Xinjiang Republic
Question one
Xinjiang is one of the most valuable places in the people’s republic of China because it has vast oil and mineral reserves, making it the largest gas producer in the country. As the largest producer of oil, it directly impacts the country’s economy and has to be protected from any things that affect the region’s stability. When the people are violent around the area, the extraction of the natural resources will be jeopardized, and the local government must come up with policies to take care of the peace and tranquility of the region so that the miners may have ample time to extract the minerals that are highly used to develop the country. The crackdown policies in the area were very effective, and the place can now be said to be safe courtesy of the crackdown policy. The Uyghurs and the Muslims used their religion to teach their children extremism and terrorism. All the children who were part of the Islamic religion in the region were introduced to terrorism through extremism teaching. When the government policies banned all Islamic gatherings, there was no other place to facilitate the training, and the spread of extremism was stopped (Khalid, 2021).
The local government showed no mercy when handling the criminals and conducted the crackdown so that any person found practicing terrorism was punished in public in front of the other people to serve as examples to the other people who were watching the events. The cruel handling of the offenders instilled fear in the people. The people who were planning appraising and additional resistance were discouraged by the inhumane treatment vested on the region’s people in question. The Uyghurs were made to be a national minority of the area, and all the rights of being the indigenous people were given to the kan. As a result, the local community that thought their land was taken for government use had no ground to cause instability in the region. In a nutshell, it is the crackdown of removing the Uighurs from their natural environment to camps that made it easy for peace to be experienced in the region.
Question two
The Chinese authorities have only one aim through the crackdown that they want peace to prevail so that they may have ample time to extract the natural resources for the benefit of the people in the country. However, the crackdown may not yield the expected results in the long run because some may cow away when people are exposed to pain and suffering. Still, the rest will retreat, regroup, and attack even more challenging, and the state of conflict will increase so much in the region, and the long-awaited peace will not be found in the area. For example, the people in the camps will use the slightest opportunities to meet and discuss an act of revenge, and it is prudent to note that the more the crackdown, the more complex the people become, and peace is far from the site (Clarke, 2015). Instead, the policies aimed at eradicating the three evils must be centered on education, dialogue, and inclusion of all the people into the benefits of the natural resources in the region. When vocational training centers are set up in the area, people can acquire the necessary skills to get employed in the quarries and come up with an ideological shift about the peace and stability of the region. If the local government embraces the Uyghurs and works with them through dialogue and mutual understanding, the equilibrium will prevail in the area.
Question three
The book Robert wrote about the war on the Uyghurs illustrates the pains the Muslim minority faced in China. Since religion was seen as a way of perpetuating extremism leading to terror, the religion was banned, and the Muslims could no longer practice their religious activities. Is only a selected few working in the government parastatals were allowed to fast and practice their religion? The dispossession of the practice of religion underprivileged them of their fundamental social rights to worship. It also led to the loss of lives and adverse suffering in their camps as the local government launched its crackdown. More than a million people of the Islamic minority were detained in different camps and were not getting the correct information (Roberts, 2020). They did not have the basic privileges like voting, which made them a people with the rights like other Chinese people. The political freedom was jeopardized, and the detained people could neither express their emotions nor enjoy their space as prescribed by the law of their country. The Uyghurs lost their status of being indigenous to Xinjiang to be termed as national Muslim minorities.
References
Clarke, M. (2015). China and the Uyghurs: the “Palestinization” of Xinjiang. Middle East Policy, 22(3), 127-146.
Khalid, A. (2021). The war on the Uyghurs: China’s internal campaign against a Muslim minority: by Sean R. Roberts, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2020, xviii+ 308 pp., US $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-20218-1.
Roberts, S. R. (2020). The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority. Princeton University Press.