A newly renovated hall in the largest museum in Urumqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang region in China, hosts an installation that makes little sense for a family outing: “The exhibition on major violent terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.” Opened in February, the well-lit room is filled with grisly details blamed on murky “terrorist” organisations. Ancient firearms, rusting gas canisters and “home-made grenades” fill glass display cases.
The exhibit is part of the ruling Chinese Communist party’s propaganda campaign to justify a mass internment programme of more than 1m Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim-majority peoples in the region. Diplomats and journalists on closely managed government tours to Xinjiang inevitably visit.
For nearly two decades, China has sought to cast harsh security measures in the region as part of a battle against “terrorist” aggressors driven by extremist ideology. In the face of growing western condemnation of its “re-education” camps, Beijing has doubled down on this narrative. But the assertion that violence in Xinjiang is the work of international terror groups has little factual basis, according to the careful tracing of China’s claims by Sean Roberts, an anthropologist at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
One of the first books to concisely explain how and why the Communist party under President Xi Jinping has embarked on an all-out war on Uighur culture, its publication comes as many western nations are waking up to the abuses. Hopes of a global response, let alone a change of course, must contend with China’s assertions that the campaign is a necessary response to an imminent threat, a claim that diplomatic partners of Beijing have so far been willing to support at the UN.
Roberts, who has carried out 25 years of field research in Uighur communities in Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Turkey, deconstructs how the “terrorism” label was appropriated after 9/11 to explain violent acts of resistance in Xinjiang. The claims had little evidence to support them but, in 2002, as part of diplomatic horse-trading to secure China’s acceptance of the “global war on terror”, the US publicly endorsed Beijing’s claims that an essentially unheard-of militant group known as the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement had a role in violence in Xinjiang.
Although the primary driver for the campaign is Beijing’s longstanding desire to assimilate the Uighurs, the justification and inspiration for its most recent drastic escalation can be found in the US-led war on terror, Roberts writes.
In 2014, Xinjiang’s Communist party boss Zhang Chunxian launched a “people’s war on terror” that was escalated in 2016 by the arrival of Chen Quanguo, a hardliner. The use of the terrorist label in Xinjiang is especially fraught. While a handful of apparently premeditated attacks have been documented, the vast majority of incidents fit more easily as spontaneous violence sparked by locally motivated grievances.
Roberts describes “self-perpetuating” cycles of repression and violence between disenfranchised Uighurs and security forces that spiralled into the events that spurred Mr Xi to launch the most recent crackdown: an attack in central Beijing in 2013, and another shortly afterwards at Kunming railway station in south-west China.
Perhaps Roberts’s greatest contribution to the debate over Xinjiang is his attempt to dismantle China’s assertions about a “terrorist threat” by sketching a picture of the isolated groups it deems international terrorist organisations. Through interviews in Uighur communities, he concludes that the groups have for the past two decades mostly hovered on the edge of extinction as a poorly resourced, loosely organised bunch with aspirations, but no capacity, to launch militant operations.
Ironically, the “people’s war on terror” may be planting the seeds of a real militant threat among Uighur exiles. When Roberts, in a recent interview, asked one former Uighur fighter whether he was afraid of dying in a fight against China, he replied that his entire family had already disappeared into camps or prisons, and “he had nothing left to live for anyway”.
Dus eigenlijk zeg je dat ik de islam niet beledig maar ik toch een vrijbrief zou hebben dat te doen en ik matties ben met de andere door jou genoemde leden en wij hier een bepaald spelletje spelen, waar ik de zogenaamd de meer prettige persoon speel?
Hahahaha,poeh zeg.
Ik vraag me wel af hoe je daar allemaal bij komt.
Onzin wat je hier zegt jij en de tokiebrigade doen niet anders dan jullie westerse waarden op ons op te dringen . Dat kunnen jullie westerlingen niks aan doen dat zit nou eenmaal in die veroveringsmentaliteit waar iedereen aan moet schikken .En dat zie je duidelijk terug op de forum.
Absoluut, de Moslims in China gaan momenteel door een hel dat me doet denken aan de slavernij en de holocaust. Mensen worden in concentratie kampen geplaatst waar ze worden gemarteld, gehersensspoeld en compleet van hun identiteit worden ontnomen. Islamitische vrouwen worden verkracht en gedwongen om met niet Moslim mannen kinderen te krijgen. Moslims worden ter plekke vermoord als ze niet meewerken aan deze gedwongen indoctrinatie. Kinderen worden ontvoerd uit hun huizen en gezinnen worden compleet gebroken. Wollah me hard breekt als ik er alleen over denk laat staan als ik erover spreek. Wat doen deze leiders hieraan met hun macht verkregen door Allah? Helemaal niets behalve glimlachen en handen schudden. Moge Allah hun van binnenuit vernietigen en vernederen voor deze hele dunya.
Heavy
Whaha tdm dat is achmed die turk die marokkaanse nicknames maakt hier .