Islamophobia in Three Asian Contexts: India, Myanmar and China.

Justice for All Analysis for OHCHR

INTRODUCTION
What is Islamophobia? Serving as conceptual framework for divisive and reactionary politics, the
Islamophobic narrative asserts that Islam and Muslims constitute an essential and existential threat
both to national security and to national purity. Some scholars1 have understood this prejudice as
arising from an Orientalist power structure, but some of the harshest impacts of Islamophobia exist
in Asian nations. Social disruption occurs as each nation struggles with the economic and cultural
challenges of adapting to globalization. As Faisal Devji (March 2020)2 observes, “Increasingly
associated with violence in the west... Islamophobia’s brutality is most readily seen in Asia, a
continent awaiting its recognition as capitalism’s new home.”

As a human rights advocacy organization, Justice for All3 advocates for persecuted Muslim
minorities with a special focus on the plight of the Rohingya, the Uighur and the Muslim minorities
in India and Kashmir. In each case, a nation’s dramatic opening to new markets has increased
opportunities for exploitation. Serving to divide, weaken and exploit a diverse population, those
that promote an Islamophobic narrative frequently link it to a securitization framework.
Amplifying fears of real and imagined threats, an authoritarian and even paranoid mindset
manifests itself both in military force and mob violence.

Therefore, though contributing social and economic factors exist for exclusionary and even
genocidal policies in these areas, Islamophobia drives popular support for extreme and destructive
social policies, magnified by grassroots social media as well as incendiary speeches by
leadership. Thus, Burman Buddhist Supremacist ideology, Han Chauvinism, and the Hindutva
movement all serve as tools for elites to manage diverse populations through fear and mutual
mistrust.

While this paper will review the character and impact of Islamophobia in these three Asian
contexts, we note that like Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is a global trend. It exists in Europe and
in the United States, where it is expressed both in popular stereotypes and in government policies
such as the “Muslim Ban,” mass surveillance and counter-terrorism policies that too often conflate
religiosity with extremism. However, though the “multicultural” nature of the USA remains
contested, and “culture wars” continue to rage, there has been sufficient popular acceptance,
economic integration, and legal protection of minorities to withstand the pressure for greater
division. With its legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and genocidal displacement of Native
Americans, the USA offers complex lessons in the messy business of making “one out of many.”
And yet, the formal and informal leadership of India, Myanmar and China will each have to find
its own political will to embrace difference, pluralism and coexistence.

INDIA
India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Damodardas Modi, is leader of the Hindu ultra-
nationalist BJP party, The BJP party is founded on the Hindutva ideology, a modern rightwing
ultra-nationalist formulation first mentioned in V.D. Savarkar’s 1923 book Hindutva, which
constructs an idealized Hindu as archetypical citizen of India. Hindutva envisions India to have
always been a Hindu nation and perceives Islam and Muslims as an essentially alien force which
threaten India through invasion and war. This results in an exclusionary national narrative focused
exclusively on the rights of Hindus that marginalizes a number of religious and ethnic identities.

Hindutva is manifested in both extreme and softer forms, ranging from a demand for greater
influence of Hindu principles in the state’s decision-making processes to the expulsion, killing, or
conversion of all non-Hindus. The fact that India is the largest democracy in the world does not
minimize the divisive and discriminatory nature of the BJP and its affinity to a fascistic
worldview. Indeed, the BJP party and its main arm, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
were inspired by both Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascists in Italy. The RSS was implicated in
the assassination of the ‘Father of the Indian Nation,’ Mahatma Gandhi and followers even went
as far to stage a re-enactment and celebrate the murder’s success on the 71st anniversary. The
BJP’s platform and India’s policies use fear and demonization to target marginalized populations
including Christians, Dalits (lower caste Hindus), Muslims, and Sikhs.4

In a speech from 2016, the BJP Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship
stated, “as long as there is Islam in the world, there will be terrorism. Until we uproot Islam, we
can’t remove terrorism.”5 In 2019 BJP President Amit Shah promised, “We will ensure
implementation of NRC in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the
country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs.”6 This threat refers to the National Register of Citizens
(NRC) in the state of Assam, used to purge the region and sent 1.9 million now stateless people to
detention centers.7

Both the 2019 change in Kashmir’s legal status and the intensification of mob violence in the
region reflects the spread of Hindutva ideology, which reflects a desire to “take back” the imagined
and currently divided homeland. After its first election victory, the BJP party undertook massive
purges of voters from the electoral rosters, suppressing voters during the actual elections and
violence and intimidation at the polls.

In 2019 the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which grants fast-tracked
Indian citizenship to previously illegal immigrants who entered the country before 2015, and who
are Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Parsi, as well as to Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh
and Pakistan. The act excludes Muslims.

The role of the media and, in particular, social media should not be underestimated as the BJP’s
leadership and grassroots have successfully deployed it to deadly consequences. In one example
of social media’s role in spreading hate, according to the Indian Express8, a WhatsApp group was
used to plan the riots and attacks against Muslims and others who were in Delhi protesting the
Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.

According to NDTV, by mid-2019, the use of hateful and divisive language by top politicians in
India increased by nearly 500 percent since the BJP-led government came to power. NDTV
scanned nearly 1,300 articles and cross-referenced this with databases. Researchers went through
1,000 tweets of politicians and public figures.9
Disinformation spreads easily on social media10, for example the false videos alleging that
Rohingya Muslim refugees are cannibals that was shared in coordinated posts on WhatsApp and
Facebook11. Even after these were removed, they were shared again during the 2019 Parliamentary
elections. Facebook moderation proved unable to protect minority populations12. Rohingya
refugees in India have faced violent threats from local leaders, and their refugee camps have been
burned.

Responding to anti-Muslim hysteria, additional developments have included the spread of violent
cow protection vigilante groups13 and the embrace of conspiracy theories known as the “love
jihad,” ie that Muslim men were systematically stealing Hindu brides, a form of racial and religious
panic without factual basis.14

The NRC/CAA can be understood as a religious based filter imposed on Indian law. However,
there are now other laws such as visa overstay laws that have a religious filter. Muslims who
overstay their visa are fined at a much higher rate than non-Muslims. Recently even the
Bangladeshi embassy staff who had to leave because of Covid were fined. Hindu staff received
very low fines, whereas Muslim staff members were fined at a much higher rate.

Moreover, bail granting procedures for Muslims are often delayed, keeping the journalists or
activists in jail for months at end. Non-Muslim media figures such as Arnab Goswami are treated
with more deference than Muslim journalists and rights defenders such as Siddique Kappan.15

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been framed as a Muslim problem or another type of
“religious” invasion. This framing was articulated in the media as the “CoronaJihad” or “Corona
Terrorism,” paradigmatic of populist and ultra-nationalist politicians utilizing crisis to stoke racial,
ethnic, and religious tensions. After the Coronavirus hit India, the Modi government announced a
sudden lockdown. The Tabligh Jamaat, a Muslim reformist group, was holding a conference in
Delhi, with attendees from all over the world. Supporters of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party began
a Social Media campaign targeting Muslims and spread rumors that the Tabligh Jamaat were
responsible for spreading Coronavirus in India. Hashtags such as #Coronajihad and #Quranovirus
were used to propagate this narrative. There was no attempt by the Modi government to dispel
these falsehoods. At the same time, there were also large gatherings in Hindu temples, but it was
only the Tabligh Jamaat which was reported negatively on by Indian media.

Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, attended a busy Hindu celebration a
day into the lockdown. And 40,000 people in 20 villages were quarantined in Punjab state after a
Covid-19 outbreak was linked to a Sikh preacher at a large gathering who had returned from a trip
to Italy and Germany, ignoring advice to self-quarantine16. And hundreds of thousands celebrated
a 10-day temple festival in Kerala state around the same time the gathering in Delhi was
happening17.

The consequences of this disinformation campaign have been great and small. In April 2020 two
newborn babies died after hospitals refused to admit their Muslim mothers amid a surge in
coronavirus-related Islamophobia.18
KASHMIR

The Kashmir region is split between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars over the
territory while claiming the region in its entirety. Since India’s de-facto annexation of Kashmir on
August 5, 2019, security forces have arrested thousands of young men, raided people’s homes,
inflicted beatings and electric shocks, and threatened to take away female relatives. Thousands of
protesters over the past year have been wounded in pellet-gun attacks, including hundreds blinded
in one or both eyes. For seven months, until March 2020, the area was under a communications
blackout with social media and internet access banned.

As we will see with Rakhine State in Myanmar, and with Xinjiang in the final section, cultural
supremacism has been securitized to justify aggressive and comprehensive control of an occupied
or colonized region asserting its rights for autonomy and self-determination.19

MYANMAR

In Myanmar/Burma, the systematic promotion of Islamophobia has been an important driver of

the Rohingya genocide. Spreading hatred on Facebook, over the last ten years the Burmese military
and its allies among Buddhist nationalist groups have worked to ensure widespread popular
rejection of this Muslim minority.

Despite some grassroots initiatives promoting pluralism and coexistence, this racist and
xenophobic rejection arises from a Burmanization movement that marginalizes numerous non-
Burman ethnicities but takes special aim at Muslim minorities. The 2015 Race and Religion laws
restricting intermarriage with Muslims were enacted because of widespread promotion of a public
narrative warning of the threat of “Islamization” ie that Muslims would take over the nation,
despite Muslims comprising less than five percent of the population. Even after 740,000 Rohingya
Muslims were forced out of Rakhine State by systematic, extremely brutal military attacks in
August and September 2017, Buddhist supremacists have claimed that Muslim nations are in a
conspiracy to make Myanmar look bad.20

While Rohingya have borne the brunt of Islamophobia, losing freedom of movement, loss of
access to education, work and voting rights, Muslims throughout Burma have experienced
harassment, mosque closures and a hostile atmosphere of suspicion21. During the 2020 pandemic22,
Muslims have been arrested23 and in general faced harsher consequences for violation of curfew
than Buddhist or even Christian minorities.24

In April 2020, three artists were jailed for three months for their “Coronavirus Awareness” mural
which some Buddhist monks perceived as disrespectful.25 In “The Rise of Religious Offence in
Transitional Myanmar” (2019), Iselin Frydenlund has examined the rise of blasphemy laws in
Myanmar, and linked them to the post-colonial adaptation of Penal Code laws intended to ensure
intercommunal harmony among British imperial subjects. During the decades of dictatorship, the
Burmese military government used the same laws to rein in speech, first in a secular, neo-Marxist
framework and then appealing to traditional Buddhist values. However, blasphemy is not a sin in
traditional Pali Buddhist practice but instead has been manufactured as a category of “religious
offence” that is opportunistically employed as a tool of Burman Buddhist domination.

The anthropologist Nick Cheesman has often written insightfully on Burmese social complexity
and in his 2017 ‘How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude
Rohingya’ examines the Burmese concept of approved “national races,” or taingyintha. He notes
that, “Ironically, the “surpassing symbolic and juridical power of national races is for people
denied civil and political rights at once the problem and their solution.”26

The Myanmar Government insists Rohingya are actually “Bengali” ie, foreigners, and only offers
identity documentation to that effect. In recent years, the authorities have created a tiered and
hierarchical system of rights based less on residency, or place of birth, than on ethnic “nationality.”
Scholar Natalie Brinham has studied the impact of these digital identity systems.27

The Rohingya have been excluded from the artificial and politicized list of approved nationalities.
Rohingya exclusion became formalized after the 2015 national census, funded by the UN’s FPWA
and the British Government, among others. Furthermore, in the late 2015 national elections,
Rohingya residents were for the first time excluded both from running for office and from voting.
Moreover, the NLD party, which won the election quite decisively, refused to run any Muslim
candidates in any local race in the nation.

The 2015 NLD success soon brought Aung San Suu Kyi into a power sharing relationship with
the military as per the 2008 Constitution, but in addition to presiding over the Rohingya Genocide
she has done nothing to reform the Constitution, the Race and Religion Laws, or the 1982
Citizenship Laws that stripped most Rohingya of their citizenship rights. Nor did she speak up for
the Rohingya during this time.28

In January 2017, State Counsellor Suu Kyi’s longtime advisor Ko Ni was assassinated at Yangon
Airport. He was a distinguished lawyer from a Muslim family. After he had publicly criticized the
Citizenship Laws and called for constitutional reforms, he had received frequent death threats.
Noticeably, Aung San Suu Kyi failed to attend his funeral. While the gunman was arrested, there
is evidence of a conspiracy among military intelligence officials. The government has failed to
properly respond to these credible allegations.29

Facebook is ubiquitous in Myanmar and notoriously has been a vehicle for spreading anti-Muslim
hatred. Despite complaints from ATHAN and other civil society coalitions in Myanmar and
elsewhere, it took four years for the tech giant to offer appropriate response, such as taking down
the pages run by perpetrators of mass atrocities. Even now, Facebook algorithms often do not
distinguish between human rights activist websites and promoters of violence. And rather
shockingly, Facebook lawyers resist legal requests to share evidence made by lawyers prosecuting
genocide in international courts.30
Not only have over 350 Rohingya villages been burned and bulldozed, and hundreds of historical
monuments, graveyards and mosques been destroyed, but the UN Mapping Unit has followed Myanmar
government practice of removing the Rohingya place names from their places of origin. In “Heritage
Destruction in Myanmar’s Rakhine State: Legal and Illegal Iconoclasm,”31 Ronan Lee observes that
heritage destruction in Myanmar’s Rakhine state should be understood as part the authorities’ policies of
genocide against the Rohingya. He calls on UNESCO to take action. Unfortunately, UNESCO World
Heritage Status has, in effect, become a tool for Burman supremacism and other forms of ethno-nationalism,
according to scholar Azzezah Kanji,32 who describes how Myanmar, India and China all commodify
traditional cultures for tourist dollars, while persecuting the same minority groups.

CHINA/XINJIANG

In addition to the majority Han population, up to 55 officially recognized “nationalities” live today
in China, occupying 60 percent of its territory. Among them, over 23 million practicing Muslims
make up less than 2% of the country's population. Most are Uighur, a Turkic cultural group, or are
labeled as Hui, ethnically similar to the Han ethnic majority. Chinese Muslims are densely
clustered in the northwestern regions of Gansu, Ningxia and Xinjiang, but live across the country,
as they have for more than a thousand years.

According to National Public Radio (NPR) news reports (November 2020, see below) Muslims in
China now fear that religious freedoms are returning to the crisis situation as in the days of the
Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, when signs of religiosity where harshly persecuted.
Religious bookstores are being closed across China, mosques are being closed or monitored, and
Chinese Islamic associations are being infiltrated by Communist functionaries. NPR quotes a
Chinese Muslim publisher comparing the current policies to early oppression: "The persecution
we are facing now is worse than that time."

Last year, NPR reported33 that authorities had forced nearly all mosques in Ningxia and the eastern
province of Henan to "renovate" by removing their domes and Arabic script. Demolitions have
since extended to mosques in Zhejiang and Gansu provinces. Imams must now take political
education classes as part of a revamped certification program. In addition, in September 2020, at
the start of the fall semester, public schools in Sanya began banning female students from wearing
headscarves to class. “Videos shared with NPR show the female students being cordoned outside
the Tianya Utsul Elementary School because they refused to comply.”34

However, it is in Xinjiang that the anti-Muslim policies are most dramatic. Since President Xi
Jinping (習近平) came to power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has implemented
aggressive social re-engineering efforts targeting Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. The government
has been up to 2 million Muslims in a vast gulag system of re-education/concentration camps,
essentially operating slave labor and brainwashing programs to replace religious beliefs and ethnic
culture. As a result of these detentions, tens of thousands of young children have lost contact with
their parents, communities and culture.
Although CCP authorities often describe these internment camps as schools, they also liken them
to hospitals. This is not the first time China has used medical analogies to suppress a religious
minority. “Historically, it’s comparable to the strategy toward Falun Gong,” said Adrian Zenz, a
researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology in Germany. A government document
published last year in Khotan Prefecture described35 forced indoctrination as “a free hospital
treatment for the masses with sick thinking.”

There is ample documentation leaked from governmental sources that prove the existence of the
internment camps. For example, Adrian Zenz analyses 78 re-education facility-related
procurement and construction bids, nearly all destined for regions with significant Uyghur or other
Muslim populations. Nearly all bids were announced beginning in March 2017, just before the
“Regulations on De-extremification” were published.36

Chinese Authorities in Xinjiang have been collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and
blood types of all residents in the region between the age of 12 and 65.37 This comprehensive
collection of biodata challenges the ownership a individual feels over his or her body, now a
commodity of the state. Sad to say, the international community is complicit in this.38

The increasingly harsh security approach to governing the Uighur minority over the last twenty
years may have had the ‘paradoxical effect of strengthening the central role of Islam in Uighur
life’ and radicalizing its interpretation by Muslim minorities (Fuller and Lipman 2004: 344).
Chinese authorities have long feared that Uighurs will attempt to establish their own national
homeland in Xinjiang, which Uighur refer to as East Turkestan. In 2009, ethnic riots there resulted
in hundreds of deaths, and a small number of Uighurs have carried out terrorist attacks in the
following years. Immediately after this, the CCP increased arrests and disappearances targeting
the trained professional class, while initiating the ‘Becoming Relatives’ program, involving CCP
cadre homestays in Uyghur homes.

China has destroyed historic Xinjiang mosques39, shrines and Muslim cemeteries40. Meanwhile,
to modernize it for tourism, the Chinese government has also destroyed the old city of Kashgar,
“the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia.”41

Scholar Reza Hasmath emphasizes inequalities deriving from Xinjiang’s status as a ‘garrison state’
or ‘internal colony’ in China as an important driver of this oppression42. As in Tibet, Han settler
activity placed local residents in structural disadvantage by consolidating executive power in the
hands of Han officials. However, it is impossible to ignore the prevailing ideology of anti-Muslim
chauvinism, even disguised as the “Global War on Terror” with Chinese Characteristics.

The CCP itself authored China’s constitution and laws embracing China’s ethnic, cultural and
religious diversity. However, its harsh, inhumanly comprehensive consolidation of state control in
Xinjiang and beyond does not conform to those founding principles.

CONCLUSION: NEVER AGAIN?

The 2019 Gert Rosenthal UN Independent Inquiry 43 makes clear how the United Nations failed
to stop genocide in Myanmar just as it failed to stop mass atrocities in Sri Lanka. Now, in failing
to respond to genocidal and Islamophobic oppression of the Uighur minority, with atrocity
prevention mechanisms, investigations, or sanctions, the United Nations and its member nations
undermine Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles and betray the core values of the UDHR.44
END NOTES
1 https://www.crg.berkeley.edu/research/islamophobia-research-documentation-project/
2 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/27/xinjiang-germany-islamophobia-global-phenomenon
3 www.justiceforall.org
4 https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/India.pdf
5 https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/union-minister-anantkumar-hegde-cant-wipe-out-terrorism-till-we-uproot-islam-1785351
6 https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/political-opportunism-in-india-exploiting-islamophobia/
7 https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/india-narendra-modi-protests-muslim-islamophobia-a9251701.html
8 https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/northeast-delhi-riots-whatsapp-group-6488320/ and

https://scroll.in/article/942300/explainer-how-whatsapp-was-hacked-to-spy-on-indian-dissidents-and-who-did-it
9 https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/under-narendra-modi-government-vip-hate-speech-skyrockets-by-500-1838925
10 https://www.wired.com/story/indias-frightening-descent-social-media-terror/
11 https://www.equalitylabs.org/facebookindiareport/#key-findings
12 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/15/facebook-ignored-hate-speech-by-indias-bjp-politicians-report/
13 https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/02/19/india-vigilante-cow-protection-groups-attack-minorities
14 https://www.equalitylabs.org/facebookindiareport
15 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/13/india-top-court-under-fire-for-bailing-out-divisive-tv-presenter and

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54865071
16 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52061915
17 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52147260 and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53165436 and

https://www.thedp.com/article/islamaphobia-tweet-engineering-professor-penn-coronavirus
18 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/19/indian-hospitals-refuse-admit-muslims-coronavirus-causes-islamophobia/
19 https://www.justiceforall.org/free-kashmir/ and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/25/pakistan-pm-khan-slams-india-

over-kashmir-islamophobia and https://iphobiacenter.org/covid-19-and-indias-

islamophobia/?fbclid=IwAR2mzehVxjcYMpRb9elbY52QXmmmztDdyQNtWWDi1bC1kgIzXBZk59jiDGY
20 Myanmar’s Buddhist-Muslim Crisis: Rohingya, Arakanese, and Burmese Narratives of Siege and Fear by John Clifford Holt |
21 https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/05/08/burma-two-islamic-schools-shuttered-rangoon and http://www.asianews.it/news-

en/Three-mosques-closed-near-Yangon-following-threats-by-Buddhist-nationalists-47042.html and
https://www.mmtimes.com/news/muslims-seek-reopening-100-mosques-across-country.html
22 https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/myanmar-blames-the-rohingya-for-covid-19-and-that-s-a-death-sentence-39843
23 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/02/myanmar-muslims-face-charges-for-holding-ramadan-prayers
24 See p. 9 in our report https://www.justiceforall.org/burma-task-force/report-regarding-icj-ruling-compliance-in-burma-for-may/

and https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/may/myanmar-coronavirus-pastor-arrest-david-lah-persecution.html
25 https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/artists-freed-anti-buddhist-claims-dropped-covid-19-mural-myanmar.html
26 DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476
27
https://files.institutesi.org/Locked_In_Locked_Out_The_Rohingya_Briefing_Paper.pdf
28 Ronan Lee, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations Volume 25, 2014 - Issue 3: Islam and Muslim-Buddhist and Muslim-
Christian relations in Southeast Asia
See also video Is Aung San Suu Kyi An Islamophobe? | Video Documentary
Sept 2019, The Stateless https://www.thestateless.com/2019/06/is-aung-san-suu-kyi-an-islamophobe-video-documentary.html
29 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-murder-politics/
30
https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-gambia/
31 Journal International Journal of Heritage Studies Volume 26, 2020 - Issue 5
DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2019.1666294
32 https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/8/4/how-ethnonationalists-use-the-unesco-world-heritage-label/
33 https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/763356996/afraid-we-will-become-the-next-xinjiang-chinas-hui-muslims-face-crackdown
34 https://www.npr.org/2020/11/21/932169863/china-targets-muslim-scholars-and-writers-with-increasingly-harsh-restrictions
35https://www.academia.edu/36638456/_Thoroughly_Reforming_them_Toward_a_Healthy_Heart_Attitude_Chinas_Political_Re

_Education_Campaign_in_Xinjiang
36 https://jamestown.org/program/evidence-for-chinas-political-re-education-campaign-in-xinjiang/
37 https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/13/china-minority-region-collects-dna-millions and

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighurs-xinjiang.html
38 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/business/china-xinjiang-uighur-dna-thermo-fisher.html
39 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/bulldozing-mosques-china-war-uighur-culture-xinjiang
40 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/09/chinas-destruction-of-uighur-burial-grounds-then-and-now
41 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/asia/28kashgar.html
42 Hasmath, R January 2019 Central Asian Survey 38(1):46-60 DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2018.1496067 Also see; Future

Responses to Managing Muslim Ethnic Minorities in China: Lessons Learned July 2020 Conference: Working Paper.
43 https://www.un.org/sg/sites/www.un.org.sg/files/atoms/files/Myanmar%20Report%20-%20May%202019.pdf
44 https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/