BEIJING: Violent outbursts are continuing in the Xinjiang region of western China, with the latest resulting in the deaths of two policemen who were attacked on Wednesday while searching a cornfield for a woman they believe is involved in a separatist cell.

The attack was the fourth incident this month in the area, bringing the total dead to 33 despite intense paramilitary police patrols since before Beijing’s Summer Olympic Games.

In both Xinjiang and the nearby Tibetan regions, China has deployed thousands of security personnel in recent months to keep the peace and root out troublemakers. Now the government might consider keeping those forces in the regions indefinitely, experts said, because tensions remain high. Required affirmations of political loyalty and surveillance of telephone calls, Internet use and physical movement are also expected to continue.

”Three days ago, I called my mother back in Tibet,” said Tenzin Losel, who fled Tibet for India in 1997 and had not spoken with his parents since this spring’s riot in Lhasa and the ensuing wave of anti-government protests that swept the Tibetan plateau. He said he did not want his call to get them in trouble with police, but he wanted to hear his mother’s voice. “She said hello and that she was okay. Then she asked if I was okay and after I said yes, she just put down the phone. I felt in that moment the tense division in Tibet.”

The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim population.

Uighur advocacy groups say China’s approach to the unrest exacerbates the problems. “I worry about the situation there very much because the Chinese policy of suppression makes the local situation more serious,” said Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uighur Congress, an exile group based in Germany.

But Chinese academics say Xinjiang is a region where China needs to maintain a firm hand to prevent separatism and terrorism. “The main and core issue in Xinjiang is separatism, although it combines with some farmers and land problems. Maybe there is a background of conflict between people and the government, but we cannot regard this case purely as citizens trying to protect their rights,” said Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Institute of Rural Development in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service