Religious abuse perils
Friday is the third anniversary of the worst single terrorist attack in modern Thailand. The poorly investigated, badly prosecuted bombing of the Erawan shrine killed 20 people and injured more than 100. The hurried police work concluded it was the act of foreigners angry at the government’s success against human trafficking. The “foreigners” turned out to be Chinese Uighurs, two of whom were arrested and are still undergoing trial. The only known Thai suspect is on bail and her trial is officially pending, unofficially unlikely.
In the rush to get the event behind them and assure future tourists that Bangkok is still a safe city, police and the army generals missed a lot of clues. The fact they didn’t even try to publish a final report made sense. It would have been strongly criticised. The supposed motive is highly suspect. Almost all the casualties of the Erawan were ethnic Chinese, the majority from the mainland. A second bomb was supposed to have been detonated at the most popular Bangkok destination for Chinese tourists — Asiatique. The bomber was reportedly caught up in a traffic jam and ended up throwing his device in the river.
It is thus far more likely that the suspected Uighur mastermind, along with the known and probable accomplices including the arrested Thai woman, were aiming to harm Chinese for their government’s policies. Police have denied and will deny this more plausible motive of the bombers. However, the actions of the Chinese government against Uighurs and other Muslim people speak volumes. To those of a terrorist mindset, attacking innocent Chinese and ethnic Chinese tourists in Thailand is an easier task than taking the issue or real and alleged mistreatment to the Chinese authorities responsible.
And that mistreatment has rapidly escalated. Not only has Beijing increased pressure on the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Indisputable proof emerged last week of an anti-religious campaign against ethnic Hui in neighbouring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region just above Vietnam and east of Yunnan province. The campaign against the Hui should cause extra concern in Thailand, apart from the obvious human rights abuses by China. The Hui are the original Muslims from China who now live in Chiang Mai and northern Thailand.
Last week, an extremely unusual mass anti-government protest occurred in Weizhou, a large town of mostly Hui nationality in China. The rally was against plans announced to tear down the towering grand mosque of Weizhou. Immediately after the protest broke up, the state-run Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Communist Party, carried a strong editorial that would have been amusing if the issue were not so serious. In the Global Times version, the mosque must be destroyed in reaction to “the illegal act” of protesting. But the protest was to oppose the demolition of the mosque.
The sad fact is that China has embarked on a general campaign against religion, because authorities have come once against to fear that some people put their religion before the Party. Re-education camps have reappeared. Last week, Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that several million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were forced into what he called “political camps for indoctrination”.
The campaign goes far beyond the former crackdown on Uighurs that supposedly targeted Islamists and potential terrorists. More than 1 million Uighurs, or 10% of the total population, have gone to these particular amps. Islamic crescents and domes have been stripped from mosques. Christian churches have been shut down and Bibles seized. Tibetan children have been moved from Buddhist temples to state schools. China tacitly confirmed the UN claims on Monday, saying that security measures “have avoided a great tragedy and saved countless lives”.
One hopes that diplomats are even now trying to dissuade China from such heavy-handed abuses of human and civil rights. The real danger of such campaigns, well illustrated in the past and probably in the Bangkok bombing three years ago, is that abuse from the state raises the chances of violent retribution from those resentful of such treatment.