The massacre of the Uyghurs: why is China cleaning up the Muslim minority?

The West assures that it takes place a new genocide under our eyes. China says it’s a security issue and that is just re-educating to a sector of the population to improve coexistence between different ethnic groups. The truth is that in the last four years at least two million peopleThe vast majority of ethnic Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in the country’s western Xinjiang region, have passed through an extensive network of detention centers throughout the region. Former detainees say they were subjected to a intense political indoctrination, forced labor, torture and sexual abuse.

The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) reacted last week and imposed sanctions on Chinese officials and Chinese companies for your responsibility in repression. The list includes senior regional leaders and officials from the Xinjiang Communist Party who have had their EU assets frozen and their visas withdrawn. “We will use the new global sanctions regime to defend human rights,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves le Drian said upon arriving at the meeting, recalling recent EU sanctions against officials Russian authorities for the arrest of the opponent Alexey Navalny. China responded immediately and announced retaliation against ten EU officials, including two parliamentarians, as well as against four international human rights organizations.

On January 19, a day before leaving office, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured that China’s actions against the Uyghur minority group constituted “Genocide and crimes against humanity”. Antony Blinken, Pompeo’s successor, said he agreed with this characterization during his confirmation hearing. The idea that genocide is taking place in the 21st century seems exaggerated, but the evidence of the atrocities China commits against the Uyghurs is undeniable.

Over a million Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s western Xinjiang region are currently in mass internment camps, prisons and other penal institutions where they are under psychological stress. , torture and, as recently reported by BBC, systematic violations. Apart from these prisons in the same region, the Chinese government maintains constant vigilance using advanced technologies, unwittingly sterilizes women, separates children from their families and sends them to boarding schools, and sends hundreds of thousands of people to forced labor in factories all over China. Guards sent by Beijing are also wiping out Uyghur elements from the region, destroying mosques and pilgrimage sites, razing traditional neighborhoods and suppressing the Uyghur language.

The Uyghurs are the main ethnic group in Xinjiang. They are predominantly Muslim, speak their own Turkish language, and have a different culture than the majority Han population of China.. According to Chinese government figures, there are 12 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, a drop in the bucket compared to 1.4 billion people in China.

China’s brutal behavior in Xinjiang does not only reflect the country’s increasingly authoritarian turn under President Xi Jinping or the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). On the contrary, the repression of the Uyghurs stems from a fundamentally colonial relationship between Beijing and a territory it conquered long ago but it did not fully integrate modern China or allow true autonomy. In the 1980s, it seemed that the CCP politburo could achieve a modus vivendi more tolerant of Uyghurs. But it all ended like many other opening actions.

Xinjiang, which the Uyghurs consider to be their homeland and which means “new frontier” in Chinese, it was conquered by the Qing dynasty in the mid-18th century and absorbed by the empire as a province at the end of the 19th century. When the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, the new ROC inherited this region as a distant colonial appendage, ruling it through Han rulers who maintained vague communication with the central state power. When Mao Zedong’s CCP came to power in 1949, he tried to exercise greater control over the region, imitating a Soviet-style system of ethno-federalism. The territory was renamed the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

This is how he explains it Sean roberts, director of the international development program at George Washington University in an article recently published in the trade journal Foreign Affairs: In the Soviet Union, the ruling Communist Party recognized the excesses of Tsarist colonialism and gave the once colonized peoples the opportunity to be at the forefront of Soviet culture and government within Soviet national republics. These republics even obtained the right – albeit symbolically – to secede from the Soviet Union. But China has never taken the same steps in its territories conquered by the empire in Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, China’s ethnic “autonomous regions” were hardly self-sufficient: they had no theoretical right to secede, and very few local party members reached positions of power. important in government. Additionally, in 1959, the CCP defended the position that Xinjiang was a historic part of China, a theory it firmly maintains to this day, denying the colonial character of the region’s entry into China. “

In 1960, the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region had very little or Uyghur autonomy. China had already eliminated indigenous cadres from regional leadership in the late 1950s and had begun to encourage Han Chinese migration to the region, facilitating marked demographic change. In 1953, the Han made up only 6% of the population of Xinjiang. In 1982, they were 38%. Despite this demographic transformation, the Uyghur homeland remained outside the Chinese Communist regime until the 1970s. Most Han migrants settled in the north of the region and lived away from the population centers of southern Uyghur. , such as Kashgar and Khotan. Mao Zedong’s various social engineering campaigns, deployed in this region as throughout China, they had a limited impact on transforming Uyghurs into loyal Maoists. In the 1980s, Xinjiang was still very different culturally, linguistically, and physically from the rest of China, especially in the southern oases of the region, which were still largely populated by Uyghurs.

The period of reforms under Deng Xiaoping, which gained momentum after Mao’s death in 1976, was favorable to the Uyghurs. Beijing timidly adopted a strategy of partial decolonization in Xinjiang. Hu YaobangA close associate of Deng and secretary general of the CPC from 1982 to 1987, he spearheaded liberalization reforms in the region, as in the rest of the country. He called on many Han migrants from Xinjiang to return to their hometowns and advocated unprecedented cultural, religious and political reform. The government has authorized the reopening of previously closed mosques and the construction of new ones. Publications and artistic expression in the Uyghur language have exploded.

But Hu’s vision of a more self-sufficient Uyghur region and a more democratic China never came true. Party conservatives purged Hu in 1987, accusing his more liberal policies of fueling student unrest across the country. The crackdown on massive student protests in the Plaza de Tiananmen in 1989 – which arose in part in response to Hu’s impeachment – marked the end of the era of political reform. However, the event that really sealed the fate of the Uyghur region was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. “China mistakenly considered that campaigns for ethnic self-determination were the driving force behind the dissolution of the Soviet Union and he acted to ensure that China does not suffer a similar fate, ”says Sean Roberts of George Washington University.

In the 1990s, the CCP launched numerous so-called anti-separatist campaigns, aimed at stifling signs of unrest. The state viewed the practice of Islamism as a call for self-determination, and purged thousands of religious practitioners. He also arrested many lay artists and writers. These aggressive campaigns have involved significant state violence: mass arrests, torture and executions. “Despite this bloody and sporadic conflict, there was no organized Uyghur militant movement in the region, no real threat of secession and no reason to believe that Xinjiang deserved such harsh treatment,” says Prof. Roberts. The September 11 attacks in the United States and Washington’s subsequent declaration of a global “war on terror” have given Beijing an opportunity to step up its crackdown on the Uyghur minority. He claimed Uyghur militants were linked to Al Qaeda. And Washington accepted it. He even placed the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (ETIM), a small Uyghur group unknown until then, on a list of terrorist organizations.

Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, China has stepped up the suppression of dissent and the repression of religion in Uyghur territory. At the same time, it has invested billions of yuan in building new infrastructure and industries in Xinjiang in order to attract migrants from other parts of the country. Until 2017 with the consolidation of Xi Jinping in power, the system of “re-education” and ethnic cleansing began to develop that we are seeing right now. The excuse this time was the need to develop Xinjiang as a new silk road land bridge. Over the past four years, Chinese authorities have interned nearly 20% of the local population in mass containment camps and subjected the rest to unprecedented surveillance, track down their behavior, their associations and their communications for any sign of disloyalty that could lead to their imprisonment. An official CCP document released by the agency France-Press made the strategy very clear: the general objective of these policies towards Uyghurs is “Break your lineage, break your roots, break your connections and break your origins.”

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