Congrats to Rachel Harris, Simon Adams, Marc-André Renold and Alessandro Chechi, plus Hugh Eakin, whose chapters in this open access book all discuss the Chinese government’s systematic destruction of Uyghur heritage:
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities (Getty, 2022)
Full-book download is available here, chapters can be downloaded separately. The book’s online search function seems dysfunctional, but the PDFs can be searched.
See esp. Ch. 7, “Uyghur Heritage under China’s ‘Antireligious Extremism’ Campaigns,” by Rachel Harris; and Ch. 16, “Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities,” by Simon Adams — on how “cultural cleansing” has been used as strategy to destroy #Yazidi #Rohingya #Uyghurs & #Hazara … ; and Ch. 23, “International Human Rights Law and Cultural Heritage,” by Marc-André Renold and Alessandro Chechi, plus several more chapters, in passing. –The parallel suffering of the Kazakhs is not mentioned, it seems.
As far as I can see, the book also does not seem to discuss how nearly all Islamic countries, on cue from mighty China, have turned their back on the Uyghurs to let their mosques be bulldozed, Korans burned, and the imams sent to concentration camps.
We saw it again on Oct 6, 2022, UN HRC vote to kill any further debate of these ongoing Chinese atrocities, with the Islamic member countries voting in unison (exception: Somalia), to endorse China’s policies of genocide and religious erasure, by refusing to discuss even the UN:s own report on these matters; — even countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, which once seemed to offer some hope of decency and solidarity — and perhaps worst of all, the Gambia (! — which concurrently is leading the OIC-sponsored case in the Hague, against Burma over the Rohingya genocide) (but maybe they are abandoning that lawsuit now?). Cf. Rushan Abbas Twitter post.
In these days of deep despair, this online book was a nice surprise to find. Once again congrats to the authors, and editors, taking up the ongoing Uyghur catastrophe.
Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu