Where Is the Outrage, and Action, in the Arab World Over China's Uyghur Genocide?

Outside the camps, Uyghur mosques and pilgrimage sites have been bulldozed. According to research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, at least 16,000 mosques in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in far western China are estimated to have been destroyed or desecrated by Chinese authorities since 2017—part of a campaign of cultural erasure. "An estimated 8,500 have been demolished outright, and, for the most part, the land on which those razed mosques once sat remains vacant," the report's authors wrote. The only mosques that have been spared have been turned into tourist sites, like in the cities of Urumqi and Kashgar.

In 2021, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, in partnership with the NGO Justice for All, issued a joint report on China's mass detention of Uyghur imams. We compiled a list of 1,046 imams in East Turkistan who were detained since 2014. Because people are severely punished for even talking on the phone with anyone in a foreign country, it is amazing that we were able to find so many names. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. The true number is certainly much larger. In some cases, an imam's entire family was also detained and taken into the camps—not only their children, but also their grandchildren.

Muhammad Salih Hajim, who translated the Quran from Arabic into Uyghur, as part of a project approved by the Chinese government many years ago, is one of many who died in custody, in either late 2017 or early 2018. He was 82 years old.

Qeyimahun Qari is another imam who recently died in custody. He was first arrested more than 30 years ago; after serving a 15-year sentence, he was released in 2006. Then in 2017, as China's mass detention program began, a village policeman seized him after morning prayers. At the time, Imam Qeyimahun was 59 years old and had no health problems. Two years after he was taken to a camp, Chinese authorities returned his lifeless body to his family.

Just recently, in early March 2023, we heard about yet another death in custody. In 2018, a religious scholar named Baqytkhan Myrzan, who is an ethnic Kazakh, was sentenced by Xinjiang authorities to 14 years in prison, simply for leading prayers on special occasions. His sister Almakhan Myrzan, who lives in Kazakhstan, confirmed to journalists that she received notification from the government that her brother had died in prison at the age of 61. She said that Chinese authorities had ignored the pleas of Myrzan's relatives in China and Kazakhstan to release him for medical treatment.

But it is not only imams. Every Uyghur family has had relatives taken away. The leaked documents from Xinjiang's internment camps, known as the "Xinjiang Police Files," include police photos of people as young as 15, and as old as 73, taken into police stations. We estimate that 1 million Uyghur children have been taken from their families and put into the custody of the state. In these so-called "boarding schools," they suffer the trauma and grief of losing all contact with their parents. The children are intensively trained to hate Islam. They shout slogans every day, praising the Communist Party and declaring their loyalty to the Chinese state.

But the Chinese government goes even further, to make sure Uyghur women will not have children at all in the future. Journalists have exposed how the Chinese government has imposed draconian birth control measures on Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, including IUDs, contraceptives and even forced abortions and sterilizations. Men and women are forced to work in factories, so they cannot marry and form families. The birthrate in Xinjiang dropped by nearly 50 percent between 2017 and 2019.

Truly, this is a plan to make the Uyghurs disappear. That is why we say it is a genocide.