China has destroyed mosques, burnt Qurans, forbidden fasting during Ramzan, and outlawed halal diets. China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
New Delhi: As the Afghanistan situation deteriorated, China hosted the Taliban in July 2021, called them a “pivotal force” and begged them not to shelter Uyghur militants from Xinjiang province, Afghanistan’s neighbour. China’s fear of radical Islam explains its outreach to the fundamentalist Taliban. It is worried about the support, which Al Qaeda (that maintains close ties with the Taliban) could provide to the so-called East Turkestan Islamic Movement and the infiltration of Islamic State (IS) fighters into Xinjiang. It does not trust Pakistan to rein in the Taliban. Beijing is also concerned about its mining interests in eastern Afghanistan, and is paying the Taliban to protect them.
The Taliban make promises, but no one trusts them. In 2001, when the Taliban were fleeing Kabul from the advancing Northern Alliance, China (that had given them weapons) refused them sanctuary in Xinjiang. The fundamentalist Taliban know that an atheist nation can never be their friend. China has around 22 million acknowledged Muslims—they are the country’s Achilles heel. Hence its brutal treatment of the adherents to a religion that it hates.
China’s target is not a specific community, but the Islamic faith—it has destroyed mosques (in one recent egregious case to build a public toilet), burnt Qurans, forbidden fasting during Ramzan, and outlawed halal diets. China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, with Beijing responsible for “policies of mass detention, torture, and cultural persecution, among other offenses”, Human Rights Watch said in a report on 19 April 2021. The 53-page report, titled “Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots” documented a “range of abuses” that also include enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, separation of families, compelled returns to China, forced labour, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights. The report, which was authored with the help of Stanford Law School’s Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic noted that while Beijing’s oppression of Turkic Muslims is “not a new phenomenon”, with growing evidence for years of China’s brutal repression of its minorities—mass surveillance, arrests without cause, forced labour, detention camps, torture and murder—has reached “unprecedented levels” in 2021. Since 2017, when Beijing intensified its crackdown, arrests in Xinjiang (with 1.5% of the population) accounted for a fifth of all arrests in China, the report said. Arrests in the region increased threefold in the last five years. Up to a million people have been detained in 300 to 400 facilities, including “political education” camps, pretrial detention centres and prisons. Children whose parents have been detained are sometimes placed in state institutions.
The so-called Islamic Ummah that regularly criticizes Israel, Myanmar, India, and the United States for their alleged actions against Muslims, has kept quiet about China’s treatment of Uyghurs. In a most shameless act of commercial seduction, 37 nations, including several members of the OIC, signed a document applauding China’s action in Xinjiang. Pakistan’s drug-addicted Prime Minister says China is such a good friend, how can Pakistan criticize its oppression of Muslims?
After the recent sharp deterioration of its relations with the US, China worries that the US could use its continued military presence in Afghanistan to support Uyghur dissidents seeking independence from Beijing. Afghan Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, had tried to court Beijing hoping that it would pressurise Pakistan to rein in the Taliban. China did nothing. Even the promised Chinese investment of $100 million in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Afghanistan and the extraction of copper and oil never materialised. With the Taliban seizing power, China’s “iron brother” Pakistan is celebrating their military victory and will have another button to press against Beijing—the infiltration of Islamic extremist groups into Xinjiang. At a meeting with the Foreign Ministers of five Central Asian states on 12 May, China’s Foreign Minister urged them not to allow the US to station its forces in Central Asia after its military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Many Muslim majority countries in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia have signed on to Beijing’s self-serving Belt and Road Initiative. China is the largest trading partner for and investor in some of these countries, and they fear losing access to Chinese money and markets if they criticize China over Xinjiang. The Uyghurs once lived at the heart of Asia’s greatest trading routes, but are now concentrated far from the political, religious and economic centres of the Muslim world. Just two years ago, no one had heard of China’s genocide of the Uyghurs. Now, voices are being raised, especially in the large Muslim-majority countries that permit the most space for media and civil society—Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan. Arab channels like Al Jazeera and Arab News have been reporting on the Uyghur issue. Amazingly, in early 2019, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry (perhaps seeking to score brownie points for Sultan Recep Erdogan) condemned China for “violating the fundamental rights of Uyghur Turks and other Muslim communities”. This may not have much immediate impact on China’s relationship with Muslim majority countries. Many of them see China as a counterweight to the United States, just as they saw the USA as a counterweight to colonial European powers of the 20th century.
Years of military alliances, invasions, interventions, and overreach have left many governments in the Middle East with the impression that the US is an untrustworthy partner, and China could be an effective counterweight. However, underlying this romance with China, is the conviction that when push comes to shove, the West (and countries like India—which is why so many Middle Eastern nations are strengthening their relations with India) will ride in on a white steed to clobber China.
China’s obduracy with the Uyghurs and the Tibetans will permanently destroy its global image. Whatever the warts and failures of the US, Europe, and India, none of them have been accused of anything quite like a genocidal campaign against a domestic Muslim group. Southeast Asia is angry with China’s encroachment on their territorial waters even as Beijing pushes its BRI projects. According to a Pew Research Centre Poll early this year, only a third of Indonesians had a favourable opinion of China, as against half, a year earlier.
Beijing has acted with a sense of impunity in Xinjiang and Tibet. Its policies are coming back to haunt it. In January 2021, the United States was the first country to declare the human rights abuses in Xinjiang as genocide. This was followed by Canada’s House of Commons and the Dutch parliament each passing non-binding motions in February 2021 to recognize China’s actions as genocide. In April 2021, the UK House of Commons unanimously passed a similar non-binding motion. In May 2021 the New Zealand parliament unanimously declared that “severe human rights abuses” were occurring against the Uyghur people in China. The Seimas of Lithuania has just passed a resolution recognizing that the Chinese government’s abuse of the Uyghurs is genocide.
Several countries, including the US, European Union, United Kingdom and Canada, have imposed targeted sanctions. In October 2020, in a stinging rebuke to China, 39 countries (including most of the EU member states, as well as Canada, Haiti, Honduras, Australia and New Zealand) chastised China in the UN for its violation of the rights of the Uyghurs and its repression in Hong Kong. 18 countries had done so in 2018. The UN initiative was led by Germany’s ambassador, but three months later Germany piloted the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment!
Instead of reading the writing on the wall, China’s blind officials, unable to understand criticism, hit back. Its wolf-warrior ambassador to the UN said the signatories spread false information and political virus, and interfered in China’s internal affairs. The Xinjiang regional government retorted that the sanctions over human rights violations in Xinjiang were “waste paper” whose real purpose was to hamper Chinese companies internationally. Beijing organised media tours of Xinjiang but reporters who have travelled independently to investigate the allegations were blocked by authorities and hounded by police.
The European Parliament passed a resolution in December 2020 on forced labour and the situation of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that deeply deplored the ongoing persecution and the serious and systematic human rights violations that amount to crimes against humanity. It called on private sector companies to assess their engagement with the Xinjiang region and if human rights were not complied with. It asked China to allow an international observation group to conduct independent observations in the Xinjiang region. The British Foreign Minister (I am no admirer of his) called the abuse of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang “one of the worst human rights crises of our time”. Canada’s Foreign Ministry said: “Mounting evidence points to systemic, state-led human rights violations by Chinese authorities”. A BBC investigation published in February 2021 contained first-hand testimony of systematic rape, sexual abuse and torture of detainees. One woman testified that women were removed from their cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. A former guard at one of the camps, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described torture and food deprivation of inmates. In a “thank you” response, China banned the BBC.
China initially denied the existence of the camps, before defending them as a necessary measure against terrorism. In 2021, the European Union approved sanctions against four Chinese officials involved in running internment camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang including travel bans and asset freezes. Reacting like a wounded canine, China said the EU sanctions were “based on nothing but lies and disinformation”, and counter-sanctioned EU officials and entities in Europe “that severely harm China’s sovereignty and interests and maliciously spread lies and disinformation”. This infuriated the European Parliament which overwhelmingly voted to freeze the ratification of the December 2020 EU-China investment deal. In a strongly-worded resolution on 20 May 2021, the Parliament also deplored what it called the “crimes against humanity” taking place against the Uyghur Muslim minority and the crackdown on the democratic opposition in Hong Kong. True to form, the Chinese government responded to the European Parliament’s vote by calling on Brussels to “immediately stop interfering in China’s internal affairs (and) abandon its confrontational approach” and played its well-worn CD that the EU-China Agreement was a balanced and win-win deal that benefits both sides, rather than a “gift” or favour bestowed by one side to the other.
Clearly, the “curb Chinese abuses” chorus is rising towards a crescendo
The 2021 census report from China (duly modified by PingPong) suggests a slowing population growth rate and ageing population (thanks to its one child policy) so, like machines, Han couples are being programmed to have three children. However, PingPong will prove that the disastrous one-child policy has not created an ageing China since Chinese mothers, thanks to its amazing scientists, now deliver healthy babies in nine weeks instead of nine months. Lately, a credible peer-reviewed analysis by a German researcher, suggests that birth-control measures against Muslims could cut up to 4.5 million births of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang within 20 years. Expect the Chinese to retort: “Nonsense, the Uyghurs are doing it voluntarily so as to be absorbed into the great Han community more easily”.
Meanwhile, the military transitional Government of Sudan has agreed to let former dictator Omar Al Bashir be tried by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in the Darfur region. China should realize the eternal wisdom of Kautilya in his 2,200-year-old Arthashastra: Direct administration of conquered territory could require more effort, money or even blood than it was worth.
Ambassador Dr Deepak Vohra is Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau; Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil.