By: IBRAHIM Jaafar
The People’s Republic of Chinais currently pursuing an unprecedented crackdown on the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, for whom the region has become a real-life dystonia.
Up to three million Uighurs have been arbitrarily detained in centres which Amnesty International has compared to “wartime concentration camps”, under the guise of combating extremism, which involve studying communist propaganda and renouncing fundamental pillars of the Islamic faith.
Uighurs can be prosecuted for the most benign manifestations of faith, such as wearing headscarves , growing long beards and reading the Quran. Their details, collected from facial recognition, identity cards and DNA samples are fed into a database to determine their loyalty to the communist creed.
“Ever since the end of Chairman Mao’s era in 1976, and probably including the period of hard military crackdown in 1989, we have not seen the scale of human rights abuse that we are seeing today in Xinjiang,” British MPs have been told.
An estimated 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death under rule of Mao Zedong, who founded the People's Republic of China.
Steve Tsang, director of the London School of Oriental Studies said: “When you have an identifiable group of citizens in a country where something like one tenth of that identifiable group live in camps, you have an enormous human rights problem.
Speaking to MPs on the committee, Prof Tsang urged politicians to speak out over abuses against Uighur Muslims.
He said: “I think if we believe in our values, in our system – even though there’s probably not much we can actually do to change the situation in China – it would be wrong for us to remain silent on the subject.”
China denied the existence of the camps until October last year, and since claimed it is detaining people guilty of minor crimes in what it describes as “vocational education centres”.
China’s brutal crackdown on Uighurs shows no sign of slowing down – so why aren’t Muslim leaders stepping in when excerpts from Communist Party recordings equate Islam to a mental illness?
The shameful silence of Muslim politicians over the treatment of this community is more than a story of betrayal. It’s a tragic tale of how globalization has exalted wealth over human rights.
The fact that China’s outreach to the Middle East and South Asia occurs concurrently with its hyper-securitisation and militarization on the domestic front, indicates the extent to which economic interests continue to dominate the global agenda of Muslim statesmen and more specifically, how easily human rights become a casualty in the era of globalized capitalism.
With China’s repressive policies now extending to the Hui Muslim minority, as evidenced by their forced eviction from a mosque in the southwestern Yunnan province last month, its position as the GCC’s largest trading partner continues unabated.
Having endured the brunt of the US military machine for decades, the Muslim world is today confronted with another leviathan forcibly seeking its political acquiescence: China.