{"id":129313,"date":"2019-03-18T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=129313"},"modified":"2019-03-25T11:33:04","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T11:33:04","slug":"xinjiang-the-silence-of-the-muslims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/xinjiang-the-silence-of-the-muslims\/","title":{"rendered":"Xinjiang: The Silence of the Muslims"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Workers walk by what is officially known as a vocational skills education center under construction in China’s Xinjiang province.\u00a0| REUTERS<\/p><\/div>\n

12 Mar 2019<\/em> – Muslim governments were not silent when Myanmar murdered Rohingya, its Muslim minority, and expelled 700,000 of them to Bangladesh. They were unanimous in their anger when the Trump administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But they are almost silent on China\u2019s attempt to suppress Islam in its far western province, Xinjiang.<\/p>\n

It is the most brazen frontal assault on Muslims in modern history. Up to a million Chinese citizens have been sent to concentration camps in Xinjiang for being Muslim. They are also guilty of being a 10 million-strong ethnic minority, mostly Uighurs but including a million and a half Kazakhs, who do not feel sufficiently \u201cChinese,\u201d but Islam is the focus of the state\u2019s anger.<\/p>\n

And in the face of this repression, the world\u2019s 49 Muslim-majority countries have said almost nothing. Malaysia refused to send a dozen Uighur refugees back to China last year, four members of Kuwait\u2019s parliament made a public protest in January and Turkey loudly condemned China\u2019s actions last month, but the other 46 governments have avoided the issue. It is very strange.<\/p>\n

When Turkey finally did cut loose, foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said: \u201cIt is no longer a secret that more than a million Uighur Turks exposed to arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing\u201d in Chinese prisons. \u201cThe reintroduction of concentration camps in the 21st century and the systematic assimilation policy of Chinese authorities against the Uighur Turks is a great embarrassment for humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even then, other Muslim countries remained silent. With the honorable exception of Al-Jazeera, the issue is rarely even mentioned in the Arab media, and popular awareness of what is happening is minimal in big Muslim countries like Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia. Why?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that the mass repression of the Uighurs and other Muslims in China only became known abroad in the past year, although it was already state policy at least two years ago. It\u2019s true, too, that a lot of the evidence is circumstantial. While there are plenty of first-person reports of the brutal treatment of the Uighurs, for example, the estimates of how many are actually imprisoned \u2014 \u201cup to a million\u201d, which would be one-tenth of all the Muslims in Xinjiang \u2014 are really estimates of how many the camps could hold, based on satellite data.<\/p>\n

China denies both the scale and the purpose of the repression. These camps, it says, are \u201cvocational training centers\u201d that tackle \u201cextremism\u201d through \u201cthought transformation\u201d (what used to be called \u201cbrainwashing,\u201d a political tradition in communist China).<\/p>\n

The detainees are held indefinitely \u2014 there are no formal charges or sentences, but hardly anybody has been released in the past couple of years \u2014 and are allegedly volunteers. They are \u201ctrainees,\u201d said the top Chinese official in Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir, last October, who are grateful for the opportunity to \u201creflect on their mistakes.\u201d Shohrat Zakir is a Muslim name: As always, there are collaborators and careerists among the oppressed. But it is a classic late colonial situation, with a communist twist.<\/p>\n

The population of Xinjiang was over 90 percent Muslim and Turkic-speaking when the new regime in China reconquered the region in 1949. Beijing\u2019s solution, as in Tibet to the south, was to drown the native population in Han Chinese immigrants: Muslims are now only 45 percent of the population.<\/p>\n

When the push-back came \u2014 anti-Chinese race riots and terrorist attacks \u2014 Beijing responded with intense surveillance and repression of the native population. Part of the package was an attempt to curb Islamic observance and the use of the local Turkic language. And when that wasn\u2019t producing the desired result, Beijing began expanding the \u201cre-education centers\u201d that now hold up to a tenth of the Muslim population.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing surprising in this. Assimilation to the Han Chinese norm was the policy of all Chinese governments even before the communist takeover. What is surprising is the response of Muslim governments elsewhere. Why are they silent? Mainly because China is lavishing loans and grants on them: $20 billion in loans to Arab countries, a rumored $6 billion to Pakistan, even more to the nearby Muslim countries of Central Asia ($27 billion in projects in Kazakhstan alone). They need the money, so they shut up. So do their tame media.<\/p>\n

When Saudi Arabia\u2019s Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited China recently, he endorsed Beijing\u2019s right to take \u201canti-terrorism\u201d and \u201cde-extremism\u201d measures in Xinjiang. Of course, he needs China\u2019s support in fighting off the accusations that he ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi even more than he needs the money.<\/p>\n

Xinjiang\u2019s Muslims have been abandoned by the world community of Muslims. They are on their own, and they are suffering.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 japantimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12 Mar 2019 – Muslim governments were not silent when Myanmar murdered Rohingya, its Muslim minority, and expelled 700,000 of them to Bangladesh. They were unanimous in their anger when the Trump administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But they are almost silent on China\u2019s attempt to suppress Islam in its far western province, Xinjiang.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":129314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,56,180,62,183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights","category-asia-pacific","category-brics","category-media","category-religion-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}