Those who might think the United States Senate has only one thing on its mind for the New Year – impeaching Donald Trump – are mistaken. Senators from both parties are also eagerly waiting to rap China over the knuckles for allegedly mistreating more than 11 million Uighurs in the far western province of Xinjiang. Indeed, Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, seems all set to whip up a global campaign against the Chinese government’s policies and measures in Xinjiang.
Uighur sympathizers may however be more impressed by the Arsenal footballer, Mesut Ozil, a German of Turkish origin, criticising China’s reported crackdown on a million Uighurs, than Mr Pompeo’s announcement that he will raise China’s mass internment of Muslim minorities with his Central Asian counterparts during next week’s trip to the region. American strictures are somewhat devalued because of the backdrop of bilateral friction over trade and tariffs. While the Chinese will dismiss US allegations as part of Mr Trump’s bargaining, other Asian countries may feel that human rights are belittled by being exploited to serve political ends
It can be no accident for instance that successive US presidents have found it convenient “accidentally” to bump into the Dalai Lama whenever Washington has been at odds with Beijing over some issue or other. Earlier, Taiwan was the leverage. In between, it’s been the unrest in Hongkong. No doubt India’s 1962 border war with China would have been similarly used if the Soviet missile crisis had not kept Jack Kennedy fully engaged.
The Uighurs, alternately Uyghurs, Uygurs, or Uigurs, are a minority Turkic ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. The Chinese recognize them as native to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. Old Russian travellers called them Sart (a name which they used for sedentary, Turkish-speaking Central Asians in general), while Western travellers called them Turki, in recognition of their language. New and seemingly credible evidence indicates that Beijing has built a series of detention camps across Xinjiang in the past three years, allegedly for voluntary re-education purposes to counter extremism, but actually as prisons. Leaked Chinese government documents, which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists labelled "The China Cables", include a nine-page memo sent in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party and the region's top security official, to camp managers.
The instructions make it clear that the camps should be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishment. The memo includes orders to never allow escapes, increase discipline and punishment of behavioural violations, promote repentance and confession, make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority, “encourage” students to truly transform, and ensure full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots. In fact, every aspect of a detainee's life is monitored and controlled: "The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed.” The guards are instructed to “implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth."
Such meticulous attention to detail hardly bears out the official claim that the camps, which China calls “vocational training centres”, are a humane and legitimate response to the threat of terrorism and religious extremism. The aim seems to be to reinvent Uighurs as loyal party cadres who are well cared for by the state. For instance, regional officials said recently that all “trainees” in the facilities had “graduated” and found stable employment.
However, Washington claims that the US government had not seen “any kind of significant improvement in the situation there” and remained extremely concerned about Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang. It argues that the Uighurs are subjected to a coordinated campaign of forcible internment and political indoctrination. Ben Emmerson QC, a leading human rights lawyer and adviser to the World Uighur Congress, claims the camps are trying to change people's identity as part of “a mass brainwashing scheme designed and directed at an entire ethnic community.” He says: "It's a total transformation that is designed specifically to wipe
the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang as a separate cultural group off the face of the Earth."
Apart from understandable Chinese resentment of US intervention, and skepticism about the timing of Mr Pompeo’s mission, he will have to contend with regional support for Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang. His visit to Belarus – the first in 25 years by a US secretary of state – is especially significant for only in October the former Soviet republic issued a statement at the United Nations on behalf of 54 countries voicing hearty approval of China’s “counter-terrorism” efforts in Xinjiang. The statement also accused Beijing’s critics of “politicising the human rights issue”.
After meetings in eastern Europe, Mr Pompeo will travel to Uzbekistan for multilateral discussions with members of what is called the C5+1 coalition of the five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – and the US established in 2015 as a platform for cooperation on matters including trade, energy and security. But in July, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were among 50 members of the UN human rights council to speak out in support of Beijing’s “counter-terrorism and deradicalisation” measures in Xinjiang, commending China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights”. Envoys from four of the five Central Asian countries have previously taken part in Chinese government-organised visits to Xinjiang. Mr Pompeo will have to face up to the hard reality that countries that publicly voice support for China’s actions there far outnumber those that express opposition.
The US government is the most vocal in its criticism. In October, Washington rolled out sweeping sanctions against 28 Chinese government entities and private companies and placed visa restrictions on officials over what it called Beijing’s “campaign of repression in Xinjiang”. US lawmakers, meanwhile, are pushing for an even stronger response. In December, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation that would commit the administration to name and sanction senior Chinese officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in the region. The bill awaits the Senate vote but members there are probably too taken up with Mr Trump’s impeachment trial to spare much time for the Muslims of a remote landlocked region of Asia even if the cudgels they take up would be more against China than for the Uighurs.
The whole thing will probably be dropped if the US gets what it seeks in the trade talks.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
