The world's next major human disaster is in the making in China. This time, we should act before it's too late.
Rwanda. East Timor. Myanmar. The world has a cruel habit of ignoring humanitarian disasters until it's too late. Old habits die hard, and the people targeted by state-led ethnic cleansing programs even harder. But the reports of mass concentration camps and the criminalisation of Islam inflicted upon China's Uighur Muslims should alarm anyone and everyone. Right now.
In August, a United Nations human rights panel reported that up to one million Uighur Muslims were forced into grounds that resemble massive internment camps in Xinjiang - the autonomous region in western China home to approximately 10 million Uighur Muslims. Gay McDougall, who sits on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, claimed that up to two million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were forced into "political camps for indoctrination".
The scale of China's internment is staggering, with at least one in every 10 Uighur Muslim living in Xinjiang "disappearing into internment camps". The figure is even more staggering for those that have family or friends locked away for no other crime but practising a faith - Islam - in a region where this religion is categorically associated with subversion, separatism and terrorism.
But the internment of one million people in Xinjiang is only the tip of the ominous state architecture of ethnic cleansing against Uighur Muslims. The very phrases "internment" and "concentration camps" instantly conjure up images of the Holocaust or the rounding up of Japanese Americans during World War II. Potent analogies that spurred the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Intercept to publish recent pieces documenting China's designation of Islam as a "mental illness," and its merciless objective to annihilate it by way of a sweeping system of ethnic cleansing, of which mass internment is only one part.
Yet, much of the world remains unaware of the horrors unfolding in Xinjiang. And even more, entirely unacquainted with a people trapped within the belly of a superpower bent on destroying them.