POLITICAL CHALLENGE

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted by the United Nations and signed on December 10, 1948 with the purpose of enshrining the rights and freedoms of all human beings regardless of faith, identity, gender and ethnicity. However, in the past few decades, many Muslim communities around the world such as Kashmiri, Rohingya, and Palestinian Muslims have faced prejudice due to their faith and identity, Uighurs are no different. Such persecution is not anything new for the Islamic world.

The Uighurs are mostly of Muslim Turkic ethnicity who regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. The majority, about 12 million, live in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwest China. Uighur communities are also found in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Australia and speak the Uighur language. Most of China’s Muslims are Hui—largely indistinguishable from their Han counterparts except in the matter of religion, and subject to far less prejudice than Uighurs.
The United Nations has recently released a report, holding credible evidence highlighting the human rights violations conducted against the Uighur population. As of now, human rights groups have estimated more than a million Uighurs are detained and estranged of their basic human rights.

Since 2017, it is believed that the Chinese government has detained up to a million Uighurs in Xinjiang for suspected terrorism in what the state defines as “re-education camps”. Expression of this Turkic Muslim identity has translated into human rights violations such as arbitrary detention, military-style discipline, thought transformation, forced confessions, abuse, torture, and murder. In November 2019, 400 internal Chinese documents, the Xinjiang Papers, were leaked containing substantial evidence of the violent strategy planned against Uighur Muslims by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Despite this evidence, little has been done by international actors to stop these human rights violations.

Using “organs of dictatorship” as mentioned in the Xinjiang Papers, China is able to establish an ideal nation-state, with a predominantly Han Chinese identity to bolster its legitimacy, defined as the right and acceptability of an authority. A nation-state is a political unit wherein the territorial state coincides with the area settled by a certain national group or people. The dominant Uighur identity in Xinjiang poses an obstacle in this regard. High Uighur population growth rates exacerbate spatial ethnic segregation, “strengthening the viewpoint that one ethnic group owns a [particular] land area”, weakening the Han national identity. This can also be seen in the case of ethnic cleansing of minority Tamil by majority Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, where, while no similarity to Uighur camps exists, the legitimacy of Sri Lanka is threatened by the separatist objectives of the Tamil nation.

Besides internment, other strategies to suppress Uighur birthrates include mass deployment of Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs), a widely used form of birth control. In 2018, a stunning 80 percent of all newly placed IUDs in China were fitted in Xinjiang, even though the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the country’s population. In Kashgar and Hotan, two significant Uighur districts, the combined natural population growth rates fell by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018. This can be countered by the notion though that a family-planning policy was introduced to all areas of Xinjiang in 1992 to comply with the national population law. Nonetheless, the massive systematic targeting implies again the forging of a national Han identity here. Therefore, in global politics, the homogenous presence of minority identity in a specific territory may be perceived as a threat to a state’s legitimacy, with minority repression being one possible consequence. The no-mercy urgency-filled crackdown, as mentioned in Xinjiang Papers, cannot simply imply the repression to be a measure to just strengthen a Han national identity. By maintaining stability in Xinjiang, this strengthening is the long-term solution to supporting development.

Xinjiang borders eight countries and the instability created by the Uighur identity here seems to be a barrier to China’s developmental goals, therefore, these human rights violations are a means to an economic end. Xinjiang is an important segment of Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which CPEC in Pakistan is a part, and it intends to link China to Europe and beyond. Many Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East have signed on to BRI. This shows how beyond the national level, in politics, the economic development goals of states supersede the need to act on norms of the global human rights regime, explaining why the governments of Muslim-majority states and international institutions such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) including Pakistan, have mostly kept quiet, This is another factor condoning the repression. The link between economic development and human rights violations can also be seen in the case of persecution against minority Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Unlike Rohingya, other minority ethnic groups like the Kachin are not targeted by Myanmar as much because other states such as China have economic investments in the energy sector in Kachin.

This continues to be a global political challenge because this is the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority in the world currently. Over the years, Pakistan has not stood silent in the matters of many other Muslim communities facing oppression. However, it is the high level of diplomatic ties with China that has limited Pakistan’s hand for help to the Uighur community as they have attracted not only the United Nations and other foreign powers but also many human rights NGOs for help.