Who are the Uighurs and why should we care about them?

Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority community residing mostly in the Xinjaing Province, Kashgar Prefecture of Northwestern China (see figure 1). Beijing has attributed the escalating oppression of this group as a strategic requirement in their fight against terrorism. As is the case with many authoritarian regimes, the terrorism label is an expedient distraction from the brutal suppression of largely internal dissent. Various reports indicate that the PRC has incarcerated up to 1 million Uighurs in detention camps in Xinjiang for what they disingenuously describe as “transformation through education.” What the PRC wants these detained Uighurs to transform into is open to debate. Xinjiang’s location (VOA map) The answer to “why we should care” has two basic elements. First, the issue of the internment camps has unsurprisingly caused debate on the world stage. The Trump Administration was considering “targeted sanctions” as late as December 2018 but has recently declined to consider such a move in an effort to preserve some level of equanimity in the high stakes tariff negotiations between the two economic superpowers. From a geopolitical standpoint, we arrive at the “if not the United States, then who?” quandary, in which it is highly doubtful that any other world body (including the United Nations) has anywhere near the leverage necessary to force the PRC’s hand on the issue.

The second concern is orders of magnitude more complicated and far less understood than the detention camps. Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province is the furthest Northeastern Province in the beleaguered country and shares a 56 mile (91 km) border with China by way of the Wakhan Corridor, a thin strip of land that borders Pakistan on its southern length, Tajikistan along the northern corridor, and stops at the small border with China at its eastern terminus. Wakhan Corridor between Afghanistan and China (via Google Maps) As you may have already surmised, the PRC province that borders Afghanistan is the aforementioned Xinjiang. This border serves as one of the most often travelled migrant egress routes from the PRC for Uighurs fleeing persecution. As part of the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative, China has vastly increased economic and security activity in Central Asia and a component of that activity concerns arrangements with Afghanistan. Of particular concern is the widely reported negotiation for the PRC to build a military base in Badakhshan. If known, the intended location of this base is most certainly classified despite the ubiquitousness of open source imagery. The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to extricate the United States from the 17-year saga of United States presence in Afghanistan. The Taliban has inexplicably morphed into a malignant caricature of a legitimate political entity and are currently engaging in peace talks with the United States in Qatar while simultaneously openly killing international aid workers in Kabul. All this points to a deteriorating security environment and a resultant power vacuum. The PRC certainly has legitimate concerns about promoting stability to its western neighbor in the increasingly likely scenario of CENTCOM downshifting to a Security Force Assistance Brigade function. However, an increasing military presence in Afghanistan, naval base in Djibouti, various security arrangements in Africa and its understated, but consistent presence in Yemen all point to long term strategic concerns.