ARGUMENT

China Must Answer for Cultural

Genocide in Court
International law is a vital part of fighting for the Uighur people.
BY AZEEM IBRAHIM | DECEMBER 3, 2019, 12:59 PM

T
he substantial leaks to the New York Times and the International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists of internal policy documents of the Chinese
Communist Party regarding the crackdown on the Uighurs and other Muslim
minorities in China’s western region of Xinjiang dramatically shift the conversation on
this issue.

They lay bare what is unambiguously a deliberate and calculated campaign of cultural
genocide—initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping and driven to its current extreme
implementation by Xinjiang’s local party boss, Chen Quanguo, a Han Chinese
nationalist hard-liner who led successful efforts at so-called pacification in Tibet before
being transferred over to the western region.

The only question that remains is what the international community is prepared to do
about it.

Various sources place the number of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities held in
detention camps in Xinjiang this year between 1 million and 1.5 million, with some
estimates going as high as 3 million. This is out of a total Uighur population of 10
million in Xinjiang, which increases to 12 million if non-Uighur Turkic Muslim groups
that have also been targeted are included—such as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and others.

Officially, the individuals detained are there for retraining: According even to the
official narrative, they are there to be inoculated against the virus of religious
extremism and are given lessons in Mandarin, Communist Party ideology, and job
skills training.

That already sounds very much like the language used under Stalinism to justify the
gulag. But details of the kinds of things that actually go on underneath the polished
narrative of the Chinese government have emerged. Sources citing former detainees
allege torture, sexual abuse, forced abortions, and, perhaps most common and
shocking, the forced sterilization of detained Uighur women.

At this point, thanks in part to international attention, the camps themselves may be
being wound down—but not to good ends. Instead, around half a million people are
being transferred to the prison system directly, with the authorities sometimes making
use of the same detention centers but simply changing the names. Hundreds of
thousands more are being sent into forced labor facilities. Outside of the detention
camps themselves, the society in Xinjiang has begun to increasingly resemble an
apartheid regime, where Han settlers from eastern China assumed to be loyal to Beijing
are given plum jobs and mostly Muslim locals are surveilled 24/7 by the most pervasive
technological police state in the world.

The Chinese authorities are vigorously pursuing a policy of implanting Han party
loyalists, whom they call “relatives,” into every household that has had a member
detained in the camps. There are reports that they routinely sleep in the same beds as
the Muslim women in the household—even when the monitors are men.

It was beyond doubt that these attacks against family life and the ability of Uighurs to
have children are a systematic policy with genocidal intent even before the emergence
of the leaked documents last month.

But the leaked documents reveal the worldview of those who have driven these
policies, the gory internal details, and even the systematic purge of Han party officials
in Xinjiang who resisted these policies as extreme, likely to inflame local conflicts and
undermine security in the region, and morally abhorrent.

They reveal that the current policies have their roots in speeches and initiatives by Xi
going back as early as 2014, not long after he started his tenure as president. In contrast
to Communist Party ideology and policy before, Xi appears to believe that social
harmony requires a monolithic cultural and national identity, as opposed to the
acceptance of a benign, cooperative pluralism envisioned—in somewhat utopian but
nevertheless influential fashion—in the original approach of the People’s Republic to
ethnic issues. In due time, this worldview from the very top came to also inform party
hierarchy appointments in Xinjiang, and the hard-liners who now rule the region are
driving that worldview to its logical conclusion.

The logical conclusion of the Xi shift in the ideological understanding of social

harmony is an exclusionary Han nationalism, underpinned by a fusion of orthodox
Confucianism and communism, according to which so-called foreign influences,
especially Islam, are taken to be radically incompatible with the norm.

A chain that started with Xi’s conjecture in 2014 that separatist terrorism would be less
of an issue in Xinjiang if the culture there was brought near to the Han than to
Xinjiang’s Turkic neighbors culminated under Chen into an unabashed, explicit policy
of cultural eradication of Islam and Islam-associated ethnic identities—complete with
torture, murder, the destruction of family life, and the potential extinction of these
groups over the coming generations.

These security-minded policies end up having genocidal consequences accidentally.

The leaked documents attest to the fact that the worldview and the intent of the top
officials who are driving these policies in Xinjiang are genocidal, as defined by the
United Nations as an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group” through acts including “causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group.”

At the very least, officials are explicitly ideologically committed to cultural genocide as
a goal on the path to so-called social harmony. And the possibility of mass killing—or
of other attempts to forcibly shatter Uighur identity, whether by sterilization or
deportation—remains very real.

This leaves the international community with an unambiguous moral duty to

intervene. If the promise of “never again” means anything, it means that the
international community is now bound to do whatever it can to prevent what is
happening in Xinjiang.

Unfortunately, the normal avenues for recourse under international law are mostly
blocked. The United Nations will be unable to pass any motion on this issue because
China will simply use its veto to block it. A liberal interventionist war of the kind we
saw in the Balkans in the late 1990s is out of the question. Not even the United States
and its allies have the military might to exert meaningful pressure in that way.

Unfortunately, the normal avenues for recourse under

international law are mostly blocked.

But it can start with an investigation led by the International Criminal Court. Once
these legal proceedings are underway, the political consensus of the international
community can be built and crystalized around it. With enough players coming on
board, from the West, the Middle East, India, and Africa, China will begin to feel the
pressure to its geopolitical and trade interests.
Some countries such as Russia and Myanmar will likely never join the rest of the
international community against their patrons in Beijing, sure. But China cannot
continue to develop and assert itself as a global leader if it restricts itself to only those
willing to follow the party line. Thus, sufficiently united, the international community
does have real leverage. If it chooses to unite on this issue, it may yet be able to remain
true to its promise of “never again.”

Muslim nations may be more of a roadblock than allies. They have succumbed to
Chinese debt-book diplomacy and have bent themselves to Beijing’s will. They are
impotent as long as Chinese investment is freely flowing to build vital infrastructure,
and they remain indebted to Beijing.

If China then acquiesces and joins that promise to humanity, it will continue to rise.
But even as it continues to grow in power and influence, it would now do so as a
responsible member of the international community—one that recognizes that nobody
has and nobody should have impunity before the humanitarian promise of
international law.

China has benefited immensely from the rules-based international order in commerce
—once it understood the value of that order. So much so that it is now one of its
greatest defenders, even in the face of a wanton U.S. administration. China can
similarly benefit from the humanitarian order promoted by international law. The
sooner it realizes the value of these rules and this order, the better for China, for its
citizens, and for the entire world.

Azeem Ibrahim is a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College and a director at the
Center for Global Policy in Washington. He is the author of Radical Origins: Why We Are Losing the Battle Against Islamic
Extremism and a former expert advisor to the U.K. government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Twitter: @azeemibrahim

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TAGS: ARGUMENT, CHINA, INTERNATIONAL LAW COMMENTS