On The Uighur Genocide
By Zoe Hatsios
As global citizens, what can we do with the knowledge that the Uighur Muslims in China are undergoing an attack which now formally meets the UN definition of genocide? Some take to Instagram, and others condemn the Chinese with a higher intensity, but it is necessary that we both learn more about the facts of the situation and spread awareness far and wide.
At least 1 million (and up to 1.5) Uighurs have been sent to internment camps, or “re-education centers” as the government calls them, since 2017. Given that they don’t make up a significant part of the Chinese population to begin with, this says a lot. In these camps, women particularly are forced into mass sterilization and abortions to prevent population growth, and there are many accounts of abuse. People in the camps have told stories of being beaten and interrogated because of their religion. All of this to say, it is minimally celebratory that 22 countries reported this activity to the UN Human Rights Council in July 2020, and terribly inhumane that just four days later, 37 countries claimed to defend China’s “achievements in the field of human rights.” TLDR: We are getting nowhere as a global community, and millions of lives are being sacrificed because of it.
More notably, how can the Holocaust be marked down in history as unacceptable, while the Chinese government has been ethnically targeting this specific group for years, going unnoticed? First - major companies, like Adidas, Amazon, and Nike, have all been linked to Uighur labor. Second - the United States, a world leader, has taken an anti-Islamic stance, especially during the Trump Administration, signaling that types of policies which exclude Muslims are acceptable. For these reasons, the most powerful global actors are encouraging this type of exclusionary behavior which has perpetuated the actions that led and continue to allow this genocide to occur.
If this small dose of information leaves you with anything, let it be that silence is a killer, and the cost of misinformation from the Chinese government will be minority lives. The Uighur genocide is just one of the many reasons that the United States has adopted a heavier containment strategy against China, and blatant human rights abuses going unnoticed and unpunished are a simple display of the economic power it holds in the global sphere.