The faux anti-imperialism of denying anti-Uighur atrocities https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/14/the-faux-anti-imperialism-of-denying-anti-uighur 14 May 2021
Why are some Western ‘anti-imperialists’ determined to whitewash China’s well-documented crimes against the Uighurs? the Uighurs are wronged four times over: by China’s oppression, by American imperialist cooptation, by left-wing denialism, and by Muslim leaders’ dereliction.
In contrast to this fickle and self-serving “solidarity” from American political leaders, scholars and human rights organisations have long been consistent in exposing and opposing China’s persecutory policies against the Uighurs, even when conflicting with the American empire’s realpolitik. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/192000/asa170501992en.pdf ( detention without trial and long prison sentences for Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other ethnic groups; long prison terms after unfair trials, e.g. those handed down to Uighur prisoners after the demonstrations in Baren county in April 1990; reported extrajudicial killings and detentions after the Baren incident; and the extensive use of the death penalty in Xinjiang.)
For the Trump administration, the Uighur’s plight was yet another card to play in its China-bashing, along with Hong Kong and COVID-19...
The current onslaught against the Uighurs is the continuation of a long history of settler colonisation, political domination, resource extraction, and geopolitical exploitation – now conducted, since 9/11, under the aegis of a “people’s war on terror.”
Far from being a recently-manufactured artefact of American manipulation, as the Grayzone and other denialists suggest, Uighur opposition to Chinese state rule is as old as the imposition of this rule itself. Independent Uighur states were declared in 1865, 1933, and 1944. By reducing the Uighurs to little more than Great Power pawns, with no autonomous politics or liberation aspirations of their own, some “anti-imperialists” reproduce the imperial hegemony they rail against.
(NB by WA university!)Grayzone is propagansappda (on the left fringe); not credible news. It has also consistently denied/white-washed Chinese repression (genocide?) of Uyghur Muslims