Glossing Over Cultural Genocide
Updated Below
Most informed observers have known for a long time that the Western press doesn’t have a clue when it comes to handling its coverage of the disparate images China projects of itself. On the one hand, China’s militaristic repression of Tibetans, Uighurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and Christians is occasionally recognized as deplorable. On the other, we are bombarded with stories about the PRC’s economic strength and progress in the global marketplace. Rarely do we see any journalist – let alone politician or business leader – try to reconcile these two themes.
Today’s Washington Post goes to particularly far lengths to avoid connecting China’s economic policies with their human rights abuses in regards to East Turkestan (Xinjiang). Despite recognizing that Uighurs have been made a minority in their own lands because of China’s policy of transferring ethnic Han Chinese into East Turkestan, the Post fails to condemn this practice as illegal.
Yet just off the highway in Mazha village, life is little changed. Most people spend their days under the tyranny of sun and windblown dust, tending trellises of green grapes. Nearly all the villagers are Uighur, the Muslim ethnic minority that was the majority in Xinjiang before the arrival of Han Chinese, the dominant group in China. The highways funded by the government’s Develop the West initiative have brought little benefit here, the villagers complain.
“We Uighur people are all farmers,” said Gulijanat Tayir, a 17-year-old student. “The Han people are running all the businesses.”
In the six years since China’s central government began its well-financed campaign to spread the benefits of economic growth beyond coastal provinces, the effort has exacerbated the extreme inequality that characterizes the national economy. Gaps have grown between urban and rural China and between the less-developed west and the frenetic east.
The Develop the West program was conceived in part to stem separatist inclinations in Xinjiang and other western provinces, where ethnic minority communities resent the continued influx of Han– a migration actively encouraged by the central government. [Emphasis added]
The Chinese Communist Party’s policy of population transfer is done to make Uighurs – and Tibetans – minorities in their own lands. Economic development, just as in Tibet, has almost exclusively benefitted Chinese settlers into the occupied lands to China’s west. The westward development campaign aims to pacify territories under military rule by simply infesting the lands with Chinese settlers, Chinese businesses, and infrastructure for the settlers and businesses to come in at an ever-quickening rate. This isn’t just a hard-nosed economic policy, but a politically driven act that is condemned under international law.
… involv[ing] the movement of people as a consequence of political and/or economic processes in which the State government or State-authorized agencies participate. (66)
Population transfer has been recognised in a report by UN Special Rapporteurs as “constitut[ing] a violation of basic principles of conventional and customary international and human rights law”.(67)
Population transfer is also a specific violation of international humanitarian law that body of law which regulates the conduct of parties engaged in armed conflict.
But the Post reporter, Peter Goodman , doesn’t recognize that the deliberate destruction of a people and a culture through population transfer is a form of genocide. From Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1994/2/Add.1 (adoption pending):
Article 7
Indigenous peoples have the collective and individual right not to be subjected to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention of and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
Yet “ethnocide and cultural genocide” is exactly what the Post documents in their article.
The Han are now a slim majority among Xinjiang’s 19 million people. That has exacerbated tensions with the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have long regarded the Han as invaders.
…
Kuche, a town whose red soils hold some of China’s largest reserves of oil and natural gas, has become a hub for giant state energy firms. Service trucks navigate a network of recently built roads. The West-East pipeline carries natural gas more than 2,000 miles across the country to Shanghai. On the edge of the city, a network of refineries has sprung up, turning crude oil into gasoline.“Yes, there’s oil here, but the money doesn’t reach ordinary people,” said a man near the crumbling walls of the ancient city, as two men squatted in the dirt, tinkering with the innards of a weathered car. “This is all we’ve got,” he said, holding out empty palms.
It’s hard to imagine a more blatant case of someone describing a bird that quacks, has webbed feat, and waddles when it walks and calling it something other than a duck. Population transfer is taking place inside East Turkestan; it has already brought enough Han to make Uighurs a minority in their own land. One result of the influx of government-funded settlers is that Uighurs are placed at a profound economic disadvantage and are forced to watch as Han settlers and CCP owned industry steal their natural resources while they struggle as subsistence farmers.
I’m tired of watching articles like this run around the obvious in ever-tightening circles without stepping forward and saying it. Not everyone knows that population transfer is a form of genocide and it’d be valuable for any reporter covering stories like this to point out that not only does Han settlement in East Turkestan deprive the Uighurs of resources and economic success, but it’s actually destroying their people.
[Update]
Two people better informed in international law and human rights than I am pointed out the following texts to me in regards to population transfer and how international laws apply to East Turkistan, Tibet, and China.
From the International Criminal Court:
Genocide is foremost an international crime for which individuals, no matter how high in authority, may be indicted, tried, and punished by the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to Article 6 of the ICC Statute, This crime involves, “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
There are a number of things to note about these acts.
…(6) Also critical is the word “destroy.” The acts that are carried out with this intent are carefully defined in (a) to (e), above. They exclude attempts, for example, to eliminate an indelible group from a territory by ethnic cleansing (that which involves their forced or coerced removal), or the destruction of the culture of a group, as by forced education of their children in a different language and customs. While “culture” is unmentioned in the articles of the ICC’s Statute and the Report of the PCICC, and may well be included as the case law of genocide develops, “ethnic cleansing” would seem to be a crime against humanity in the Statute. Under Article 7.1.d, it is unlawful to deport of forcibly transfer a population.
Also the Fourth Geneva Conventions can be reasonably interpreted to apply to population transfer:
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that “[t]he occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” As a signatory to this convention, the People’s Republic of China is legally bound by its provisions.
Population transfer in Tibet also amounts to a war crime. The violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention is regarded as a “grave breach” of the Convention or its Protocol.(69) Article 85 paragraph 5 of Protocol 1 specifies that “grave breaches of these instruments shall be regarded as war crimes.” The PRC accepted and agreed to be bound by Protocol 1 on September 14, 1983.
Technorati Tags: China, Tibet, population transfer, Uighur, Xinjiang
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[...] Cross posted at Tibet Will Be Free. [Update] [...]
[...] Cross posted at Tibet Will Be Free. [...]
This all reminds me so much of stalin and his relocation of foreigners and political minorities during the purges. Because of it being a totalitarian communist nation no one knew that relocation and general genocide had been committed on 40-100 million people. What should be done about this on the individual level?