Eric's Beijing Diary

The video below follows up on one I featured in a previous blog post. That video addressed the condition of Muslims in China, while this one focuses particularly on Kazakhs. In China there are two main groups of Muslims. the Hui Muslims and the Uyghurs. Both are Sunni Muslims, but the Hui have been integrated much more thoroughly than the Uyghurs.

But there are also the Kazakhs. For the life of me, I cannot imagine why the Communist party boss of Xinjiang is going after the Kazakhs. They are the most peace-loving people you could hope to meet. But there is one problem. Some of the Kazakhs in this video seem to be part Chinese, but most Kazakhs I have met do not look Chinese at all. They have a much more European appearance. Han Chinese people in Xinjiang tend to be a little paranoid of non-Chinese looking people. This fear is not entirely unjustified, because there has been violence. I know that some people outside of China, particularly Americans, will say that the local Muslims became violent because they were provoked. To my way of thinking, that's not relevant. Violence is never justified unless it is done directly in self-defense. So I do recognize that there are jihad Muslims in Xinjiang who have caused trouble. But this is a tiny minority of the Uyghur people, and I don't recall hearing anything about violence in Kazakh communities. But they are Muslim and they look foreign, and those two things together mean they are fair game. It's unfortunate. They are not foreigners. They are Chinese citizens. I have had Kazakh students. You couldn't ask for better. They are really nice kids. What's even more puzzling is that, as you will hear in the beginning of this program, the human rights leader involved with this issue (helping folks in Kazakhstan who have relatives in Xinjiang) is now under house arrest himself in Kazakhstan. That makes me think the Kazakh government is on China's side. And as late as the end of May this year, the Chinese Ambassador was emphatically denying that Kazakhs were being detained in Xinjiang. Incredible.

I think we need to keep watching this. But it is of note that no Muslim nation (except Turkey) has spoken out against the incarceration of Muslims in Xinjiang.

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Labels: Kazakhs, Muslims, Xinjiang