China guilty of Uighur ‘dystopian hellscape’

Is China guilty of genocide in Xinjiang? Yesterday the New York Times declared that China was committing “the ultimate crime” against its Muslim ethnic Uighurs. China bitterly denies it. Shackled to a steel chair for days on end. Regularly beaten in freezing temperatures. Forced to watch as guards assault other inmates. Subjected to relentless Communist Party propaganda. Forbidden to practise their Islamic faith or speak their mother tongue. These are the conditions thousands of Uighur Muslims face in detention camps in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, according to a new report by Amnesty International. The report is shocking. But for many, the information it contains is neither new nor surprising. In recent months, the Chinese government has been accused of using physical torture, forced sterilisations and population transfers to attack and eradicate Muslim minorities in the country’s northwest. Yesterday, the leading New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, wrote “China is not massacring Uighurs, so this is not a genocide in the commonly accepted sense. But under the legal definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention, China’s practices appear to qualify as genocide by suppressing births of a particular ethnic group.” Amnesty International leader Agnès Callamard says authorities are committing crimes against humanity to create a “dystopian hellscape” for the Uighur people. “It should shock the conscience of humanity,” she declared. Approximately 12 million Uighurs live in Xinjiang. They have their own language, similar to Turkish, and their own culture – distinct from the Han Chinese majority. In recent decades, tensions have flared between the Uighurs and Chinese authorities. Then, in 2017, there was a huge security crackdown. Today, experts agree that up to one million Muslims are imprisoned in the province. Beijing has repeatedly rejected claims it is abusing the Uighurs’ human rights. It says the camps are voluntary but necessary de-radicalisation programmes, key to stamping out the threat of Islamic extremism. But last week, a series of independent hearings led by lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice began in London to determine whether the alleged abuses should be called a genocide. It is a term that has been applied to some of the most infamous crimes in human history, from the killing of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 to the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War Two. There is no one definition of genocide, but a UN convention describes it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Many believe the answer is obvious. So far in 2021, the Dutch, Canadian, Lithuanian and UK parliaments have all passed resolutions accusing China of genocide, and the US State Department agrees. But for some governments, the issue is complicated by China’s economic might. Last month, China replaced Germany as the UK’s biggest import market. If British prime minister Boris Johnson publicly agreed that China is guilty of genocide, then it would be almost impossible for him to justify trading with the nation. For some, the reluctance of the international community to declare a genocide – or not – is unbearable. “The public wants an answer to this question,” Sir Geoffrey Nice declared ahead of his tribunal. “If nobody else will provide it, we will.” Is China guilty of genocide in Xinjiang? Global outrage No, say some. Even the author of the Amnesty report could not say definitively that genocide had occurred. And it would be hypocritical for the West to accuse China. When the Canadian parliament passed its resolution, one Chinese state newspaper pointed out that the abuse of Canada’s Indigenous people remains in recent memory. Moreover, many say the word genocide only applies to mass murder. Yes, say others. The Chinese government does not need to have killed millions of Muslims to be guilty of genocide. There is a huge amount of evidence to suggest that state authorities are systematically seeking to wipe out the Uighurs’ ethnic identity. There can be no justification for mass imprisonment, torture and forced sterilisation. Amnesty International is right – the UN must act now. KeywordsPropaganda - Information, which may be biased or misleading, used to promote a certain viewpoint.