One of the world’s largest religious freedom violations was brought to light this past Friday in a United Nations report on the detention of some one million (in some estimates two million!) Uighur and other Muslim minorities in internment camps in Xinjiang Province in Western China at the hands of the Chinese government.
These minorities have long lived in tension with the Chinese government, who fears their separatist tendencies and uses the rhetoric of the War on Terror to legitimate its suppression of them. (See this excellent piece by Mehdi Hasan). The Chinese government exaggerates, as Hasan explain:
That isn’t to say that Uighur militant groups are a myth, but the few that do exist are small, weak, and pose very little threat to the Chinese state. Most are inspired by local factors rather than international alliances. To quote Michael Clarke, an Australian academic who has studied Xinjiang, “It’s not that China shouldn’t be concerned about [global terrorist ties], but the core issue is that the linkages have been exaggerated by the Chinese government.”
Xinjiang Province also happens to be the home of China’s largest oil and gas reserves.
Religion is integral to the internments and to the Chinese government’s suppression of Uighurs in recent years. A common criticism of religious freedom advocates is that they depict conflicts as religious that are really about something else: economics, self-determination. Here, yes, these factors are also involved. But so is religion — in a big way. Hasan describes China’s policies:
The Chinese government seems bent on humiliating and abusing the Muslims of Xinjiang. In recent years, Beijing has banned Uighur parents from naming their sons “Muhammad”; children from entering mosques; and government employees from fasting during Ramadan. Muslim men are prohibited from growing “abnormally” long beards, while Muslim women cannot wear the face veil in public.
Then there are the “political camps for indoctrination,” cited by the U.N. panel last week, in which hundreds of thousands of detainees are forced to shout Communist Party slogans; declare their loyalty only to the Chinese dictator, President Xi Jinping; and are “lectured about the dangers of Islam.”
The word “Orwellian,” therefore, does not do justice to the harrowing accounts of abuses coming out of Xinjiang, rightly dubbed a “police state” and “apartheid with Chinese characteristics” by The Economist. The U.N. panel said it was a “massive internment camp” — “a sort of ‘no-rights zone.’”
The camps merit outrage, not the indifference shown by heads of Western and even Muslim majority states. Hasan again:
So where is the global outcry? Where are the protests from Western governments, which so often claim to value human rights above all else? President Donald Trump says he has “a lot of respect for China” and likes to brag that Xi Jinping is “a friend of mine.” On a visit to China earlier this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May won plaudits from Chinese state-run media for being “pragmatic” and ignoring Western journalists and activists who “keep pestering [her] to criticize Beijing” over human rights abuses. Her fellow European leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, has visited China 11 times in 12 years — but has never publicly raised the issue of the Uighurs on any of those trips.
Where is the outrage from the governments of majority-Muslim countries, which so often claim to speak on behalf of their oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters across the globe? They are loud in their condemnation of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians and Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. But a million Muslims behind bars? Beards and veils banned? Imams humiliated? The news out of Xinjiang has been met only with radio silence from the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Take the Turkish government, which in the past has spoken out in defense of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, but these days is keen on cozying up to Beijing. Or consider the Iranian government, which not long ago announced a “new chapter” in Tehran-Beijing relations, praising China for having stood “by the side of the Iranian nation during hard days.”
The camps remind everyone that Muslims are often the recipients, not just the perpetrators, of massive human rights and religious freedom violations. The world’s states, the human rights community, and, not least, religious freedom advocates are called to respond.