China’s rights abuses in Xinjiang a ‘bellwether for a shifting global order’

From Democracy Digest

Recent events have stoked alarm among the sizeable Uighur diaspora in Turkey that the country is no longer the haven it has been for decades, The Financial Times reports:

Turkey hosts one of the largest population outside China of Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group who have faced a severe security clampdown in their native Xinjiang province. An estimated 1.5m Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been confined to Chinese internment camps, where human rights groups say they are forced to renounce their faith and scores have disappeared. Beijing defends the hardline measures as necessary to fight “extremism”.

China’s effort to line up countries to support it in the face of western criticism over human rights abuses in Xinjiang has become a “bellwether for a shifting global order”, said Sean Roberts, a director at The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. “If Turkey was to recognise that what’s happening in China is not a mass human rights violation, that would be a huge win for China,” he said.

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