We Need To Do More To Stop The Genocide Of Uyghur Muslims (Opinion)

China is currently committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims. For seven years the world watched as China targeted Uyghurs for repression, enacted laws governing how they can behave, built concentration camps and then filled them with almost two million Uyghurs. Why was the Western World silent for so long when these countries usually condemn and sanction nations that commit human rights violations? The answer may not surprise you: China is powerful. China is a keystone trading partner to many countries in the global economy, they possess the second-largest military in the world and they operate with great secrecy within their borders. Oftentimes it is just easier for nations and individuals to pretend like nothing is happening. But something is happening. A genocide is happening, and the world needs to respond.

While this may seem like a completely new problem, there is a compelling historical comparison that we can make to gain insight into how the world should react to China’s genocide. China is behaving and is structured similarly to pre-World War 2 Germany. While imperfect, the comparison demonstrates that strong intervention is necessary in China’s ongoing genocide, to prevent this genocide from continuing and also to prevent it from potentially evolving into something even more horrific.

Here are some of the many key economic, political and social factors China shares with Nazi Germany:

1.  China under the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) uses their economic power to pursue foreign policy goals. They use predatory economic practices such as currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, market access restrictions and nationalist subsidies to become integral to the global economy. Then they try to permanently tie weaker trading partners to it and exert economic leverage over those countries for foreign policy concessions, a perfect example being their famous “belt and road” initiative. Nazi Germany used this same strategy and many of the same mechanisms when preparing for World War II.

2.  China is trying to challenge the current world power in the United States like Germany attempted to do to Britain in the second World War.

3.  China is a one-party state that has criminalized almost all dissent from its citizens. Nazi Germany also prevented political dissent and made all other political parties illegal.

4.  China has a unitary head of state, Xi Jinping, with almost unlimited power. Adolf Hitler commanded the same amount of power in Nazi Germany.

5.  China recently (for all intents and purposes) brought Hong Kong under its control, in a move similar to how pre-war Germany annexed Austria and part of Czechoslovakia before officially starting World War II.

6.  China has more internationally contested territory that they view as theirs, Taiwan and the South China Sea, like how pre-war Germany considered the majority ethnically German parts of Europe theirs.

These factors demonstrate the similarities in organizational structure and that the ambitions of China are similar to those of pre-war Nazi Germany.

The rest of this article will focus on this final similarity:

7. The CCP have identified the Uyghur Muslims as an ethnicity that threatens their vice grip on their parties’ control over the citizenry, similar to how the Nazi’s viewed the Jewish people, and the CCP is following a similar progression of repression to genocide as Germany did.

Within China’s borders, the CCP has popularized the idea that the Uyghur Muslims are dangerous terrorists who need to be re-educated if they are to be good Chinese citizens. By capitalizing on the 2013 and 2014 terrorist attacks of extremist Uyghur Muslims, they rationalize and justify their treatment of this ethnic group to the rest of their citizens. Similarly, Nazi Germany started their campaign to exterminate Jewish people by popularizing antisemitism in its population and convincing the German people that the Jewish people were a threat to German interests.

In 2015, the CCP started systematic legal repression of the Uyghur culture and people by banning the Uyghur’s traditional religious garb and facial hair. They have continued and expanded their criminalization of religious expression by Uyghur Muslims. After their rise to power, the Nazis enacted many laws regulating the behaviors of the Jewish people living within their borders including that they self-identify as Jewish and were not allowed to marry Aryans.

Workers walk along the fence of a likely detention center for Muslims in Xinjiang on September 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter | Reuters)

In 2017, the CCP established concentration camps, where over a million Uyghurs have been imprisoned. Concentration camps are the most well-known feature of the Holocaust. Uyghur concentration camps allow the CCP to forcibly control the Uyghurs to serve the regime's current purposes. The separation also serves the secondary purpose of alienating a minority population from the rest of the citizenry, which makes the justification of their treatment to the dominant ethnic group easier. Released prisoners can even become pariahs from regular society, where no one will speak to them out of fear of CCP retaliation.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis had three types of prisons for Jewish people: ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps, all of which served different purposes to the Nazi regime. Ghettos consolidated Jewsish people within cities and separated them from the rest of the population. Concentration camps were prisons that Jews were sent to because they were Jewish, which further removed them from society and any form of the rule of law. Both ghettos and concentration camps allowed the Nazi regime to exploit Jewish prisoners as slave laborers. Death camps resembled concentration camps, but their purpose was to kill every person sent there. 

The CCP camps today most resemble Jewish ghettos and concentration camps from the period before Hitler decided that Nazi Germany would mass murder the Jewish people and was debating different forced emigration plans:

1.  In CCP camps, Uyghurs are forced to memorize communist propaganda, swear fealty to the CCP and forgo their native languages to learn Mandarin. This is a clear departure from the historical example of the Nazi party, which never intended to allow Jewish people back into Germany.

2.  In camps all over China there have been reliable accounts of various types of torture against Uyghur inmates. Torture and horrific treatment before murder were common in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Many of the same forms of torture that affected Jews during the holocaust are being done to Uyghurs today. Prisoners are kept in filthy overcrowded conditions that can lead to sickness, fed very little and often have to perform a ritual to get anything, and are regularly subjected to beatings by their captors. While it is difficult to know the full extent of what transpires in Uyghur concentration camps, what we do know is horrific.

3. Uyghurs are forced to work in slave labor camps, picking cotton and manufacturing goods, while living in fear of being sent to concentration camps if they do not comply. The Nazi’s used slave labor to force Jews to work in munitions factories and produce winter gear for the Wehrmacht during World War II, and also lived under threat of being sent to a concentration camp if they did not comply. The Uyghurs, like the Jews during the holocaust, serve a key role as coerced free labor in their oppressor’s global supply chain, working under threat of torture or death.

4.  Survivors recently documented the widespread sexual violence against female Uyghurs and the continuous systematic rape of female prisoners. The rape of Jewish women by guards was also a frequent feature of concentration camps in the Holocaust.

5.  Uyghurs are routinely subjected to medical testing and then murdered for their organs to keep the Chinese organ trade thriving. Similarly, the Nazis ran horrific medical tests on Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust to serve their war efforts.

6.  Finally, Uyghur women are forcibly sterilized to prevent future generations of Uyghurs from being born. This final measure of preventing more Uyghurs from coming into existence demonstrates the CCP’s same end goal for the Uyghurs group as the Nazis desired for the Jews.

While they stop short of mass murder, the CCP is exerting its power to exterminate the culture, religion, and many individuals of the Uyghur Muslims.

In Germany, we have a historical example demonstrating what happens when an authoritarian state obsessed with power and control targets, separates and tries to eliminate a minority ethnic-religious group that it views as a threat. The CCP’s overall goal of genocide is different than the Nazis so far. Unlike the Nazis, the CCP is trying to destroy the Uyghurs’ religion and culture through forced assimilation, so far resorting to killing only when they deem it necessary or convenient. While horrific, deplorable and sickening, the fact that mass murder is not yet occurring means that the world can intervene before the worst form of genocide potentially occurs.

Again, we can turn to history to inform us about why we need to intervene now. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto destroyed, its people killed; its buildings burned. The last Jewish community in what had been the capital of Jewish culture in Europe was condemned to death by the Nazis. It had only been spared so far because the Nazis required slave labor for their war machine raging across Europe. Shmuel Zygielbojm, a representative of the exiled Polish government, learned of what was happening in the Warsaw Ghetto. In response, he wrote a pointed suicide note that was to be shared with the leaders of the allied powers. “Though responsibility for the crime of the murder of the Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself.” His point was that the blame rests not only on those who committed the genocide but also with all of those who could have done something but chose not to. The presidents and prime ministers who enabled and bargained with a tyrannical regime before the war. The leaders who dragged their feet as they rationalized that it was not the right time to intervene. The people who ignored the rumblings of genocide and allowed the tragedy to proceed.

Zygielbojm’s suicide note echoes through time as a reproach of the world’s complicity in crimes against humanity. We waited too long to stop the Nazis and it allowed them to move forward with the most horrific genocide in human history. Today we have the opportunity to intervene before it is too late. Led by the U.S. and the EU, bold leaders can prevent this genocide from continuing. We can save a culture and potentially millions of lives.

If we refuse to be strong, one day, history will demand to know why we did not do more.Why did we tolerate U.S. companies lobbying for slave labor?Why did our leaders bargain with a state committing genocide? Why did we choose not to help a dying ethnicity? Why didn’t we do more?