Biased media rub salt into wound

July 5, 2009, will be remembered as one of the darkest days in China's history.

On that day, a handful of separatists rampaged through the bustling but peaceful streets of Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, to unleash a gruesome orgy of killing, looting and arson. They were riled up by the words of a destructive mastermind: "To be braver"; "to stage something big". The separatists found easy prey among residents, men, women and children - of Han, Uygur and other ethnic groups. They had an explicit agenda: To create terror, to spread hatred, to divide Xinjiang from China.

To an extent, the separatists achieved their vicious goals by turning a city of peace, where people of various ethnic backgrounds used to live in harmony, into an abyss of violence and brutality. We have seen the horrifying images on television and the Internet of how terror was inflicted with the indiscriminate slaying of innocent people. We have seen photographs of corpses littered on the streets, some with heads or limbs chopped off. Blood was shed in Urumqi, too much of it.