The movement for the freedom of East Turkistan from seven decades old occupation by the Communist regime of People’s Republic of China (PRC) received a historic shot in the arm on June 17, 2020 when US President Donald Trump signed the “Uyghur Intervention and Global Humanitarian Unified Response Act of 2019”. In short, this Act is known as the “Uyghur Act of 2019”.
The main thrust of this new US law is “… to direct US resources to address human rights violations and abuses…. by PRC’s mass surveillance and internment of over 1,000,000 (one million) Uyghurs and other predominantly Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”.
It is also worth noting that a similar Bill (HR-4331) on Tibet was passed by the House of Representatives on 28th January, 2020 which bars Beijing from interfering in the process of selection of next Dalai Lama and offers diplomatic legitimacy to the democratically elected ‘SIKYONG’ (President) of Dalai Lama’s Central Administration in Dharamshala, India.
Before “Uyghur Act of 2019” became an ‘Act’ in the US constitution, the Bill was fortified and passed twice both by each House of the US Congress (Parliament) with outstanding majority. On the last count the House of Representatives, the Lower House, passed it with a majority of 413 to 1. This is exceptional because in the House of 435 seats with 4 lying vacant, the Democrats occupy 232 while Republicans hold just 198 and the remaining one seat is with the Libertarians. The tally was equally interesting in the Senate, the Upper House, which passed the Bill unanimously despite the fact that the Democrats hold a majority of 53 in a chamber of 100 members while the Democrats have only 45 seats. Remaining two seats are held by pro-Democrat Independents.
This expression of US unity and universal support to an occupied Muslim country against China gains still more significance as it has happened on the eve of a fiercely fought Presidential election. The international importance of this development too is no less either when seen in the context of new realignments happening among the community of Islamic nations which has so far chosen to remain oblivious and indifferent to the sufferings of a fellow Muslim country, forcibly occupied by China.
The new American “Uyghur Act of 2019” has its origin in the reports of widespread violations of human rights of the Uyghur-dominated Muslim population of Xinjiang. It was known as the ‘Republic of East Turkistan’ until 1949 when it was forcibly occupied by Mao’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA)
From ‘Republic of East Turkistan’ to ‘China’s Xinjiang’
The new American “Uyghur Act of 2019” has its origin in the reports of widespread violations of human rights of the Uyghur-dominated Muslim population of Xinjiang. It was known as the ‘Republic of East Turkistan’ until 1949 when it was forcibly occupied by Mao’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). This was the very first imperialist action of the Communist government of Chairman Mao after pulling down the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek through a bloody Communist rebellion. The new occupied land was renamed as ‘Xinjiang’ meaning ‘New Frontier’ and is the largest province of PRC with an area of over 16 lakh (1.6 million) sq km. Clubbed with Tibet, which too was occupied forcibly by the PLA in 1950-51, the two colonised regions account for more than half of the land of present day China and over two-thirds of its natural resources.
Concentration camps as ‘schools for patriotism’
Report compiled in recent years from various sources have proven beyond doubt that Chinese government’s official arms like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), PLA, Public Security Bureau (the dreaded ‘Gestapo’ police of Beijing government) has confined one to three million Uyghurs in heavily guarded concentration camps where they are undergoing torture, brainwashing and cultural overhauling to tame them into ‘patriotic’ Chinese citizens. The sources of these reports include escaping Uyghur victims; family contacts of those leaders and organisations of East Turkistan freedom movement who are functioning from outside China; Chinese government’s own leaked official documents; probes of independent human rights organisations, tourist visitors and observers; and satellite based remote imaging which prove the existence of numerous and massive camps across Xinjiang, built over past few years.
The Chinese ‘art’ of dialogue
When Mao wiped out an entire generation of Uyghur leadership on the pretext of ‘dialogue’
“…It is no injustice to conquer the lands of barbarians. It is not an inhuman act to kill barbarians. It is not dishonest to deceive barbarians…” — prominent Chinese philosopher Wang Fu Zhi, who lived in the 17th century
In Chinese socio-cultural and political lexicon, the term ‘barbarian’ stands for every other race on earth that is not Han. That explains the burden of being the ‘supreme’ race or being ‘the Middle Kingdom’ which generations of Hans have been carrying on their shoulders across the centuries. That also explains why the Qin dynasty and successive generations of Hans chose to build the ‘Great’ Wall to hide behind it in order to protect themselves from a host of ‘barbaric’ nomadic invasions from Inner Asia who included Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs–and you just name them. That also explains why Chinese hold the distinction of being among those very few races in the world who take pride in their art of ‘deception’ and cheating.
When Comrade Mao Zedong was in the last leg of his successful Communist revolution in China, his ‘Peoples Liberation Army’ (PLA) faced stiff resistance from a host of Uyghur clans of ‘The Republic of East Turkistan’ in the far West. Uyghurs, a fiery and self-respecting Muslim race, dominated this mineral-rich region which has been off and on under the control of various warlords. As Mao’s Communists were taking control of one after other regions of China the Uyghurs had successfully broken off from the control of Nationalist Kuomintang rule in 1933, though for a short period. But they had regained their independence again since 1944. That explains why they would not submit themselves to yet another era of slavery of the Hans.
It was this moment when Mao used his charm of Communist sweet talk and offered to settle all those thorny issues through a ‘friendly dialogue’ which were on the minds of Uyghur leaders. Along with his invitations to the Uyghur clan leaders in August 1949, Mao also sent a plane to Novosibirsk in neighboring USSR to fetch the Uyghur leaders for this ‘friendly dialogue’. A large section among the influential leaders fell for Mao’s bait. But before the plane could reach Beijing, it exploded midair on August 26 and almost an entire generation of East Turkistani leadership was wiped out in a single go.
Following this ‘victory’, Mao did not have to make much efforts before he could identify some collaborators among the surviving leaders. Professing loyalty to Mao’s Peoples’ Republic of China, Saifuddin Azizi, one of the surviving leaders, joined the Chinese Communist Party. The rest of job of suppressing anti-invasion uprising of Uyghur and Kazakh populations was not difficult for PLA General Wang Zhen who soon took control of the Second “Republic of East Turkistan”. The ‘Republic’ was renamed as “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR) of China. And collaborator Saifuddin Azizi was appointed as the first Communist Party Governor of the ‘Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture’ of the new PRC.
History repeated itself in Tibet two years later in 1951 when neighboring Tibet was occupied by China following a so-called “17-point Agreement between China and Tibet” that they signed with a celebrated Tibetan collaborator Ngapo Ngawang Jigme who was never authorised by the Dalai Lama government of Lhasa to sign any agreement with China. In the case of Tibet, the Tibetan independence from China had already lasted from 1913 to 1951.
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