The war on terror was a blunt instrument that impacted large swathes of Muslim populations, including China’s Uighur population. Like other similarly coined terms including the war on drugs, the war on terror didn’t allow for surgical precision in its implementation.
In his new book, The War on the Uyghurs, author Sean R. Roberts traces the early days of the war on terror to spotlight how China exploited a small pocket of U.S. counterterrorism initiatives to cover their own agenda of criminalizing the entire Uighur population.
China had previously viewed their conflict with the Uighurs as a local problem. Those problems surfaced over mass migration of the Han Chinese into Xinjiang, the ancestral Uighur home in northwest China. The Uighurs viewed the migration as China’s attempt to take over the region’s many natural resources. China subsequently refused to honor peaceful Uighur protest over these and other grievances.
After 9/11, China successfully lobbied the UN for a small group of Uighur militants in Afghanistan, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic movement (ETIM), to be labeled a terrorist organization, using the opportunity to present Uighur violence through the same lens as al-Qaeda terrorism.
By moving ETIM onto a terror designation list, China lay the groundwork to later link the entire Chinese Uighur population as possible enemy combatants. China also moved from identifying this as a separatist movement to Islamist terror. Within that context came China’s recent pattern of justifying a series of increasingly draconian “preventative” measures to counter extremism.
In reality, Foreign Policy explains, Uighurs as a whole have more in common with Rumi — the 13th century Sufi mystic, scholar and poet — than Al-Qaeda:
“The region’s Uighurs, most of whom practice Sufi Islam and speak a Turkic language, have long had their national ambitions frustrated by Beijing. The latest wave of Uighur separatism has been inspired not by Osama bin Laden but by the unraveling of the Soviet Union, as militants seek to emulate the independence gained by some Muslim communities in Central Asia.”
Roberts argues that China, with its status as as a “responsible stakeholder,” was granted an international nod to pin the terrorism label on its entire Uighur population, ultimately giving rise to mass incarceration, physical and cultural genocide.
A cultural anthropologist at George Washington University, Roberts recently spoke with Axios explaining how ETIM “did not have the resources or the capacity to do anything inside China … Though Uighur militant groups would later arise that did carry out a limited number of violent attacks in China, it was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy … in part the result of years of government repression after ETIM’s designation.”
Some of those attacks targeted the Han Chinese, including 2009 riot where hundreds died and a 2014 stabbing that killed 31 passengers at a railway station. China blamed the series of attacks on Uighur separatists under ETIM.
As a response, China began insisting that the Uighurs integrate into China by forcing them to renounce Islam and embrace communist ideology. China opened up camps they referred to as “vocational centers” aimed at countering radicalization while treating Islam like a mental illness.
As Roberts argues in an article published in the Journal of Critical Asian Studies, the threat to China wasn’t the perceived “Islamic” radicalization; rather, it was biological. Leaning on the work of Michael Foucault, Roberts states that the gradual exclusion of the Uighurs was “an expression of biopolitics where the Uyghur people as a whole have come to symbolize an almost biological threat to society that must be quarantined through surveillance, punishment, and detention.”
Roberts also delineates between state policy in China’s “war on terror” and what he says is the inevitable outcome of the demonization an entire ethnic population being labeled as a threat under the banner of a global war.
Over the years, the Chinese government placed a tight lid on the escalating situation in Xinjiang. Nonetheless, stories escaping the region have painted a portrait of unmatched brutality and oppression including “reeducation camps,” forced sterilization, forced labor, forced cohabitation and forced family separation.
On November 5, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally revoked the designation of ETIM as a “terrorist organization” due to a lack of credible evidence over the last decade that the ETIM still exists. Pompeo has also referred to China’s mass incarceration as “the stain of the century.”
While Beijing rejects this description, the Uighur community has welcomed the decision, calling it “long overdue” and a “definitive rejection of China’s claims.”
“The harmful effects of China’s exploitations of the imagined ETIM threat are real — 20 years of state terror directed at Uighurs.” — Omar Kanat, Executive Director, Uighur Human Rights Project.
Rory MacLeod, a monitoring, evaluation and learning analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, summed up the issue concisely in a Twitter thread, concluding that
“Supporters of the move to delist [the ETIM] meanwhile claim that it sends a clear message to China and the world that the US sees through its thinly veiled rationale for human rights abuses in the name of an ulterior agenda. Ultimately however, the decision cannot be put down to technical and moral factors alone (Trump admins approach to FP has hardly been values based)– primarily, it is {also} a political move … “
Roberts contends that the international community, the United States included, is at least in part to blame for the ongoing horrors against the Uighur population in China. In short, he says, the rhetoric of war matters.
“It has been the international obsession with combating a vaguely defined ‘terrorist’ enemy that has allowed the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to implement these measures with impunity and that, at least in part, has inspired their excessively brutal and genocidal nature.” — Sean Roberts
While it is true that in the rush to fight terror and extremism, labels were applied to individuals, organizations and movements which didn’t always warrant their designation, it is important to state clearly that the moral responsibility for the mistreatment of the Chinese Uighur population falls on China, and not the United States or the international community.
Moreover, the genocidal nature of China’s authoritarian regime is important to remember as America moves forward with potentially new leadership that will have to decide how it will engage with this regime.
