One Million Muslim Uighurs Have Been Detained by China, the U.N. Says. Where’s the Global Outrage?

It was on September 16, 2001, five days after the 9/11 attacks, that President George W. Bush declared his now-infamous “war on terrorism.” Other governments around the world followed suit — but few matched the speed, intensity, and sheer cynicism with which the autocrats in Beijing aligned themselves with the Bush Administration.

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Fast forward 17 years: On Friday, a panel of U.N. human rights experts said Uighurs in Xinjiang were being treated as “enemies of the state” and announced that it had received credible reports about the “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” in “counter-extremism centers.”

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Other economic factors come into play, too: Xinjiang is home to the country’s largest reserves of coal and natural gas.

Fighting terrorism, though, has become a useful cover for authoritarian governments around the world.

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