Canada must stand up for Uighurs in China
We should join global efforts to hold Beijing to account for its cruelties against Uighurs
It will come as news to nobody that the Communist regime in Beijing lies through its teeth about the state of human rights in China, but nothing comes close to the lies Beijing tells to cover up its mounting persecution of Muslims. Those lies have been getting harder to tell, ever since Xi Jinping ’s police state embarked upon measures so extreme and tyrannical that it’s become harder for the regime to keep the truth from getting to the outside world.
An in-depth Human Rights Watch investigation published on Monday found that in the far western expanses of Xinjiang, a region nearly as big as Canada’s Prairie Provinces, “the government’s religious restrictions are so stringent that it has effectively outlawed Islam.”
Last month, the head of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination told a UN human rights panel in Geneva that Xinjiang ’s Uighur autonomous region has been turned into “a massive internment camp.”
Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, perhaps a million people in all, have been detained for weeks and sometimes months at a time in a network of indoctrination camps. At first, the Chinese government denied that the camps even existed. But as evidence has mounted — eyewitness accounts, the Chinese government’s own documents, satellite photographs, construction blueprints — the party line has changed.
Chinese officials are now describing the camps as “vocational education facilities,” training centres and residential schools where petty criminals are housed while undergoing “rehabilitation and reintegration.”
Former inmates who have managed to escape China describe the camps as hell holes of torture and forced labour. Internees are required to learn Mandarin, sing patriotic songs, memorize government propaganda and recite florid loyalty oaths.
Xinjiang ’s Uighurs, Tajiks and Kazakhs have tended to see themselves as peoples apart from the Han Chinese cultural hegemony that the Communist regime has imposed in the region in recent years. Separatist sentiment has waxed and waned, and radical Islam has occasionally found a place for itself in the region. The Communist party line is that extraordinary measures have been necessary to eradicate “ideological diseases” in the region, particularly among the 10 million Uighurs. Devout Muslims are classified as mentally ill.
In Xinjiang ’s towns and cities, population movements are closely controlled. Surveillance is ubiquitous. The Communist administration is employing biometric data, experimental voice-recognition and facialrecognition technology, house arrest, DNA data banks and digital tracking to closely monitor and control the public. Cameras are everywhere. Travel is severely restricted. Over the past two years, hundreds of thousands of special police have been deployed to newly built stations and temporary checkpoints.
As grim as all this is, the gross human rights abuses in Xinjiang are at least beginning to emerge as subjects of closer global scrutiny. On Monday, in an unusual move, Michelle Bachelet, in her first speech as the UN’s new High Commissioner for Human Rights, singled out Beijing ’s mistreatment of Xinjiang ’s Uighurs for special notice.
The former Chilean president specifically referred to “deeply disturbing allegations of largescale arbitrary detentions of Uighurs and other Muslim communities in so-called re-education camps across Xinjiang.”
Bachelet called on Beijing to reverse its closed-door policy and allow the UN Human Rights office complete access to Xinjiang and all other regions of China. That would be a good start.
In Washington, meanwhile, a bipartisan initiative in Congress has begun to push the Trump White House to “swiftly act” and trigger the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act to sanction Chinese government officials and entities directly complicit in the Xinjiang abuses. On Monday, the Australian opposition Labour party followed suit, calling on Canberra to draw up a similar list for sanctions. A petition drawn up by a group of Australian imams asking parliament to start ramping up pressure on Beijing managed to gather 10,000 signatures.
Canada, predictably, has been quiet, even though Ottawa could have been out in front in holding Beijing to account for its cruelties in Xinjiang. It’s been 12 years since the Canadian Uighur Huseyin Celil, who fled China as a refugee in 2001, was arrested while visiting family in Uzbekistan. Celil was extradited to China and chucked into prison, and in 2012 Celil was given a life sentence without a proper trial on trumped up terror charges. Celil’s sentence was later reduced after being subjected to a “re-education” program.
Canada could make some use of itself taking the lead in backing UN human rights investigators’ efforts to gain access to Xinjiang, and Ottawa’s own Magnitsky law would serve perfectly well in a collaboration with Australia and the United States to sanction the tormentors of Xinjiang ’s Uighurs.
Canada has neither reason nor excuse not to do so.
Gross human rights abuses ... are at least beginning to emerge as subjects of closer global scrutiny.