The Road to GenocideThe Uyghurs have the potential to threaten China's national unity, which is the real reason we are seeing the largest incarceration of an ethnic or religious minority since the Holocaust.
Aaron Sarin
31 May 2022
These are strange days for campaigners and activists working to raise awareness of the Uyghur genocide in China. While I daresay not one among them would begrudge the Ukrainian people the tremendous outpouring of international support they have received, these campaigners might be entitled to a certain frustration. The Uyghur plight led to plenty of attention and precious little action, and nothing remotely like the united front seen in recent months. But this united front could be cause for optimism. We’ve seen the West (mostly) overcome its internal divisions long enough to rally around Ukrainians—something no one expected. Why should this momentum not be carried forward to the Uyghur crisis?
Already, the eyes of the world may be returning to Xinjiang. Last week, a slew of photographs hacked from the region’s police computer servers showed us the faces of 5,000 Uyghur detainees—some confused, some defiant, some tearful; the oldest is 73, the youngest is just 15.
https://twitter.com/mathieuvonrohr/status/1528955873426563074At the same time, UN Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet flew out on a long-delayed visit to the cities of Ürümqi and Kashgar: a report is expected. Of course, it will be a sanitised affair. We’ll hear nothing of gang rapes committed by Party officials in smart suits; we won’t see a trace of the “tiger chair” torture devices or electric cattle prods. Bachelet has been warned by Beijing that her visit must be “friendly.”
This immediately brings to mind last year’s COVID-19 origin investigation farce. Chinese authorities made the WHO wait a full year, wielded a strict veto over the scientists selected to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and then presided over a stage-managed affair in which the WHO’s team simply entered the Institute, put questions to senior staff, accepted their answers without asking for evidence, and left. It’s hard to imagine the sequence of events being much different this time around. Many of the camps built at the height of the arrests in 2017–19 have already been dismantled or repurposed as factories, with a large portion of detainees simply transferred into the formal penal system. Meanwhile, new concentration camps are being constructed in the desert.
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The whirlwind of anti-Islam hysteria has ensured that Kazakh and Kyrgyz and Hui Muslims have sometimes been swept into the camps along with Uyghurs, but this is not to say that Islam itself was Xi Jinping’s primary target. There are also Christians in the camps, and these Christians have their crime stamped openly on their faces: it is their Turkic ethnicity. Islamic practice and Turkic features have both been targeted as indicators of Uyghurness—the distinguishing marks of a fledgling Uyghur nation—and Beijing is not worried about collateral damage.
This crime will be analysed for decades to come, and in order to understand it we need some historical context. The crooked path that led China to genocide can be traced all the way back to 1884, the year the Qing dynasty conquered a chunk of Turkic territory to its north-west. This area had long been home to a distinct ethnolinguistic community calling itself Uyghur. The emperor named his latest acquisition Xinjiang, literally “New Frontier,” a title that presents a difficulty to modern nationalists who like to assert that the area has always been Chinese.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/05/31/the-road-to-genocide/
