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Jakarta Post

US raises China’s Uighur problem with Muslim groups

Friendly visit: US Ambassador to Indonesia Joseph R

Dian Septiari (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, October 16, 2019

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US raises China’s Uighur problem with Muslim groups

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riendly visit: US Ambassador to Indonesia Joseph R. Donovan Jr. (left) chats with Haedar Nashir, the chairman of Indonesia’s second-largest Islamic organization Muhammadiyah, at the Muhammadiyah office in Jakarta on Tuesday. (JP/Seto Wardhana)

The United States’ envoy to Jakarta has begun a “long overdue” move to engage with leaders of Indonesia’s two largest Muslim organizations, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), as it looks for allies to pressure China over its alleged human rights abuses against the Uighur minority.

Muhammadiyah welcomed the move and expected the US to set an example in handling human rights abuses around the world — including in Yemen, where a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia has simmered since 2015.

US Ambassador to Indonesia Joseph R. Donovan Jr. on Tuesday visited the Muhammadiyah headquarters in Central Jakarta to meet group chairman Haedar Nashir and encourage the organization to speak out against China’s treatment of the Uighur minority.

“I encouraged Muhammadiyah to continue to speak out against the repression of the Uighur minority in China, and we agreed to meet again and to work closer together on all these issues,” he told reporters in Jakarta after the meeting.

The envoy said he wanted to express the US’ concerns about the repression of “perhaps more than 1 million” Uighurs in China's northwestern province.

A United Nations panel of human rights experts said last year that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China were being held in what appeared to be a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.

China has accused the US of meddling in its internal affairs, instead describing the complexes in remote Xinjiang as "vocational training centers" set up to stamp out extremism and give people new skills. The Chinese Embassy in Jakarta was not immediately available for comment.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo previously likened the situation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Reuters reports.

Donovan said his visit to the Muslim grassroots organization was long overdue. “We tried to do something like this earlier in the year but the timing hadn't worked out,” he said.

The US ambassador is scheduled to meet NU leaders on Wednesday.

Donovan’s Chinese counterpart in Jakarta, Xiao Qian, made a similar move late last year, visiting the leaders of the two Muslim groups to put a damper on the growing condemnation of China’s alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Muhammadiyah secretary-general Abdul Mu'ti said Muhammadiyah was of the view that any human rights violations were unjustified and should be investigated carefully.

“There has to be a fair verification process over the alleged violations of human rights and of course everything must be based on facts. We do not want this human rights issue to just become a political commodity for a certain country to use against another country,” he said.

He said human rights violations happened everywhere, including in Myanmar and Yemen, which was also briefly discussed with the US envoy.

“We understand the US is not in an easy position because the problems in Yemen have become a proxy war involving the Saudis and the Iranians, and we all know the US position on Iran and [on] the Saudis,” Mu’ti said.

“We hope the US can act as a bridge in the Yemen problem, even though that is not easy to do.”

The Xinjiang problem started to gain traction in Indonesia around the end of last year, when various Indonesian Muslim figures including from Muhammadiyah began to call for an investigation into alleged human rights violations against China’s Uighur population.

Since then, China has turned on the charm by arranging closely monitored junkets for representatives of various groups so they could see the region for themselves.

In February, 15 representatives from the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), NU and Muhammadiyah visited Xinjiang for a week on a tour organized by Beijing. They were given limited access to see facilities in Hotan and Kashgar that many rights groups claim are detention camps.

NU chairman Said Aqil Siradj previously said there was no need for Indonesia to raise any concerns over alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang because according to him it was “very good there, no need to talk about it”.

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