This afternoon Mom related an incident that happened in Hotan, Xinjiang (新疆和田) a few days ago. The way she described it, a few Uyghurs, claiming disability, had boarded a commercial flight carrying heavy metal implements—purportedly crutches. Right after take-off, they disassembled these into metal sticks and start making their way to the cockpit, apparently making threatening voices in Uyghur along the way to the effect that they intended to hijack the flight, and, allegedly, that they had a bomb. As they made their way through business class, however, they were held up by the business class passengers (“一些干部和大学教授”) and then by a number of police travelling on a training tour. After a serious, extended brawl (“二十多分钟”) the hijackers were restrained, and the plane landed safely. The fighting must have been quite heavy, because two of the hijackers later died.
The Western press had a
slightly different version of it. Or, they had the abbreviated official version, followed by the "German-based World Uyghur Congress" version, which states that "the plane turned back after Uyghurs and Hans began fighting after a disagreement over seat assignments", and an account of Han-Uyghur tensions in the region. The way it was put certainly seemed to give more credence to the second version of events. It didn't help that "the phone listed for Hotan police rang unanswered Friday."
Then again, you may say that the way I put it seems to be giving, or at least trying to give, more credence to
the first version.
That's really the whole point, isn't it: how do you know who's telling the truth? I don't really trust Chinese officialdom to tell the whole truth, especially in such a sensitive region, but I wouldn't trust a Uyghur exile group based in Europe to tell the whole truth either. Both sides would probably try to portray events in the light most favorable to them or supportive of their cause, ignoring or retouching any inconvenient details along the way. Everyone does this to some extent, maybe. But clearly, when the two accounts differ so radically, someone is just plain wrong here.
Maybe the official version is right and the World Uyghur Congress is simply parroting their stage line, which they can plausibly claim not to have any firm evidence against yet. Or maybe it was just an extraordinarily bad linguistic misunderstanding and the "hijackers"
were really just shouting things to the effect that they wanted their actual seats back.
But maybe it doesn't matter, because the [masses of] people whose opinions do matter will decide based on their prejudices, on which of the two sides they distrust or mistrust more, rather than on anything remotely resembling a cool, objective assessment. (Or in Staff Sergeant Dignam's words, "Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.")
Which is very unfortunate, especially when things
end up the way they did. There was probably police mistreatment involved. But I do think it was indeed a hijack attempt, and that injuries sustained during the brawl on the plane contributed substantially to the subsequent deaths. But then again, could be completely wrong. And I concede that. I don't claim to actually know what happened, before seeing more convincing evidence either way.
Sometimes I really wish I could look every one of those people in the eye, and confront them with both versions of the story, and of how they could come about. And remind them that words can tell such lies, that only those who were on the plane could have known what actually happened, that nobody should take drastic action based on hearsay alone, that the truth is usually somewhere in between ...
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