Stop Uyghur Genocide
The Uyghur Muslims of East Turkestan are forced between the ‘rock’ of Chinese communist oppression and the ‘hard place’ of being a tool of Western foreign policy.
Muslims around the world have been hearing terrible news about the situation of Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan for some years.
The situation of the Uyghur Muslims is made doubly worse by the fact that governments in the Muslim world have not just remained silent – because of their economic dependency on China – but have, in some cases even been complicit in returning Uyghur Muslims to the oppression of Chinese Communist rule.
It is also made more complicated by the fact that the major focus on their plight in the Western media coincided with the change in US foreign policy under President Trump. Whereas previous administrations had chosen to engage China in order to secure their interests, the Trump administration (and now the Biden administration) were more confrontational. They use this issue as one of several sticks to beat the Chinese government. Hence, the US government will welcome anyone who is anti-China, because that suits their interests, not because it helps the Uyghur Muslims.
Because of this, some on the political left in Western countries do not accept any negative accusations against China, as they see all of it as part of US propaganda. Similarly, some strong supporters of the governments in the Muslim world follow whatever line they hear from their government – which is usually to deny that the Chinese government has undertaken any persecution at all.
And in between all of these tensions are the Muslims in East Turkestan – who for years have been subject to political oppression; racism from the Han Chinese; and an ideological war on their Islamic beliefs and practices by the atheistic communist regime. Reports of force-feeding in Ramadhan, or Imams being arrested pre-date the Trump era – though they weren’t so widely reported at the time.
At the heart of the problem is that China’s policies are simply a copy of counter-extremism measures invented by the US, UK and other states in their so-called ‘war on terror’. We have seen the same by India against Muslims in Kashmir, Russia against Muslims in Chechenya, and the Zionist occupiers in Palestine. Even many Muslim governments implement the same policies.
China has political objectives in East Turkestan that they seek to justify with accusations of ‘terrorism’ against the Muslim population – based on the lie that the more Islamic a person is, the more of a threat they pose. Hence, all these countries act to suppress Islamic expression through surveillance, criminalisation, re-‘education’ programmes, and various other means of oppression. In this way they are the same.
#Uyghur #Stand4Uyghurs
