China is using the pretext of the so called war on terror to conduct genocide of its minority Uighurs and labeling theie group international extremist group.
Xinjiang called Eastern Turkistan, has been the home for ethnically Turkic Uihgur Muslims who speak a language akin to Turkish. Uihgurs, who ruled the Silk Road cities, have lived in the region for more than four millennia and played an important role in the cultural and mercantile exchanges between the East and West.
Xinjiang, rich in mineral resources, including 38 percent of coal reserves and 25 percent of the petroleum and natural gas reserves, is China’s largest province accounting for 16 percent of the landmass. Though home to only 1.6 percent of the population, this region has tremendous strategic significance for China, which conducts nuclear tests at the Lop Nor range. As a policy, both former Soviet Union and China always used Muslim populated areas for their nuclear tests despite the fallout, resulting in the wide-scale contamination of water sources and land causing large number of cancer cases, congenital birth defects and numerous other related diseases among the Uihgur population.
Despite the mineral wealth, more than ninety percent of local Muslims live below poverty line .Their pleas to improve their conditions fell on deaf ears of Beijing, forcing Uighurs to resort to armed struggle for independence soon after the Red Army occupied the area in 1949. However, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung designed an aggressive population transfer policy under which Hans Chinese were brought in from far away places and settled in the midst of Muslims in Uighur.
According to Germany-based Eastern Turkistan Information Centre, Beijing tried to exploit the United States led war on terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 events in New York by insisting that Muslim freedom fighters in Xingjian as terrorists. Beijing arrests Uihgur Muslims in large numbers, concludes trials within days, often resulting in death sentence executed on the same day. The Uighurs are now “afraid to talk, not just to foreigners, but even to each other”.
Islam, inextricably linked to their culture and identity, came to the region in 934 AD during the reign of the Karakhanid kings and Kashgar became one of the major centres of Islam. According to statistics, there have been over 23,700 mosques in the region. However, in Beijing’s resolve to destroy this very identity, the Chinese government has placed growing restrictions on the practice of Islam in the region.
A Human Rights Watch report tells of how the Uihgurs were forced to breed pigs and mosques were shut down and occasionally used as pork warehouses to add terrible insult to devastating injury.
According to official sources, around 8,000 Imams indoctrinated in communism, deliver Friday sermons. Religious schools have been banned, many mosques closed and the building of new mosques restricted. The police raid peaceful but ‘unauthorised’ religious gatherings and those found to be leading the gatherings have been sentenced to long-term imprisonment. Government employees risk being fired if they go to mosques.
Reiterating this Amnesty International (AI) said, “fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was banned in government offices, schools and hospitals. Students face expulsion if they refused to break the fast. Mosques have been closed down because they were located near schools and deemed a “bad influence” on young people. The crackdown was expanded to include other sectors of society”.
Uighur women working in government offices too were told not to wear headscarves during work as it was regarded “feudalistic”. Typical headscarves were permitted in school, but those tied in a religious way, showing only the face, are not acceptable. Some Muslim women were forbidden from wearing Islamic head covers.
Preaching or teaching of Islam outside government control is considered subversive and Amnesty said that, since the mid-1990s, several hundred Uighurs accused of such activities have been executed while thousands more have been detained, imprisoned and tortured. Uighur children have not been taught their history and traditions in schools. Places and monuments representing the Uighur heritage have been destroyed and in most of the big cities there is nothing left to indicate any presence of the Uighur culture.
A government circular called on officials to step up surveillance on weddings and funerals as well as circumcision ceremonies, house-moving rituals and the wearing of earrings. Uighur government and party officials have been told to seek permission before attending any such festivals or ceremonies and report back to the government upon the completion of their activities. The regulations applied only to Uighur Muslims and not to the whole of the Xingjian Province.
Though denied repeatedly, Amnesty has recorded hundreds of executions and extra-judicial killings of Uighurs. Applying incredible torture methods to crush their freedom struggle, China commonly uses painful and brutal torture methods never used before. According to state media, that the Chinese government has executed hundreds of Uighur Muslim freedom fighters. Among them was Alerkin Abula, who founded, in 1993, the East Turkistan Islamic Party of Allah, fighting for freedom in the Xingjian province.
The former United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson, warned Chinese leaders during a visit to Beijing that they should not use the war on terror as an excuse for widespread repression in Xingjian.
This is a conflict China has been anxious to hide from its people, foreign governments, overseas investors and tourists. Beijing has effectively pre-empted often-weak Muslim countries, which rely on China for political, economic and military assistance, from speaking out against its repression of Muslims in Xingjian. Diplomats are kept under close watch and foreign journalists are allowed to visit only in the company of escorts.
Under the circumstances, China’s notoriously repressive birth control policies, including, but not limited, to forced abortions would seem to suggest that Xingjian is one of the worst places in the world to be a Muslim right now. This is especially so in the context of the ongoing global war on Islam and the fast growing relations between China and Israel known for its conspiracies against Islam and Muslims.
Meanwhile Muslim countries have done nothing to bring pressure or persuade China to offer Uighur Muslims their legitimate rights and end their long-sufferings. The toothless Organisation of Islamic Conference too has forgotten the Xingjian Muslims and failed even to send a delegation to Beijing to at least draw attention to their plight.
For far too long the world has forgotten, or ignored, the plight of Uihgur Muslims who are also not exceptionally popular in the West as, unlike the Buddhists of Tibet who have Dalai Lama, they have no charismatic leader in exile or celebrity converts in Hollywood to rally to their cause.