INTERNATIONAL DESK: Dolkun Isa, dissident and president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), has taken on Xi Jinping, China’s ruthless leader and the world’s most powerful man.
He’d like Britain – and Britain’s new Foreign Secretary – to show his support.
His message for David Cameron is clear. “Britain should lead the way in standing up to China,” he says.
“I know that when Cameron was prime minister he was very pro-China. The need to do business is understandable, but not any amount of business at any cost.”
Only eight years ago, Prime Minister Cameron was enjoying fish and chips and a pint of IPA with Xi in a pub near Chequers. Not content with laying the groundwork for the Brexit debacle, Cameron had just signed a deal to allow China General Nuclear (CGN) a key role in three British nuclear power projects. Security concerns and spiralling costs eventually killed these improbable plans.
Times have changed. Ties with Beijing have entered a new ice age.
As recently as September, however, Cameron the lobbyist was promoting a major Sri Lankan project in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a plan to invest in the infrastructure of more than 150 countries.
The Colombo Port City project has been billed as a Chinese-funded rival to Singapore and Dubai. But critics of China fear this major Indo-Pacific development could one day function as a military outpost for the CCP.
China hawks in the Conservative Party criticised Cameron for promoting Chinese interests.
“Today, China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. Now he’s foreign secretary, I really hope [Cameron] acknowledges this. The UK is seen as a leading light for democracy and the rule of law all over the world. It is influential, and it should be making a stand on this,” he says.
“He needs to think what China’s motives are. Everything the CCP does is about furthering its power and influence at home or abroad.”
Isa, 56, says that since 2016, the situation in his home province of Xinjian, North West China, has deteriorated. “But the repression was already known about well before 2016, and surely, Cameron must have known that. The BBC and the international media published evidence about the abuses and repression in 2014.
“Even if he didn’t know what was happening before 2018 or 2019, after that time it’s not possible. He refers to the leaked documents in the New York Times that revealed Xi’s zero tolerance, “no mercy policy” towards the Uyghurs.
“There is no excuse for Cameron or anyone else to keep quiet on the situation in Xinjiang now.”
Calmly, and dispassionately, Isa lists the headline horrors of China’s repression of its Muslim minorities. “There are millions doing forced labour,” he says. “This is slavery in the 21st century. One million children are separated from their families and there’s a programme of indoctrination and destruction of religious and cultural identity. Forced sterilisation is happening in the concentration camps.
After numerous reports by human rights groups, and condemnation by politicians in liberal democracies, he says global action taken against China for its industrial level cruelty and repression has been unimpressive – and certainly ineffective.
At least a law signed by US President Joe Biden severely restricts the import of goods or commodities from China’s Xinjiang region. Goods now produced in Xinjiang and/or supply chains connected to Xinjiang are presumed to have used forced labour in Uyghur concentration camps and are therefore banned in the US.
Some looked to Wednesday’s meeting between Xi and Biden in San Francisco for signs to see if civil rights were still high on the west’s agenda. There were accords on curbing fentanyl production and boosting military-to-military communications.
But there was little else to show for the meeting.
After Xi had departed, reporters asked Biden if he still regarded Xi as a dictator. The US President had used the term, to China’s fury, earlier in the year. “Well, look, he is,” Biden said.
“We welcome what the Biden Administration has done,” says Isa. “But already China is managing to export banned products. It’s disguising their origins by exporting them via third countries. We are also currently discussing with the EU the need for Europe to ban these imports.”
WUC took the British Government to court last October in a bid to show it was remiss in not investigating cotton imports from Xinjiang.
Isa says it may resume the legal battle against UK agencies next year.
“Britain has been silent on this issue. I think the laws do exist to prevent imports made from slave labour. But it’s not being implemented to stop products from Xinjiang.”
Being a high-profile dissident, exiled from the world’s most powerful police state comes at a huge cost. Isa’s mother Ayhan Memet died aged 78 in a Chinese labour camp in May 2018. In his new book The China Freedom Trap, he describes how he only learnt of her death three weeks later while listening to a report on Radio Free Asia. Both his brothers are in camps, the younger one aged 49, with a life sentence.
Isa’s elder sister appeared on a video aired by Chinese media in 2020 to denounce him and says his claims and campaigns were all based on lies. “I know she was reading from a CCP script. And I know she had no choice, but it was very painful. The only crime committed by my family members is being related to me and being Uyghur.
“It can feel depressing and lonely to be in exile. But no more so than it is for the millions of other Uyghurs, some of whom have suffered far worse than I have.”
The Chinese authorities accuse him of being a senior figure in the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation, which it says has carried out arson attacks.
In 2018 at the UN, a senior Chinese official said Isa had been “participating, inciting and funding separatism and terrorism for years”. Amnesty International has noted that the CCP uses the term “separatism” to describe a range of activities that amount to little more than a peaceful expression of dissent.
“The terrorism charge is a big lie,” Isa says. “I have always advocated peaceful, non-violent campaigning.”
In 1997 China issued a red notice to Interpol about his alleged crimes. This was ignored by his current home Germany and other western countries, although he was briefly detained in Italy in 2017 and briefly denied entry into South Korea in 2009.
“I feel safe in Germany now,” he says. “But the arm of China is getting longer. I’ve been arrested in Italy. To be honest, I can only say that I’m safe right now, in this instant.”
We have already seen China use its power and technology to suppress democracy and civil rights beyond its own borders. “More than 20 countries are already using Chinese surveillance technology to repress their populations. Think about Iran, for example,” he says.
Human rights campaigners and some US politicians say the brutal Iranian regime is using video surveillance technology provided by a Chinese company, Tiandy Technologies, which is believed to have supplied Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and other security services
Last week, another Chinese firm, Hikvision, was linked to provision of surveillance cameras to Israel for use in the West Bank
Isa says even the projected altruism and internationalist spirit of the Belt and Road project is largely smoke and mirrors.
But other nations appear to be falling for it.
After meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last month, Pakistan’s caretaker premier Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar called his country’s partnership with the world’s number two economy a match “made in heaven”, adding: “We will always stand with China and trust you blindly.”
“The huge projects in Pakistan will be mostly run by Chinese companies,” says Isa. “There’s always a price to pay.”
One of WUC’s key campaigns is for the UN to establish a “special rapporteur on transnational repression” at the United Nations, to investigate the actions of authoritarian states like China that seek to silence dissent abroad.
In the UK and elsewhere.China and its United Front operatives have used social messaging apps to monitor and intimidate expatriates. Others have experienced intimidating phone calls threatening them or designed tp aimed at extracting personal information.
“I think the people in the UK should understand that China won’t stop. It doesn’t have a red line.
“We saw this in the unofficial Chinese police stations in the UK,” he says in reference to the news that Chinese agents have used bases in Britain to harass and coerce the Chinese here.
He notes that in some countries, including the UAE, China is even operating its own jails.
This sign of Beijing’s sinister influence abroad should be a wake-up call, he says.
In April last year, i reported how, with the world distracted by the detonation of the Ukraine war, Saudi Arabia was set to quietly deport a 13-year-old Uyghur child and her mother – along with two other Uyghurs – to China, where they faced imprisonment and torture, despite UN experts declaring that such deportation would be illegal.
The ugly publicity generated by the prospect of Muslim dissidents being bundled into a plane in the birthplace of the Prophet and being sent back to an Islamophobic police state may have stayed Riyadh’s hand for a while. But Isa’s sources have told him that Buheliqiemu Abula and her teenage daughter were recently deported to China.
“It’s shameful, but a majority of Arab and Muslim states are doing similar things to co-operate with China and win business.”
He believes it is possible – even essential – to join the dots between the suffering of Uyghurs and other peoples around the world.
Of the Ukraine conflict he notes that Russia is getting closer to China in a bid to boost global authoritarianism.
“In addition, China is trying to divide and conquer. It hopes to set western countries against each other and looks for weak links, like Hungary.”
He thinks that to protect itself and its own citizens and not just the oppressed elsewhere in the world, the West needs “to stay strong and be prepared to make some sacrifices”.
But Beijing’s actions closer to home are ever clearer.
Look at the evidence, says Isa. “We are suffering genocide. The Tibetans are suffering cultural genocide. Taiwanese independence and democracy is under threat. Hong Kong’s democracy has been destroyed.
“So if you simply put the economy first, you need to think what the world will look like in 30 year’s time.
“This is a global threat to democracy and the rule of law.”
As we finish the interview, Isa tells me he’s preparing to travel to Canada. The peripatetic campaigner is no longer able to go home, and not entirely safe in the rest of the world. But his work goes on, and he will continue saying it loud and clear to anyone – including hopefully, Britain’s new foreign secretary – who will listen.(i)
জুমবাংলা নিউজ সবার আগে পেতে Follow করুন জুমবাংলা গুগল নিউজ, জুমবাংলা টুইটার , জুমবাংলা ফেসবুক, জুমবাংলা টেলিগ্রাম এবং সাবস্ক্রাইব করুন জুমবাংলা ইউটিউব চ্যানেলে।
