The Uyghur American Association (UAA) demanded officials in Beijing disclose their deployment of drones in the vast western Xinjiang Province, site of restive ethnic tensions between native Uighurs and Han Chinese immigrants.

The drone surveillance and spying program stems from a July 28 terror attack in the provincial capital of Umumqi that left 96 people dead, including 59 attackers shot dead by police. Two months before, China began a series of crackdowns on suspected terrorist groups in the crisis-hit region, a sweep that is expected to last a year.

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"The domestic use of unmanned aerial vehicles is an extremely serious and disturbing development," the Washington, DC-based association said, warning of an escalation of unrest.

Xinjiang has been within China's sphere of influence since the 2nd century AD, and a constituent part of the country since the 18th century. However, its peoples and languages then (and now) were Turkic — Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz — and its religion was Islam, unlike the Chinese-speaking, Buddhist Han. Xinjiang remains majority Uighur (45 percent), but the incoming Han have pushed up the Chinese population to 40 percent. 

Violence in the province first erupted in the 1990s, and has simmered ever since. Beijing insists the newcomers are helping to build the Xinjiang economy, long left to the wayside compared to the now-affluent eastern provinces. Natives charge ethnic Han with job discrimination, religious bias, and taking an unfair portion of the provinces resources. 

After the spate of violence in July, says Beijing, local leaders were prompted to contact the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), whose fleet of drones now guide police with to search for attackers across the sprawling province. Searches were most recently conducted in Xinjiang's southwestern Yarkant county, near the Silk Road city of Kashgar.

"We provided important intelligence for the search and arrest of terrorists and were highly praised by the front-line anti-terror police officers," says an article on the company's website. CASC is the largest contractor to the Chinese space program, and one of the largest weapons builders in China.

 The UAA contends the use of drones only exacerbates the situation, saying the use of drones suggests China views the entire Uighur population as "state enemies."

"It is intimidating entire communities, including the very people its purported anti-terror campaign is supposed to protect," UAA president Alim Seytoff said in the statement.

Tagsdrones, uighur xinjiang, Xinjiang violence, Xinjiang crackdown, Xinjiang ethnic violence