Why are Muslim countries silent about the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims in China? Saudi Arabia’s King Salman opened the G20 summit Saturday in a first for an Arab country with the virtual forum dominated by the questions of how to tackle the distribution of the coronavirus vaccines and the worst global recession. Some of the countries wanted to boycott the G20 summit under Saudi Arabia’s presidency, because they questioned Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. But none even bothered to question China’s genocide against millions of Uyghur Muslims. It is all too easy to blame Donald Trump for the crisis in global affairs, but for decades China has taken advantage of America and the western countries by refusing to contribute its share. The President of the United States revealed that China is a highly visible threat to international order. The ultimate goal of China is not to become part of the free and fair society, but it is to destroy that democratic society. China has already wrecked America’s prized intellectual property and trade secrets, causing the loss of millions of jobs all across America. It sucked supply chains away from around the globe and then made slave labor to produce the products. The world biggest supply chains are located in China; that is why during the pandemic countries like Japan paid a huge price when China locked down.
But, let us see how the next President of the United States will deal with this threat. Will he ignore the millions of Muslims who continue to be oppressed? Or will he align the US with the international community to hold China accountable? I know China is too powerful to be ignored, but this is a significant test for the international community and for the next US President. Will free nations set the standard tones to make China perform on the same principles? There is no doubt that China’s status in global affairs now makes it too important to be dismissed, but the world cannot allow China not to play by international democratic rules and principles. The world cannot be safe until China changes its modus operandi.
The international communities wrongly assumed that engagement with China would produce a future with the bright promise of cooperation and rule of law. The West and America have engaged with China for almost fifty years, but that relationship has not produced any improvement in human rights, freedom of expression or religion, or other values that democratic societies hold; instead, the interaction has made the Chinese government economically more powerful to abuse the weak. It is time for the international community to pressure China to accept international norms and rules. The free world must triumph over the oppressive regime in Beijing.
Uyghur lives matter . Why did the Muslims countries not protest against China’s human rights conditions concerning Uyghur Muslims at the G20 Summit in Saudi Arabia? China is one of the worst perpetrators of crimes against religious devotees and continues its decades-long war on religious faith, including Uyghur Muslims, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, and other practitioners. Communist China wants to force all religions to embrace the same doctrine and practice in line with the Communist party doctrine. One of the great crimes of the twenty-first century is being committed in front of our eyes. More than one million Uyghur Muslims have been sent to concentration camps in Xinjiang for the alleged crime of being Muslims, identified by such signs as having a beard, wearing a veil, attending services, observing Ramadan, or praying. In spite of Communist China’s war against the Uyghurs and with millions of Muslims witnessing it, the world‘s fifty Muslim countries have said and done nothing. Since April 2017, China has had an ongoing campaign to suppress the ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic identities of its Muslim minorities. They have targeted and forcibly relocated Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim minority groups to internment camps that they claim are re-education programs to teach career skills. Beyond the camps they disappear or are beaten, tortured, raped, drugged, or forced to renounce Islam. They have required many to renounce their ethnic identities, removed numerous children from their families, and forced them into state-run indoctrination facilities. Women and girls are routinely subject to coerced marriages and other abuses, including forced abortion, compulsory sterilization, and involuntary birth control implantations, sure indicators of ethnic cleansing. The Chinese Communist government has implemented a systematic campaign against Muslims—men, women, and children.
But Muslim countries’ response to the Uyghurs’ plight, their outrage, shows a deep hypocrisy. Most hypocritical was that the Muslim countries have usually been so forthright in their claim to stand for global Muslims’ rights. Recently, a case in point is the beheading of a French teacher who had shown a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, previously published by a satirical magazine, in a class on freedom of expression. Muslims believe that any depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous. Since then, Muslim countries from the West to the East have criticized President Macron; those countries include Turkey, Qatar, Iran, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslims nations. The majority of Muslim countries have organized street protests against France. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioned his counterpart’s mental health, provoking France to recall its ambassador to Ankara. Erdogan demanded a boycott of French goods, and several other countries insisted on a boycott of France. But Erdogan is not likely to condemn the abuse of his Muslim brothers in China. Yet, mass protests against Macron are emerging in a broad swath of Muslim countries from Libya to Pakistan and from Lebanon to Iran, turning a local argument into a global campaign against France and its leader Macron. Where is the outcry against China?
What if a western country or America were discriminating against or persecuting Muslims to the degree that China is against Uyghurs or other Muslims? The global left and hypocrite Muslim leaders and countries would be loudly raging, but instead they are silent on China. Today, Muslim countries and its leaders bend their knees and bite their tongues as China engages in genocide against its Muslim population. They use the idea of Muslim solidarity only when it fits them.
So far, Muslim countries and their leaders have not taken any stand against Uyghur genocide and did not denounce its perpetrator at the G20 summit. The irony is that many Muslim countries consider America as enemy of Islam. While the US and EU countries such as France are trying to put pressure on China because of the persecution of Muslims, China has not been subject to any criticism by Muslim countries. Because China is too important an ally for the Muslim countries to lose and because the Uyghur Muslims are not important enough to stop China from killing their fellow Muslims, no country with a majority Muslim population advocates for them. Many of the leaders have been bought off because, first, many Muslim countries in the Middle East, Central Asia, or Africa have interests and business ties with China and do not want to destroy their relations, and, second, they themselves violate human rights so that could never have been their first priority.
China is now a more active and influential voice at the United Nations because so many countries are benefiting from billions of dollars in Chinese investments through its Belt and Road Infrastructure Initiative. When the Australia government asked for an international investigation into the origins of COVID, it faced sanctions, and now Australia is saying it has been misunderstood by China. Muslim countries have been hypocritical because China has given many loans and grants to the Arab countries, to Pakistan, and to Central Asian countries, which need the money to be sure, so they refuse to denounce China as does their corrupt media. Saudi Arabia’s Prince Salman even endorsed China‘s right to take anti-terrorism and extremism measures in Xinjiang where the Muslims live.
There is no doubt about the Chinese Communist Party’s designs for hegemony. China sends propagandists into other countries for research purposes and sets up high-schools and colleges. The international community has given the Chinese Communist Party and the regime itself special economic treatment; for example, the Confucius Institute clearly demonstrates the Communist Chinese government’s sponsored overseas propaganda established to silence its human rights abuses. The Chinese government is at war with people of faith, but it is a war that they will never win. The global community should not let them win. The only way to truly change Communist China is to act not on the basis of what Chinese leaders say, but on what they will do. And we can no longer ignore the evidence. We should not let Communist China destroy our freedoms or deconstruct the basic democratic principles and rule-based order that our societies have worked so hard to establish and maintain.
Dr. Aland Mizell is with the MCI, SETBI and a regular Mindanao Times.You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
