Ankara watches Urumqi -- and its feet

 Ankara has now expressed “deep concern” over clashes in the streets, which caused an officially reported 156 deaths, and relayed hopes that those responsible will be punished. Turkey's confidence that China would “take measures to prevent the recurrence of such events in the future” has been cruelly justified by the massive presence of troops on the streets of Urumqi. Of course Turkey is not unique in fumbling for the right response to these events. The European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, has also been equivocal in its concern. The principal reaction has come from the outgoing EU Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering, who called the handling of the protest “disturbing,” and from a commission spokeswoman who called for an end to violence and for access to independent media. America, too, regretted the loss of life, but Washington's position is compromised by the 13 Uighurs still held in Guantanamo Bay.

Such throat-clearing hesitation is in part warranted by the uncertainty over what has occurred on the streets of Urumqi. The one thing that is certain is that this has been no Twitter revolution but an ugly race riot. Uighur protests over the lynching of two persons in a factory in faraway Guangdong prompted an even angrier reaction by Han Chinese. What isn't clear is whether it was the violence of the original protests or whether it was the way those protests were reported on the official media that caused events to spiral out of control. The official version is that it was Uighur agitators, directed from abroad, who were responsible for the violence and that the massive deployment of troops is there simply to contain the rioting. Uighurs in exile blame the authorities for a Tiananmen Square-style repression of a peaceful protest.

The world's circumspection is also the result of concern that this is no time for China to be at war with itself. Developed and developing nations alike would much rather see Beijing's eye on the global economic crisis. The hasty departure of President Hu Jintao from the G8 summit in L'Aquila is a source of worry. The world is more concerned with China's stability than its progress toward democracy, its economic recovery rather than its ability to satisfy the nationalist aspirations of constituent ethnic groups.

Ankara enters a peculiar maze in its reaction to events in Xinjiang. Turkey has no love of other nations taking too close an interest in its own ability to handle ethnicity-based dissent. China's eagerness to blame outside meddling rather than its own policies of assimilation sounds like a cruel parody of a line Turkish politicians have long tread over the treatment of the country's Kurds. Ankara, too, has a long and undistinguished record of confusing legitimate dissent with illegal separatism or terror. At the same time, Turkish sympathies clearly and naturally extend to the Turkic Uighurs. The headlines of the Turkish press this week are full of empathy for their ethnic cousins in what the more nationalist among them refer to as East Turkestan. Dissident Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer has (almost) a Dalai Lama-like fame in Turkey -- a victim of systemic intolerance and whose long imprisonment and now exile undermines Beijing's claim to even-handedness. Yet a sense of realism dictates that Turkey's protest at the treatment of Uighurs would backfire and merely lend credence to Chinese paranoia over foreign plots.

So while Ankara's diplomatic tone of wait-and-see is all too understandable, it is a message that wins little support at home. The one consolation the government might take would be to be moved by the grotesque tragedy in Urumqi to press on with its own agenda of domestic reform.