Massacre in East Turkestan

[muckefuck]

The news filtering out of Xinjiang, suggesting that Chinese security forces machine-gunned a peaceful protest (official total: 156 dead), reminds me once again how much it sucks to be a repressed minority without a charismatic international representative or, at very least, a substantial émigré community to lobby on your behalf. Had they been Tibetans--well, we know quite well what the reaction would've been, since we saw it during last year's riots. But the Uyghurs have the misfortune of being not only hopelessly obscure but also the wrong religion: scary bomb-flinging Muslims instead of cuddly quiescent Buddhists. As a result, we've done much worse than simply ignore them. In fact, the USA has further marginalised them and their struggle. This was the price the PRC demanded for their cooperation in the "War on Terror" and the Bush administration, in the absence of any advocates on their behalf at home, had no reason not to sell them out.

I know, I know: Let's add Uyghurs to the long, long list of innocents who have been screwed over in the name of satisfying the United States' short-sighted policy goals. I acknowledge that by spotlighting their unfair treatment, I'm playing favourites in the same way as all the Free Tibeters. The real losers in the game of international suffering are the scads of individuals who don't belong to any kind of coherent group based on simple criteria and, thus, are completely below the radar of even the most informal news organisations. Besides, it's not like all the condemnation of the Iranian crackdown from Obama on down has kept any of the protesters from being abducted, beaten, imprisoned, or otherwise abused.

Comments

Re: alas

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

my take on the last few millennia of history there is that the harder you push, the harder and faster they push back, which is why ShrubCo was gonna, you know, rebuild the country, only with substandard roads & infrastructure, impossible to replicate or maintain American style farming programs, and a propped up central government whose credibility rests on summer dry tinder. To my eye, Obama is doing about the best that I think can be done to rehabilitate the last 8 years, but it's a very bad hand we've been dealt all around over there, and I hold no hope that it wont all come down to ash yet