100 died fighting Chinese troops last spring in the nearby town of Baren.

Although there had been periodic outbreaks for several years beforehand, notably in a protest against nuclear testing in Lop Nur in 1986, the current unrest began with the Baren incident in April 1990, when hundreds of armed Uyghurs invaded Baren, attacked local government offices and for several days fought off the Chinese military sent to stop them.

In 1984 a small town in south-west Xinjiang was awarded the title of 'Ethnic Unity Model'. The population of Baren, in Akto county, in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, was two-thirds Uyghur and slightly less than one-third Kyrgyz, with the remainder Han Chinese, Tajik and Hui. While this kind of ethnic diversity is common in Xinjiang, the authorities seldom miss a chance to stress the value of ‘ethnic unity, The town’s apparent stability made the violent incident that took place there six years later an even greater shock for the government - and it is today the event most Western analysts regard as the first major confrontation between Uyghurs and the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang.

The East Turkistan Government in Exile and the overwhelming majority of East Turkistanis across our global diaspora commemorated the 30th Anniversary of the Baren Revolution, also known as the Baren Uprising, or the Baren Massacre, which erupted on April 5, 1990 in East Turkistan's Akto County.