At 7 o’clock last Thursday, dozens of protesters suddenly marched through the doors of Nike Town on Oxford Street in London. Amidst the chaos – as management at Nike scrambled to get a hold of the situation – came a clear voice through a megaphone: ‘We are here, because in Xinjiang province in China, Nike are using Uighur people as slave labourers.’
The protesters assertion followed a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) the previous Sunday that found that between 2017 and 2019, 80,000 people from China’s Muslim Uighur minority had been working under ‘conditions that strongly suggested forced labour’.
Using open source public documents, satellite imagery, and adverts from China, ASPI found evidence that suggested huge numbers of China’s Uighur minority were being used by 83 global brands – like Nike, Apple and Dell – as forced labourers.
As one advert ASPI uncovered stated: “The advantages of Xinjiang workers are: semi-military style management, can withstand hardship, no loss of personnel … minimum order 100 workers!”
ASPI findings further evidence to corroborate the growing belief that between one and three million Uighurs are being held against their will in detention centres in Xinjiang; ASPI claim that many of the 80,000 forced Uighur workers were transferred from detention camps in Xinjiang to factories in Western China – and, further, that the threat of transfer back to the camps was being used to keep them there.
In 2018, Al Jazeera reported that “10-20 percent of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang are currently experiencing or have endured the horrors of the largest network of internment camps since World War II.”
The claim these camps are detention centres imprisoning Uighurs on the basis of their identify – rather than being education centres for educational skills, as the Chinese government claims they are – has garnered significant credibility amongst commentators on China since a recent leak emerged from within the Chinese state.
On the 18th of February, the Guardian reported on a 137-page leak regarding the detention of 300 Uighur people, that strongly suggested that the ‘crime’ of the Uighurs (a largely Muslim community) detained was merely that of their ethnic and religious identity.
Arrestable offences listed in the leaked documents included; growing a beard, wearing a veil, accidentally visiting a foreign website, and; praying or attending a mosque.
Moreover, fears for the wider Uighur community in Xinjiang – outside these camps – have also begun to grow. Al Jazeera reported on the 18th of February that Uighur families in Xinjiang are subject to intense surveillance; Al Jazeera also reported on facial recognition software that has been placed on the doors of Uighur homes to monitor entry, and Han Chinese ‘siblings’ that have been sent to live in many Uighur homes and keep an eye on Uighur inhabitants.
The rampant surge in Coronavirus is proving a further fear for many in the Uighur community. As Al Jazeera wrote on the 13th of February, ‘exiled Uighurs’ have deep fears about the consequences of the virus hitting the camps.
Dilnur Reyhan, a French sociologist of Uighur descent, expressed this fear explicitly: “People are starting to panic. Our families are there, dealing with the camps and the virus, and we do not know if they have enough to eat or if they have masks”.
On the 24th of February, Mansur Mirovale, writing for Al Jazeera, despaired at the international silence on the plight of the Uighur community – especially among Muslim countries.
While the response of major global governments has been muted, Uighur communities abroad have been leading loud and determined protests across the globe.
While the scale of the Uighurs plight is daunting, hope can be gleaned from even these smaller actions – like the modest protest outside the Chinese embassy in London last Thursday.
The group that assembled outside the Chinese embassy – by standing together, as Uighurs, Muslims, Jews, leftists, and concerned members of the public – refused to let ethnicity and religion divide them.
Indeed, the group were so determined to stand up to division that, despite the rain and cold, they did not go home when the rally ended. Instead, they marched towards Nike Town on Oxford Street to show the world that the Uighurs plight would not go unnoticed.
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