Deepak Vohra
Governments or Parliaments in the USA, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Lithuania have already declared the treatment of Chinese Uyghurs as genocide. In 2021, the European Union approved sanctions against Chinese officials running internment camps for Uyghurs. The Xinjiang Regional Government dismissed the sanctions as a "wastepaper" whose real purpose was to hamper Chinese companies internationally (no Chinese agency can think beyond money).
The independent Uyghur Tribunal established in September 2020 in London examined evidence regarding China's human rights abuses against the Uyghur people to evaluate whether it constituted genocide. China was invited to give evidence but stayed away. A BBC investigation published in February 2021 contained first-hand testimony of systematic rape, sexual abuse, and torture of detainees. China banned the BBC.
The Tribunal collected extensive evidence and testimonials about abuses including forced sterilization, contraception, abortion, and infanticides
A few days before the verdict, the Tribunal published what it described as leaked Chinese government documents on the role leader Xi Jinping played in directing the Communist Party’s campaign of forcible assimilation of religious minorities in Xinjiang.
Copies of the documents, some marked top secret, describe internal speeches delivered by Xi and other senior party leaders regarding circumstances in Xinjiang between 2014 and 2017 when the assimilation campaign was conceived and launched.
The documents show Xi warning about the dangers of religious influence and unemployment among minorities, and emphasizing the importance of “population proportion” or the balance between minorities and Han Chinese, for maintaining control in the region.The Uyghur Tribunal is headed by Geoffrey Nice, Chief Prosecutor in the former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s trial before the International Criminal Court. A young Uyghur escapee who said prayed five times a day, was a “non-smoker” and a well-behaved man, but this attracted the unwelcome attention of the local Party chief.
Camera surveillance has become pervasive in detention facilities and outside of them, the testimonies at the tribunal highlighted.
SenseTime, China’s largest facial recognition startup filed a patent in 2019 that included the ability to classify Uyghurs from non-Uyghurs.
Beijing describes Uyghur women who allege sexual assault as ‘liars’, ‘morally depraved’, of ‘inferior character’, scumbags, bitches of ‘bad moral quality.’
Since 2017, when Beijing intensified its crackdown, arrests in Xinjiang, with just 1.5% of China’s population, were up 300%, accounting for a fifth of all arrests.
The Tribunal announced its verdict on 8 December 2021, a bad time for China, as some nations have announced a diplomatic boycott of the February 2022 Beijing Olympics over the Uyghur issue. It ruled that China committed genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang; accused China's senior leadership of acts against Muslim minority groups.
Xi’s Comprehensive Security Framework (2014) compared jihadism to a virus that could infect even asymptomatic people unless they were properly inoculated through preventive detention and reeducation. The Tribunal said that it was satisfied that China followed a “deliberate, systematic and concerted policy” of limiting and reducing Uyghur births. The Tribunal noted that atrocities could not have happened in China without implicit and explicit authorization from the very top.
China dismissed the Tribunal as a “political farce committed by a few clowns”, adding that “lies cannot conceal the truth…nor stop the historic course…of Xinjiang’s stability, prosperity, and development.”
In February 2021, Facebook said it had discovered “an extremely targeted” Chinese operation to hack overseas Uyghur activists. Just a few days ago, Twitter banned hundreds of fake Chinese accounts linked to East Turkistan. China tries to spread its fake narrative even more rapidly than its virus. Unused to an independent media, Chinese propaganda is often ham-handed, as with attempts to rebut concerns about tennis star Peng Shuai last month.
In 2020, China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesmen and Ambassadors shared on social media footage purporting to show Italians applauding Chinese COVID aid as the Chinese national anthem was sung in the background. The footage was doctored from scenes that originally showed Italians clapping for their medical workers.
Last year, Xi hailed his country's Xinjiang policy as "a success," adding that the region "is enjoying a favorable setting of social stability." It is the stability of the graveyard
The long-term costs, in terms of China’s reputational damage among Muslims abroad and the resentment among China’s faithful at home, have yet to be added up.
Unfamiliar with the democratic system, China’s ambassador ‘ordered’ the U.K. government to stop the Tribunal, just as the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi ordered a web portal to remove a report comparing Xi Jinping to Adolf Hitler.
There was a report that the host venue, Church House, was pressured not to hold the event, while some people connected to the Chinese Embassy tried to hire out another part of the building. Tribunal staff reported several attempts to hack into their digital system while relatives in China of witnesses were forced to denounce their own family members as liars. In September 2021 the Chinese Ambassador to London was banned from the British Parliament since China had sanctioned some British MPs over their criticism of the violation of the rights of Uyghurs. The Chinese Embassy called it a “despicable and cowardly action of certain individuals…for personal political gains”
China initially denied that the camps existed, but faced with compelling satellite imagery, claimed that they were vocational training centers designed to purify the minds of the Uyghurs.
In late 2019, it announced that all inmates of the camps had “graduated” even though none has returned home.
You might recall that were allegations of forced sterilization of people from a particular community in India in the mid-1970s that led to the Government losing the elections.
I was posted in France, and the local media highlighted the testimonies given to the Chief Justice Shah Commission established in 1977 that did embarrass us greatly especially the finding that most IAS officers accepted orders even though they thought these orders were improper.
Two years ago, the New York Times had published a story based on over 400 pages of leaked documents about China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority. It included a chilling guide on how to handle Uyghurs asking about their relatives. the standard reply was that they were in a Government training school. Even as the Party presented its efforts in Xinjiang to the public as benevolent, it discussed and organized a ruthless and extraordinary campaign in internal communications.
Senior party leaders are recorded ordering drastic and urgent action against extremist violence, including mass detentions, and discussing the consequences with cool detachment.
Xi laid the groundwork for the crackdown following a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uyghur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing several. Officials argued that the Islamic terror attacks in Britain resulted from policies that put “human rights above security,” and Xi urged the party to emulate aspects of America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks.
The government sends Xinjiang’s brightest young Uyghurs to universities across China, to train a new generation of Uyghur civil servants and teachers loyal to the party. The crackdown has been so extensive that it affected even these elite students and that made the authorities nervous.
Officials told the students that their relatives had been infected by the ‘virus’ of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured.
Xi Jinping called on the Party to unleash the tools of “dictatorship” to eradicate radical Islam and show “absolutely no mercy” since religious extremism is like taking a drug, and you lose your sense, go crazy and will do anything.
While his predecessors emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in Xinjiang, Xi demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslims.
The documents were leaked by a member of the Chinese political establishment who hoped that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability.
One million officials and party cadres are uninvited ‘guests’ in the homes of Muslim families to monitor them. They scrutinize and report “problems” such as active adherence to the Islamic faith, contact with family members abroad, and anything less than absolute fealty to the Communist Party.
Detainees’ ability to recapture their freedom depends on persuading their jailers that they are Mandarin-speaking, Islam-free worshipers of Xi and the Communist Party.
Chinese officials rushed out ever more outrageous claims as international criticism of the camps mounted: they said that the government aimed to “transform” Uyghurs into “normal” human beings, that Uyghurs were the “happiest Muslims in the world,” and that by being sterilized Uyghur women had been liberated from being “baby-making machines”.
(Deepak Vohra is a senior diplomat, special Advisor to Prime Minister on Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil)
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