Watch your words, Erdogan!

Maybe the Turks and the Uighurs share common blood ancestry, but that does not justify, by a far stretch, such intemperate remarks on the part of the Turkish prime minister.
'Genocide' is a very strong word. It implies concerted, systematic action undertaken with the specific aim of eliminating or expelling a people from a certain area. The recent incident was nothing like that. It was an airing of grievances, mostly economic but lined with ethnic undertones, which went violently wrong. It was not at all very concerted, but more a spontaneous mass eruption. There was no systematic or explicit aim of ethnic cleansing. The mobs which went around beating people up perhaps did target people according to their ethnic group; but they did not go around the area seeking every member of the other ethnic group as a target. The police did far less than even that.
I assume Erdogan meant to suggest genocide towards the Uighurs, not towards the Han, when he spoke. However, in the absence of any breakdown of casualties by ethnic group, it is a most shaky assumption that the majority of casualties were Uighur. In view of the facts that the rioting mobs at the start were primarily Uighur and that the Han form a majority in Urumqi, it is more probable that the majority of the casualties were Han. Where does that leave Erdogan's description of the incident as "almost genocide, where hundreds of people were killed"? Is he saying that the disgruntled Uighur, a minority in their own homeland, are attempting to carry out genocide against the Han?
There are words to describe incidents where hundreds of people are killed. Tragedy, massacre, riot, and war are some of them; so is genocide. But each of them describe different circumstances, and to entirely disregard these circumstances when picking which word to use is not only ignorant, disgustingly so for a leader of a country which itself stands accused of genocide in times past, but also irresponsible, because to use such words in a public context, in such voltaile times, can be to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Genocide, a prominent public figure says. Genocide, the radicals start crying. And soon the masses are chanting it too, and then it may just become a reality.