After clash season...

A few months after the clashes in Tehran and Urumqi, first sentences to those detained then are now arisen. And they aren’t good news. In fact, nine people have been sentenced to death in the two countries. The motivation for both clashes was different, but the repression and the punishment don’t vary at all.

In the country of the Ayatollahs, at least three people have been sentenced to death. High concerns surround these sentences, especially because is unsure how the testimonies that conducted to them were obtained. Amnesty International and other groups have asked for more transparency in the whole process -with little or no response from Tehran.

The concerns grow when someone looks at the figures given by the government and the ones obtained by other groups. From the two dozen deaths that the government accounts to the two hundred that some organizations count, there are a lot of people missing in between. And for the families of those officially missing, or now under trial, the fear of the worst is always there.

Fear is precisely what many analysts think Ahmadinajad’s government is trying to achieve. By making an example of them, some say, Iranian’s government is trying to silence the opposition movement. And the three current death sentences may be just the beginning. The voices asking for more blood have long been heard since even before the beginning of the conflict.

In China at least the numbers are known. 197 killed and more than 1,600 injured. The controversy is not that much about how many died in the clashes but about how many of them were Han and how many Uighur. That about those already dead. About the ones now sentenced for that, six of them have received death penalties while another one got a life sentence. The names of all of them suggest that they are all Uighur.

Death penalty around the world

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