The Lack of Coverage On The Uyghur Crisis

Ozan Kose

The international media has unarguably failed to make the Uighur Muslims crisis in China relevant. They have fallen short in making this current event as relevant as it can and this failed the Uighur people of Xinjiang, whose voices are being silenced one “re-education” camp at a time. There has not been near enough international coverage on this urgent crisis, and as a result of the news media not setting the agenda for this to be viewed as a pressing issue, not enough has been done socially and politically. As this humanitarian crisis has largely failed to make massive headlines or breaking news, British Broadcasting Chanel (BBC) is one of the few mainstream news networks that have had coverage concerning this story. For the number of families being torn apart, people being detained, exploited, and targeted purely for their race and religion, there has been nowhere near enough effort to make this story relevant across the world. Without the news media covering this crisis, the urgency of the issue is reduced from a social perspective, and it made it more difficult to hold the Chinese government accountable for its actions. Change is impossible if there is silence. In a time when breaking news headlines are what people pay attention to and remember the most, a few articles here and there are insufficient to engage the public in the current ethnic cleansing that is happening in Xinjiang today.

The Turkish originating Muslim minority of Xinjiang are facing genocide and an extremely clear violation of human rights that deserves to be breaking news. I use the term genocide as defined by the United Nations in article two of the Convention of Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; genocide is committing acts “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," including causing mental harm, preventing births within a certain group, as well as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. These are all acts allegedly committed in the camps as shared by numerous Uighurs that have managed to escape and the limited investigations that have been done into the situation. Survivors allege being forced to go against their religion by drinking alcohol and eating pork as well as having their children taken away from them. It is estimated that over a million Uighurs have been detained in these camps with research showing that “women have been forcibly subjected to forms of birth control” according to BBC coverage of the issue.

Local Chinese journalists are heavily censored and lack the freedom of speech or press required to be able to cover this issue. This could be one of the many reasons to explain the lack of coverage from within the country. It is difficult to cover government in deeply complex situations when journalistic freedom and mobility are restricted. China is not an easy place to cover as demonstrated by the VICE in the documentary “China’s Vanishing Muslims” where the reporter, Isobel Yeung, filmed undercover. She was followed in the streets and was stopped and questioned every time she was caught trying to interview people. However, throughout history, there have been many stories happening in secretive, censored, or authoritarian states; this does not mean the story is less worthy of being reported on.

Right now, the Uighur Muslims are voiceless. It is our duty to accurately report on and fight for the Uighurs to tell their stories because they are not able to. Not only are the Uighurs silenced but so are local journalists. Foreign media must take on that responsibility and make the world listen to voices that must be heard, or the world will face the risk of the Uighurs’ voices slowly disappearing one by one, unheard.

There is very clearly an overload of information today as the world globalizes more each day and the consumption of information is near-constant. Due to these circumstances, it can be difficult to prioritize which stories are priorities, however, we must not let that lead to the failure to report on a huge human rights crisis that is affecting millions of people.