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One. Million. People. There are around 11 million Uighurs living in Xinjiang, which means that almost one in 10 of them has been detained.

Fast forward 17 years: On Friday, a panel of U.N. human rights experts said Uighurs in Xinjiang were being treated as “enemies of the state” and announced that it had received credible reports about the “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” in “counter-extremism centers.” One. Million. People. It’s an astonishingly high number. In the context of the Uighur population as a whole, it’s even more shocking: There are around 11 million Uighurs living in Xinjiang, which means that almost one in 10 of them has been detained, according to the U.N. How is this not anything other than one of the biggest, and most underreported, human rights crises in the world today?



Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images



To be clear, the Chinese have launched vicious crackdowns against the Uighurs on several occasions since 9/11 — most notably, the “ To be clear, the Chinese have launched vicious crackdowns against the Uighurs on several occasions since 9/11 — most notably, the “ strike hard and punish ” campaign of 2009. In fact, ever since Chinese communist forces conquered and occupied the short-lived East Turkestan Republic in 1949 and turned it into the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region , any attempts by Uighurs to demand greater freedom or autonomy from Beijing have been brutally stamped out . This, it seems, is how the Chinese do “assimilation.” Yet, as Amnesty International’s Nicholas Bequelin told me, the sheer scale of this latest crackdown should be seen as a “turning point.” The Chinese government is currently “engaged in a mass brainwashing operation that requires the detention of hundreds of thousands of people, arbitrarily, outside of any legal framework, in order to subject them to intense political indoctrination, in the hope that this will make them into a more compliant and loyal political entity,” Bequelin said. It won’t work, of course. As Bequelin pointed out, “There is no way that China can ensure it has sufficient loyalty from the Uighur people.” The Chinese, he said, will instead “create a generation with very deep grievances because they are detained outside of any kind of legal framework and they are treated as colonial subjects.” Every colonial project, he added, “generates its own anti-colonial project.”



A Uighur woman sweeps outside her house on July 1, 2017, in the old town of Kashgar, in the far western Xinjiang province, China. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images



As with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, China’s war on terror in Xinjiang risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Chinese — like the Americans and the Israelis — don’t really give a damn about alleged terrorist threats. This has much less to do with security and much more to with politics. Beijing is asserting control over a restless province that borders eight countries — including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other economic factors come into play, too: Xinjiang is home to the country’s U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, China’s war on terror in Xinjiang risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Chinese — like the Americans and the Israelis — don’t really give a damn about alleged terrorist threats. This has much less to do with security and much more to with politics. Beijing is asserting control over a restless province that borders eight countries — including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other economic factors come into play, too: Xinjiang is home to the country’s largest reserves of coal and natural gas Fighting terrorism, though, has become a useful cover for authoritarian governments around the world. Bequelin, who is the East Asia director at Amnesty International and a former visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s China Center, draws a “direct line” from the Bush declaration of a war on terror in 2001 to the repression of the Uighurs in 2018. “The war on terror rhetoric immensely benefitted the Chinese,” said Bequelin. “It was a 180-degree turn for the discourse of the Chinese state with respect to its ability in Xinjiang: from minimizing and trying to hide it to casting its efforts and suppression of any form of dissent as ‘counterterrorism.’ So there is a direct line here.”

“The war on terror rhetoric immensely benefitted the Chinese.”

Demonstrators attend a protest in front of the Chinese consulate in Istanbul, on July 5, 2018, to denounce China’s treatment of ethnically Uighur Muslims during a deadly riot in July 2009. Photo: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images



So where is the global outcry? Where are the protests from Western governments, which so often claim to value human rights above all else? President Donald Trump says he has “ the global outcry? Where are the protests from Western governments, which so often claim to value human rights above all else? President Donald Trump says he has “ a lot of respect for China ” and likes to brag that Xi Jinping is “ a friend of mine .” On a visit to China earlier this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May won plaudits from Chinese state-run media for being “pragmatic” and ignoring Western journalists and activists who “keep pestering [her] to criticize Beijing” over human rights abuses. Her fellow European leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, has visited China 11 times in 12 years — but has never publicly raised the issue of the Uighurs on any of those trips.

Where is the outrage from the governments of majority-Muslim countries, which so often claim to speak on behalf of their oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters across the globe?

Where is the outrage from the governments of majority-Muslim countries, which so often claim to speak on behalf of their oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters across the globe? They are loud in their condemnation of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians and Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. But a million Muslims behind bars? Beards and veils banned? Imams humiliated? The news out of Xinjiang has been met only with radio silence from the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Take the Turkish government, which in the past has spoken out in defense of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, but these days is keen on cozying up to Beijing. Or consider the Iranian government, which not long ago announced a “new chapter” in Tehran-Beijing relations, praising China for having stood “by the side of the Iranian nation during hard days.”