Through a human rights lens, China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims is indefensible. Recently, however, given the developing global awareness of the Uyghurs’ situation, Beijing has made efforts to rationalise its actions and the implications of these explanations are worth exploring.
The Chinese Communist Party has been responding to occasional protests, rioting and terrorist attacks in the Xinjiang region since 1989 and policies such as the October 1990 ‘Strike Hard’ campaign saw thousands arrested under accusations of terrorism and separatism. In the past decade, especially from 2014-2016, terrorist attacks in China were again linked to separatists in Xinjiang, and it appears that the CCP has become concerned about a handful of contacts between Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region and Islamic militant organisations in South East Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, in October 2015, Yu Zhengsheng, Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a member of the Politburo, told locals in the Kashgar
prefecture that they were living on the “front-line of terror” and must be ready to fight a “protracted war” to ensure the stability of the region.
Although analysts believe that the connection between foreign Islamist groups and violence in the Xinjiang region is tenuous and that even the most generous estimates of Uyghur militant capacity would make the potential viability of a Uyghur insurgency extremely low (Greitens, Lee and Yazici 2020), CCP policy appears to be based on the fear that Islamist insurgents could destabilise the region. Indeed, leaked documents published in the New York Times in 2019 indicate President Xi’s fear that terrorists who had received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, thereby justifying repression in the region on the basis of Beijing’s own security concerns.
China’s framing of its policy as a response to a national security threat presents a difficulty to the international community in how it responds. Western anti-terror measures in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, for example the use of Guantanamo Bay internment camp by the USA (including the imprisonment of a number of alleged Uyghurs terrorists, who were later released), have also been shown to violate international human rights law, though not to the same extent as the mass-internment taking place in the Xinjiang region. This means, however, that where the CCP is able to convince domestic audiences that it faces a credible threat to their safety and security, if the UN - especially Western members - minimises China’s security concerns, they run the risk of opening themselves to the accusation that they value Western lives more highly than those of China’s citizens, and that Western concerns about terrorism, for which the US and the UK went to war, take precedence over the fears of other nations.
Indeed, other nations have supported China’s “right” to defend its state security. Saudi Arabia, also a dictatorship accused of human rights violations, made a public statement in support of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in February 2019 and Radio Free Asia reports that it has deported at least four Uyghurs to China over the past four years when they were either visiting the country as part of Mecca or living in Saudi Arabia legally. Thailand, too, is thought to have repatriated more than 100 of 350 Uyghur refugees who fled to the country to escape repression in Xinjiang in 2014. Unlike in the Saudi Arabian case, where support for Chinese policy is more likely linked to the autocratic nature of both governments, Thailand’s acquiescence to Chinese demands probably stems from the economic pressure which the state is able to impose.
More widely, in July 2019, 22 countries formally condemned China’s mass detention of Xinjiang’s Muslims at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, with signatories including the UK, France, Germany, Ireland and Japan. In response, China enlisted the support of fellow authoritarian states, finding 37 nations to countersign a letter which read “we commend China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights.” Signatories included Cambodia, Cuba, Egypt, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia and the United Arab Emirates. Autocratic nations are pushing back against what they see as Western moralising driving the actions of the UN and this makes it difficult to find a united solution to ending China’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims.
This does not mean, however, that there is nothing we can do, and the international community cannot allow China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims to continue unabated.
The fact that more states have supported China’s policies than opposed them, shows how human rights around the world are being eroded and respect for international law and human dignity are diminishing. If we do not take action on an individual and on a state level to defend human rights wherever violations occur, these rights will continue to be eroded. State security must not take priority over human dignity. While it is important that states protect their security, this can never be a blank cheque for human rights abuses and must take place within the constraints of international human rights law.
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