Magnus Fiskesjö: China's Thousandfold Guantánamos
With China's assault on scores of leading academics and intellectuals, business as usual is no longer possible. The recent mass arrests of scores of leading academics and intellectuals in
western China is one of many indications that the Chinese regime's current
campaign against the native Uighur, Kazakh and other peoples is already a
genocide. It is now clearly engaged in "acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,
as such," as defined in the 1948 international Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Uighur Human
Rights Project recently counted 386 targeted academics, artists and other prominent
intellectuals as having been arrested by the regime. They probably are
all, if still alive, in the concentration camps in the Xinjiang region, built
there since 2017. The Chinese regime is
clearly carrying out such mass arrests of famous figures, alongside hundreds of
thousands of "ordinary people," to destroy the dignity and very
identity of these indigenous peoples. To achieve this goal, the regime goes after
the most admired artists, writers, academics, poets, clerics, athletes and so
on.
These proud icons are all being sent to lawless brainwashing camps. There,
according to numerous eyewitness testimonies, they are forced to
denounce themselves, their very professional and personal dignity, and bow to
prefabricated verdicts of being "two-faced" secret radicals -- even
though they are long-established, decent, proud leaders of their people. The detainees
are all there on the say-so of the Communist bosses, who are in some cases even
filling the camps by quotas.
Perhaps the most
famous Uighur singer and troubadour of all, Sanubar Tursun, was to have
performed at an international music festival in France in February. Her
cancellation was announced from the stage -- she "disappeared" last
December. The reason can be
nothing other than the great respect for her among her own people. She's also
internationally famous and has performed alongside her Chinese colleague
the pipa artist Wu Man.
But as with the others dragged off, most likely to the camps, we do not know
where she is or what she would be accused of.
The many famous
intellectuals are clearly targeted personally. They include the beloved native
anthropologist and folklorist Rahile Dawut, picked up as she was leaving for a conference
in Beijing; Qurban Mamut, a leading journalist and editor of one of the
region's foremost state-approved magazines; and Tashpolat Tiyip, an internationally noted expert on desert
climate and, until his arrest, president of Xinjiang University -- said to have
been sentenced to death.A dozen other scholars
from that same leading university and many others have vanished, too. And
reports of similar disappearances keep pouring in from agonized exiles and
members of the diasporas who can no longer reach any of their loved ones, such
as the famous comedian Adil Mijit and hundreds more.
Why? Please watch the
music video "Dear Teacher," from 2016, by ultrafamous Uighur pop
singer Ablajan -- now also in the camps. You'll see proud schoolchildren
confident in their future as both ethnic and modern, learning
Uighur as well as Chinese and English, science as well as traditional courtesy.
It's an optimistic Uighur identity. But that is exactly what the regime is
targeting: schoolchildren are now prohibited from even speaking their language
in school; native customs and everyday religion, down to funerary rites, are
being eradicated. The trauma and fear of internment and death among all the
12 million native peoples in Xinjiang is now compounded by the fact that
nobody can sing either Sanubar Tursun's passionate tunes or Ablajan's proud new
pop. All are being silenced.
This is genocide. It
already meets all five of the convention's
statutes: killings; massive mental harm inflicted on entire peoples;
prohibitions on native languages and customs, forced assimilation to Chinese
ways, including forced violation of food taboos; termination of pregnancies and
forced marriages of native women to Chinese men; and the systematic
confiscation of children from detained parents.
The targeting of
intellectuals as a method to instill fear and trauma in the entire population
is but one aspect of this campaign. It also includes shuttering bookstores,
throwing native books into bonfires, painting over of bilingual street signs,
bulldozing mosques and so on -- In short, carpet-bombing the province with
chauvinist prejudice, similar to when in North America, settler-colonist
regimes set out to "kill the Indian, save the man.".. read more:
