{"id":928,"date":"2018-07-27T15:31:54","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T15:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=928"},"modified":"2018-07-27T15:31:54","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T15:31:54","slug":"east-turkestan-chinas-human-rights-abuses-against-uyghurs-ignored-by-muslim-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=928","title":{"rendered":"East Turkestan: China\u2019s Human Rights Abuses Against Uyghurs Ignored by Muslim World"},"content":{"rendered":"
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UNPO<\/p>\n

China\u2019s ongoing mistreatment of its Muslim Uyghur minority continues to escape the headlines, including in Muslim-majority nations. Although the forced assimilation campaign targets the Uyghurs\u2019 culture and religion amongst other human rights violations, they have received no support from other Muslim populations; common critics of islamophobia and abuses against Muslim minorities such as Palestinians are also silent. This is in part due to China\u2019s growing economic interests in regions such as the Middle East, but also a consequence of the Uyghurs\u2019 geographical and political isolation from the rest of the world, and the difficulty for international actors to gain access to the region. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The article below was published by\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n

Internment camps with up to a million prisoners. Empty neighborhoods. Students, musicians, athletes, and peaceful academics jailed. A massive high-tech surveillance state that monitors and judges every movement. The future of more than 10 million Uighurs, the members of China\u2019s Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, is looking increasingly grim.<\/p>\n

As the Chinese authorities continue a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, the northwest region of China that\u2019s home to the Uighur, Islam has been one of the main targets. Major mosques in the major cities of Kashgar and Urumqi now stand empty. Prisoners in the camps are told to renounce God and embrace the Chinese Communist Party. Prayers, religious education, and the Ramadan fast are increasingly restricted or banned. Even in the rest of China, Arabic text is being stripped from public buildings, and Islamophobia is being tacitly encouraged by party authorities.<\/p>\n

But amid this state-backed campaign against their religious brethren, Muslim leaders and communities around the world stand silent. While the fate of the Palestinians stirs rage and resistance throughout the Islamic world, and millions stood up to condemn the persecution of the Rohingya, there\u2019s been hardly a sound on behalf of the Uighur. No Muslim nation\u2019s head of state has made a public statement in support of the Uighurs this decade.\u00a0 Politicians and many religious leaders who claim to speak for the faith are silent in the face of China\u2019s political and economic power.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of our primary barriers has been a definite lack of attention from Muslim-majority states,\u201d said Peter Irwin, a project manager at the World Uyghur Congress. This isn\u2019t out of ignorance. \u201cIt is very well documented,\u201d said Omer Kanat, the director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. \u201cThe Muslim-majority countries governments know what\u2019s happening in East Turkestan,\u201d he said, using the Uighur term for the region.<\/p>\n

Many Muslim governments have strengthened their relationship with China or even gone out of their way to support China\u2019s persecution. Last summer, Egypt deported several ethnic Uighurs back to China, where they faced near-certain jail time and, potentially, death, to little protest. This followed similar moves by Malaysia and Pakistan in 2011.<\/p>\n

This is in stark contrast to how these countries react to news of prejudice against Muslims by the West or, especially, Israel. Events in Gaza have sparked protests across the Islamic world, not only in the Middle East but also in more distant Bangladesh and Indonesia. If Egypt or Malaysia had deported Palestinians to Israeli prisons, the uproar would likely have been ferocious. But the brutal, and expressly anti-religious, persecution of Uighurs prompts no response, even as the campaign spreads to the Uighur diaspora worldwide. If Egypt or Malaysia had deported Palestinians to Israeli prisons, the uproar would likely have been ferocious. But the brutal, and expressly anti-religious, persecution of Uighurs prompts no response, even as the campaign spreads to the Uighur diaspora worldwide.<\/p>\n

Part of the answer is that money talks. China has become a key trade partner of every Muslim-majority nation. Many are members of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or are participating in China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative. In South Asia, this means infrastructure investment. In Southeast Asia, China is a key market for commodities such as palm oil and coal. The Middle East benefits due to China\u2019s position as the world\u2019s top importer of oil and its rapidly increasing use of natural gas.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany states in the Middle East are becoming more economically dependent on China,\u201d said Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, a Chinese-Middle East relations expert at the University of Technology Sydney. \u201cChina\u2019s geoeconomic strategy has resulted in political influence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there is a direct fear of retribution or fear of pressure,\u201d said Dawn Murphy, a China-Middle East relations expert at Princeton University. \u201cI do think that the elite of these various countries are weighing their interests, and they are making a decision that continuing to have positive relations with China is more important than bringing up these human rights issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Xinjiang\u2019s immediate neighbors, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakhstan, face a particularly difficult situation. The ongoing persecution has caught up some of their own citizens, or their families. But with both close economic and geopolitical ties to China, these countries are highly reluctant to speak up. Pakistan sees China as a vital balancer against India, and their relationship, sometimes referred to as the \u201ciron brotherhood,\u201d goes back decades.<\/p>\n

But there are subtler reasons the Uighur are ignored. They are on the edge of the Muslim world, in contrast to the Palestinian cause, which is directly connected to the fate of one of Islam\u2019s holiest cities, Jerusalem. China has little place in the cultural imagination of Islam, in contrast with Muslims\u2019 fraught relationship with the idea of a Jewish state. Even as China\u2019s presence in the Middle East grows, it lacks the looming presence of the United States or Israel.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s success at cutting off access to Xinjiang is another reason. A regular dose of videos depicting Palestinian suffering hits YouTube every day. Interviews with tearful Rohingya stream on Al Jazeera and other global media outlets. Palestinian representatives and advocates speak and write in the media. But few images are emerging from Xinjiang due to restrictions on press access and the massive state censorship apparatus. That means the world sees little more than blurry satellite footage of the internment camps. Even Uighurs who have escaped are often only able to talk anonymously, not least because Chinese intelligence regularly threatens persecution of their families back home if they speak up.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also much harder to stir up feelings about a new cause rather than an old, established one. For leaders who care more about their own popularity than human rights, it\u2019s an easy call. \u201cPeople tend to pay more attention to this kind of issue,\u201d said Ahmad Farouk Musa, the director of the Malaysian nongovernmental organization Islamic Renaissance Front. \u201cYou gain popularity if you show you are anti-Zionism and if you are fighting for the Palestinians, as compared to the Rohingya or Uighurs.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are two places, however, where there may be hope for leadership. One is Southeast Asia, where Indonesia and Malaysia are two of the Islamic world\u2019s few democracies. Both have relatively a free press, have an active civil society, and, importantly, are geographically close to China, giving the giant country more of a presence in the local public consciousness. Anti-Chinese feeling is strong in both nations, especially Indonesia.<\/p>\n

Malaysia bears watching due to its recent historic election. China was a key campaign issue, due to its connection to the massive, multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal. The new government is taking a strong position on China, with the new finance minister, Lim Guan Eng, pledging to review all of China\u2019s trade deals with the country and suspending several existing projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Chinese had been very influential in giving loans to [former Prime Minister] Najib [Razak] to stay in power, so they felt compelled to accept whatever the Chinese wanted them to do,\u201d Musa said. \u201cI hope that the new government has shifted their policy and will become more sensitive towards this issue and about human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first test of this will happen soon, as the Chinese government is demanding the deportation of 11 Uighur asylum-seekers from Malaysia. The new government, led by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, may not be as willing to bend to China\u2019s demands as the previous one.<\/p>\n

The other place to watch is Turkey, which has a strong cultural connection to the Turkic-speaking Uighurs and is home to the largest Uighur exile community. In 2009, when riots broke out in Urumqi, only Turkey\u2019s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke out. Turkey has also seen the only widespread protests against China\u2019s treatment of Uighurs, most recently in 2015.<\/p>\n

\u201cTurkey is the only major country whose leadership as well as the public is widely aware of the Uighur persecution in East Turkestan,\u201d said Alip Erkin , a Uighur activist currently living aboard.<\/p>\n

But Turkey\u2019s growing authoritarianism has caused it to look toward China as a possible ally against the West. Since Turkey\u2019s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu visited China last year and said his country would eliminate \u201canti-China media reports,\u201d there has been less attention given to the Uighur cause, including on the streets. Still, many Uighurs hold out hope.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany Uighurs think Turkey can be the ultimate defender of the Uighur cause when the time is right,\u201d Erkin said.<\/p>\n

While the signs of hope are there for the Uighur cause, they are small and localized. China\u2019s profile is growing, and more Muslim-majority nations are becoming dependent on its economic power\u2014earlier this month, $23 billion in loans was promised to Arab states. The chances of a unified Muslim response to the Uighur human rights crisis are getting slimmer and slimmer.<\/p>\n

Source:http:\/\/unpo.org\/article\/20991<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UNPO China\u2019s ongoing mistreatment of its Muslim Uyghur minority continues to escape the headlines, including in Muslim-majority nations. Although the forced assimilation campaign targets the Uyghurs\u2019 culture and religion amongst other human rights violations, they have received no support from other Muslim populations; common critics of islamophobia and abuses against Muslim minorities such as Palestinians […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uyghur-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":929,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions\/929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}