Terrorwashing a Genocide: How the war on terror facilitated Communist China's repression of Uyghurs.

• Author: Mauk, Ben
• Position: BOOKS

IN 2002, THE United States sent 22 Uyghur men to Guantanamo Bay, where they joined more than 700 other detainees living beyond the comforts of the Geneva Convention. The men were Chinese citizens who U.S. intelligence believed had received weapons training in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military had advertised $5,000 a head for their capture on leaflets circulated among bounty hunters in Pakistan. After their camp in Afghanistan was bombed in the early days of the American invasion, 18 of the men spent months hiding in the caves of Tora Bora, hoping to return to China. When they finally made it across the border to Pakistan, their mountain guides lured them to a mosque, where they were turned over to U.S. forces and flown to Gitmo.

Years passed. After a series of tribunals in the mid-2000s, the military concluded that none of the detained men was an enemy combatant. None could be charged with a crime under U.S. law. Until their detention, none had even heard of Al Qaeda, the great enemy of America with whom their obscure militant group was meant to be closely allied. The prisoners "only have one enemy, and that's the Chinese," one of the detainees told a tribunal in 2004. "They have been torturing us and killing us all: old, young, men, women, little children, and unborn children."

Something had clearly gone amiss. Yet the prospect of bringing the detainees into the U.S. was unthinkable to military and political leaders, even after a federal district court judge ordered some of the men released. Nor could they be shipped to China, to be forcibly disappeared inside an opaque prison system where political dissidents are routinely executed. (Although the exact figure is a state secret, China kills thousands of prisoners every year, several times the number of executions performed by the rest of the world combined.)

Small countries eventually stepped in to resolve what had become a very American paradox of habeas corpus. In 2006, Albania accepted five of the men. In 2009, four more--the youngest of whom, at 30, had been in prison since he was 23--found asylum in Bermuda. That same year, many of the remaining Uyghurs were temporarily resettled in the small Pacific island nation of Palau, although one man was rejected because he had developed a debilitating mental disorder at Guantanamo that Palauan hospitals were not equipped to treat. Finally, after more than a decade in detention, the last three detainees were accepted in 2013 by Slovakia.

At the time, critics saw the odyssey of Guantanamo's Uyghur detainees as an indictment of the U.S. war on terror. In the light of more recent events, that same odyssey now reads like a fable of Uyghur life under aglobal war on terror--an early chapter in the story of an ethnic minority willfully misconstrued by powerful nation-states, their threat to imperial expansion obscenely exaggerated.

Both stories involve post-9/11 forms of cross-border policing as well as new ways of constructing fugitive populations on which to test them. The difference is that what was once an American obsession is now an international one. "Terrorism" has become the opportunistic cover for governments around the world looking to subdue any kind of non-state agitator: ethnic nationalists in Russia, pirates in Indonesia, environmentalists in the Philippines, Kurdish revolutionaries in Turkey. There is hardly a government anywhere that has not adopted some feature of the war on terror, from its ideological abstractions of good and evil to the special permissions it grants states to monitor and control citizens.

THE EVOLUTION IS nowhere so stark as in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a frontier territory whose minority Uyghur population is almost certainly the most monitored and controlled on the planet. How did it happen that, at the dawn of the war on terror, the United States came to target 22 men from China who had never heard of Al Qaeda or committed any crime against...