Over the past three years, increased global attention has been drawn to China’s crackdown on more than a million members of its Uighur-Muslim minority in Xinjiang.
China has long faced accusations that it operates detention centres masked as “vocational training” camps, where Muslims are held against their will indefinitely and subjected to torture and abuse.
Activists, human rights organisations and even governments - including the United States administration and Canada’s Parliament - have repeatedly referred to China’s actions as genocide, while Australia has criticised the reports as “deeply disturbing”.
But China is not alone in systemically targeting Muslims.
There is mounting evidence of other countries carrying out similar actions, including mass detention and implementing restrictions on religious freedom while defending China’s record.
A recent found that government restrictions on religion had globally reached their highest point in more than a decade.
India
For more than two years, India, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, has been slowly implementing policies that could effectively see millions of people forced into statelessness.
Since 2019, the country has been building a series of detention camps despite protests from international human rights groups.
That same year, India published its National Register of Citizens (NRC) - a list of every registered Indian citizen in the northeastern state of Assam. The Modi government says many Muslims in Assam, whose families came from neighbouring Bangladesh, are not rightful citizens of the country.
The Modi government pushed through both chambers of parliament the Citizenship Amendment Bill - a mass amnesty bill that handed citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh living in the country without authorisation.
But Muslims were excluded from the bill. Instead, the Modi government has pledged to make the NRC nationwide before the 2024 election, which will include the name of every man, woman and child who is not an Indian citizen.
Protests in Kolkata against the use of detention camps in India. Source: Hindustan Times
For Muslims who can’t produce citizenship documents, Mr Modi intends to evict them from their communities and place them in detention.
Calls from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to see Muslims included on the bill were unsuccessful.
Genocide Watch has issued a genocide alert for the Muslim population living in the Indian states of Kashmir and Assam.
Meanwhile across the country, authorities stand accused of ignoring mob violence against Muslims, including lynchings and other violent attacks.
The country’s Home Minister, Amit Shah, has previously referred to Muslims as "termites" and "infiltrators".
“Infiltrators are like termites in the soil of Bengal,” Mr Shah said in 2019 at a rally in West Bengal.
“A Bharatiya Janata Party government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal,” he said, referring to illegal immigrants from neighbouring Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
Last week, The Guardian reported that around 170 Rohingya refugees living in India had been rounded up into detention centres by Indian authorities and told they would be forcibly deported back to Myanmar, as part of a wider nationwide crackdown against Rohingyas.
Violence and discrimination relating to Hindu nationalists have been documented. In the latest , India's status declined from "Free" to "Partly Free" due to "a multiyear pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies have presided over rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and pursued a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters".
"While India is a multiparty democracy, the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has presided over discriminatory policies and increased violence affecting the Muslim population," the report said.
While the Australian government has been quick to condemn the treatment of Uighurs in China, it was been comparatively silent on India's alleged human rights abuses.
Sri Lanka
On Sunday, Sri Lanka announced that it would use a controversial anti-terror law to deal with religious extremism.
The government gave itself sweeping powers to detain suspects for up to two years for “de-radicalisation” purposes.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said the regulations would allow for the detention of anyone suspected of causing “acts of violence or religious, racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill will or hostility between different communities”.
At the same time, the Sri Lankan government announced the banning of the burqa, and the closing of more than 1,000 Islamic schools accused of flouting national education policy.
The moves come ahead of the second anniversary of the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks that killed 279 people and wounded over 500.
The coordinated suicide bombings were blamed on a local Islamic extremist group.
Muslims make up just under 10 per cent of Sri Lanka’s 22 million population.
Sri Lanka also recently defended China’s treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council earlier this month, Ambassador C.A. Chandraprema accused the UN of making “various sensational claims” about allegations of abuse against Muslims in China.
“We have serious concerns about the credibility of these sources. We note that the policy of freedom of religion has been fully implemented in the Xinjiang province,” Ambassador Chandraprema said.
“Many Muslim countries have been destroyed in the past two decades in the guise of promoting democracy. However, Xinjiang has been at peace and has enjoyed democracy with the rest of China during this period.”
Myanmar
The Muslim-majority Rohingya in northern Myanmar have long been targeted by Myanmar armed forces and police, with the United Nations accusing the country of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Mynamar soldiers have been ordered to “kill all you see” in their massacre of Rohingyas, with mass murders, mass rapes, and villages destroyed in a crackdown that's both religious and ethnic.
A brutal crackdown by the Myanmar military in August 2017 saw more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims flee to southern Bangladesh.
Rohingya Muslims, who numbered around one million in Myanmar at the beginning of that year, represent the largest percentage of Muslims in Myanmar.
The Myanmar government has systemically denied them citizenship and refused to recognise them as a people.
More than half a million Rohingya are still believed to be living in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine province, with UN investigators warning of “serious risk that genocidal actions may occur or recur”.
Meanwhile, many of those who have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh risk becoming effectively stateless.
As of last week, Australia has suspended military co-operation with Myanmar and redirected aid to non-government organisations in response to escalating violence following last month's military coup.
Muslim-majority Rohingya in northern Myanmar have been targeted by Myanmar armed forces and police since 2015. Source: AAP
"We condemn the use of lethal force or violence against civilians exercising their universal rights, including the right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly," Senator Payne said in a statement on Sunday.
"We continue to strongly urge the Myanmar security forces to exercise restraint and refrain from violence against civilians.
"Australia's development program is also being redirected to the immediate humanitarian needs of the most vulnerable and poor including the Rohingyas and other ethnic minorities."
China
Over the past few years, Uighur activists have attempted to draw the world's attention to a vast network of “re-education” camps, where human rights groups and former detainees say people are being subject to forced political indoctrination, abuse and torture.
The Chinese government claims the camps are "voluntary" in nature and used to counter religious extremism.
A recent report by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy - a US-based foreign policy think tank - found .
The report cited examples of the torture of Uighurs, internment and forced labour, widespread rape and sexual abuse as well as systematic forced abortions and sterilizations.
The Australian government has repeatedly criticised the Chinese government for enforcing “repressive measures” against Uighurs, although unlike other countries such as Canada and the United States, it has stopped short of referring to their actions as “genocide”.
The federal government and Labor blocked an attempt by Independent Senator Rex Patrick last week to push through a Senate motion that would have recognised the Chinese government's actions against the Muslim minority as "genocide".
China has strongly denied allegations of human rights abuses in the western Chinese province.
Dr Michael Shoebridge, the Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Defence, Strategy and National Security program, said Muslim communities around the world have faced increased targeting over the past 20 years in the face of terror attacks.
But he stressed that China's oppression of its Uighurs remains distinct from other instances of minority persecution.
“A distinctive feature of China's violent oppression of its Uighur and Turkic ethnic populations is the scale of the camps and of the mass detentions - over one million people - and the abuses suffered in the camps ranging from beatings, interrogations, forced sterilisation, sexual assault and indoctrination,” he said.
“There is also the suffering of those living outside camps in tightly surveilled communities who are subject to arbitrary detention, beatings and arrest.
“The scale can hide the individual atrocities - which we are fortunately able to hear about through the graphic accounts of escapees and survivors.
“The scale of the Chinese government's current abuses has also reached the level where it is credible to use the term 'genocide' when it comes to the Turkic and Uighur communities.”
He also noted the Chinese government was distinct in its efforts to silence and intimidate Uighurs, and prevent both its own media and foreign journalists from reporting on Xinjiang from within mainland China.
“Other governments, particularly those with more open societies and connections to the wider journalistic world, fortunately, cannot replicate this level of domestic and foreign control.”
