A Voiceless Outcry
by laylaa abdul-khabirMuslim Uighurs Struggle in China's Xinjiang Province
When many people think about China and human rights, the issue of Tibet immediately comes to mind. Coverage on China's human rights record has tended to ignore other less-known regions and ethnic minorities that suffer repression at the hands of the Chinese government.
Xinjiang province in Northwestern China is home to the Uighur people, a Muslim ethnic group that has struggled for self-rule with China for decades. The 8 million Uighurs form 46% of Xinjiang's population. They have fought for and won, in 1933 and 1944, the independence of their own territory, called the East Turkistan Republic. Each of these periods of rule were short-lived, however; China soon reclaimed the territory and to this day maintains that Xinjiang is an "autonomous region" that is irrefutably a part of China.
China's heavy hand is seen across the region today, from religious restrictions on Islamic practices to the unjustified detainment and execution of Uighur activists, which is under-reported. As Uighurs' voices are left out of the world's consciousness, China gets a blank check to continue its oppressive activities in the region.
The Uighurs [pronounced WEE-gurs] are a Turkic people that have lived in modern-day Xinjiang from as early as the 9th century. Xinjiang was ruled by the Qing Dynasty Manchus from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century, a period during which numerous Uighur revolts occured. In 1864, the Uighurs successfully established their own state, which was named Yettishar. However, Yettishar was re-conquered by the British-backed Manchus in 1884 and was at this point renamed "Xinjiang" or "New Territory." Uighurs continue to refer to the area today as "East Turkistan" or "Uighurstan," rejecting the Chinese-appropriated name.
Uighurs feel little kinship with the dominant Han Chinese ethnic group, with whom they don't share culture, language or religion. China has long feared the rise of a transnational Uighur state formed from Uighur communities in Xinjiang and neighboring Central Asian countries. Resentment brews among Uighurs over China's perpetual intervention, which is seen an attempt to suppress or eradicate local culture and religion.
Political movements for Xinjiang independence from China primarily emerged in the 1940s as a series of attempted uprisings against local warlords and the Chinese Communists. The movements have existed for decades, with peaking and waning levels of popularity. The more radical of these separatist groups are frequently blamed for sporadic incidents of violence in Xinjiang, including attacks and bombings. The most prominent independence group today is the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an organization established in the 1990’s that China has blamed for much of the violence that occurred in that period.
Determined to contain the "separatist" ambitions of Uighurs, the Chinese government imposes a net of rules and restrictions to keep Xinjiang under tight government control. China suppresses religious practices in the Muslim majority region, hoping that by squashing religious identity, nationalist aspirations will die as well. Freedom to pray and study Islam is heavily regulated. Government workers are forbidden from attending mosques and religious schools, and cannot display any religious symbols in public, including the headscarf for women and beards for men. The only Qur'an allowed to be read is the official government-sanctioned one. Signs posted on mosques by the Communist Party limit the length of the imam's lecture during Friday services and prohibit prayer in public areas. During Ramadan, the Muslims' holy month, restrictions tighten even more. Headscarves and beards are prohibited altogether, and teachers and students are told not to observe the fast. In a New York Times article dated Oct. 18, 2008, it was reported that Kashgar University enforced this rule particularly strictly as the school tried to make students eat during the day and locked them inside in the evening to prevent them from returning home to break their fasts.
China blames the sporadic violence and unrest in Xinjiang on the need for government crackdown. As reported by MSNBC last August, as China headed toward the Beijing Olympics, the government warned that the East Turkistan Islamic Movement was the single "biggest threat" to China and the Olympics. Four days before the Olympics, an attack carried out by two Uighur men on Chinese border police that killed seventeen was linked by the Chinese government to the ETIM. China cited this incident as a reason to further step up its level of scrutiny in Xinjiang, and significantly increased the patrols, arrests and detentions it already conducted in the region. The state arbitrarily arrests Uighurs on charges of "illegal religious activities" or "threatening the security of the state," most of the time without citing specific reasons. The BBC in April 2005 reported that a joint report released by Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China stated that thousands of Uighurs are arrested by the Chinese government every year, and that more than half of those in Xinjiang's re-education camps are there for practicing 'illegal religious activies.'
Given the mass detentions, abuses and systematic repression of rights in Xinjiang, where is the international outcry? Why is Xinjiang not spotlighted for human rights abuses, especially by Western critics and the past Bush administration, who were quick to leap to the defense of Tibet? In the past 8 years, the Bush administration has largely turned a blind eye on China's abuses in Xinjiang. When George W. Bush declared his "War on Terror" following September 11, 2001, China lined up beside him in part because the state saw its own opportunity to benefit by labeling the Muslim Uighur separatists as a "terrorist group," and in some cases, went as far as to say they were "Al-Qaeda linked." In a moment of shifting rhetoric, as the Bush administration was warming up its vocal cords to repeat "terror threat" and "militant Islamic extremists" over and over again as a justification for its war over the next many years, China saw a chance to simply transfer the rhetoric over to a situation that had long been a thorn in its side. Human rights groups and scholars of the region rebuked the notion that Uighur independence movements were a militant threat connected to Al-Qaeda, but the damage was done. The 2005 joint human rights report later stated that China had "opportunistically [used] the post-11 September environment to make the outrageous claim that individuals disseminating peaceful religious and cultural messages in Xinjiang are terrorists who have simply changed tactics."
China shows little sign of ending its operations and loosening government control in Xinjiang. Many nameless and faceless Uighurs continue to be arrested, detained, or executed, their stories never reaching the press. Xinjiang has missed the U.S. shortlist for popular human rights repressed regions to act concerned about, and the media coverage is not likely to increase. Xinjiang lacks the star power of the Dalai Lama as a worldwide advocate, as Tibet has. Instead, most people respond with "X--what?" when hearing or reading about the region for the first time. The future looks potentially brighter with the rise of Uighur leaders who are increasingly speaking out against the human rights abuses. For now, however, Xinjiang’s inhabitants must endure in silence.
For more information about China’s repressed minorities and actions you can take, visit http://www.ir2008.org/. Or read the summary online of the Human Rights Watch report mentioned in this article by searching the title: “China: Religious Repression of Uighur Muslims.”