Central Asian silence on terror and persecution in Xinjiang

From Sarajevo, where the World Congress of Uyghur Exiles is taking place, Director Zumretaj Arkin's denounces Beijing's pressure. ‘The positive narrative that the standard of living in Xinjiang continues to improve is just propaganda’.

Sarajevo (AsiaNews) - From Xinjiang, the northwestern Turkic province of China, where Uyghurs and other representatives of Turkic language and culture ethnic groups live, worrying news continues to arrive about people being sent to concentration camps, where they are forced to work for ‘rehabilitation’.

Radio Azattyk spoke about this with the director of the World Congress of Uyghurs Abroad, Zumretaj Arkin, to understand why this situation is being talked about in the West, but kept silent in neighbouring Central Asia.

The Congress held its general assembly in the past few days in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Uyghur delegates from 25 different countries from Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America gathered.

The organisers pointed out the criticism that came from the Chinese authorities. Bosnia was also chosen for the fact that it witnessed genocide, as Arkin explains, although there are differences between the situations in the Chinese and Balkan worlds.

The repression and violence in these lands have been documented and reported to international courts, as one would like to see happen for the fate of the Uyghurs.

Cooperation is sought from civil society and with survivors, historians and people sensitive to these events, to learn from the Balkan events what should be done to support the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.

Especially since the tribunal for the international Uyghur case was chaired by Englishman Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was also the prosecutor in the case of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevič. The victims in Bosnia are still struggling for recognition of responsibility for the genocide, and the search for the remains of their murdered relatives.

Bosnia is also a Muslim-majority country, which therefore shows more intense solidarity with its Uyghur co-religionists. Since the announcement of the assembly last June, those in charge have received many threats, says Arkin, and ‘real smear campaigns against members of Congress, especially candidates for positions of responsibility’.

The Chinese government pressurised their families back home, taking several relatives hostage, not to mention the slander spread on the internet and social networks, with an avalanche of spam messages from Chinese accounts, in which even the ex-president's signature was used to send forged documents.

The Chinese embassy in Bosnia also threatened to prevent the rally, even conjuring up catastrophes at the rally site and sending unwanted guests from Turkey to disrupt the whole organisation.

As Zumretaj explains, ‘the Chinese use many tools to organise transnational repressions, as we call the tactics adopted through people they trust, often with the support of diplomats and a vast network of informers’.

Uyghurs loyal to the Beijing government are also active, spying on their own community in various countries and spreading discord among their compatriots, as well as various agents from China and other nationalities.

In Xinjiang, persecution is particularly directed at restricting religious freedom, with a series of increasingly strict laws and regulations starting in 2014 under the auspices of ‘de-extremisation’ and the fight against terrorism.

Even private prayer in the home is considered a crime of extremism, not to mention Friday prayer gatherings or other Islamic rituals, such as pilgrimage and visiting mosques. For these reasons, more than 3 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims from Xinjiang have allegedly been taken to rehabilitation camps over the past ten years.

The Chinese government tries to deny these accusations and put forward a positive narrative that the Uyghurs' standard of living continues to improve, but as Arkin puts it, “this is just propaganda”, and the silence of the governments of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is due to the fact that they are all “indebted to Beijing for the large Chinese investments in recent years”.

• Central Asia
• China
• Xinjiang
• Uyghurs