It was just one month before the Olympic Games when Chinese guards led three men away to execution, somewhere amid the apple orchards, at the end of an open-air trial watched by 7,000 local Muslims.

The crowd looked on in silence as judges handed out death sentences and life prison terms to 17 other men accused of organising an armed Islamic party. Those condemned now await their turn before the firing squad.

The spectacle, outside the oasis town of Kashgar, was the climax of a campaign intended to crush resistance and ensure “stability” in a vast western region known to Victorian explorers as Chinese Turkestan. Instead, it seems to have set off the worst violence for a decade, igniting an armed struggle against Chinese rule that has smouldered along the ancient Silk Road for 60 years.

Since those macabre incidents, militants have killed at least 20 security personnel in three attacks, importing the tactics of a guerrilla jihad to the oil and gas-rich autonomous region of Xinjiang.

China has been shocked by the events, probably because its media failed to report the campaign of violent repression that preceded them. Details of the July 9 show trial were printed only in the local Chinese-language newspaper in Kashgar and were kept out of the national press, perhaps to avoid international attention ahead of the Olympics.

The paper’s article is political dynamite as it illustrates why the trial may have proved to be a miscalculation that has cost Chinese lives. “Three men shot immediately!” trumpeted the headline above a report of the public session of the Kashgar Intermediate People’s Court on that sunny morning.

The three were Abdulawi Yimin, Muhetaer Sertiwati and Ahmati Rehman. They were condemned for organising the East Turkestan Islamic party, described by the court as “a terrorist organisation”, and for setting up a training camp in mountains near the Afghan border.

A judge read out the confirmation of their sentences from China’s supreme court which, since 2007, must approve all executions. Then the three were dragged away with their hands bound and were shot.

The judge turned to the remaining 17 defendants. “These criminals planned, organised and carried out violent terrorist activities and military training exercises and they resisted arrest by every means,” he said.

One policeman was killed when security forces stormed the training camp in January last year.

The court imposed two suspended death sentences and sentenced one man to life in prison. It then issued 14 more verdicts including capital sentences, but no details were given. Court records are not open to the public.

The point of the trial was to hammer home China’s resolve to crush agitation for independence among Uighurs, a Turkic people who follow a moderate version of Islam in several states of Central Asia.

It was orchestrated by the same member of the Chinese politburo, Wang Lequan, who directed measures against an uprising in Tibet this spring. His men have detained suspects without trial, raided homes, confiscated passports, stopped pilgrimages to Mecca and banned government employees from worshipping in mosques.

Wang’s so-called “peaceful Xinjiang” policy lasted as long as it took the Olympic torch to make its heavily guarded way through the region. On August 4, as dignitaries prepared to welcome world leaders to Beijing, a 33-year-old vegetable seller and a taxi driver of 28, both Uighurs, took revenge on the People’s Armed Police, a para-military unit, in Kashgar.

One hid in a tree to watch 70 soldiers march out for their morning exercises outside the Yijin hotel. His accomplice waited at the wheel of a Dongfang dumper truck, stolen by the pair.

The first man spoke into his mobile phone. Then the truck roared down the road, crashed into the ranks, turned over and hit a tree.

“The driver scrambled out and threw a homemade bomb which blew off his own arm,” the Kashgar Daily reported in its Chinese edition, two days later. Then the two assailants got among their victims with makeshift grenades, guns and knives. They killed 16 men before they were subdued.

Later Shi Dagang, the city’s Communist party leader, said the two had been planning their deed for about a month - which dates their conspiracy to the time of the show trial. “Many Uighurs believe they were related to those people on trial,” said a Xinjiang man, who gave only his Muslim first name, Rehmat.

The militants struck next in the city of Kuqa last Sunday with a terrifying nighttime assault. Men and women threw bombs and opened fire on government offices, a supermarket and a hotel suspected of operating a brothel. At least one guard died.

The Chinese security forces claimed to have shot dead at least eight “terrorists”, two blew themselves up and a 15-year-old girl was among a handful captured, along with dozens of explosive devices.

Two days later a group of men jumped out of a truck at a checkpoint south of Kashgar and stabbed to death three civilian security guards.

Chinese spokesmen claim this is a new campaign of international terror master-minded by the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But the episodes indicate fury and revenge rather than coherent planning, while the repression has united Uighurs and Hui Muslims, a rival ethnic group, against the government.

“This is a life or death battle,” said Wang in an address to cadres last week, “It will be long-term, complicated and as hard as stone.”

In that the politburo member is probably correct.

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