Human Rights Groups all over the world commemorated International Human Rights Day on December 10, the same day that, 59 years ago, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In one small corner of the Hague, protest today was on behalf of 8 million Chinese Uyghurs. The Uyghurs, a Turkic speaking Muslim minority in China, have long struggled with the Chinese government for their autonomy.
China has systematically denied religious freedom, cultural identity and economic advancement to the Uyghurs in favor of the Han Chinese majority. Now the Chinese-Uyghur dispute, like others around the world, has become part of the fabric of the U.S. led Global War on Terror. China has demonstrated both its commitment to the war on terror and its intention to continue denying Uyghur rights, by cracking down on the entire population.
The Uyghur live in the oil and gas rich Xinjaing province, which takes up a sixth of Chinese territory. Despite Chinese claims to the territory bordering Kyrgistan, and Tajikistan, many Uyghurs believe that they have a distinct national identity from the Chinese. And they did have an independent kingdom there, briefly, in the 7th century. The province was formally annexed in 1955 following a couple of attempts at secession by the Uyghurs, who called the province East Turkestan.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Uyghur separatist militants staged a number of bombings at public places in China to register their protest. The attacks ultimately killed over 150 people, and injured many more. It has been argued that this rise in violence was inspired by the Afghan mujahideen, who managed to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989. It has been estimated that about 1,000 Uyghur separatists trained with Osama bin Laden in Aghanistan. Despite this, the Uyghur cause is not, at root, an Islamist cause. The U.S. war on terror offered the Chinese government a pretext for further crackdowns.
According to Human Rights Watch in 2005, religious control of the Uighur has become extreme:
Highly intrusive religious control extends to organized religious activities, religious practitioners, schools, cultural institutions, publishing houses, and even to the personal appearance and behavior of Uighur individuals. State authorities politically vet all imams on a regular basis and require “self-criticism” sessions; impose surveillance on mosques; purge schools of religious teachers and students; screen literature and poetry for political allusions; and equate any expression of dissatisfaction with Beijing’s policies with “separatism” – a state security crime under Chinese law that can draw the death penalty.
At its most extreme, peaceful activists practicing their religion in ways that the Party and government deem unacceptable are arrested, tortured, and at times executed. The harshest punishments are saved for those accused of involvement in so-called separatist activity, which officials increasingly term “terrorism” for domestic and external consumption.
There are currently 17 Uighur detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The United States has acknowledged that they are not terrorists. According to one detainee, Pakistani bounty hunters [a href=http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18511/26/] sold him to the Americans, [/link] along with 17 others, for $5,000 a man. According to another, Adel Abdu Al-Hakim, he was crossing Afghanistan en route to Turkey to escape persecution in China when the U.S. bombing campaign began, in 2001. He escaped to Pakistan where he was sold to the Americans who transferred him back to Afghanistan for interrogation. There, it became clear that Al Hakim was not a terrorist; nevertheless he, and his cohort, were transferred to Guantanamo Bay.
