Category Archives: International Law

Block China With An Independent East Turkistan

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019 

By Rukiye Turdush, Uyghur Research Institute

Uighurs living in Turkey walk toward the Chinese embassy during a demonstration to commemorate the anniversary of deadly ethnic unrest in 1997 in Gulja, in China’s far-western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in Ankara on February 5, 2014. The protesters carried placards that read Stop the Chinese Massacre against Uighurs , 64 years occupation of East Turkistan by China and Freedom for Eastern Turkistan and waved the blue flag with a white star and a crescent representing Eastern Turkistan. AFP/ADEM ALTAN/GETTY

People of East Turkistan, called Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party, have endured the long and oppressive colonisation of China for many years. Although China did not round up people of East Turkistan and shoot them with machine guns in front of the world, they have locked them up and are eliminating them one by one in concentration camps. [1]

Every Uyghur living outside China is searching and asking for the location of their disappeared family members.  Uyghur girls are forced to marry Han Chinese as a part of their gene washing policy. Uyghur children are forcibly removed from their families as Chinese officials with genocidal intention proclaim, “cut the lineage, cut the roots, cut the connection.” [2]

Around three million Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslims are currently locked up in concentration camps and are being subjected to torture and death.[3] The religion, culture and identity of Muslims in East Turkistan are now entirely banned. The world has remained silent in its moral obligation to do something about this tragedy.

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Why Chaos Is Here To Stay

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019

By Laurent Chamontin

A confusing traffic light system with multiple signal heads. Getty

The 2010s are characterized by an exceptional amount of political volatility (e.g., Brexit, and Donald Trump’s election). This volatility resulted from an unprecedented level of complexity, whether at the level of individuals, nations, or the world, generating outbursts of populism, loss of long-term orientation, dysfunctional newspeak, and decay of international institutions. To overcome this challenge, democracies must rethink their education policies and promote a redesign of multilateral institutions to better coexist with the nation state.

If the purpose of politics is to provide mankind with the consideration of perspectives for the purpose of organization, then indeed we are experiencing a world-scale political crisis. Any nostalgia for supposedly more stable eras put aside, political volatility has increased to a level unprecedented since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Continue reading →

Great Power Political Convergence and UN Reform: Solving the Democratic Deficit

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 4, April 2019

By Anders Corr

A bronze sculpture titled “Non-Violence” by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd stands to the north of the United Nations Building in New York. It depicts the knotted barrel of a Colt Python .357 Magnum. Reuterswärd designed the sculpture following the murder of songwriter John Lennon. Credit: Vicente Montoya/Getty.

The international system operates across military, economic, and diplomatic hierarchies of states situated in competing alliances and international organizations. The major powers assert the predominance of influence in these alliances and international organizations, leading to a severe and global democratic deficit. Huge numbers of people, most notably the approximately 18% of the world’s population living in China, and 2% of the population living in Russia, have no democratically-appointed representation at the United Nations or influence in the world’s most important alliance systems.

The global democratic deficit leads to critical inefficiencies and unfair policies. States use unequal access to military, wealth, and knowledge resources to influence international organizations and alliance systems for individual state gains that lead to global inefficiencies and trade-offs where individual major power goals contradict the public good, or the national interests of other states. Perhaps the most dangerous such inefficiency is the rising risk of nuclear war, as countries like the U.S. and China compete to impose their competing visions of the future on the world.

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East Turkistan Needs You

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

East Turkestanis and their supporters demonstrate in front of the White House, calling for US support for an independent East Turkestan, currently occupied by China. The demonstration occurred on November 12, 2018, the anniversary of the founding of the First and Second East Turkestan Republics. Photo: ETNAM

By Salih Hudayar

Few Americans have ever heard of “Xinjiang”. Even fewer have ever heard it called by its proper name (the name its oppressed inhabitants use): “East Turkistan”. This strategically-significant region, my ancestral Homeland, is home to an ethnically Turkic, Muslim population of people called the Uyghurs. On official maps, it borders eight countries, but most Uyghurs will count China and Tibet as separate, independent countries and tell you that it borders ten. And therein lies the issue.

The vast majority of Uyghurs, like the vast majority of Tibetans, don’t see themselves as part of China. They see China as an occupying force, and rightly so. Up until late 1949 — when the Chinese Communist Party invaded the region and overthrew our government — it was an independent Republic. Most Uyghurs feel no connection to Beijing. Imagine for a moment that the United States Army invaded the Canadian province of Alberta. Surely the residents of Alberta would feel no connection to Washington, D.C.

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State Sponsorship of Uyghur Separatists: the History and Current Policy Options for East Turkestan (Xinjiang, China)

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

By Anders Corr, Ph.D.

A 1922 map of China. Source: John Bartholomew, The Times Atlas, London, 1922.

This article is a slight revision of a talk given on March 25, 2019, in Oxford, England. The associated university is not named at the request of the host organization’s president, who was concerned about possible repercussions.

I would like to thank the Terrorism Research Society (TRS) for kindly hosting this event. 

The historical map shown here is from 1922, and shows what China looked like when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 in Shanghai. It shows East Turkestan and Tibet in the west as autonomous regions — much more autonomous than they are today.

East Turkestan is now occupied militarily by China and officially called the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. In Chinese, “Xinjiang” means “new frontier”. But Xinjiang has an ancient history as a culturally diverse crossroads of trading on what the Chinese call “the silk road”, but which was actually more Iranian than Chinese. It was central to the ancient Persian trading areas called the Sogdian network by historians. It has been home to Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, to Mongolians, Indians, Greeks, Koreans, Buddhists, and Christians. Since at least the First East Turkestan Republic of 1933 is has been called East Turkestan by Turkic Muslim residents. The Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has indiscriminately labeled Uyghurs who support an independent East Turkestan today, as separatist and terrorist in their goals and means. The acronym of the Chinese Communist Party is the “CCP”. The CCP seeks to colonize and extinguish all linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity in Xinjiang today, in order to assimilate the territory under its own preferred Han Chinese race, and their own atheist communist ideology.

In the face of such extreme repression, some Uyghurs have indeed advocated separatism and utilized terrorism and violence, including street riots, as a means.

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