Uighur muslims: a minority marginalised by their motherland
As ethnic tensions in Xinjiang continue to mount and global leaders remain silent on the genocide, hopes of China being brought to reckoning are fast diminishing.
Photo Courtesy: Malcolm Brown on Flickr
There’s been a recent spike in media coverage of the long-standing conflict between the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang and their Han Chinese neighbours. The surfacing of a rare glimpse inside the re-education camps in Xinjiang provides a harrowing insight into the systematic oppression of the Uighurs and the state of religious intolerance in China. As the UN fails to hold China accountable, a burning question arises: how will Uighur Muslims be able to attain equal legal status in their homeland when the international community continues to tiptoe around flagrant human rights abuses?
Xinjiang is an autonomous territory in the northwest of China and home to 12 million Uighur Muslims, the majority of whom live in the Tarim Basin. Despite an intermittent history of autonomy and brief periods of independence, Xinjiang was brought under Chinese control by the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century. In 1949, following the Chinese Civil War, Xinjiang was officially established as a province within the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
In 1955, Xinjiang was declared an autonomous region. From the 1950s to the end of the 20th century, the Han Chinese population grew from 7 to 40 per cent due to the mass immigration of Han Chinese between the 1950s and the 1970s, which was further accelerated by China’s economic reform in 1978. Although Uighur Muslims are still the dominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, the sociocultural, religious, and economic differences between the two groups has given rise to ethnic conflict.
The backstory
The separatist sentiment stirring among the Uighurs in the late 1960s led to the formation of the East Turkestan People’s Revolutionary Party and the United Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan, both of which received backing from the Soviet Union. The tensions between China and the USSR, particularly in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompted some support of Uighur separatist groups from the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led to the independence of several Muslim states in Central Asia, the watershed moment of the East Turkestan independence movement was the 1990 Barin uprising.
The exact details of the uprising remain disputed due to conflicting accounts from the Uighurs and the Han Chinese. On the evening of April 4, 1990, leader of the East Turkestan Islamic Party, Zeydun Yusup, headed a group of 200 to 300 Uighur militants to a local government office in a protest against Chinese rule in Xinjiang and the forced abortions being inflicted upon Uighur women. Between April 5 and 10, a series of violent skirmishes played out between the Uighurs and the armed police dispatched by the Chinese government to quash the upheaval. Widespread civil disorder ensued, leading to the detention and blacklisting of nearly 8,000 Uighurs by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who were labelled as “splittists”.
While the 1990s saw a series of bombings, demonstrations, and violent clashes involving riot police, Chinese paramilitary troops, and Uighur civilians, it was at the turn of the century that the unrest in Xinjiang reached boiling point. The July 2009 Ürümqi riots were a series of violent ethnic clashes and protests in Ürümqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Triggered by a factory brawl involving Uighur and Han Chinese workers in Guangdong province, Uighur protesters took to the streets of Ürümqi on July 5, 2009, initially peacefully, but soon escalating into widespread violence.
Rioters targeted Han Chinese people and businesses, resulting in at least 200 casualties. The Chinese government responded with paramilitary forces and introduced a curfew. Mass arrests, trials, and sentencings followed, and the government imposed an internet and communications blackout in the city. These events deepened ethnic tensions and mistrust between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Although over a decade has passed since the Ürümqi riots, the underlying tensions that erupted in Xinjiang during the summer of 2009 are still very much alive.
The current political climate
It’s believed that approximately one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are being held in internment camps in Xinjiang, the majority of whom are being detained arbitrarily. Chinese government officials maintain that the people in custody are religious extremists, and the facilities are vocational training centres that are focused on reforming the so-called extremists through skills development and a mandatory educational programme.
The reality, however, is far grimmer. Although there’s limited footage of the “re-education” camps in full operation, reports from former inmates who have since been exiled from China have attested to the curriculum of political indoctrination, forced allegiance to the CCP, and the compulsory study of communist propaganda. Former prisoners have also alleged that authorities use various forms of torture from waterboarding to tiger chairs as punishment for disobedience.
The Chinese government has attributed its actions against Uighur Muslims to concerns about radicalisation threatening national security. In 2014, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism to address the risk posed by so-called extremists. However, with most prisoners detained without receiving a formal charge, the government’s justification of a “war on terror” is dubious at best. In reality, most of the Uighurs detained in Xinjiang have been arrested for merely practising their religion. “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins” wrote Maisumujiang Maimuer, a Chinese religious affairs official, in the state news media.
In an effort to promote Chinese cultural influence in Xinjiang, a set of laws were passed in 2017 banning people from growing long beards and wearing veils in public spaces. Cultural assimilation has therefore become synonymous with cultural erosion, as Uighurs are deprived of their right to freedom of religion. The only form of devotion allowed in the detention centres is worship of President Xi Jinping, which has contributed to the development of a cult of personality surrounding his leadership.
Detainees have reported being forced to chant mantras well-wishing the CCP leader. Other daily activities include singing revolutionary songs, memorising the Chinese national anthem, and engaging in ritualistic expressions of praise for the Communist Party. Resembling Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate”, the PRC’s popular political slogan, known as the Three Evils, which condemns terrorism, extremism, and separatism, is also recited daily. Those who refuse to comply face severe punishment in the form of starvation and sleep deprivation. But perhaps the most concerning practice in the camps is the forced abortions and sterilisation of Uighur women to control the state’s Muslim population. In this sense, it’s Huxley’s motto of “civilisation is sterilisation” that rings true.
One of the primary reasons for detaining Uighurs in Xinjiang is because families are having what the CCP deems to be an excessive number of children. However, in 2019, China’s birth rate was 10.48 per 1,000, making it the lowest figure on record in 70 years according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The troubling reality is that as restrictions tighten on minority ethnic communities, the government is encouraging Han Chinese families to expand to strengthen the nation’s diminishing workforce. Anthropologist Adrian Zenz has labelled this double standard a “demographic genocide”. The policing of reproductive processes among Uighur women has taken the form of the involuntary administration of contraceptive implants. Zenz found that in 2018, 80 per cent of intrauterine device fittings in China took place in Xinjiang, despite the fact that this region constitutes only 1.8 per cent of China’s population.
The global reaction
China’s campaign of social engineering is a pernicious form of ethnocide. In 2019, a joint statement was issued by 23 UN member states, including the UK and the USA, condemning the CCP’s restrictions on cultural and religious practices, as well as its use of mobile malware for mass surveillance, which disproportionately affects Uighur Muslims.
By contrast, Belarus issued a joint statement with the backing of 54 UN member states, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, applauding China’s deradicalisation and counterterrorism efforts. This group of nations has also praised China for what they perceive as a commitment to protecting human rights, which they claim has been misrepresented and politicised by the media. They voiced their disapproval of international interference in China’s internal affairs and refuted the seemingly baseless allegations raised by several member states regarding discriminatory policies.
Quite tellingly, it’s the countries whose human rights records have been routinely brought into question that have endorsed China’s actions. Although far from the point of reconciliation, it’s interesting to note that the persecution and displacement of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar have received significantly more media coverage and global attention than the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
A fraught silence prevails in the Middle East despite clear evidence of ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. The lack of Muslim-majority countries willing to condemn China’s treatment of minorities is indicative of how economic interests often take precedence over human rights in a precarious geopolitical balancing act where morality scarcely gets a look-in.
The international response to the human rights violations in Xinjiang has been marked by varying degrees of concern, with some countries and organisations condemning the actions while others have remained hesitant or non-committal in their stance. The question that remains is how the international community can ensure accountability for these human rights violations and work towards a just and humane resolution for Xinjiang’s Uighur Muslims once and for all.