The Uighurs, the Muslim minority in China’s Xinjiang province, are in the news for all the wrong and heartbreaking reasons. For one, they are in the midst of what the United Nations defines as genocide. Over a million and perhaps twice or thrice those many are essentially locked up in what Beijing charmingly calls re-education camps, which are in reality like concentration camps. Between ten and 20 percent of the total population of about 11 million Uighurs are in such camps experiencing daily systematic repression and oppression by the Chinese authorities, according to serious reporting persisting now for years.
I have written about the issue. While updating my information this morning it stuck me yet again that the distance between Xinjiang’s capital Ürümqi (Pronounced Oorum chi) and Islamabad is about 1680 kilometers or a 1000 miles. I mention Pakistan’s capital because here is an assertively Islamic republic and that too the only nuclear power within the Islamic world to boot, whose very founding in 1947 was claimed to be a haven for Muslims, doing absolutely nothing as fellow Muslims are being subjected to genocidal treatment by its benefactor China, benefactor being the key word. Prime Minister Imran Khan has maintained expedient silence over the issue, pretending to not even know about the issue in his country’s neighborhood.
It is astonishing that practically the entire Islamic world is silent on the issue even though it affects the one thing they otherwise get so worked up over—fellow Muslims.
India with its close to 200 million Muslims too has been strategically non-committal about the issue. It is ironic that America under the administration of a president famously antipathetic to Muslims is among the strongest to censure Beijing over its treatment of the Uighurs.
It is a measure of how the Uighur’s terrible plight is making an impression on America when John Oliver chronicles it on his HBO show ‘Last Week with John Oliver’ as he did yesterday.
The Chinese approach to Xinjiang as a territory and Muslims as a community is the same as it has had for Tibet and Tibetans. Sending the majority Han community to Xinjiang in large numbers to essentially muscle out the province’s distinct cultural traditions and language is one of many way that Beijing employs to advance its grip over the region apart from the terrible re-education camps. Quite craftily, if now unsuccessfully, Beijing has since 2009, when riots broke out in the province, tried to cast the Uighurs as terrorists simply because they are Muslims. That specious and cruel justification has long run its course because the Uighurs have begun to receive some notice internationally. Like I said if John Oliver features it as a full segment, it means something even though he is often the odd man out among his peers to pay attention to such serious global issues.
Just how intrusive the Chinese state is in the province that one gets the sense that there are more CCTV cameras than there are perhaps people (literary exaggeration.) As Oliver mentions there is a list 75 “behavioral indications” of religious extremism that the Chinese authorities employ to track like there.
From what I have been reading Beijing has given up all pretense of being proper or moral in its policing of the region. Beijing knows that the so-called champions of all things Islam and Muslims such as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will always fall with the party line given the economic servitudes it has piled up around the world.
There is next to no chance that anything will change for the Uighurs no matter who speaks out.
