Over the past three years, China’s crackdown on more than one million Uighur-Islamic minority members of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region has received worldwide attention.
China has long faced accusations that Muslims operate masked detention centers as “vocational training” camps that have been detained indefinitely against their will and have been tortured and ill-treated.
While activists, human rights groups, and even governments, including the US and Parliament of Canada, have repeatedly referred to China’s actions as genocide, Australia has criticized the report as “extremely alarming.”
But China is not the only country that systematically targets Islam.
While defending China’s records, there is increasing evidence that other countries are taking similar actions, such as mass detention and the enforcement of restrictions on religious freedom.
These days Pyu Survey report Government regulation of religion has been found to reach the highest level worldwide in more than a decade.
India
For more than two years, India, the world’s third-largest population of Muslims, has slowly implemented policies that can effectively see millions of people being driven into statelessness.
Since 2019, the country has built a series of detention camps despite protests from international human rights groups.
That same year, India released the National Register (NRC). This is a list of all Indian citizens registered in northeastern Assam. The Modi government states that many Assam Musams whose families came from neighboring Bangladesh are not legitimate citizens of the country.
The Modi administration has promoted a citizenship amendment bill in both parliaments. This is a large amnesia bill that transfers citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh without permission.
Protest in Kolkata against the use of detention camps in India.
Hindustan Times
However, Muslims were excluded from the bill. Instead, the Government of Modi promised to create an NRC nationwide that would include the names of all non-Indian men, women and children before the 2024 elections.
For Muslims who are unable to create citizenship documents, Mr. Modi intends to expel them from their community and detain them.
Call from Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights It was a failure to see the Muslims included in the bill.
Genocide Watch has issued genocide alerts to Muslims living in Kashmir and Assam, India.
Meanwhile, nationally, authorities have been accused of ignoring mob violence against Islam, including Lynch and other violent attacks.
The country’s interior minister, Amit Shah, previously called Muslims “termites” and “intruders.”
“Intruders are like termites that live in Bengal’s soil,” Shah said at a rally in West Bengal in 2019.
“The Bharatiya Janata government picks up intruders one by one and throws them into the Bay of Bengal,” he said, referring to illegal immigrants from neighboring Muslim-dominated Bangladesh.
Last week, the Guardian said about 170 Rohingya refugees living in India were gathered in detention centers by Indian authorities and deported to Myanmar as part of a broader national crackdown on Rohingya. reported.
Violence and discrimination related to Hindu nationalists are documented. In the latest Freedom In The World Report India’s position is “due to a multi-year pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies presided over violence and rising discriminatory policies affecting the Islamic population and pursued crackdowns on dissenting statements. It decreased from “free” to “partially free”. Media, scholars, civil society groups, and protesters. “
“India is a multi-party democracy, but the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has increased discriminatory policies and violence affecting the Muslim population. “I preside over,” the report said.
The Australian government quickly condemned the treatment of Uighurs in China, but was relatively silent on allegations of human rights abuses in India.
Sri Lanka
On Sunday, Sri Lanka announced that it would use controversial anti-terrorism laws to address religious extremism.
The government has given itself radical authority to detain suspects for up to two years for the purpose of “radicalization.”
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said the rule would allow detention of persons suspected of causing “violence, religious, racial, community incongruity, malicious sentiment, or hostility between different communities.”...
At the same time, the Sri Lankan government announced a ban on Burqa and closed more than 1,000 Islamic schools accused of ignoring national education policy.
The move is ahead of the second anniversary of the 2019 Easter Sunday attack, which killed 279 people and injured more than 500.
The coordinated suicide bombing was blamed on a local Islamic extremist group.
Muslims make up just under 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s 22 million population.
Sri Lanka recently defended the treatment of Chinese Uighurs in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Ambassador CA Chandra Prema, who spoke at the UN Human Rights Council earlier this month, accused the UN of making “various sensational claims” about allegations of abuse of Chinese Muslims.
“We are seriously concerned about the credibility of these sources. Keep in mind that the policy of religious freedom is fully implemented in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region,” said Ambassador Chandra Prema.
“Many Islamic countries have been destroyed in the last two decades under the guise of promoting democracy. However, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is peaceful and has enjoyed democracy with other parts of China during this period. I did. “
Myanmar
The Rohingya, dominated by Muslims in northern Myanmar, have long been the target of Myanmar’s military and police, and the United Nations has accused the country of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Myanmar soldiers were ordered to “kill everything visible” in the Rohingya massacre and the village was destroyed by mass murder, mass rape, and religious and ethnic crackdowns.
A brutal crackdown by Myanmar troops in August 2017 fled more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to southern Bangladesh.
The Rohingya Muslims, which reached about one million in Myanmar earlier that year, represent the largest proportion of Myanmar’s Muslims.
The Myanmar government systematically denied their citizenship and refused to recognize them as citizens.
More than 500,000 Rohingya are still believed to live in northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, and UN investigators warn of “a serious risk of a genocide or possible recurrence.” I will.
On the other hand, many who have fled to neighboring Bangladesh are at risk of becoming virtually stateless.
As of last week, Australia suspended military cooperation with Myanmar and redirected aid to non-governmental organizations in response to intensifying violence following the military coup last month.
“We condemn the use of deadly power and violence against civilians who exercise universal rights, such as freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly,” Senator Payne said in a statement on Sunday.
“We continue to urge Myanmar security forces to use detention and refrain from violence against civilians.
“Australia’s development programs are also aimed at the urgent humanitarian needs of the most vulnerable and poor, including the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities.”
China
Over the past few years, Uighur activists have gained worldwide attention to a vast network of “re-education” camps where human rights groups and former detainees say people are being forced into political indoctrination, ill-treatment and torture. I have tried.
The Chinese government claims that camps are “voluntary” in nature and are used to counter religious extremism.
A recent report from the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, an independent US think tank, was found. China’s actions in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region violate all provisions of the UN Genocide Convention..
The report cited examples of Uighur torture, detention and forced labor, widespread rape and sexual abuse, and systematic forced abortion and sterilization.
The Australian government has repeatedly criticized the Chinese government for implementing “repressive measures” against Uighurs, but unlike other countries such as Canada and the United States, they call their actions “genocide.” Has not reached.
The federal government and Labor Party blocked an attempt by independent senator Rex Patrick last week to push forward a motion by the Senate to recognize the Chinese government’s actions against the Islamic minority as “genocide.”
China has strongly denied allegations of human rights abuses in the states of western China.
Dr. Michael Schubridge, director of defense, strategy and national security programs at the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy, said the Islamic community around the world has faced an increase in targets over the last two decades in the face of terrorist attacks. Said that.
But he emphasized that China’s crackdown on Uighurs remains different from other minority persecutions.
“A distinguishing feature of China’s violent repression of Uighur and Turkish ethnic groups is the scale of camps and mass detentions (more than one million), as well as beatings, interrogations, forced slaughter, and sexual assault. It was all the abuse in the camp, “he said.
“There is also the suffering of those who live outside camps in closely monitored communities and are subject to arbitrary detention, beatings and arrests.
“The scale can hide individual atrocities. Fortunately, you can hear it through a graphic description of the fugitives and survivors.
“The current magnitude of abuse by the Chinese government has also reached a level where it is credible to use the term” genocide “for the Turkish and Uighur communities. “
He also said the Chinese government was clear in its efforts to silence and intimidate Uighurs and prevent both domestic media and foreign journalists from reporting on Xinjiang from within mainland China.
“Fortunately, other governments, especially those with connections to a wider society and a wider world of journalism, cannot reproduce this level of internal and external control.”
Other countries have escaped scrutiny as Australia condemns China’s crackdown on Islam.
