Photo by: Kemal Aslan/Depo Photos via ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock
The Uighur are a Muslim group located in Xinjiang, province of China. Since 1949, the Han Chinese have been harassing, imprisoning and torturing them because of their culture, religion and the value of the land. For decades, they have been forced to do things by the Chinese that are against their culture. The Han Chinese have taken away their jobs and put them in concentration camps, as well as incarcerated them without due process. The Han Chinese will go to extreme measures to force their political views on them. The Uighur feel that they are being discriminated against and are losing their human rights. The Han Chinese are trying to conceal what they have done to them by taking away their basic freedoms. According to BBC, “China is locking up hundreds of thousands of Uighur muslims without trial in its western region of Xinjiang. China is trying to keep this a secret from the world.” The Han Chinese initiatives against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang demonstrate what could be the greatest abuse of human rights in our world today. The Han Chinese aren’t truthful about their acts, a significant security increase threatens their human rights, and more than one million Uighur have been thrown into concentration camps.
It has been claimed by the Han Chinese that the Muslim practice promotes acts of brutality, yet, according to The University of Western Australia, “Only 10.3% of terrorist attacks since 1970 have been committed by Islamist-motivated groups.” The Islamic religion does not exclusively promote violence or peace, much like other religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism do not intend on doing so. Violent acts carried out by members of the Islamic religion are acting on their own accord and are taking the basis of the Islamic religion, and misinterpreting it severely. The cover-up efforts by the Han Chinese to conceal their acts against Uighur Muslims hide what happens in Xinjiang. After initially issuing several denials of their actions, Han Chinese officials have said they are not enforcing arbitrary detention and political re-education through a network of secret camps. Instead, they contend that some citizens guilty of “minor offenses” were sent to vocational centers to provide employment opportunities. If this were the case, why would citizens guilty of “minor offenses” emerge from these “vocational centers” pleading for their own life to be taken because they cannot bear the pain they’ve experienced in these camps?
A dangerous increase in security within Xinjiang continues to abuse personal privacy. According to The Economist, there are 500 officers for every 100,000 Xinjiang inhabitants, and police stations located at every 300 feet. Every Uighur is carefully watched through cell phone tracking, abrupt-home searches, and security checkpoints. These frequent events violate personal privacy and abuse the Han Chinese police’s power. In a report from 2018 by The Jamestown Foundation, China is reported to have increased security-related spending by 213%, thus proving the measures they’re willing to go to harness the Uighur. Since the 1990s, there have been several attacks from the Uighur towards the Han Chinese, however, when you compare the turmoil caused by Chinese mistreating the Uighur to the harsh protests by the Uighur, you’ll find that there is no significant difference in human loss and traumatic aftermath. China is using this excuse that they only publicized after they started forcing Uighur into “re-education camps”, also known as concentration camps. Another monstrosity by the Han Chinese is their incarceration of over one million Uighur into concentration camps. These camps use methods such as forcing prisoners to sing political songs, holding lessons to convert Uighur beliefs to Han Chinese ones, and learning their language. Uighur are often denied food and water and are physically tortured. Xinjiang, with just 1.5 percent of China’s population, accounted for one-fifth of all criminal arrests last year, claims Fortune Magazine. It is through the continued use of shameless propaganda, suffocating security increases, and genocidal concentration camps that the Han Chinese are slowly murdering the culture and lives of Uighur Muslims.
Finally, the Uighur have been accused of trying to overthrow China’s government and convert Han Chinese to practice Uighur culture, however it has been clearly shown that in reality the other way around. They have been forced into concentration camps by the Han Chinese, where they have no choice but to partake in Chinese culture and leave their own behind. The Uighur have been the traditional dominant ethnic group in Xinjiang and have since expressed no efforts to harm or change the Han Chinese culture in any way, even when the Han Chinese expressed their initiatives of gaining their jobs and land. “In 1933, amid the turbulence of China's civil wars, Uighur leaders in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar declared a short-lived independent Republic of East Turkestan,” says Time Magazine. This proves they still possess no intentions of overthrowing the Chinese government, but instead are trying to move in the opposite direction by avoiding possible conflict.
China has oppressed the Uighur in ways that no other country would be able to get away with. They cannot accept the fact that all of the people living in China don’t follow the same religion and share the same ethnic culture and beliefs as them. The Han Chinese believe that they’re more powerful than the Uighur and want to take over their religion and identity to convert the Uighur to be more like them. The Uighur would not have caused any harm had the Chinese not started harassing them and taking away their rights.The question still remains: What hostility do the Chinese hold against the Uighur that made them go to these extreme measures of potentially ruining their lives?
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Written By: Katrina Gillen
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