THE PERSECUTION OF UYGHUR MUSLIMS
- Justice Society Durham
- Feb 2, 2022
- 5 min read
In this article, one of Justice Society Durham's student contributors, Aalaina Khan discusses the persecution of Uyghur Muslims, first by providing a brief look at the history of the issue and then a consideration of the People's tribunal and its recent decision.
When Dominic Raab said this about what the Chinese government was doing, he was wasn’t being harsh – only factual. "extensive and invasive surveillance targeting minorities, systematic restrictions on Uighur culture, education, and the practice of Islam, and the widespread use of forced labour.” The Uyghur has been abused by the Chinse government since 2014, when anti-Uyghur policies were implemented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), following the election of the then new President Xi Jinping but he was not alone in his persecution of ethnic minorities in China, he was aided by Chen Quanguo.
Historical context
Chen Quanguo was the Party secretary (the most senior official of any province) of the Tibet Autonomous Region where he persecuted Tibetans who were protesting the Chinese dominance of Tibet via self-immolations. Chen then made it impossible for them to do so, prohibiting gas from being bought and preventing Tibetans from travelling to India, where they were meant to be receiving blessings from the Dalai Lama – who the Chinese government blame for the unrest in the region. He also created a force of over 20,000 Communist Party members to investigate villages and rural monasteries. Locals in the area also say that the ‘Red Armband Patrols’ (a volunteer group) raided homes in order to confiscate photos of the Dalai Lama as well. The methods used in Tibet have been considered a ‘rehearsal’ to what has occurred in Xinjiang and are ‘draconian’ by Michael Dillion, the founding director for a historian the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at Durham University, whose expertise lies in modern Chinese history and more specifically in the Xinjiang region and Muslims in China. In 2016 Xi made a speech at the National Religious Work Conference, stating that religious communities have to “promote Chinese culture, strive to integrate religious belief with Chinese culture,”. Later that same year Chen Quanguo went on to become the party secretary of Xinjiang, where he is still serving as the party secretary today.
All this combined with other information that has been leaked out of China have ultimately cumulated in the creation of a People’s Tribunal on the topic. The case of the Uyghur Muslims has not been taken to International Court of Justice (ICJ), or the International Criminal Court (ICC) as China is not a signatory to either and hence cases in those countries cannot be taken forward to available courts (ICJ and ICC) that have been designed for exactly these sorts of trials on human rights abuses. According to the Uyghur tribunal website if the ICJ and ICC were used, then “there would be no need for people’s tribunals.” The tribunal will follow ‘international law and legal norms’ throughout the trial. The Uyghur tribunal website also highlights that all people participating in the tribunal will be free of any link to the PRC or the Uyghurs but will naturally be calling upon witness from both and whilst some organisations may enter more evidence that will not be an influencing factor in the ultimate decision. The reason for the trials varies, the most obvious one being an attempt to pressure States and international organisations to meaningfully deal with these human rights violations but also the tribunal is being used to document and safeguard evidence that could potentially be lost in the future but would be necessary if any case was ever taken up.
In 2019, Human Rights Watch itself recognised the statement signed by 22 signatories promoting the end of the ‘mass arbitrary detentions and related violations’ that are occurring against Muslims in Xinjiang as outstanding. It was only earlier that year, during the regular review of Human Rights in every UN member state, that the Chinese government refused to provide adequate responses to the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) on this very topic. The Chinese delegation also spoke to their counterparts from the global south to urge them not to attend a panel held specifically to discuss the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that occurred in March of that year. China will not talk about violations happening in their country and they will clearly try to pressure others into not discussing it as well.
A white paper from 2020 reveals that almost 1.3 million people had, every year, gone through “vocational training” in the years 2014 and 2019, with 415,400 of them coming from southern Xinjiang. Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist specialising in Uyghurs from the Xinjiang province says this number gives us a chance to determine how much “coercive labor through the centralized, militarized training of rural surplus laborers” is actually happening in the area.
In the most recent (November 2021) report from the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide which belongs to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum confirms that even the most available information to the public shows that Chinese officials have been abusing the Uyghurs in many ways, including rape and sexual violence, “the forced sterilization of Uyghur women; the forced placement of IUDs; the detention of members of the Uyghur community; the physical abuse of detainees; the forced separation of Uyghur families, including children, whether by transfer or detention; and the forced labor extracted from Uyghurs held in detention as well as those recently released or otherwise not detained.”
March 2021 saw Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy; a non-partisan think tank based in the U.S.A. has also found the CPP “[responsible] for committing genocide against the Uyghurs in breach of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), along with the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) have also found a legal opinion on the human rights violations of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government. The ultimate opinion is that there is a ‘credible case’ for both the ‘a widespread and systematic attack on the Uyghur people in the region’ and the crimes of genocide that they find are occurring, with the ‘intent to destroy the Uyghur population’ though a ‘Chinese State-mandated conduct’. The systematic attack is highlighted to GLAN by “crimes against humanity are taking place including enslavement, imprisonment, torture, rape, enforced sterilization, enforced disappearance and persecution.” GLAN also takes the opinion that there are possible criminal labilities of certain individuals such as Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Quanguo Party Secretary of Xinjiang and Zhu Hailun, Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Political and Legal Committee from 2016 to 2019, and now Deputy Secretary of the Xinjiang People’s Congress.
The People’s Tribunal reached its finality on 9th December 2021, the verdict ultimately was that there is enough evidence to show ‘deliberate, systematic and concerted policy with the object of so-called 'optimizing' the population in Xinjiang by the means of a long-term reduction of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations to be achieved through limiting and reducing Uyghur births,". The verdict also places senior officials, like President Xi Jinping and Chen Quanguo, in direct connection to these policies being implemented in attempts to eradicate Uyghur Muslims.
Bibliography:
Lesser Dragons: Minority Peoples of China by Michael Dillion
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