By Nina Larson
Tibetan and Uyghur representatives urged countries at a United Nations meeting last week to pressure China to repeal a new law they say aims to wipe out minority communities.
The Law on Ethnic Unity and Promotion of Progress, which takes effect on July 1, aims to create a “common” national identity among ethnic groups and “strengthen cohesion.”
But rights advocates accuse it was formed to provide Beijing with legal cover for pursuing existing policies of forced assimilation throughout the vast Han-majority country.
Among other things, the law penalizes involvement in “violent terrorist activities, ethnic separatist activities or religious extremist activities”.
UN rights chief Volker Turk has called for “the law to be repealed”, warning before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this month that it risked “deepening restrictions on the freedoms of language, education, practice of religion, culture, expression and assembly”.
During a council side event on Friday, Tibetan and Uyghur representatives outlined how they said their cultural, religious and linguistic identities were being criminalized.
‘cultural genocide’
By law, Tibetans are “no longer legally allowed to exist”, said Thinlay Chukki, the representative of the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Central and Eastern Europe, warning of a “cultural genocide”.
It is “legislating the erasure of Tibetans as a Tibetan identity, as a Tibetan culture, as a Tibetan language,” she told AFP.
China officially recognizes 55 official ethnic minorities within its borders who speak hundreds of languages and dialects.
But government policies have already directed Mandarin Chinese to be used as the language of instruction in some areas with large minority populations, including Tibet.
Chukki said the law was legalizing a system already in place of forcibly sending Tibetan children to residential boarding schools, where they were “forcefully subjected to the Mandarin language as well as Han Chinese culture”.
Activists say a similar system of boarding schools exists in the Xinjiang region, where the UN has warned of possible crimes against humanity targeting the mainly Muslim Uyghur minority – something China strongly denies.
Beijing wants to “destroy our entire identity, to separate the generations,” Zumretay Arkin, vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, told AFP.
The new law, she warned, “will completely eradicate Uyghur identity, heritage, religion. It will force people to adopt Han Chinese identity.”
‘bad’
Bhuchung Tsering, head of the research and monitoring unit at the International Campaign for Tibet, criticized the “evil tactic of going after the younger generation and cutting them off from their culture”.
Speaking to AFP ahead of Friday’s event, he pointed to numerous anecdotes of Tibetan children now “unable to talk to their parents”.
He also noted two sections of the law: one ordering parents to “teach their children about this new identity” and the other requiring citizens to report violations of the law.
“If you read these two together, you’re practically forcing children to report on their parents,” he said.
During Friday’s event, a Chinese representative in the audience defended the law and slammed “countries and organizations that repeatedly use human rights as a political tool to smear China.”
‘International Press’
Tibetan and Uyghur speakers urged other diplomats there and the UN to push China to repeal the legislation, pointing in particular to a clause that could hold overseas people and organizations liable for violating the new law.
This risked seeing “China increase its use of transnational repression against dissidents and human rights activists and defenders,” Arkin warned.
of China Vice Minister of Justice Hu Weilie said at a press conference last week that the clause was “legitimate” and “conforms with international practice”.
