Imagine
that you are living in a country where most of your family members are now
detained in mass detention camps where they face inhuman torture including
waterboarding! You ask – why? Well, according to the government, as an ethnic
and religious minority your family members are perceived as potential threats
to the law and order of the country. You ask – isn’t such a racist
discriminatory practice against someone born into a family that is not part of
the majority ethnic group? What happened to all those rights enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights? What about the international laws
prohibiting such crimes against a people? Isn’t our state a member of the
United Nations?
Did not
our government ratify such laws and are expected to live by such binding
articles?
No, you won’t get any satisfactory answer from the Chinese (PRC or the
People’s Republic of China) government on a plethora of such vital questions,
if you are a Turkic-speaking Uyghur (also spelled Uighur). Uyghurs of today’s
Xinjiang province (formerly East Turkestan) in far northwestern part of China
are victims of a brutal government policy of forced subjugation or elimination.
They are targeted for mass detention simply because of their ethnicity and
religion that is different from those of the majority Han Chinese. Nearly a
million of them are now caged in mass detention camps in their native land,
which came under full control of the Chinese only in 1949 when Mao Zedong came
to power. [Before the annexation of their native land the Uyghurs had a
distinct and rich history of their own. Their major cities Urumqi, the capital
of Xinjiang, and Kashgar (Kashi), an ancient center of trade on the historic
Silk Road near the border between Russia and China, were famous trading cities
in the medieval times.]
While, we may hesitate to use the term ‘genocide’ yet for what the
Uyghurs are facing these days inside China, but the signs are all too evident
to recognize early signs of an ethnic cleansing. It’s ugly and nothing to feel
good about Xi Jinping’s China. The testimonies of detainees who have passed
through these centers, that Amnesty International claims are being run like
wartime concentration camps, are replete with reports of torture including
waterboarding, electrocution and force-feeding. According to eyewitnesses, the
situation is so horrific that some of the detainees have even committed
suicide, which is forbidden in Islam. The Chinese government has incarcerated
everyone from professors, journalists, comedians, editors and poets to nursing
mothers, children, the elderly and even the terminally ill inside these
detention centers.
Lately, the Xi’s government has announced a five-year plan aimed at
“Sinicizing” Islam to make it “compatible with socialism”. Activists,
however, warned that this campaign would gradually lead to a total
eradication of Islam – with which some 23 million Chinese still identify in the
country.
Thanks to the Chinese government propaganda, the Uyghurs are perceived
as trouble makers by most Han Chinese and as such, are told that these
‘terrorists’ must be restrained and ‘reeducated’ or ‘reprogramed’ to accept the
new reality in China that has no room for dissension, dialogue and debate. Not
surprisingly, the frustrated Uyghurs who increasingly find themselves cornered
against the wall and are denied the rights to their culture, plus the political
and economic windfalls that have hitherto benefitted the Han settlers to their
mineral-rich region have sometimes reacted violently by attacking Han settlers
and the trigger-happy police with knives.
As we have seen elsewhere, ethnic riots do not occur in vacuum. If the
young Uyghurs, a minority group comprising roughly half the population of
Xinjiang province, had not lost trust in the state and its institutions it is
difficult to accept that such riots could have occurred.
Mao’s successors have resorted to Sinicization (i.e., Hanification) of
the region. They have changed the demography of the region by settling Han
Chinese from other parts. They have curtailed the region’s
millennium-plus-years old rich Muslim culture and are practicing widespread
religious repression against the ethnic Uyghurs. Authorities have banned
“abnormal beards,” religious names for children, fasting during Ramadan and
restricted attending weddings and funerals. They have conducted forced abortion
on Uyghur women. They have closed down Qur’anic and Uyghur language schools to
cut down their Islamic and cultural ties with other Muslims. Because of the
Mandarin-based educational policy of the state, the Uyghurs can’t pass and find
jobs in their own land. Their intellectuals are imprisoned and anyone talking
with visitors from outside, esp. foreign reporters and human rights group, are
suspected of being disloyal, and often risk prison times. Police question them
on the street, demanding to know where they’re going and why. Metal detectors,
facial scanners and document checks are routine. Surveillance cameras are
everywhere, even in some public restrooms. “In one Uighur mosque, I counted 40
of them,” writes Peter Martin for the Bloomberg.com who recently visited
Xinjiang. During his entire stay, he could not hear a single call of prayer
(adhan) from any mosque.
In essence, the once dynamic region in the Silk Road that woke up for
centuries with the adhan heard from the minarets has been turned into a police
state where Uyghurs are afraid to speak with anyone or even call adhan for
believers to gather and pray together.
The communist party-state has institutionalized unfathomed
discrimination based on Uyghur’s distinct religion, habitus, physiognomy,
language culture and socioeconomic status. In so doing, they have only widened
the gap between the Han settlers and the indigenous Uyghurs. It developed
Xinjiang as a penal colony, as a nuclear testing ground and dumping ground for
radioactive wastes (that is responsible for unusually high birth defects and
mortality rate amongst the inhabitants) and as a buffer against invasion, and
as a supplier of raw materials and living space for an overpopulated country.
Apparently, none of the strong-arm tactics and gross disregard of the
frontier territory and its native people is working and thus, now Xi and his
brutal regime is experimenting with its latest criminal policy of mass
detention in “political training centers,” heavily fortified buildings that
were likened to the reeducation camps of the Mao Zedong era. Associated Press
has reported that Uighurs were forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs, praise
the communist party and endure solitary confinement. Former detainees told
Human Rights Watch they were jailed without hearings, shackled and beaten
mercilessly. Observers have compared the camps to Soviet Gulags, and in a
May 20, 2018 editorial, the Washington Post wrote: “All who believe in the
principle of ‘never again’ after the horror of the Nazi extermination camps and
Stalin’s gulag must speak up against China’s grotesque use of brainwashing,
prisons and torture.”
In August 2018 the United Nations called upon China to end the
detention, but government officials denied the existence of the camps. How long
can the criminal regime of Xi Jinping deny what is so obvious and well-known?
While one can understand Xi’s loftiest goal of transforming China as one
of the world’s great powers one cannot excuse his gross violations of human
rights. Although Xinjiang represents just 1.5 percent of China’s population of
1.4 billion and 1.3 percent of its economy, the Alaska-sized Muslim-majority
region borders eight countries and sits at the geographic heart of Xi’s
signature Belt and Road Initiative and serves as a crossroads for a railway
link to London and a route to the Arabian Sea through Pakistan, where China is
financing a $62 billion port and transportation corridor called the CPEC
(China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). It’s a trillion-dollar plan to finance new
highways, ports and other modern infrastructure projects in developing
countries that will connect them to China’s markets and put them in China’s
debt for decades to come.
Xi’s authoritarian regime has spent vast sums of money to building up
cities in Xinjiang to attract companies and fuel economic growth in the
relatively poor region. Concerns about PRC’s diabolical crackdown policy of the
Uyghurs and lawlessness in Xinjiang, however, don’t appear to be reassuring investors.
Almost no foreign companies have located there, and the region’s economy slowed
last year.
Although China sees that as a temporary setback, unless Xi changes his
criminal – apparently the most intense – campaign of coercive social
reengineering since the end of the Cultural Revolution and stops its ethnic
cleansing crimes against the minority Uyghur Muslims, and instead focuses in
nation-building through integration that benefits all (including minority
Muslims and Christians) he will be forced to live with the failed Soviet and
Balkan experience. Is that outcome a desirable one for the PRC and its
president who has already been dubbed as the “world’s most dangerous opponent”
of open societies?
It is also feared that this repugnant campaign of mass detention of
Muslims is set to expand, as the regional governments within PRC with sizeable
Muslim populations are dispatching officials to detention centers in Xinjiang
with the explicit aim of learning to and adopting the same criminal measures.
It is important for the international community to condemn the Chinese
ethnic cleansing crimes against the minority Uyghur and demand a release of all
those detained immediately. If Xi’s authoritarian regime fails to comply then
the international community should adopt a “Global Magnitsky Act” to sanction
Chinese officials that are complicit in the human rights violations occurring
in Xinjiang. The freezing of assets and exclusion from banking systems overseas
are within the power of concerned governments.
It is equally important for all the developing and third world countries
where China has invested heavily in recent years that they use such as a point
of strategic leverage and encourage Beijing into compliance with international
human-rights norms and stop its horrendous crimes against the Uyghur.
For China to be great again, it must earn the respect and trust of the
world community by respecting the human rights of its minorities to live and
prosper as equals. It simply cannot afford to behaving like a rogue state that
arrogantly sees the Soviet Gulags and Nazi Concentration Camps as models to
copy.
Set the Uyghurs free now, Mr. Xi. Otherwise, history will treat you the
same way it has treated despots like Hitler and Mussolini, and many others that
followed their inglorious trail.
Dr. Habib
Siddiqui has a long history as a peaceful activist in an effort towards
improving human rights and creating a just and equitable world. He has written
extensively in the arena of humanity, global politics, social conscience and
human rights since 1980, many of which have appeared in newspapers, magazines,
journals and the Internet. He has tirelessly championed the cause of the
disadvantaged, the poor and the forgotten here in Americas and abroad.
Commenting on his articles, others have said, "His meticulously researched
essays and articles combined with real human dimensions on the plight of the
displaced peoples of Rohingya in Myanmar, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Palestine, and American Muslims in the post-9/11 era have made him a singular
important intellectual offering a sane voice with counterpoints to the shrill
threats of the oppressors and the powerful. He offers a fresh and insightful
perspective on a whole generation of a misunderstood and displaced people with
little or no voice of their own." He has authored 11 books, five of which
are now available through Amazon.com. His latest book - Devotional Stories is
published by A.S. Noordeen, Malaysia.
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