Sri Lanka - Uyghur Muslims minorities in China-agony and anguish

(MENAFN- Colombo Gazette)

China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur Muslim population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang. Human rights groups believe China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls“re-education camps”, and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms.

There is also evidence that Uyghurs are being used as forced labour and of women being forcibly sterilized. Some former camp detainees have also alleged they were tortured and sexually abused. The US is among several countries to have accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. The leading human rights groups Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have published reports accusing China of crimes against humanity.

The Context

Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group native to Xinjiang . They are distinct from the Han Chinese , the predominant ethnic group in China. Uyghurs are the second-largest predominantly Muslim ethnicity in China and Islam is an important aspect of Uyghur identity. The Uyghur language has around 10 million speakers and is shared with other minority groups in the region.

Historically, Chinese dynasties exerted control over parts of modern-day Xinjiang. The region came under Chinese rule as a result of the westward expansion of the Manchu -led Qing dynasty during the 1700s, which also saw the conquests of Tibet and Mongolia . From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Chinese government sponsored a mass migration of Han Chinese to Xinjiang and introduced policies designed to suppress cultural identity and religion in the region. During this period, Uyghur independence organizations emerged with some support from the Soviet Union, with the East Turkestan People's Party being the largest in 1968. During the 1970s, the Soviets supported the United Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan (URFET) against the Han Chinese.

Reconciliation

During the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping , China pursued a new policy of cultural liberalization in Xinjiang and adopted a flexible language policy nationally. Despite a positive response among party officials and minority groups, the Chinese government viewed this policy as unsuccessful and from the mid-1980s its official pluralistic language policy became increasingly subordinate to a covert policy of minority assimilation motivated by geopolitical concerns. 

Consequently, and in Xinjiang particularly, multilingualism and cultural pluralism were restricted to favor a“monolingual, monocultural model”, which in turn helped to embed and strengthen an oppositional Uyghur identity. Attempts by the Chinese state to encourage economic development in the region by exploiting natural resources led to ethnic tension and discontent within Xinjiang over the region's lack of autonomy. In April 1990, a violent uprising in Barin , near Kashgar, was suppressed by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), involving a large number of deaths.

Chinese Policy

“Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of“two-faced people,” dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end.” —Maisumujiang Maimuer, Chinese religious affairs official, August 10, 2017, on a Xinhua Weibo page.

Writing in 1998, political scientist Barry Sautman considered the above policies designed to reduce inequality between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang unsuccessful at eliminating conflicts because they were shaped by the“paternalistic and hierarchical approach to ethnic relations adopted by the Chinese government”. . 

In May 2014, the Chinese government launched the“Strike Hard Campaign” against Violent Terrorism in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and other Turkic Muslims. Research by Stanford Law School's Human Rights & Conflict Resolution, along with reports by human rights organizations, the media, activist groups, and others, and internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, show that the Chinese government has committed—and continues to commit—crimes against humanity against the Turkic Muslim population.

The Chinese government's oppression of Muslims is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years has reached unprecedented levels. As many as a million people have been arbitrarily detained in 300 to 400 facilities, which include“political education” camps, pretrial detention centers, and prisons. Courts have handed down harsh prison sentences without due process, sentencing Turkic Muslims to years in prison merely for sending an Islamic religious recording to a family member or downloading e-books in Uyghur. Detainees and prisoners are subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor. The oppression continues outside the detention facilities: the Chinese authorities impose on Turkic Muslims a pervasive system of mass surveillance, controls on movement, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, cultural and religious erasure, and family separation.

In 2017, according to official statistics, arrests in Xinjiang accounted for nearly 21 percent of all arrests in China, despite people in Xinjiang making up only 1.5 percent of the total population. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have used various pretexts to damage or destroy two-thirds of Xinjiang's mosques; about half of those have been demolished outright. Important Islamic sacred sites have been demolished across the region.

Suppression of Islamic Scholarship

The intellectual heart of China's Islamic community has largely been silenced as scholars, writers, religious leaders and their families are under constant state surveillance. A once-thriving academic and religious exchange between Chinese Muslims and centers across the Middle East and South Asia has halted, as those having business or religious ties abroad are subject to Chinese state harassment and detention.

“What dominates Muslim [government] cadres is the [Communist] party line and the official version of Islam promoted by government agencies and organizations,” says Ma Haiyun, an associate professor at Frostburg State University, where he studies Islam in China.“The result of this restriction is to make traditional discourses on Islam more commercial, patriotic and Chinese.”

The door to Qingzhen Shuju — Islam Books — remains padlocked, the shop full of stacks of books in their unopened packaging. Located in an upscale university neighborhood in Beijing, the bookstore and its accompanying website were a prominent publisher of Islamic philosophy works and the newest Arabic works translated into Chinese — until publisher Ma Yinglong was arrested in 2017 on charges of illegal publishing and terrorism. Two people close to him say he remains in detention in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.

International Criticism

The United States State Department and the parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands have determined that China's conduct also constitutes genocide under international law. Human Rights Watch has not documented the existence of the necessary genocidal intent at this time.

More than 40 mainly Western countries have criticized China at the United Nations over the reported torture and repression of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, keeping a spotlight on a region where foreign governments and researchers say one million people or more have been confined in camps.

The 43 countries that signed the statement criticizing China expressed particular concern at“credible-based reports” of the existence of“re-education camps” in Xinjiang.“We call on China to allow immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang for independent observers, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and her office,” the countries said.

It was the third time in three years that the US and mainly European nations used the Human Rights Committee meeting to criticize China over its policies on the Uyghurs.

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