The Muslim World Looks On as China Persecutes Its Muslims

[question everything]

(From earlier this year but another forgotten story)

When deadly riots between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese erupted in China’s western region of Xinjiang in 2009, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t mince words. “The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide,” he said as his industry minister called on Turks to boycott Chinese goods.

The predicament of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs is much more dramatic today, as the Chinese government seeks to wipe out Xinjiang’s Muslim heritage and assimilate its people. According to a U.N. rapporteur, up to a million Uighurs and other Muslims have been imprisoned in a network of “counter-extremism centers,” with another two million forced into “re-education camps for political and cultural indoctrination.” But Mr. Erdogan has yet to speak out in person on Beijing’s latest Xinjiang crackdown, unleashed in 2017. Virtually all other Muslim leaders are equally quiet, in contrast to the steady stream of condemnation that they shower on Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and on Myanmar for the Rohingya crisis.

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The shift isn’t hard to explain. With its massive Belt and Road investment initiative and its expanding military and technology muscle, China is simply too central an actor in the Muslim world—and the world at large—for the cause of the Uighurs to matter much. That is especially the case as U.S. foreign policy turns increasingly unpredictable, prompting many Muslim countries to reach out to Beijing as a hedge... At a U.N. gathering in November to review China’s human-rights record, criticism mostly came from Western democracies, while Muslim nations such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh offered praise for Beijing. Asked in a January television interview about the treatment of Uighurs and the detention camps, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan repeated his now-standard line that he is unaware of the “exact situation” in Xinjiang, just across his country’s border.

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As part of their effort to re-engineer Xinjiang society after a wave of unrest and terrorist attacks, Chinese authorities have banned public expressions of the Muslim faith, such as beards for men, headscarves for women and halal signs in restaurants and food stores. Access to the few mosques that still operate in Xinjiang is heavily restricted, with groups of club-wielding security personnel stationed outside during prayer times. A network of biometric police checkpoints studs the region’s roads and cities, and Uighurs living abroad are by and large unable to communicate with their families inside Xinjiang. Chinese officials say that the camps in Xinjiang are “vocational” and teach the local population modern job skills and Mandarin. They also say that the draconian security restrictions in the region, China’s largest by territory, are necessary because of attacks by Islamist separatists in the past. Some Uighur Islamists who have traveled outside of China joined extremist groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda in Syria and Afghanistan.

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One of the reasons for the reluctance of Muslim governments to criticize China over Xinjiang is that, following the upheaval of the 2011 Arab Spring, many are implementing unprecedented crackdowns on dissent of their own. Countries such as Egypt and the Gulf monarchies are using the language of combating extremism to justify detentions of human-rights activists and independent journalists and to shut down opposition voices online. As a result, coverage of Xinjiang has been very limited on pan-Arab satellite TV channels.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-muslim-rulers-stay-quiet-over-chinas-assault-on-the-uighurs-11550767403 (paid subscription)