Source: Foreign Affairs
Date: May 26, 2018
Foreign Affairs reports on changing patterns in the United States’ official attitude toward China’s Uyghur Muslim minority. In the years following 9/11, the US and China found a common enemy in the Uyghurs as the United States detained 22 of them without charges for years at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, while China keeps several hundred thousand Uyghurs in re-education camps.
This week, US diplomats championed the cause of the Uyghurs at the United Nations accusing Beijing of preventing the exiled Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa from entering UN headquarters in New York.
China accuses Isa of inciting and funding separatism and terrorism and claims that his Germany-based organization, the World Uyghur Congress, is a political wing of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which the UN Security Council designated a terrorist organization in September 2002. The US and Germany maintain that there is no evidence of links between the two groups.
The US defends Isa, saying China was seeking to retaliate against an advocate who has shed light on political repression against the Uyghurs. China’s representatives at the UN deny these allegations, saying it abolished its use of re-education labor camps long ago and that the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities enjoy “the best protection of their human rights in history.”
Bitter Winter has published several reports confirming that a large and growing number of Uyghurs is detained in re-education camps. These camps, far from having being abolished, also hosts thousands of members of The Church of Almighty God and other banned religious minorities.
