MUSLIMS LIVING AS MINORITIES
The Genocide of Uyghurs and the Silence of Muslim-Majority Countries When social stability trumps individual rights BY ALI MÜCTEBA GÖKÇEK
U
yghur Muslims have faced oppression throughout their historical relations with China. The region that the Chinese call Xinjiang only really became a constituent part of the larger China when the Qing Dynasty conquered it in the 1750s. China’s relationship with the Uyghurs has been fundamentally colonial in nature. The Uyghur homeland served as a frontier colony, one that is held arms-length away from the mother country, and as a settler colony that has been overwhelmingly settled by the population of the colonizing country. The first modern rebellion against the Chinese was led by Yakup Beg, who unified the region as Kashgaria (1865-1877) and sought international recognition of its independent status. It further became involved in Chinese politics in the late 19th century when the Qing made the region a province of its mainland. Later, in 1944 the Ili Rebellion – considered the start of the East Turkestan National
Liberation Revolution (The Three Districts Revolution) -- against the Kuomintang rule, with Soviet support, liberated the region’s Turkic people and enabled the short-lived proclamation of the East Turkestan Republic in the region. Although the Republic made numerous efforts for diplomatic recognition, no country recognized its envoys as representatives of an independent country. The uprising concluded with a ceasefire in Oct. 1949 with the end of the Kuomintang rule. In 1955, communist-ruled China asserted its control and established the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the country’s highest level of minority autonomous entity. Ever since then, this minority population has been under constant pressure. Starting in the late 1940s, China began sending large numbers of Han Chinese there — their portion of the population increased from approximately 7% to 40% by 2008 (https:// geog.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/ users/fan/403.pdf) — to change the region’s demographics. The sporadic anti-oppression protests since then have led to Beijing’s
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recent harsh response: concentration camps. Many Uyghurs would place the “beginning of the end” on July 5, 2009, the day the Ürümqi demonstrations began. Protesting Beijing’s lack of investigation into the murder of two Uyghur men in the hands of the Han Chinese, the protesters were standing up for their basic human rights and due process. However, Beijing responded by attacking the Uyghurs and detaining around 800,000 to 2,000,000 of them in concentration camps. With an abundance of evidence surfacing from released documents, satellite imagery and survivor testimonies (https://time. com/6048222/un-china-uyghurs/), many countries have pressured China to stop its campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing. On July 10, 2019, 22 Western countries — and zero Muslim-majority countries — sent a signed letter to the U.N. criticizing China’s policies and demanding their end. A few days later, 37 countries responded with a letter defending China. Almost half were Muslim-majority countries, among
