A UN human rights panel reported on 10 August that more than one million Uyghur people are being held in mass detention centres in China. The detentions are being described as a method to combat religious extremism but seem to actually be a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”
Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination estimates that Uyghurs, and other Turkic Muslim minorities, have been forced into re-education camps or “political camps for indoctrination”. More than a million people are also being held in so-called counter-extremism centres in the Xinjiang region in westernmost China. Xinjiang is the home region of more than 10 million ethnic Uyghurs. The Chinese government so far denies the existence of the camps.
The Uyghur people
The Uyghurs are a Turkic, Muslim ethnic minority group who live in central and east Asia, mostly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey. The Uyghur community in China are a large percentage of the Xinjiang province, an officially autonomous region, where they make up 45% of the population.
China has recently been engaged in a form of forced assimilation policy, however tensions between Uyghurs and the Chinese have been ongoing for decades. Human rights organisations have previously expressed concerns about the treatment of the Uyghurs in China and most notably the lack of freedom of religious expression or belief that they experience at the hands of the Chinese government.
Indoctrination and forced assimilation
Changes in regional policy became stronger after Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party Secretary for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region came to power in 2016. An Amnesty International report said that his rise to power emphasised “social stability” and increased security, which was swiftly followed by the installation of detention centres. The centres were known as “counter-extremism centres”, “political study centres”, or “education and transformation centres”. People were subjected to arbitrary detention and forced to study China’s policies and laws.
In the year after Quanguo came to power, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) authorities implemented a number of rulings under the “De-extremification Regulation”. They set out to prohibit behaviours that were classified as “extremist”, including, the prohibition of Islamic names requiring all children under 16 to change them, the forced return to China of Uyghurs studying abroad and banning the use of the Uyghur language in schools.
Amnesty and other human rights organisations have submitted reports to the UN committee documenting claims of imprisonment and indoctrination in camps, in which prisoners are made to swear allegiance to China’s President Xi Jinping. In addition to this, it is reported that detainees are held indefinitely without charge, do not receive legal representation and have also been subjected to poor conditions and torture.
China has imposed a number of policies restricting the religious and cultural practices of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Province. In Karamay, a city in Xinjiang, bearded men were banned from boarding buses, women have been restricted on the wearing of veils, women and those under 18 are banned from entering mosques, fasting is prohibited during Ramadan for government workers and students, and private study of the Quran is forbidden.
Religious tensions have also escalated in other parts of China including the Ningxia region where hundreds of Muslims protested to stop the demolition of their mosque. Amnesty have viewed the destruction of the mosque as,
‘an indication that the government is now looking to extend control over the Muslim ethnic minorities.’
Freedom of Religious belief
Chinese constitution proclaims that citizens “enjoy freedom of religious belief”. Article 36 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China states:
‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion.’
Despite the claims of the constitution, it is clear that China’s behaviour towards religious freedom, is, in clear contravention of its own constitution. A clause in the article states:
‘The state protects normal religious activities.’
Without defining what those ‘normal’ religious activities would be, the constitution allows for a huge gap in which violations can occur without repercussion.
Response
Chinese state media have defended the “intense controls” in Xinjiang, stating that they are a contributing factor to the ‘stability’ in the region. As this is the UN’s first statement on the subject of Uyghur internment camps, the international community must continue working to ensure that China better defines and maintains domestic and international conventions on religious freedoms. To ignore this further could signal a deepening crisis and the potential for regional instability.