Rahima Mahmut is unhappy with British foreign secretary James Cleverly’s August trip to China (“James Cleverly’s trip is a betrayal of the Uyghurs,” The Spectator, August 30, 2023). She writes:
Think of the genocides that have taken place in the past. Picture the hardened faces of the perpetrators you’ve seen in photographs in historical documentaries. Now imagine a British foreign secretary standing beside these perpetrators, shaking hands with them, gushing about how much he values their relationship. It seems unthinkable.
As a Uyghur, I don’t need to imagine this though—it happened today when James Cleverly traveled to China to stand beside the men who are attempting to destroy my people.
Cleverly will be well aware of China’s treatment of Uyghurs. Xi Jinping initiated his genocidal campaign against them as far back as 2016. The last few years have seen the largest incarceration of an ethnic group since the Holocaust. Uyghur survivors who have escaped have described torture, starvation, sterilisation, and horrific instances of gang rape in the so-called ‘re-education camps’ that are now ubiquitous in the Uyghur homeland. It is estimated that over one million Uyghurs are currently in these internment camps.
For Muslims outside the camps, Xi has made Orwell’s 1984 an everyday reality. They live under a suffocating surveillance infrastructure. The Uyghur region now resembles a high-tech prison….
Complicity in the name of comity is unfortunately nothing new in diplomatic encounters between relatively civilized states and the totalitarian states of the 20th and 21st centuries. It would be better to skip the trips to Munich, Moscow, and Beijing than to thus imply a sanction of such regimes and turn a blind eye to their atrocities.
Mahmut suggests that Cleverly could have made the visit worthwhile if instead of being publicly chummy with the torturers of her people, he had “risen to the occasion and publicly criticized China’s genocide.” Even if he had been kicked out of China for doing so, that would have been better than helping the mandarins of the regime pretend that he and they are part of the same moral universe.
