A rally gathered in the Hotan sports stadium in October...

A rally gathered in the Hotan sports stadium in October to watch court officials sentence a man to death, a scene that was played out hundreds of times across China in 2001 as part of the Communist Party's latest drive against crime. The man, Metrozi Mettohti, 34, was given the death penalty for trying to "split the country" and for storing weapons as part of a persistent and occasionally violent separatist movement among China's Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking ethnic group of nine million people, most of them Muslims, concentrated along the country's far western border.
According to one account, Mr. Mettohti shouted "Long live Eastern Turkestan!" - the name of the country separatists would like to create - before being gagged.
After the rally, local people say, he was put in the back of a truck, driven to a village outside of town and shot in the back of the head. The execution could not be officially verified.
"The government gives very little information about the people who are executed, and news of executions isn't published outside the places where they occur," said a young Uighur man in Hotan.
Most of the Uighurs condemned to death here are charged with murder or with otherwise causing deaths, but some, like Mettohti, are being executed for lesser transgressions.
At least 25 Uighurs have been executed in 2001 and scores more are waiting on death row, say people who track these executions in the local news media. They say the number is probably much higher because the government in August stopped publicizing most of the executions, which Uighurs say are part of a larger effort to suppress legitimate dissent and accelerate the ethnic group's assimilation into the country's larger Han Chinese population.
The Chinese government says the executions are meant to keep the separatist threat in check, arguing that Beijing is battling Islamic terrorists not unlike those the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, just a few hundred miles away.
How many Uighur separatists are operating in Xinjiang today is impossible to estimate, but the number of serious separatists inside China is still believed to be small.
"This is mostly social and civil unrest by disorganized, disgruntled, fairly impulsive young men, not a widespread movement," said Dru C. Gladney, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii who follows developments in Xinjiang.
The repression has deepened Uighur resentment of the Chinese, but has also eroded sympathy for the separatists.