INTRODUCTION:
Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic population living in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China. They have traditionally inhabited a number of oases across the Taklamakan desert within the Tarim basin. Almost 80% of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs live in the Tarim basin, while the rest of them live in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang. They have an estimated population of about eleven million.
Beginning in the year 2014, the Chinese government has been doing a series of violations of human rights against this ethnic minority. Scholars estimate that at least one million Uyghurs have been forcefully detained in internment camps since 2017. In addition to forceful and arbitrary detention, the government of China has subjected them to forced labor, forced sterilization, forced contraception, forced abortion and political indoctrination.
Government policies also include suppression of religious practices and religious freedom. Since 2017, as per experts say; an estimated sixteen thousand mosques have been destroyed or damaged. Chinese officials claim these camps to be re-educational vocational training centers serving the goal to ensure adherence to the Communist party’s ideology, to prevent separatism among masses and to combat so-called terrorism.
These policies perpetuated against the Uyghurs, mostly Muslims resulted in the fall of birth rates in the Xinjiang region as well as the whole country. Chinese government reports show that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in many of the Uyghur regions fell by a massive 60%. Simultaneously, the birth rate of the whole country fell by 9.69%.
The large-scale internment detention of these people led scholars to write that, “It is the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities ever since the second world war”.
IDENTITY:
The modern scholars consider modern Uyghurs to be the descendants of a number of human races, namely, the ancient Uyghurs of Mongolia who migrated into the Tarim Basin after the fall of the Uyghur Khanate, Irenic Saka tribes and other Indo-European peoples who settled into the Trim basin.
From the 1920s to the 1930s, western writers called the Turkish speaking Muslims as ‘Turks’ and ‘Turkic’. And the Turkic Muslims who had migrated to the Xinjiang cities of Ili and Urumqi were called ‘Tranche’ meaning Farmers. The Soviets called them ‘Sort’ and ‘Turkic’. Later, the term ‘Shantou’ i.e. ‘turban headed’ was used to refer to the people of southern Xinjiang. The adoption of the term ‘Uyghur’ was decided in a conference of Tashkent, 1921 by the Soviets to foster division among the Muslim population in Xinjiang’. After the communist victory, the Chinese Communist party continued the soviet given term ‘Uyghur’ to describe the modern ethnic population.
Some meanings given for the word ‘Uyghur’ derive it to mean from the verb- ‘to follow/ accommodate. Other derivations give its meaning to be ‘non-rebellious’. None of these are found to be profoundly and satisfactorily correct. Yet currently, Uyghur refers to a settled group of Turkic speaking people, primarily farmers living in the Trim basin.
The modern Uyghurs being native to Xinjiang, are distinct from the Han Chinese, the ethnic group which is majority in China. The Uyghur language is spoken by 10 million active speakers within the Xinjiang region. Also, the Uyghurs are the second largest Muslim population in China after the Hui.
HISTORY:
The people concerned with the Uyghur ethnicity have claimed Uyghur history to be certainly long. Historian Muhammad Amin Bughra has written in his book ‘A History of East Turkestan’ that Uyghur Turks have a history of 9000 years. While, after the discoveries of Tarim mummies, another historian Turgun Almas claimed its history to be over 6400 years old. Whereas The World Uyghur Congress claimed its history to be 4000 years old. However, the Chinese officials documented in their ‘History and Development of Xinjiang’ that the Uyghur community was formed after the dissolution of the Uyghur Khaganate in 840.
UYGHUR KHAGANATE:
The Uyghur Khaganate lasted from 744 up until 840. After a civil war and a famine, the Khaganate was disintegrated by another Turkic tribe. Thus, many of the tribes under thee former government fled to Mongolia.
UYGHUR KINGDOMS:
The Uyghurs who fled the Khaganate went to live among the Karluks; another tribe of Mongolia. They soon founded two kingdoms that lasted from the 9th century till 14th century. The second and the last kingdom was ultimately and finally annihilated by the Chagatai Khaganate in late 14th century.
ISLAMIZATION OF THE TRIBES:
In the tenth century, the Karluk tribe founded the Kara-Khanid Khaganate and in the same century, their ruler converted to Islam. It was the first Turkic dynasty to convert to Islam.
During the 1340s, Uyghur land was under mongol control annexed to the Chagatai Khaganate. In the 14th century, their Khan Temur Tughluq, converted to Islam and his nobles followed suit. His son Khizr Khan conquered two major Uyghur cities, therefore masses in large numbers became Muslims. The people were previously Buddhists. The massive conversion was a gradual process by the beginning of 16th century.
The Muslim faith was also spread by the assistance of Sufis and the branches of the Naqshbandi order who even seized political control of some parts of the Tarim basin.
QING RULE:
The Khoja rulers who had seized political control were spilt into two groups. Meanwhile, in the 17th century, the Buddhist Dzungar Khanate grew in power which brought them into contact with the Qings. On the other side, one faction of the Khojas sought aid against the other from the Dzungars. The Qing-Dzungar war lasted a decade and the Khojas acted as vassals for the Dzungars against the Qings. Finally, the conflict with the Dzungars ended with the Dzungar genocide in the mid-18th century.
The Qing now sponsored settlements of various tribes including Han, Hui, Uyghurs including many others in northern Xinjiang. In the Dzungarian khanate, they established new cities like Urumqi and Yining. Hence, the Qing unified Xinjiang. The defeat of the Buddhist rulers led to the empowering of Muslim begs and Taranchis as well as increasing Turkic Muslim power in northern Xinjiang.
FIRST EAST TURKESTAN REPUBLIC:
In 1920 The Qing dynasty was replaced by the Republic of China. During the 1920s, Pan-Turkic Jadidists had become a challenge to the warlord Yang Zenxin, who was controlling Xinjiang at the time. Uyghurs set several uprising against his rule when finally, they established an independent government called the First East Turkistan Republic after a rebellion in 1931. However, their independent rule was short lived and the Republic fell after the battle of kashgar in 1934.
SECOND EAST TURKISTAN REPUBLIC:
After the battle, Xinjiang was ruled by another warlord named Sheng Shicai from 1934 to 1943 with Soviet aid on his side.
However, Shicai and the Soviets fell out which led the warlord to expel them and join hands with the Americans. This led the Soviets to capitalize upon the Uyghurs and other Turkic tribes’ discontentment and influence them to stage an uprising against the present ruler. Consequently, they rebelled with Soviet support in 1944 which resulted in the establishment of the Second East Turkistan Republic.
Finally, on 13 October 1949, The People’s Liberation Army [PLA] entered the region and the East Turkistan National Army was merged with the PLA. Thus, the second East Turkistan Republic came to an end.
CONTEMPORARY ERA [1949-PRESENT]:
The Chinese Premier Mao Zedong of CCP declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1949 and he turned The Second East Turkestan Republic into an Autonomous Prefecture. A puppet governor was also installed by the party to rule the region. Xinjiang’s name was also changed to Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region [XUAR], where Uyghurs being the largest ethnic group.
Starting from the 1950s to 70s, the Chinese government sponsored large migrations of the Han Chinese to Xinjiang by introducing policies and economic incentives to lure them in to the region.
During the 1980s, the Chinese state tried to force upon the Uyghurs and other ethnic groups their so-called ‘Monolingual and Monocultural model’. This led to the migration and arrival of between 1-2 million Han Chinese which further marginalized the Turkic groups and created resentment against the Han Chinese. Hence, the mass migration affected the Uyghurs’ local culture, language and traditions.
Simultaneously, there was tension and discontentment going on in the region because the state encouraged for the economic development in Xinjiang by exploiting its natural resources.
Ghulja Incident
The growing tensions led to peaceful protests by Turkic Muslims in February 1997 in the city of Ghulja. The police showed massive crackdown and arrested tens of thousands of people and committed extrajudicial killings and even executions of protesters following unfair trials.
They were protesting because the police rounded up and executed 30 ‘alleged separatists’ who were suspected.
Urumqi bus bombings
The Urumqi bus bombings later in the same month killed 9 while injuring 68. The responsibility was later claimed by Uyghur separatist groups.
Again, a bus was bombed leaving two killed in the same city.
Urumqi Riots
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, in 2009, a protest in Urumqi against false rape allegations that targeted Turkic Muslim men was turned into violence. The July 2009 Urumqi riots resulted in over a hundred deaths that was the result of a violent dispute between Uyghur and Han Chinese factory laborers. Following which, dozens of Han Chinese were killed between 2009 and 2016. These attacks were designed and conducted by Uyghur Separatist groups and the Turkistan Islamic Party [which was a UN designated terrorist organization].
Major Government Policies
Following some high profile attacks allegedly carried out by Turkic Muslims at the Kunming train station in Yunan province, CCP leader Xi Jinping told his politburo, “We should unite the people to build a copper ad iron wall against terrorism and make terrorists like rats scurrying across the street with everybody shouting- BEAT THEM!” In 2014, following a secret meeting with CCP leaders in Beijing, The Chinese Government officially launched China’s ‘People’s War on Terror’. President Jinping later launched the ‘Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism’ in May 2014. All of this was going to be implemented in Xinjiang.
Thus, The CCP commenced a ‘People’s War’ in Xinjiang against ‘The Three Evil Forces’ of ‘Separatism, Terrorism and Extremism’. They deployed a staggering number of two hundred thousand party cadres for their campaign.
In 2016, Xi Jinping appointed Chen Quanguo as Xinjiang’s secretary, having previously served in the Tibet Autonomous Region. While in Tibet, he was notorious for his hardline opposition to his own party members who advocated for solutions to legitimate grievances, which included land rights and access to Tibetan language in school education. His applied tactics in Xinjiang such as heavy surveillance and securitization; even forcing those who are seen as over-religious to undergo political re-education, were developed in Tibet.
As soon as his appointment in Xinjiang, he recruited tens of thousands of additional police officers and divided the Xinjiang society into literally three divisions- ‘trusted, average and untrustworthy’. At Urumqi, he ordered his soldiers to “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” By April 2017, mass arrests had already begun.
Mass Arbitrary Detention Camps:
Since 2016, The Government has been using Internment camps to govern Xinjiang. These internment camps were first used as re-education camps. The Government did not acknowledge their existence until 2018 and called them ‘vocational education and training centers.’ Most of the people detained are Uyghurs. According to German scholar Adrian Zenz, “Mass internments in the camps peaked in 2018 and have abated since.” The US State department estimates say that approximately nearly two million people passed through these camps between April 2017 and December 2018. While in September 2020, a Chinese Government White paper stated that an average 1.29 million workers went through their so-called vocational training per year between 2014 and 2019. In march 2019, Zens told the UN that 1.5 million Uyghurs had been detained in camps. In November that year, he estimated the number of internment camps to have surpassed 1000. And in July of the next year, he wrote that his estimation has increased since November; the detainees from 1.5 million to 1.8 million, being extra judicially detained. He, thus, described it as “The largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust.”
New York Times reporters Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley’s report says that Governor Chen Quanguo encouraged his officials to ‘round up everyone who should be rounded up’ and Reporter Ben Dooley says that Quonguo has been quoted as directing for the centers to ‘teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison’. Most people detained in the camps were never charged with a crime, neither had any legal avenues to challenge their detention. The detainees have been targeted for various reasons including travelling to or contacting people from any of the 26 countries considered sensitive by Beijing, attending mosque services, having more children, or sending text messages having Quranic texts in them; as per Human Rights Watch.
The Qaraqash Document- an internal official document leaked in February 2020 elaborated the reasons for which internees were detained in a district of Qaraqash county. Overseas connection and travel to the 26 sensitive countries, going on an unofficial Hajj pilgrimage, communicating with someone abroad and even accidently clicking on an overseas website on their phone. Turkic Muslims were mainly detained for religious activities such as fasting, prayer, studying religion, having a household with dense religious atmosphere, having a beard, wearing a headscarf or having a wife who wears one. Muslims have also been detained for not doing patriotic community service such as flag raising or for violating the country’s child planning policy.
Scholars have also contemplated and said that Turkic Muslims are targeted and prosecuted solely for their ethnic identity and religious belief. Indictments in Xinjiang alone, accounted for 13 percent of all indictments in the whole country in 2017. The number of arrests and indictments in Xinjiang has increased by 306 percent and 237 percent respectively in the last five years.
Charges for arrest also include ‘separatism, terrorism, religious extremism’. Chinese authorities have made many of these arrests without any evidentiary basis and often ignore to respect the process rights of the detainees. Detainees and their relatives interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported to them that at no point were they presented with an arrest warrant by the authorities, with any evidence of crime or any other documentation, nor were they informed which authorities were responsible for their arrests.
The Xinjiang Authorities maintain tight control of information. Till now, only seven verdicts of incarceration have been public. Some of them are:
- Jin Dehuai- Hui Muslim, serving life imprisonment for creating ‘splittism’ for organizing trips abroad to study the Quran and inviting religious figures from other countries to Xinjiang.
- Nebijan Ghoja Ehmet- Uyghur, for inciting hatred and discrimination, for telling others what is Halal and Haram, 10 years in prison.
- Nuran Pioner- Kazakh, convicted of disturbing public order and extremism, for educating over 70 people in religion, 17 years in prison.
- Nie Shigang- Hui, originally convicted of ‘assisting in terrorist activities’ and ‘money laundering’ for helping over 100 Turkic Muslims transfer their money to their relatives in Egypt- fund authorities said were used for terrorist activities’
- Huang Shike- Hui, for illegal use of internet for explaining the Quran to others in a WeChat group, sentenced to two years in prison.
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND ABUSES:
Torture:
The UN Report confirms the human rights violations through international journalists, researchers and rights organizations. Their reports and exposes show the detainees were forced to pledge allegiance and complete loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and to renounce Islam. They are also forcefully persuaded to sing praises for communism and learn mandarin. Another major organization Human Rights Watch has also reported of torture, cruel, inhuman and other forms of degrading treatments of detainees by the staff who hung them from ceilings and walls, forcibly deprived them of sleep and subjected them to prolonged shackling.
Mihrigul Tursun, a young Uyghur mother, describing her experience at the camps; said she was drugged, deprived of sleep, forced to undergo medical examination and strapped in a chair and received electric shocks. She described how 40-68 women, chained at the wrists and ankles, were put in the same 420 square feet underground cell in which they were expected to urinate and defecate. The cell had just one small hole in the ceiling for ventilation.
Detainees have also reported of being subjected to wearing iron clothes weighing 50 pounds which caused immense and terrible pain in their whole body. Others have reported of being strapped to metal chairs known as ‘tiger chairs’ during interrogation.
Brainwashing:
A former detainee said among his many routines in the camps, one was to sing praises in the name of Xi Jinping before eating. He says detainees were forced to memorize a list which goes like this, “Religion is opium, religion is bad, you must believe in no religion, you must believe in the Communist party, only the party could lead you to the bright future.”
The Heritage foundation reported that “children whose parents are detained in camps are often sent to state-run orphanages and brainwashed to forget their ethnic roots. Even if they are not detained, children are forced to move to inner China to immerse themselves into the Han Culture under the government’s Xinjiang classroom policy’
Forced labor:
The Xinjiang region produces about a fifth of the world’s cotton. In December 2020, research seen by the BBC showed that half a million people were being forced to pick cotton. May human rights group also say suit. There is evidence that new factories have been built within the grounds of re-education camps.
Buzz feed news reported that 14 million square feet of new factories were built in 2018 alone. In late 2020, factories covered 21 million square feet of land within the camps. Later, at least 83 worldwide companies were found to have profited from Uyghur labor. Many companies responded by pledging to ensure it does not happen again by checking goods’ supply lines, such as Marks & Spencer and Samsung. Apple and Fila did not offer their responses. The Chinese government is reported to have pressured foreign companies to reject claims of forced labor abuses. Companies such as Adidas and Nike were boycotted in China after they criticized the treatment of Uyghurs, which resulted in significant drops of sales.
Sexual Violence and Various Violations of Reproductive Rights
BBC News, Human Rights Watch and other sources have reported various cases of mass rape and sexual torture. Multiple women who were formerly detained have made accusations of sexual abuse, rape and sexual torture. In an interview with the BBC, Sayragul Sauytbay, a teacher, told that the employees of the camps in which she was detained, conducted mass rapes, saying “The guards picked the young girls they wanted and took them away.” She also told the BBC of an organized gang rape in which a woman around the age of 21 was forced to make a confession in a crowd of 100 other women detained, before being raped by multiple policemen in front of the crowd.” Tursunay Ziawudun was held in detention caps for nine months. She told the BBC that masked men gang raped her on three occasions, and they used electric shock on and inside her genitals. She also said camp authorities took women in her cell every night to rape them.
Chinese government officials deny all these allegations of human rights violations inside internment camps. It was reported in March 2021 that the government also disclosed personal medical information of these women witnesses in order to discredit and dishonor them.
Emerging reports also reveal violations of the reproductive rights of Turkic Muslim women. Several former detainees and residents outside of the camps have described of being subjected to procedures without consent. Rakhima Senbay, a mother of four and a former detainee, said she forcibly implanted with an inauterine contraceptive device [IUD], according to the Washington Post. Gulzir Mogdin, Zumrat Dawut and another unnamed woman said they were subjected to forced abortions while in Xinjiang.
German researcher Adrian Zenz reported that 80% of new Chinese placements in 2018 occurred in Xinjiang alone, despite the region consisting only 1.8% of the nation’s population. Zenz also reported that ethnic minority population began to decline in 2015. Prior to the drop in birth rates, Uyghur population had a growth rate 2.6 times of the Han Chinese before 2015. According to a fax provided to the CNN by Xinjiang Regional Government, the birth rates in the region felly by 32.68% from 2017 to 2018. In 2019, birth rates fell by 24% year over year, as compared to the declining birth rate of 4.2% in entire China. Zenz later analyzed that population growth in two largest prefectures of Xinjiang- Kashgar and Hotan fell by a massive 84% between 2015-18. Some official government records leaked to The Financial Times showed that the most common reason for detaining Uyghurs in camps was the violation of family planning policy and the second most common reason was ‘practicing Islam.’
Forced Co-Habitation, Co-Sleeping, Rape and Abortion:
Since 2018, Chinese government workers began forcibly living in the homes of Uyghur families to monitor them and assimilate among them, as well as to keep a look upon their religious practices. The Government introduced a program that assigned Han Chinese men to monitor the homes of Uyghurs and sleep in the same bed as Uyghur women. According to Radio free Asia, The Han Chinese men were trained to call themselves ‘relatives’ and forcibly co-habited in Uyghur homes for the purpose of promoting so-called ‘ethnic unity’. Chinese officials say that co sleeping is acceptable provided that there is a one-meter distance between the ‘relative’ and the woman. Uyghur activists say that no such restraint takes place, and they call the program ‘mass rape disguised as marriage’. Human Rights Watch has condemned the program while World Uyghur Congress called it represents “Total annihilation of the safety, security and well-being of the family members.”
Organ Harvesting Allegations:
The China Tribunal determined in May 2020 and said that China has persecuted and medically tested Uyghurs. Its report expressed concerns that Uyghurs were vulnerable to being subject to organ harvesting but did not have evidence of its happening yet. In November 2020, Ethan Guttmann told RFA that a former hospital in Aksu, China which had been converted into an internment camp would allow local officials to streamline the organ harvesting process and provide a stead stream of harvested organs from Uyghurs. During the next month, Ethan said he believed at least 25000 people in Xinjiang were being killed for their organs each year. He also claimed that fast lanes were built for the movement of organs in local airports. And crematories had recently built in the province to quickly dispose victims’ bodies.
In 2020, a Chinese woman alleged that Uyghurs were killed in order to provide ‘Halal organs’ for primarily Saudi clients. She also recalled another alleged incident in 2006, stating 37 Saudi clients received organs from killed Uyghurs at the department of Liver Transplantation of Tianjin Tada Hospital. Dr. Enver Tohti, a former surgeon in Xianjiang thought that the allegations were credible.
USE OF BIOMETRIC AND SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY:
Outside China:
China’s robust surveillance system extends worldwide, especially to monitor the Uyghur Diaspora. According to MIT Technology Review, “China’s hacking of Uyghurs is so aggressive that it’s affectively global. It targets journalists and anyone who raises Beijing’s suspicions of insufficient loyalty.”
Also in March 2021, Facebook reported that hackers based in China were conducting cyberespionage against members of the Uyghur community.
Uyghurs in the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been detained and deported to China. CNN reported that rights activists fear the irony that while western nations take China to task over its treatment of Uyghurs, on the other hand, countries in the middle east and beyond will increasingly be willing to accept its crackdown on the ethnic group. According to Associated Press, Dubai has a history where Uyghurs are interrogated and deported back to China.
Inside China:
According to a man named Yahir Imin, Chinese authorities drew his blood, scanned his face, recorded his fingerprints and documented his voice. China collects genetic materials from millions of Uyghurs. China uses facial recognition by technology to sort people by ethnicity and uses DNA to tell if an individual is a Uyghur. Charles Rollet says that security projects include not only security cameras but also video analytic bulbs, monitoring systems, data centers, police checkpoints and even drones. According to ASPI, the government is investing billions of dollars in only these security plans and projects and employing Chinese companies for the manufacture of the security items. Morgan Stanley claimed that by 2020, 400 surveillance cameras were to be operating.
CULTURAL EFFECTS:
The Government’s apparent goal in creating the camps is the erasure of Turkic Muslim and religion. Detainees are prohibited to practice their beliefs and speak their language.
Mosques:
An estimated 16000 mosques in Xinjiang have been damaged or destroyed since 2017 and about half of those have been demolished. Many of the remaining mosques have been desecrated in other ways such as through the removal of the crescent from atop the mosques or by installing framed copies of state policies on “de-extremification” or “ethnic unity” on their walls.
Education:
Since 2011, schools in Xinjiang transitioned to what officials called a policy of bilingual education. The primary medium of instruction is Standard Chinese, with only few hours a week devoted to Uyghur literature.
Further, in 2021, the standard Uyghur language textbooks used in Xinjiang since the early 2000s were outlawed and their authors and editors sentenced to death or life imprisonment on separatism charges.
Cemeteries:
In September 2019, Agency France-Press visited 13 destroyed cemeteries across four cities and witnessed exposed bones remaining in four of them. Through an examination of satellite images, the agency press determined the grave demolition has been going on for more than a decade.
In January 2020, a CNN report based on an analysis of Google maps satellite imagery said that Chinese authorities had destroyed more than 100 graveyards in Xinjiang.
Clothing:
Chinese authorities discourage the wearing of headscarves, veils and other Islamic clothings. Documents leaked from the Xinjiang internment camps have noted that some inmates have been detained for wearing traditional clothes.
Names of children:
A list of banned names has been put into force since 2015, which was later extended to the entire Xinjiang region. Some prominent banned names include “Islam”, “Quran”, “Hajj”, “Medina” and even the name “Muhammad” is banned for children to be named.
GLOBAL RESPONSE TO THE ATROCITIES:
In an assessment by the UN Human Rights Office, The United Nations stated that China’s policies and actions in Xinjiang may be crimes against humanity, although it did not use the term ‘Genocide’. Yet the UN Human Rights office has urged China to release people who have been arbitrarily detained and disclose the whereabouts of those who are missing.
In January 2021, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo officially declared that China was committing a genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. On 19 January, soon to be secretary of state Antony Blinken was asked whether he agreed with Pompeo’s conclusion of the genocide against Uyghurs, he remarked, “That would be my judgement as well.” The US was the first country to declare China’s committing of genocide against Uyghurs. Lawmakers in several other countries like Canada and France followed suit after America. The US’s actions were followed by Canada’s House of Commons and The Dutch Parliament each passing a non-binding motion in February 2021 to recognize China’s actions of genocide.
However, China’s allies have remained silent. Prioritizing their economic and strategic ties with China first, many governments have ignored the human rights abuses. In June 2022, sixty countries signed a statement calling for the UN Rights Chief to respect the Xinjiang issue as “China’s internal affair”. Shockingly, Muslim majority countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were among the signatories. Human rights groups have criticized the Muslim-majority countries for condoning the abuses and atrocities perpetuated upon the Uyghurs and other ethnic groups.