The following article has been published in the Aus­trali­an Jewish News by ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim.

China’s north-western Autonom­ous Region, known offi­cially as Xinjiang, holds vast natural resources and is stra­tegic­ally located, having borders with Pakistan, Afgh­anistan and Central Asia.

The Uyghurs are the largest of the pre­dom­in­antly Muslim ethnic minority groups who together comprise the majority of the region’s 25 million people. They refer to the region as “East Turkestan”, reflect­ing the closeness of their cultural and religious ties to other Turkic-speaking Muslim com­munit­ies outside China, and the fact that a separate East Turkestan republic was estab­lished briefly in the 1930s and again in the 1940s.

Sus­pect­ing the loyalties of the Turkic Muslim com­munit­ies, the Chinese gov­ern­ment has for decades provided economic incent­ives to China’s ethnic majority Han pop­u­la­tion to move to the region, so that they now dominate the cities and are given the best jobs and political positions ahead of the local com­munit­ies. China has followed similar policies in neigh­bour­ing Tibet.

The tensions that the Chinese government’s policies have created with these com­munit­ies are not only eth­nic­ally-based.  An animus against religion is rooted in the government’s communist ideology. The Uyghurs’ profound belief in an omni­po­tent, omni­scient and omni­be­ne­vol­ent God is an intol­er­able threat to the government’s claim to be the steward of an omni­po­tent, omni­scient and omni­be­ne­vol­ent State. Earthly rulers of a total­it­ari­an per­sua­sion seem to react badly when reminded that they are ulti­mately answer­able to a Higher Power.

The Uyghurs have reacted to years of ethnic dis­crim­in­a­tion, economic mar­gin­al­isa­tion and restric­tions on religious and cultural practices with political protests and public displays of religious devotion. At times this has erupted into violence, including ethnic riots in 2009, a terrorist attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people in May 2014, and a suicide bombing outside a train station several weeks later that injured about 80 people, one fatally.

These events produced the brutal policies which have developed into the Chinese government’s current offensive against the Uyghur pop­u­la­tion.  In truth, however, the vast majority of Uyghurs adhere to moderate tra­di­tions of Islam.  According to leaked Chinese gov­ern­ment documents, it was the revival of public piety that most alarmed the regime, and explains why it now views virtually the entire Uyghur pop­u­la­tion, including the elderly and children, as suspect, and has treated more than one million of them as enemies of the State.

Uyghurs are under constant police sur­veil­lance, in their private homes and wherever they go, to watch for signs of “religious extremism” that include owning books about Uyghurs, growing a beard, having a prayer rug, “praying too much”, or quitting smoking or drinking.  Mosques and cemeter­ies have been demol­ished.  There are reports of Uyghurs being forcibly ster­il­ised and children being separated from their com­munit­ies.

According to US State Depart­ment estimates, more than a million Uyghurs have been herded into detention camps for “re-education” and “voca­tion­al training”. These are Orwellian euphem­isms for coercing a change in their political thinking, their iden­tit­ies, and their religious beliefs. Inmates are required to sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays, are forced to eat pork and are subjected to physical and verbal abuse by prison guards.

Drone footage said to be from the region shows dozens of people bound and blind­folded with their shaved heads bowed, being led on to trains by armed guards, reportedly headed for one of the camps. For some, this evokes memories of mass trans­ports of Jews during the Shoah.  However, the aim of these measures does not appear to be to exterm­in­ate the Uyghurs phys­ic­ally, but rather to re-engineer their thoughts and refashion their souls. Whether or not this col­lect­ive “spirit-murder” amounts to genocide, it is monstrous by any standard.

There is something else which calls the Jewish people to speak and to act on this issue, and it goes to the core of our identity.  It is the profound con­vic­tion that freedom and dignity are the God-given birth­right of each and every indi­vidu­al, and not priv­ileges to be conferred or withdrawn at the whim of the State.

Just how starkly the current gov­ern­ment in China stands in oppos­i­tion to this principle was driven home in a ‘thank you’ message the ECAJ received last Friday from a young person of Uyghur back­ground following the release of our statement about the Uyghurs.

Like many other young Uyghurs who have left the region in recent years to further their studies, this person lost all contact with family members at home several years ago.  It was espe­cially moving to learn that this person had studied and been supported in Israel:

“It was very hard to con­cen­trate to study and even not possible to have a normal mentality, since I don’t know what happened to my family. But thanks to the support and help of my super­visors and friends in Israel, I was able to get through the hardest time in my life and suc­cess­fully finished my study.  Shabbat shalom.”

Nothing could demon­strate more elo­quently how the values of ethical mono­the­ism, first intro­duced into the world by Judaism, remain as vital and dis­rupt­ive today as when Moses con­fron­ted Pharaoh with them more than three millennia ago.

Peter Wertheim AM is co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry