Mass detention of Uighurs has been superseded by trade talks

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing China Sanctions
BY AMY MACKINNON

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood participates in a protest march demanding the European Union take action against China in support of the Uighurs, in Brussels, on April 27, 2018.

Two human rights advocates who focus on China issues say they were told by U.S. officials last year that the Trump administration was preparing to impose sanctions on Beijing in December over its treatment of Uighur Muslims in the country’s western region of East Turkestan.
The advocates were given to understand that the sanctions would fall under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. government to place travel bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers.
But when International Human Rights Day came and went on Dec. 10—the day the United States customarily unveils a tranche of such sanctions each year—no announcement was made. 

The administration squelched the plan in order to avoid harming trade talks with China.
“Discussions with government officials indicated that there would be sanctions forthcoming in December,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. 

A second human rights advocate, who did not want to be named, heard similar things in briefings with government officials.
Richardson said she has since heard from officials who expressed frustration that the sanctions issue was off the table due to the trade talks. 

She declined to identify the officials who had briefed her.
Rob Berschinski, the senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, said his organization had also been “cautiously optimistic” that the sanctions on Chinese officials would be announced in December under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The U.S. failure to impose sanctions over China’s actions in East Turkestan—where it has forced up to a million Uighurs into internment camps—has been a big disappointment for the human rights community.
“While the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements, I think it’s important to remember that history is not going to remember the details of the negotiations but where the United States was on this massive human rights issue,” said Francisco Bencosme, the Asia-Pacific advocacy manager at Amnesty International USA.
At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was considering imposing Magnitsky sanctions in many places, including China.
A spokesperson for the State Department said: “The United States is developing a whole-of-government strategy to address the unprecedented campaign of repression in East Turkestan.”
“In regards to specific actions by the United States, the State Department does not forecast potential sanctions.”
At the Treasury, a spokesperson said officials would not “telegraph sanctions or comment on prospective actions.”
A United Nations human rights panel has said China has turned East Turkestan, home to some 11 million people, mostly Uighurs, into a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

The Daily Beast has reported that China is also seeking to build a worldwide register of Uighurs who live abroad and has threatened to detain their relatives if they do not comply with requests for information from the Chinese police.
Many Uighurs living in the United States have family in the camps and face the dilemma to speak out—at the risk of more harm to their relatives—or keep silent.
“Every Uighur in the USA has family members in the concentration camps,” said Murat Ataman, whose brother, Dilshat Perhat Ataman, was taken to a camp in June 2018. 

Dilshat, an editor of a popular Uighur website, served a four-year sentence in prison between 2010 and 2014 on charges of endangering state security.
It took four months for Murat to learn that his brother had been taken to a camp. 

Uighurs in East Turkestan are forced to install monitoring apps on their cellphones, limiting their ability to communicate freely with the outside world and making it hard for their families abroad to track their whereabouts.
On March 27, Pompeo met with members of the Uighur diaspora. 

Among the group was Ferkat Jawdat, who came to the United States as a refugee in 2011. 

His mother and four of his father’s relatives are currently being detained in East Turkestan.
Five days after the meeting, Jawdat received a message from contacts in China that his aunt and uncle had been sent to the camps. 

Jawdat said that members of his family have previously been questioned about his activism in the United States.
“I decided to go public because I don’t know if I can save my mom or not, but I want to save the other people,” he said.
“China’s plan is to wipe out the whole nation. This will be written in the history books as a genocide... My children, your kids, they’re going to learn about this. I don’t want my daughter to one day ask me, ‘What did you do to stop this?’” Jawdat said.
Commenting on the suggestion that trade talks had been given priority over the mass incarceration of Muslims in China, he said: “The U.S. should give up some economic development to save our next generations.”
Members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeatedly called on the Trump administration to place sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in East Turkestan and have introduced sanctions bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“For nearly a year I have joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in demanding the Trump Administration impose sanctions on Chinese officials directly involved in putting roughly a million Uighurs into internment camps,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, said in a statement to Foreign Policy.
At a rally in support of the Uighurs in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, successive speakers called for the United States to place sanctions on Chinese officials.
“Each time the world swears never again. When will we actually mean it?” said Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress.
Given China’s influential economic clout, many members of the Uighur community see the United States as their only hope.
Among Muslim countries, only Turkey has sharply condemned China for its treatment of the Uighurs and other Muslims. 

Muslim-majority states have even supported it. 

In 2017, Egypt detained and deported dozens of Uighur students back to China. 

On a visit to China this year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom supported China’s right to undertake anti-terrorism measures. 

Last month, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—whose 57 member states have substantial Muslim populations—passed a resolution that commended China’s efforts to care for its Muslim citizens.
China has invested heavily in countries across Central Asia and the Middle East as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Berschinski of Human Rights First, who previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, said 2018 was the first year that no sanctions were announced under the Magnitsky Act or the Global Magnitsky Act on International Human Rights Day.
No official explanation was given, although Berschinski suggested that perhaps a work overload at the Treasury Department may have been a contributing factor.
The Magnitsky Act takes its name from a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison after exposing widespread corruption. 

Passed in 2012, the law enabled the U.S. government to place sanctions on human rights abusers. 

The Global Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2016, extended that ability to the rest of the world.
“People are starting to get concerned that the administration is giving up on Global Magnitsky sanctions,” Berschinski said.

China's crimes against humanity

U.S. Steps Up Criticism of China for Detentions in East Turkestan

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

Kelley Currie, an American diplomat, denounced the mass detention of Muslims in China’s western colony of East Turkestan.

GENEVA — As China prepared to defend its record before the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United States on Wednesday led Western governments, academic experts and human rights supporters in challenging Beijing over its mass detention of Muslims in the western colony of East Turkestan.
China’s oppression of religious and ethnic minorities is well known. 

“What’s new is the breadth of the repression and how the Chinese government is using breakthroughs in technology to increase its effectiveness,” Kelley Currie, a senior United States diplomat, told a meeting on the sidelines of the council in Geneva.
The United States would consider targeted measures against East Turkestan officials to promote accountability for violations there, said Ms. Currie, who serves with the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. 

She urged China to reverse its policies and allow access to the region by United Nations experts.
The United States withdrew from the human rights council last year, accusing it of having an anti-Israeli bias and serving as a platform for some of the world’s worst rights abusers, but it has since pulled back from complete disengagement.
American diplomats returned to the council months later to criticize China’s human rights record. 

The United States called Wednesday’s meeting an effort to draw global attention to China’s extreme measures in detaining upward of a million people in re-education and detention centers and to build momentum for action by countries that are members of the Human Rights Council.
The meeting also highlighted an escalating effort by China to counter international criticism. 

China is scheduled to appear at the council on Thursday for the last round of a formal review of its human rights performance.
Leading up to that appearance, China played host to diplomats from several largely sympathetic countries posted to their diplomatic missions in Geneva — including Pakistan, Russia, Belarus, Cuba and Venezuela. 

It led guided tours of East Turkestan and showed off what it called "vocational training centers".
China’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva organized four meetings and a photo exhibition to reinforce that narrative. 

Diplomats and human rights activists reported that it also lobbied hard to dissuade other countries from attending the United States event on Wednesday, warning it would view participation as a hostile act.
That pushback, along with qualms about aligning too closely with the Trump administration appears to have kept some countries from supporting the event. 

But Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada agreed to sponsor the meeting, drawing diplomats from a dozen countries and a large crowd of rights activists.
Adrian Zenz, a German lecturer and an expert on East Turkestan, told the gathering that China’s re-education and detention centers have expanded rapidly in the past two years and hold as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities. 

He called China’s tactics “nothing less than a systematic campaign of cultural genocide.”
Omir Bekali, a 43-year old Kazakh Uyghur, said that East Turkestan police arrested and tortured him for days in 2017, after which he was held at a camp for six months, in a small room with 40 people.
There, Mr. Bekali said, the detainees had to sing songs about Xi Jinping, praise the country’s Communist Party and eat pork. 

“We had no right to talk,” he told those who attended the meeting.
A diplomat who carried a placard that identified him as representing China called Mr. Bekali’s account “a complete lie.”
“These centers are nothing else than normal boarding schools” he said.
That narrative, supported by China’s political and economic muscle, has silenced many countries, especially those that are predominantly Muslim.
In an earlier council session reviewing China’s human rights record, Turkey was the only Muslim country that criticized China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslims.
Still, human rights groups saw Wednesday’s meeting as a chance to build momentum for a stronger response by Human Rights Council members later this year.
Beijing’s strong defense of its measures in East Turkestan, Mr. Zenz said, “tells me that the re-education campaign” there “is part of a more strategic effort that we may see expand beyond East Turkestan and possibly beyond China.”

China's Final Solution

Scholars condemn China for mass detention of Muslim Uighurs

Reuters

Paramilitary policemen gesture to stop a photographer from taking pictures as they stand guard after an explosives attack hit downtown Urumqi in the East Turkestan colony May 23, 2014. 

WASHINGTON -- Countries must hit China with sanctions over the mass detention of ethnic Uighurs, hundreds of scholars said on Monday, warning that a failure to act would signal acceptance of “psychological torture of innocent civilians”.
Beijing has in recent months faced an outcry from activists, academics and foreign governments over mass detentions and strict surveillance of the Muslim Uighur minority and other ethnic groups in the restive western colony of East Turkestan.
In August, a U.N. human rights panel said it had received many credible reports that a million or more Uighurs and other minorities are being held in a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy” in the colony.
Representatives from a group of 278 scholars in various disciplines from dozens of countries called on China at a news briefing in Washington to end its detention policies, and for sanctions directed at key Chinese leaders and security companies linked to the abuses.
“This situation must be addressed to prevent setting negative future precedents regarding the acceptability of any state’s complete repression of a segment of its population, especially on the basis of ethnicity or religion,” the group said in a statement.
Countries should expedite asylum requests from East Turkestan’s Muslim minorities, as well as “spearhead a movement for U.N. action aimed at investigating this mass internment system and closing the camps”, it said.
After initial denials about the detention camps, Chinese officials have said some people "guilty of minor offences" were being sent to “vocational” training centers, where they are taught "work skills" and "legal knowledge" aimed at curbing militancy.
Michael Clarke, an East Turkestan expert at Australian National University who signed the statement, told reporters that China sought international respect for its weight in global affairs.
“The international community needs to demonstrate to Beijing that it will not actually get that while it’s doing this to a significant portion of its own citizenry,” Clarke said.

Chinazism, Forced Sinicization and Cultural Genocide

Chinese civil servants are happy to occupy Uyghur homes in East Turkestan

By Darren Byler, Ph.D.

A civilian worker presents a Uyghur child whom he has been assigned to treat as his "relative" with a picture book titled Our China, in an undated photo from East Turkestan's Chinese Communist Youth League.

Over the past two years, news of the mass detention of Muslim-majority Uyghurs has slowly filtered out of the East Turkestan colony in Western China.
These reports have coalesced into the outlines of a nightmarish system of massive prison camps and AI-enabled surveillance systems. 

Uyghurs, a group of nearly 11 million people who are native to Central Asia, have come to refer to themselves as a "people destroyed."
Chinese authorities have described their project to re-engineer Uyghur society as a response to religious "extremism" and the threat of terrorism. 

In the absence of a free press, stories of violent attacks by Uyghurs have been amplified far beyond all evidence of resistance to state control.
Up to one million Uyghurs are estimated to be imprisoned inside the camps, according to the scholar Adrian Zenz and Human Rights Watch. 

Beijing denies the camps are detention centers and instead claims they are "vocational training centers," which students are happy to attend.
Amid the growing outrage over the camps around the world, more than one million government workers, members of China's ethnic Han majority, have been quietly sent to Uyghur homes to monitor and assess Uyghur resistance to this process.
These "relatives," as they have been trained to call themselves, are part of an effort to fully assimilate the Uyghur population by undermining things as basic as religion and language, family structure and food culture.
Chinese Uyghurs forced to welcome Communist Party into their homes

Reports of the home stay system published in state media said the visits would "enhance ethnic unity," with pictures posted of Communist Party members posing smiling with Uyghur families.
When I visited the region in April 2018 I met a number of these Han civil servants. 

I asked them to tell me about their work and what they thought about it.
Through my research I found that these "relatives" have been given two major tasks when they arrive in Uyghur homes. 

Their first priority is fact finding. They are tasked with uncovering religious and ethnic nationalist attitudes. 

They also attempt to understand the loyalties Uyghurs have to family members that have been detained.
The manual that is used by "relatives" in Kashgar prefecture advocates asking Uyghur children questions regarding sensitive issues since "they will tell the truth." 

The information they gleaned through this process is then entered into digital security systems, where higher-level authorities determine who should be sent to the camp system.
The second priority for the "relatives" is what they refer to as "showing warmth" or care to Uyghurs.
This approach centers on showing "sympathy" regarding Uyghur living circumstances and asking questions regarding things that would "improve" their lives.

Photo taken on July 2, 2018, shows a man walking past a wall bearing a China Communist Party slogan in Kashgar.

Of course, this form of care does not include extending sympathy for missing and detained family members. 

The manual they used in Kashgar Prefecture warned against this. 

It told them to be careful not to be "brainwashed" into sympathizing with Uyghur families.
I found that it was difficult for the majority of the civil servants I spoke with to place themselves in the position of the Uyghurs whose lives and society they were destroying. 

They saw the type of violent paternalism they were engaged in as necessary to find a solution to what they called the "East Turkestan problem."
Many of them believed that dominating all aspects of Uyghur life was the only way to move forward with the project of the Chinese nation.
George Orwell has argued that when people come to believe in the necessity of their dominance they often become obsessed with disrespect on the part of others. 

Their domination needs to be loved. 

In such a state, Orwell notes, "actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them."
Uyghur crackdown in East Turkestan doubles security spending in one year

Under such conditions outrages such as imprisonment without trial, the removal of children and the occupation of minority homes are viewed as normal and necessary.
Many of the Han civilians who were involved in the broad Uyghur "reeducation" effort, particularly the most recent arrivals in East Turkestan, told me that they saw themselves as building a kind of secular Han nationalism. 

And this impulse, combined with the totalitarian control of the Chinese leadership, made the question of the ethics of the camp system an even harder question to ask.
For them it was easier to say that in the end this painful, yet banal, process would be a long-term benefit to East Turkestan's Uyghurs and Kazakhs -- another Muslim ethnic minority in the region. After all, through this process East Turkestan would become secular and safe for Han people.
Many "relatives" believed they had sacrificed their time and energy in "reeducating" Muslims, and in return they believed they deserve to be embraced by their Uyghur and Kazakh "little brothers and sisters." 

They were not able to think about the effects of what they are doing from the perspective of their Muslim neighbors.
As Hannah Arendt observed decades ago about systems of mass oppression elsewhere, the banality of Uyghur unfreedom was simply a product of those in power "doing their jobs." 

Until Han "relatives" can confront what they have been forced to enact, resistance to the state-directed human engineering project in East Turkestan will remain unthinkable.

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

UN alarmed by reports of China's mass detention of Uighurs

BBC News
The UN commission says China discriminates against its Uighur population.

The UN says it is alarmed by reports of the mass detention of Uighurs in China and called for the release of those held on a counter terrorism "pretext".
It comes after a UN committee heard reports that up to one million Muslim Uighurs in China's East Turkestan colony, were held in re-education camps.
Beijing has denied the allegations but admitted that "some" religious "extremists" were being held for re-education.
China blames Islamist militants and separatists for unrest in the region.
During a review earlier this month, members of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said credible reports suggested Beijing had "turned the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internment camp".
China responded that Uighurs enjoyed full rights but Beijing made a rare admission that "those deceived by religious extremism... shall be assisted by resettlement and re-education".
East Turkestan has seen intermittent violence - followed by crackdowns - for years.

What does the UN say?
The UN body on Thursday released its concluding observation, criticising the "broad definition of terrorism and vague references to extremism and unclear definition of separatism in Chinese legislation".
The committee called on Beijing to:

• End the practice of detention without lawful charge, trial and conviction;
• Immediately release individuals currently detained under these circumstances;
• Provide the number of people held as well as the grounds for their detention;
• Conduct "impartial investigations into all allegations of racial, ethnic and ethno-religious profiling".

What is China accused of?
Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have submitted reports to the UN committee documenting claims of mass imprisonment, in camps where inmates are forced to swear loyalty to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
The World Uyghur Congress said in its report that detainees are held indefinitely without charge, and forced to shout Communist Party slogans.
It said they are poorly fed, and reports of torture are widespread.
Most inmates have never been charged with a crime and do not receive legal representation.
The latest UN statement comes amid worsening religious tensions elsewhere in China.
In the north-western Ningxia region, hundreds of Muslims have been engaged in a standoff with authorities to prevent their mosque from being demolished.

Who are the Uighurs?
The Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority mostly based in China's colony of East Turkestan. 

They make up around 45% of the population there.

Chinese occupation forces in East Turkestan, where all filming and reporting by foreign media is tightly controlled.

East Turkestan is a Chinese colony, like Tibet to its south.
Reports that more and more Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are being detained in East Turkestan have been circulating for some months.