War on terror or Islamophobia?

Book review of The War on the Uyghurs: China's Campaign Against Xinjiang's Muslims

The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against Xinjiang’s Muslims

Author: Sean R Roberts

Publisher: Manchester University Press, UK

Pages: 328

Price: £20

An important omission in this otherwise scholarly and forensic study of China’s repression of Uighur Muslims is any reference to the Muslim world’s striking indifference to the plight of their Chinese co-religionists, over a million of whom are incarcerated in high-security anti-internment camps as part of Beijing’s counter-terror measures.

Except Turkey, no other major Muslim country has spoken out. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC), whose mandate is to “safeguard the rights, dignity, and religious and cultural identity” of Muslim minorities, has remained silent. Imran Khan, when asked, shrugged his shoulders and said: “I don’t know very much about it.”  

Yet, Pakistan was one of the Muslim countries along with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Syria who signed a letter to the United Nations defending China's human rights record and endorsing its claim that what were being called detention camps were actually “vocational education and training centres” to protect vulnerable Muslims from extremist influence.

One factor behind this collective silence in most Islamic countries is said to be their heavy reliance on Chinese investment which they don’t wish to jeopardise, recognising its growing global power even as Western influence is waning. Their own abuse of the global “war on terror” to crack down on local ethnic groups could be another. The idea of a universal Muslim brotherhood has always been a myth, and this indifference offers more proof of that.

Meanwhile, the Uighur story has to be seen in the context of China’s long history of suppressing minority ethnic groups as part of its broad ideological push towards total cultural assimilation of ethnic Chinese with the ultimate objective of creating a one-size-fits-all single “state race”.   Initially, the Chinese campaign was focused on suppressing the impulses of Uighur nationalism which ran rather high in the early years of 20th century. For a brief period, Uighurs even declared the Xinjiang region independent. Since 1949, however, it has been under complete Chinese control.

The attention turned to Muslim Uighurs after the 9/11 attacks  and the US-led global “war on terror” that followed. During the invasion of Afghanistan more than 20 Uighurs were captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for years though they were never charged, and most were later released and resettled elsewhere.

However, this gave China enough cover to intensify its suppression of the Uighur people, but now specifically targeting its Muslim population. The 11-million strong community was promptly classified as a “terrorist threat” followed by a brutal crackdown.

Mr Roberts, a respected American academic who has spent 30 years following the Uighur saga, says in this well-researched and -documented book that what is going on in China is “cultural genocide” of Uighurs.

“In effect, the Chinese state has launched a campaign to destroy Uyghur identity as we know it,” he writes. And this, he adds, is happening through a “complex of policies to attack...practices, religious beliefs, and social capital that define Uyghurs.”  At the centre of these policies are the internment camps which he likens to the Nazi concentration camps and Stalin’s gulag.

The book is devoted almost wholly to explaining how China used the global “war on terror” as a cover for its mistreatment of the Uighur people. Sometimes, it goes a bit too far in portraying China as somehow unique in abusing the war on terror— even suggesting that its actions “emboldened” other countries to emulate it.

To put it in perspective, liberal Western democracies were the first to jump on George Bush’s “war on terror” bandwagon in the name of challenging what was touted as an “existential threat” to Western values and way of life. Every Muslim came to be seen as a potential terror suspect somehow complicit in the terrible acts of fellow Muslims.

Across Europe, visible symbols of Muslim identity were sought to be suppressed. Wearing a hijab, going to the mosque, possessing Arabic literature....anything deemed Islamic was looked upon with suspicion. Just being a Muslim became a sign of separatism. The mantra was “integration, integration and more integration”. And it came with programmes to “de-radicalise” Muslims, increased surveillance of Muslim communities, and special units to deal with them. Britain’s Labour Government under Tony Blair introduced Europe’s toughest anti-terror law amid a wave of Islamophobic discourse, especially after the July 7, 2005 London bombings.

None of this is to play down China’s ruthless treatment of Uighurs or for that matter other ethnic groups.  Its grim record on human rights is all too well known to be ignored. But any suggestion that China alone is guilty of misusing anti-terror laws is misleading. Despite its best intentions and a genuine concern for the plight of Uighurs, this book inadvertently risks playing into the West’s broader anti-China narrative. That notwithstanding, it’s an important book for its sheer informational value. It is an authoritative, passionately written account of the Uighur story: who are Uighurs, how they came to settle in Chinese territory, why is China hostile towards them, and what’s going on now.

Unfortunately, nobody outside the West is paying attention.