Why should the West condemn China’s harsh treatment of its Uighur Muslims when the Islamic world is actively collaborating with China’s global campaign against the Uighurs?

In fact, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — a 57-Muslim country consortium that calls itself “the collective voice of the Muslim world” issued a report saying that it “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.”

RFERL According to the China’s Transnational Repression of Uighurs Dataset, a new database and report that was launched on June 24th shows how China’s campaign against the Uyghurs has gone global, rapidly expanding from Central and South Asia to include Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

The report, which claims to be the most complete account of China’s international campaign, documents how governments — predominantly from Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East and Asia — have cooperated with Beijing to surveil, detain, and repatriate Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities from China who have fled Xinjiang.

SupChina Who are the Uyghur Muslims and what is happening in Xinjiang?

• Uyghurs are a Muslim Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China. Uyghurs (also spelled Uighur — either way, pronounced WEE-gur) — about 10 million people — live mostly in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the farthest west and most heavily Muslim jurisdiction under Beijing’s control. The total population of Xinjiang is around 22 million.

• After ethnic riots by Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in 2009 that left nearly 200 people dead — and following Uyghur-connected terrorist attacks in Beijing in 2013 and Kunming and Urumqi in 2014 — extreme measures have been taken to lock down Xinjiang and restrict the mobility and speech of the Uyghur population.

• Xinjiang is now a totalitarian police state of historic proportions — it is widely cited as one of the most heavily policed places in the world today. Public security budgets have skyrocketed and futuristic surveillance systems have been pioneered in the region. As a result, over 20 percent of all criminal arrests in China happens in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region contains only 1.5 percent of the country’s population.

• The official justification for such extreme measures is “counterterrorism” and “social stability.” But human rights groups have long argued that the level of repression is excessive, counterproductive, and a human rights violation, as it effectively censures all expressions of Uyghur culture, even normal religious and linguistic traditions.

• Alarming reports of a mass internment system have come out in the past year. Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, revealed the scope of the internment campaign and documented that construction of the camps began in earnest in March 2017.

• In the camps, officials seek to brainwash prisoners to disavow Islam and pledge loyalty to the Communist Party, and torture those who refuse, eyewitnesses have said.

• Arbitrary detentions without charge or trial are the norm for prisoners in these camps, and ethnically Kazakh Muslims have been “disappeared” in large numbers along with Uyghurs. Common “crimes” are “viewing foreign websites, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or growing a beard.” The widespread use of arbitrary detention is also being used as a tool to force Uyghurs abroad into silence.

• Up to a million Muslims have been put in the camps in Xinjiang, according to “many numerous and credible reports,” a United Nations panel said in early August 2018.

• China has specifically denied that “re-education” camps exist, but this is semantics: Evidence continues to build of a network of centers for “transformation through education” (教育转化 jiàoyù zhuǎnhuà) or “counter-extremism education” (去极端化教育 qù jíduān huà jiàoyù) holding many hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang.

• “An entire culture is being criminalized,” scholars like Rian Thum are saying. Another scholar, James Millward, comments: “In Xinjiang, the definition of extremism has expanded so far as to incorporate virtually anything you do as a Muslim.”

Daniel Greenfield The war of letters began when 22 countries penned a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minority communities.

The letter in defense of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang was signed by France, Germany, Canada, Sweden and 18 other, mostly Western and European, countries. The case of the missing Muslim signatories was solved when the People’s Republic of China fired back with its own letter signed by 37 countries.

This letter in defense of China’s crackdown on Islam was signed by 16 Muslim countries.  While some of the Muslim signatories were drawn from African countries, the letter was also signed by ambassadors for the leading Arab governments including Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Kuwait. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, also signed on.

“There has been a lot of criticism against Muslim majority countries for their silence on Xinjiang and the repression of the Uighurs,” Bradley Jardine, the director of research at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and the report’s lead author, told RFE/RL. “But this database shows that it isn’t just hypocrisy from the Islamic world, it’s active collaboration with China.”

United Nations human rights officials estimate that 1 million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities are detained at camps in a vast Chinese internment system. Many former detainees allege they were subjected to attempted indoctrination, physical abuse, and even sterilization.

The United States government and several Western parliaments have labeled China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide, but most governments of majority Muslim states — who increasingly have close financial and political ties to Beijing through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — have remained silent on the issue.

According to the report, efforts to target Uighurs and force them back to China have intensified since 2017, when Beijing is believed to have begun its mass internment program in Xinjiang. “Through these practices, the government of China is able to extend its repression and control over the Uighur people across sovereign boundaries,” the report says.

China’s government initially denied the Xinjiang camps’ existence, but has since been on a diplomatic and public-relations campaign to counter the growing outcry against what Beijing has termed “vocational-education centers” by defending them as necessary to combat Islamic extremism.

Concerns over terrorism have been at the heart of official Chinese reasoning for targeting Uyghurs abroad that employs an evolving array of tactics, the report notes, from espionage and cyberattacks to issuing Red Notices via Interpol, an organization designed to coordinate global policing activities.

While Chinese authorities have long viewed the Uighur community with suspicion, and radical Uighur separatist groups have carried out attacks, the report argues that the 2009 ethnic riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, were a turning point for Beijing.

The riots claimed 200 lives, most of them ethnic Hans, and attacks by extremist Uighur groups escalated the security situation in Xinjiang in the following years. The unrest led to swift retaliation by Beijing in the name of fighting extremism.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan recently made headlines when he declined to acknowledge or condemn the Chinese government’s alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang during a June 20 interview with the U.S. news outlet Axios.

In December 2020, Beijing ratified a 2017 extradition treaty between the two countries. But the Turkish parliament has yet to follow suit, leaving Uyghurs fearful that the looming decision could see many of them sent back to China at Beijing’s request.

“Turkey was once seen as a safe haven, but no more,” Jardine said. “The West now needs to start looking at expanding its refugee quotas and facilitating Uyghur claims from Turkey and other countries that are complicit in China’s transnational repression.”

Islamabad and Beijing maintain strong ties, and the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) remains a flagship project within China’s BRI.

Lawyers for Uighur groups have submitted new evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s Office of the Prosecutor showing the government in Tajikistan has been cooperating with Beijing to send Uighurs back to China.