Sumera B Reshi Minority
A United Nations human rights panel has accused the Chinese government of ruthlessly cracking down on Uighurs, an ethnic Muslim minority in China’s western Xinjiang province, and capturing as many as one million in internment camps that are shrouded in secrecy and ‘re-education’ programs.
Reuters reported that over the past two years, authorities have ‘dramatically stepped up security and surveillance’ in the region, introducing ‘police checkpoints, re-education centres and mass DNA collection’.
According to the UN report, the Uyghurs are being held without charge or trial, and abuse and torture are common.
However, China has denied the accusations and termed the report ‘completely untrue’. According to the officials in China, Uighurs enjoyed full rights but ‘those deceived by religious extremism… shall be assisted by resettlement and re-education’. Nonetheless, as per the UN report, these programs range from attempts at psychological indoctrination — studying communist propaganda and giving thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping — to reports of water boarding and other forms of torture.
Sarah Brooks, an Asia specialist for the International Service for Human Rights, an advocacy group, stated that China’s answers to the United Nations panel were ‘par for the course’, keeping to ‘a longstanding tradition of the Chinese government to give non-answers to deeply important questions.’
As stated by Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, “There’s no legal basis, none, for people to be held this way. There is no warrant, there is no crime, there is no calling a lawyer, there is no calling your family, there is no knowing when you are going to get out, there is no knowing what you have been charged with.”
The Chinese government’s subjugation of ethnic Uighurs, most of whom are Sunni Muslim, has intensified in recent years amid what it calls an anti-extremism initiative.
Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that 2 million Uighurs and Muslim minorities were forced into ‘political camps for indoctrination’ in the western Xinjiang autonomous region.
“In the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability,” China has turned Xinjiang province “into something that resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of ‘no rights zone’,” said Gay McDougall.
The Chinese government has pushed back on the allegations. Hu Lianhe, a senior official with the Chinese government agency that oversees ethnic and religious affairs in the country, told the UN panel on that ‘there is no arbitrary detention’ of the Uighur minority and that ‘there are no such things as re-education centres.’
But Hu did say that convicted ‘criminals charged with minor offences’ were sent to “vocational education and employment training centres” to help them reintegrate. He declined to say how many people were being held in these centres.
This hostility between the UN panel and China is a culmination of a human rights situation in the Xinjiang region that has become increasingly precarious, according to human rights organizations, advocacy groups, and journalists, who have tried to document the situation despite China’s tight media control.
This is the reason why the UN is finally confronting Beijing on its brutal policies against, and detainment of, the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities within China’s borders.
In response to UN panel, the state-run, English language Tabloid, Global Times newspaper said the country’s security measures in Xinjiang have helped China prevent ‘great tragedy’, and as per Chinese officials such measures have stopped Xinjiang from becoming ‘China’s Syria or Libya.’
Since 2017, Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang have witnessed atrocities with the hands of authorities. Scores of Uyghurs have ‘disappeared’ and sent to so-called re-education camps. Even the New York Times reported that one of the best-known experts of Uyghur culture, Rahile Dawut, has not been heard from for eight months. Family, friends and others feel sure the professor is being secretly held in a re-education camp.
Profile of Uyghurs
The Uyghurs are a Muslim ethnic minority mostly based in China’s Xinjiang province. They make up around 45 per cent of the population. In Xinjiang province, almost 10 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities live. Xinjiang is an autonomous region in China’s northwest that borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. It has been under Chinese control since 1949, when the communist People’s Republic of China was established.
Instead of Mandarin & Cantonese, Uyghurs speak Asian Turkic language similar to Uzbek — and most practice a moderate form of Sunni Islam. Some activists, including those who seek independence from China, refer to the region as East Turkestan.
The situation of Uyghur Muslims
Xinjiang province, once situated along the ancient Silk Road trading route, is oil- and resource-rich. However, years of demographic shift inflamed ethnic tensions, especially within some of the larger cities. For instance, in 2009, riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang province, after the Uyghurs protested their treatment by the government and the Han majority. About 200 people were killed and hundreds injured during the unrest.
Besides, Xinjiang province is also a major logistics hub of Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar infrastructure project along the old Silk Road meant to boost China’s economic and political influence around the world, especially to reach to oil-rich Middle-East and Africa. Xinjiang’s increasing importance to China’s global aspirations is likely a major reason Beijing is tightening its grip.
As a part of a policy of ‘de-extremification’, China is continuously cracking down on the Uyghurs. China has generated extreme policies, from the banning of certain Muslim names for babies and has resorted to torture and political indoctrination in ‘re-education’ camps where hundreds of thousands have been detained.
Mighty Communist China has a dark history with re-education camps, combining hard labor with indoctrination. According to research carried out by Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar on China’s policies toward the Uyghurs, who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology in Berlin, Chinese officials began using dedicated camps in Xinjiang around 2014 — around the same time that China blamed a series of terrorist attacks on radical Uyghur separatists. Adrian Zenz also described the crisis in Uyghur as ‘a humanitarian emergency’. “This is a very targeted political re-education effort that is seeking to change the core identity and belief system of an entire people.” In an interview to the New York Times, he said, “On that scale, it’s pretty unprecedented.”
Therefore, China is more targeted ‘de-extremification’ restrictions gained coverage in the West, including a ban on another on long beards and veils. The government has also made it illegal to not watch state television and to not send children to government schools. Authorities have tried to promote drinking and smoking, as the people who didn’t drink or smoke are deemed as devout Muslims yet suspicious in the eyes of authorities. Time and again, Chinese officials have justified these policies as a mandatory step to counter religious radicalization and extremism, but critics say these policies are meant to curb Islamic traditions and practices.
According to James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University, the Chinese government is “trying to expunge ethnonational characteristics from the people. They’re not trying to drive them out of the country; they’re trying to hold them in.”
The nomenclature given to these camps by the Chinese officials according to the experts are in fact the most sinister pillar of this de-extremification policy. Further, experts assess as many as two million people have disappeared into these camps, with about one million currently being held.
However, the Chinese government has dismissed that these camps exist. When confronted about them at the United Nations, the officials claimed they were for the ‘assistance and education’ of minor criminals. China’s state-run media has denied the reports of detention camps as Western media ‘baselessly criticizing China’s human rights.’ But leaked documents and firsthand accounts from people detained at the camps have helped paint a disturbing picture of what amount to modern-day concentration camps.
The Chinese authorities see the camps as ‘a kind of conversion therapy, and they talk about it that way, as per James Millward.
Kashgar, an Uyghur-dominated city near the border with Kyrgyzstan is surrounded by imposing walls topped with razor wire, with watchtowers at two corners. According to the Vox 15 August 2018 analysis, a slogan painted on the wall reads, ‘All ethnic groups should be like the pods of a pomegranate, tightly wrapped together.’
Additionally, the devotees of the spiritual practice, Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong) have been brutally oppressed and persecuted. The Chinese regime comprehended Falun Gong’s presence as a threat to its authoritarian rule and began a campaign to eradicate the practice in July 1999.
The official press office for Falun Gong, the Falun Dafa Information Center, estimates that millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested and detained since the persecution started, often enduring torture and abuse. The regime also launched mass propaganda campaigns in an effort to turn public opinion against Falun Gong practitioners.
Moreover, in Xinjiang, China has doubled the security budget for the region, stepped up recruitment of police officers, built more police stations, sent ethnic Han cadres to stay with Uyghur families and installed surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology.
“The Chinese authorities had built 1,000 to 1,200 internment camps. There are also reports that the authorities have stepped up construction of orphanages to accommodate children of those detained,” Dr. Zenz reckoned.
Dr Zenz further added, “The criteria for detention are unclear. Officials are rounding up members of the public to meet official quotas, targeting specific groups, including people with foreign connections or who have travelled abroad, people who have received a phone call from overseas and people who are engaged in religious activities.”
As per Dr Zenz, the crackdown is not limited to Uyghurs but has expanded to other mainly Muslim populations, including the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz or the Hui, despite the fact they are not linked to any acts of resistance against the state.
In an interview with Foreign Policy, one the non-resident Uyghur said, “The whole of Xinjiang was like a prison. Once you get in, it’s very hard to go out”. Nonetheless, Xinjiang’s deputy foreign publicity director, Ailiti Saliyev, proudly said, “the happiest Muslims in the world live in Xinjiang.”
The world in general and UN in particular wishes Uyghur people live a free and hassle-free life and if they are suppressed to a greater extent, then calm China can get volatile in coming years. Let President Xi Jinping take care of Uyghurs as it is taking care of its BRI project.
