James Palmer | Vox

Conspiracy, paranoia, and real plots: the bizarre history of Turkey’s military coups

2016-07-22T14:03:00-04:00

Pro-Erdoğan supporters wave Turkish national flags during a rally at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 18, 2016, following the military failed coup attempt of July 15. | ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images

A lot is still uncertain about the failed coup in Turkey on July 15, but one thing seems clear: The coup leaders believed they were acting in a long Turkish military tradition of protecting Turkey’s democracy from its elected leaders. Since 1960, the military has seized the reins of power in Turkey four times, acting, in their view, to guard the values of the Turkish republic from those who would threaten it.

This time the threat, they thought, came from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan, who won a heated presidential election in 2014 after a long span as prime minister, has governed in an increasingly authoritarian fashion: censoring the press, arresting political opponents, brutally quashing protests, and attempting to abrogate greater and greater powers to his office. While eschewing radical Islamist movements and publicly reaffirming secularism, he’s given a stronger role to religious education and ramped up his own Islamic rhetoric.

It’s hard to puzzle out the truth amid the events of what Kerem Öktem, a professor of Southeast European studies and modern Turkey at the University of Graz, described to me as a “hyperreal coup,” where both Erdoğan and some of his opponents are “blurring the line between reality and fabrication.”

On the surface, the coup was the most recent exchange of fire between popularly elected leaders and a military that believes it, not the voters, knows best how to guard the country’s democratic legacy. But behind that, there’s a morass of conspiracy accusations, deep-rooted paranoia, and real plots that goes back decades.

Why does the army think it’s so special?

Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1922, the army has seen itself as the most important part of the country. Much of that is because of the man who made the nation, Mustafa Kemal — better known as Atatürk, “Father of the Turks.” (That’s a surname given to him by a grateful people in 1934, not the world’s greatest case of nominative determinism.) Go anywhere in Turkey and you’ll pass by busts of Atatürk gazing paternally down on the country he made.

Before Turkey, there was the Ottoman Empire, which by World War I was a crumbling, failed power trying desperately to reform. When the Ottomans picked the losing side in the war, it proved the final blow to the imperial system. Atatürk, one of the few successful Ottoman generals, carved the new, modern Turkish state out of the ruined body of the empire, establishing Turkey as we know it today.

He did so in the teeth of opposition from the victors, who had planned to split the Ottoman territories up between them, dividing up the fallen empire in a treaty signed in Sevres, France, in 1920. Brilliant resistance by Atatürk, including successful campaigning against an invading Greek army and others, produced the new nation.

That gave the army the most respected place in the new Turkey, but it also created a permanent military-political anxiety: “Sevres syndrome,” the belief that the rest of the world was always conspiring to split up Turkey. Outside forces weren’t the only enemy, however: Atatürk was determined to drag his country kicking and screaming into the modern world, and he saw religion as one of the chief obstacles to that.

The Ottomans had positioned themselves as the ordained leaders of Sunni Islam, but for Atatürk, Islam had been a dead weight on the country’s progress. Although he used religious language in public and claimed to be a Muslim in his autobiography, he was probably an atheist, or at least a tough-minded agnostic.

Atatürk borrowed a French idea, laïcité, the control of religion by the state. He brought religious bodies under the hand of the government, suppressed religious courts, changed the weekend from Friday and Saturday (the custom in most Muslim countries, since Friday is Islam’s holy day) to the Western style of Saturday and Sunday, and banned religious headgear for all but a select few.

The religious reforms were just one part of a much wider modernization program that included banning the traditional Turkish hat (called a fez) and switching from Arabic to Roman script, as well as visionary plans to promote women’s education, work, and political involvement. But while nobody was that attached to the fez, religious feeling would prove much harder to root out.

However, while the leaders of the new republic were secularists, even atheists, they were decidedly Sunni secularists — men who, as a local adaptation of a popular joke has it, believed “there is no Allah, and he chose Abu Bakr to lead the caliphate.” Mainstream Sunni institutions got softer treatment than more unorthodox forms of Islam like Sufism, yet alone Shia Muslims or Christians.

(This legacy lingered; when I worked at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul in 1994 as a teenager — I had an unusual childhood — the priests there had to switch from their clerical robes to business suits whenever they went outside to avoid being charged under the secularist laws. It was vanishingly rare for such a charge to be brought against Islamic preachers.)

That gave them the space to survive, and eventually to thrive again — and to play the role in politics that Atatürk had most feared.

Keeping democracy in hand — over and over again

After Atatürk’s death in 1938, “Kemalism,” as his policy of reform, secularization, and national unity came to be known, became the guiding ideal of the army, especially the officer class. With Islam out of fashion, Kemalism was the new faith, and Atatürk’s massive mausoleum, with its murals depicting the army guarding the republic, was its Mecca.

While Turkey was a one-party state, it was easy for the military to directly retain control. But as the country democratized after World War II, the growing power of the civilian government and a revival in religious practice increasingly worried military elites who saw themselves as the guardians of Atatürk’s legacy — especially against Islamic influence. The army still enjoyed plenty of privileges, including separate military courts that made its members virtually immune from civilian oversight or prosecution.

Yet that wasn’t enough. The military intervened repeatedly to keep Turkish democracy on what it thought was the right course in times of instability, staging forceful coups in 1960 and 1980 and effectively dismissing prime ministers from office in 1971 and 1997.

It banned numerous political parties, especially ones with strong Islamic ties. But at first, the main targets tended to be the left, particularly groups sympathetic to Turkey’s embattled Kurdish minority. In its self-appointed task as the “guardian of democracy,” the military committed numerous atrocities.

The worst period was in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, when hundreds of thousands of citizens, mostly young people with left-wing sympathies, were arrested and tortured. Each time, democracy was eventually restored, but with considerable restraints imposed by the army.

But it’s the 1997 coup that perhaps most typified Kemalist fears. Instead of being triggered by generalized instability, it targeted the power of the Islamic parties. These parties were riding a wave of renewed popularity — in large part because the military’s earlier actions had repressed more secular opposition groups and nearly shattered the left. The army’s thuggish excesses had ended up creating the very thing Kemalists most feared: a widely popular Islamic opposition.

It was this atmosphere that created the massive success of Erdoğan, a former mayor of Istanbul. His four-month prison sentence for reading an aggressively Islamist poem in 1997 only served to give him extra credibility to a public fed up with the military’s controls.

Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (more commonly known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) won a sweeping electoral victory against a divided opposition in 2002. Combined with a sudden economic boom in the early 2000s, this gave Erdoğan the mandate he needed to fight off Kemalist resistance.

The military, put off balance by the AKP’s success and as enthusiastic about Turkey’s sudden economic might as anyone else, failed to act. For his part, Erdoğan seemed to prefer pragmatism to Islamism, reassuring the public that he represented an accepting, compromising form of Islamic politics.

Turkey’s “deep state”: a political underworld

But to understand the atmosphere of fear and distrust swirling in Turkey, you need to take into account not just the military, but what Turks call the “deep state.” Buckle up, because things are about to get really weird.

You know your friend on Facebook who posts about how 9/11 was a CIA plot, Sandy Hook a false flag operation, and that Obama secretly conspired with Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden? Imagine that everything he said was, if not true, at least plausible, and you have some idea of what the deep background of Turkish politics looks like. Attempting to map out the relationships between the powerful ends up looking like one of those crazy boards full of string where the Illuminati control the Boy Scouts.

The term to know here is “deep state,” or devin devlet, a term coined in the 1970s to describe the shadowy anti-democratic cabals that allegedly linked the military, organized crime, terrorists, foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, the government, and the judiciary in Turkey.

A loose outline goes like this: From the 1950s onward, backed by CIA funds under the anti-communist “Operation Gladio” — a Europe-wide program to create stay-behind forces in the event of Soviet invasion — elements within the Turkish military suborned numerous other groups to pursue their agenda.

This included ties to organized crime and heroin smuggling, especially from the 1970s onward, and the use of ultranationalist terrorist groups such as the Grey Wolves, a fanatic pan-Turkic movement, to create instability and murder the military’s enemies.

There’s no doubt that many of these conspiracies are, or were, real, and that elements in the Turkish military have always been willing to use dirty tricks, murder, terrorism, and repression to achieve their goals. The basement of Turkish politics is deep, dark, and full of spiders.

But the idea that all the various plots are part of one deeper, continuous conspiracy is only half-true. The problem is that the “deep state” has always reflected the worst fears of those making accusations about it. To Islamists, its fundamental purpose is to crush religion; for liberals, it’s anti-democratic; for Kurds, it’s fanatically nationalist and anti-Kurdish; for nationalists, it’s secretly in league with the US; for anti-Semites, it’s an Israeli-backed scheme.

A labyrinth of conspiracies, some overlapping with each other, and many undertaken primarily to line the pockets of their backers, seems far more likely than a single, centrally directed grand conspiracy. But agencies inside the military, such as the “Special Warfare Department” and “Gendarmerie Counter-Terrorism Unit,” were undoubtedly the minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, crunching on the bones of thousands of sacrificial victims.

By the 2000s, the Turkish public was fed up with being lied to, eager for change, and a massive producer and consumer of new media. Major scandals in the late 1990s exposed the dirty links between the security forces, the government, and organized crime and fueled a desire to see the “deep state” exposed.

The increased openness, and the AKP’s anti-Kemalist sentiments, brought some of the atrocities of the past to light. The perpetrators of past coups were put on trial. Constitutional reforms weakened the role of the military, especially its courts. The reputation of the army plummeted in Transparency International’s surveys, from the most trusted national institution in 2004 to being perceived as just as corrupt as politicians by 2011.

Yet the idea of the deep state also acted as a vehicle for a new wave of political persecutions, and as a shield for the corrupt to defend themselves against accusations. That’s been particularly the case for Erdoğan, an enthusiastic campaigner for the “annihilation” of the deep state.

The exemplar was the 2008 Ergenekon accusations, where hundreds of defendants — a mixture of military officials and civil leaders — were blamed for a secret plot to overthrow the government. That plot possibly existed, in some form or another, but it was also clear that many of the defendants were there for opposing Erdoğan, and that the campaign was a way to further his own power.

Think of McCarthyism in the US. There were real Communist infiltrators, but their numbers were tiny compared to the frenzy of accusations hurled by McCarthy for the sake of his own career.

So it is with Erdoğan: As the coup has bloodily shown, he has real and dangerous opponents — but his accusations have always gone far beyond their real numbers, and threaten innocent and guilty alike. (This prescient 2012 New Yorker profile by Dexter Filkins is worth reading in full.) The Sledgehammer accusations in 2010, another supposed military plot, served the same purpose as Ergenekon while being even less plausible.

Instead of bringing a cleansing light to Turkish politics, then, the AKP-led attacks on the “deep state” ended up being part of the transformation of its own support base into a new form of the deep state.

“There is plausible circumstantial evidence that the old deep state, together with new additions, is back on the streets,” Öktem told me. “The kind of violence and symbolic humiliation and extrajudicial killings is extremely reminiscent of the 1990s, when deep state operatives were pretty much ruling the Kurdish provinces. The novelty is the presence of actors who seem to use a jihadist rhetoric and a deeply religious language.”

False flags and exiled teachers

Complicating this is the role of Fethullah Gülen, a charismatic Islamic preacher, businessman, and educator who has built up a massive movement in Turkey since the 1970s (although he’s lived in the US since 1999 for “health reasons”).

His movement emphasizes modernity, community, and social action, and he has strong ties to Sufism, a peaceful, esoteric Islamic tradition with a long history in Turkey. This let him build up his power base while being seen as a potential ally to every side.

Even his form of Islam was acceptable to the Kemalists, with its emphasis on private worship and obedience to the Turkish state; it also struck a chord with millions of Turks who valued faith but didn’t want it to dominate life.

The Gülenist movement emphasized joining the state in order to gradually shift it toward Islamic ideals; thousands of military and police officers, judges, and civil servants were members or sympathizers, often owing their job to other Gülenists.

At first, Gülen was a strong ally of Erdoğan. Gülenist media cheered on the Ergenekon case and called for the destruction of the old “deep state.” The Gülenists could be ruthless in exploiting their power, too; investigative journalist Ahmet Şik was detained for a year, and his work destroyed, when he wrote a book on the movement.

But in late 2013, Erdoğan turned on Gülen and his followers, accusing them of being the new deep state, working to subvert the intelligence services and overthrow his government Although tensions had been building for some time, the immediate cause was a corruption scandal involving the children of senior AKP leaders, including Erdoğan, which the president claimed was a plot by the Gülenists.

Today, Gülen functions in Erdoğan’s rhetoric in much the same way Leon Trotsky did in Joseph Stalin’s: as a traitor and manipulator who can be blamed for everything that goes wrong. Gülen’s supporters have been systematically purged from the police and the government.

It is no surprise, then, that Erdoğan immediately accused the Gülenists of masterminding Friday’s coup attempt. While it is unclear at this point whether Gülen and his followers were in any way involved (which they have flatly denied), it’s certainly possible, since the army was virtually the only area that hadn’t yet been ideologically cleansed since 2013.

That meant there was still a substantial collection of officers with Gülenist ties, as there had been in every Turkish institution before the purges. They had good reason to fear that they might be the next target — which could have been what prompted the sloppy and ill-planned coup.

But in a twist typical of conspiratorial politics, Turks opposed to Erdoğan, including Gülen, are already accusing him of being behind the plot. That seems an improbable and highly risky move.

Yet he’s seizing the chance to eliminate his enemies, calling the coup a “gift from God.” The event is being compared to the 1933 Reichstag fire that gave Hitler his final excuse to seize absolute power; Erdoğan has said outright in the past that he admires Hitler’s “reforms.”

The military’s threat to Turkish democracy may now be over, perhaps for good. But with it may go other aspects of the Kemalist legacy: a desire to look to Europe, a preference for the modern and the urban, and the will to keep religion from dominating politics.

Erdoğan’s populist authoritarianism threatens a frightening change in Turkey — a dictatorship with the barest veneer of democracy laid over it as cover, fueled by resentment and religious conviction, and drawing in elements from jihadists to intelligence officers to organized crime to shield itself and assault its enemies.

Disturbing pictures of soldiers lynched on the street are already emerging, although it’s hard to tell whether these represent semi-organized violence by Erdoğan-affiliated militias or the fury of the crowd in response to the army’s own killings. Erdoğan has begun a wave of rolling purges and arrests removing the last vestiges of his political and judicial opposition.

Despite their fear of Erdoğan, the opposition turned out into the streets that night to save democracy from the military. Whether they can keep together to defend the rights the Turkish people faced down tanks to protect is another question.

James Palmer is a writer and historian living in Beijing.

There are more than 20 million Muslims in China. For some, piety is a dangerous political act.

2016-07-15T09:14:49-04:00

Chinese riot police watch a Muslim ethnic Uighur woman protest in Urumqi in China's far west Xinjiang province on July 7, 2009. | Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

For devout Muslims, Ramadan, the lunar month when they fast from dawn to dusk, is a time for self-discipline, reflection, and deepening their relationship with God and others. But for the Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang autonomous ethnic region, the far-western Chinese province governed tightly by Beijing, the fast isn’t a devotion but a political weapon.

As in previous years, there are numerous reports that Muslims in Xinjiang have been forced to eat during the day. Restaurants have been forbidden from closing, mosques are closely monitored or shut, and government workers and students have been expressly banned from fasting. Not showing up to a midday college meal or village feast can get your name put on the kind of list you don’t want to be on.

In other parts of China, though, fasting Muslims face little more than the thoughtless questions from colleagues that Muslims in the West frequently encounter. So why, then, is an act that’s private and religious in Xi’an or Beijing viewed in Xinjiang as public, political, and dangerous?

The answer is that for Xinjiang’s Muslim residents, who are deeply resentful about rule from Beijing, religious piety is increasingly a signal of resistance to Chinese domination. And even when it isn’t, local Chinese officials will treat it as if it is anyway.

Wait, China has Muslims?

A lot of people might be surprised to learn that China has any Muslims, let alone a substantial Muslim population. But in fact, Muslims have been settling in China since the foundation of the faith more than 1,400 years ago. Many came during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), when whole populations shifted across the vast Mongol Empire.

Today there are more than 20 million Muslims in China. (For comparison, there are an estimated 3.3 million Muslims in the United States, and the entire population of Saudi Arabia is around 29 million, nearly all of whom are Muslim). Ten out of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities are Sunni Muslims.

One such group is the Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur), a Turkic-speaking ethnic group native to China’s vast far western Xinjiang region (officially called the Xinjiang autonomous ethnic region).

Although Chinese empires have often ruled parts of Xinjiang throughout history, their control over it was only ever shaky at best: Even when claimed by Chinese rulers, it was often independent in practice. The Qing Empire changed its name to Xinjiang (“New Frontier”) when it annexed the region as an official Chinese province in 1884, after reconquering the territory from local warlords and rebels.

The idea of a distinct ethnic group that identifies as “Uighur” is also relatively new, dating back to 1921 when locals adopted the term from Russia. The Russian government had itself borrowed the term from a medieval Turkic empire that had once seriously threatened Chinese power — a connection that appealed to the modern Uighur.

But while the Uighur name is new, the people’s sense of themselves as a separate ethnic group different from their neighbors — and determinedly non-Chinese — is much, much older.

The “three evil forces”: terrorism, religious extremism, and separatism

For this reason, many Uighur today passionately believe their region should be its own independent country, like their Central Asian neighbors. The proposed name for this country is “East Turkestan,” which harks back to ideas of pan-Turkic unity that were popular in the 1920s. Like many aspiring countries, it even has a flag, left over from a short-lived and unrecognized republic formed by rebels in 1933–’34.

Many Uighur still keep the flags — secretly. That’s because for Beijing, talk of East Turkestan is criminal sedition: an attempt to break up China and throw the country into chaos. (The concept of a single, unified China with unchanging borders is historical nonsense, but it has a powerful grip on Chinese.) Indeed, separatism is grouped in Chinese propaganda with terrorism and religious extremism as the “three evil forces” that threaten the region.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, any ideas of independence, especially in border areas such as Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, have been rigorously suppressed. Uighur have been encouraged to think of themselves as one ethnicity among many in China, all contributing to the nation. But with language, culture, and politics dominated by the Han Chinese majority, that’s a hard pill for the Uighur to swallow.

Ethnic tensions in Xinjiang between the Uighur, who are the majority population in Xinjiang, and the Han Chinese, who are China’s majority ethnicity but are in the minority in Xinjiang — have grown in recent decades as more and more newcomers (mostly Han) have begun settling in the oil-rich province since the beginning of China’s economic reforms in 1979. Energy has created new jobs, but most of these are limited to Mandarin speakers, which excludes the majority of Uighur.

In 2009, those tensions exploded in a vicious pogrom by young Uighur men against Han, in which at least 197 people were killed. (Though the violence was primarily directed against Han, other Muslim groups and ethnic minorities were also targets, since they were seen as intruders threatening Uighur businesses and culture.)

The pogrom, crushed by China’s paramilitary units, kicked off a wave of counter-violence from Han communities. Beijing reined in the Han communal violence but instituted a new wave of repression that further fueled Uighur resentment.

As a result, Xinjiang today is essentially locked in a low-level insurgency, with dozens dying every month. However, the immense scale of the territory (the province is approximately 635,900 square miles — for comparison, the state of Texas is just 268,596 square miles), coupled with the inability of journalists to visit many areas, makes it hard to tell who’s killing whom. What the Chinese authorities call a terrorist attack, exiled Uighur groups will describe as a massacre of protesters by the police.

China blames every incidence of violence on the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” a supposed Islamist terrorist group founded by militant Uighur separatists with ties to global Islamic terrorist networks.

However, much of what is known about the group comes from the Chinese authorities and press, who are eager to label any opposition to Beijing as terrorism. Indeed, many analysts think it’s more likely there are a number of splinter groups operating in the region, with different agendas and varying degrees of ties to global Islamist terrorism.

But there is growing evidence of jihadist propaganda spreading among an angry Uighur population, mixed in among the hugely popular Turkish and Central Asian music and videos exchanged on DVDs and memory sticks.

There have also been verifiable terrorist attacks, as the violence — which had previously been largely confined to Xinjiang — has begun to spill over into the rest of China. In 2014, a small Uighur group armed with knives attacked a crowd at a railway station in Kunming, hundreds of miles from Xinjiang, killing 29 innocent victims and sparking widespread horror and rage.

For many Uighur, especially young men, the cycle of violence and repression has caused them to become more anti-Chinese than ever.

Why is the Ramadan fast so important?

In this heated context, Ramadan fasting, as well as many other outward expressions of Islamic piety and identity, has become a potent political symbol. Uighur observance of Ramadan has sometimes been spotty in the past, especially outside of Xinjiang, but many Uighur have become more religiously observant in recent years.

Starting around the 1990s, displays of public piety became more common, historian Rian Thum, an assistant professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, told me, as many Uighur began reasserting their Islamic identities in deliberate opposition to the Chinese state.

The official Chinese position is that Muslims in Xinjiang enjoy “greater religious freedom than at any time in history,” according to a white paper the Chinese government released just before Ramadan this year. The paper claims that any restrictions are the result of existing regulations against Chinese Communist Party members, who must voluntarily pledge atheism, or because of regulations that forbid the religious indoctrination of minors.

In practice, however, while private fasting is possible, attempts at communal piety are strictly restricted in Xinjiang. Mosques are closed during the day, while restaurants are forced to remain open. Students’ and government workers’ names are checked for attendance at mandated daytime meals, and the individuals are called in for questioning if they fail to eat. Repeated offenses can mean being expelled from school or fired from a government job.

According to one Chinese expert who interpreted the white paper, the policy is essentially that Muslims “without political obligations” are welcome to fast. But what these “political obligations” actually are is kept deliberately vague, allowing the state the flexibility to punish as it pleases. And in Xinjiang, even the course of the sun can be political.

Officially, the region is in the same single, Beijing-centered time zone that every other part of China is in. Even though the country spans roughly as much territory as the continental US, which has four different time zones, the whole of China sticks to the same clock, thanks to a 1949 policy implemented by Mao Zedong in an effort to promote national unity.

In reality, though, Xinjiang is so far west that it’s two hours behind the capital. Since Muslims determine when to begin and end their fasts each day based on the position of the sun, this means that Uighur keep “local time” whenever possible. But as far as the Chinese state authorities in Beijing are concerned, letting the sun, rather than Beijing, decide when you eat implies defiance.

The fasting restrictions are just one aspect of a raft of religious constraints applied tightly in Xinjiang, although the details vary from area to area. Schoolchildren are forced to recite atheistic pledges. Public prayer is often forbidden, and even parents teaching the Quran to their children at home can be punished by authorities claiming this constitutes “illegal religious schools.”

Uighur are often harassed for visible symbols of faith, with long beards and the veil singled out as signs of the “three evil forces” of separatism, terrorism, and extremism. Propaganda posters throughout the region extol the virtues of ditching religious symbols. In some regions, street patrols harass veil-wearing women, while businesses are “asked” to sign pledges that they won’t allow the hirsute or veiled onto their premises. Refusing to shave can mean prison time.

Good Muslims, bad Uighur

It might be tempting to attribute this to Chinese state policy aimed at suppressing religious sentiment in general and promoting communist-style atheism. And indeed, that’s how the Communist Party defends the policy: It claims that Uighur simply have to follow the same rules that apply to everyone, such as requiring Communist Party members to be atheists and forbidding the religious education of minors.

But while religious groups are often squeezed tightly in China, the restrictions on the Uighur are far tighter than for anyone else. It’s not just party members who can’t fast, but all government workers. It’s not just minors who are forced to eat in the daytime, but college students too.

And it’s not religion by itself that worries Beijing most, but the potential religion offers for resistance — especially among a fiercely independent people sitting on a critical strategic border region.

The restrictions placed on Uighur are not generally applied to members of other religions, especially those seen as indigenously Chinese, such as (accurately) Daoism and (inaccurately) Buddhism. Buddhist monasteries regularly run schools, and temples in Beijing fill up every year with party members praying for their children’s examination success.

And, perhaps even more telling, the restrictions aren’t even applied to most other Muslims in China. Outside of Xinjiang, restrictions on Ramadan fasting or other Islamic religious practices are relatively uncommon. And when they do occur, they’re more on a scale with the occasional persecutions of Christian or Buddhist sects — nothing close to the concerted repression campaign against the Uighur.

For the Chinese authorities, forcing Uighur to publicly deny their own traditions serves multiple purposes, as asking Christians to trample the cross once did in Japan or pushing Catholics to attend Protestant mass did in Elizabethan England. It directly asserts the authority of Beijing over everyday life. It allows potential dissidents and militants to be singled out and monitored or arrested. And it puts pressure on young Uighur, in particular, to accept the official Chinese Communist Party narrative.

The pressure is exceptionally harsh when it acts as a gate closing off potential education and future possibilities. Since access to good jobs, especially outside of Xinjiang, depends on receiving a Chinese-language education, adhering to even the most basic Islamic religious practices requires a huge personal sacrifice by young Uighur enrolled in the state education system, as they risk being kicked out if they disobeying restrictions.

By pushing them to deny their own practices, officials hope that young Uighur will internalize the party’s values in order to justify their own submission.

Anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise in China — but the government has an incentive to keep it in check

The past decade has seen distrust of Muslims spread beyond Xinjiang to a much wider swath of China, as James Leibold, a political scientist and senior lecturer at Australia’s La Trobe University, recently noted in a paper for the Jamestown Foundation.

Online commentators are agitating against “Islamization” and “Arabization,” and government policies on issues such as halal butchers — that is, butchers who follow Islamic religious laws regarding the slaughter of animals and food preparation — are becoming increasingly contentious.

Paranoid critics argue that laws regulating the halal meat trade or allowing the building of new mosques are, in fact, cover for a wider campaign of infiltration and “Islamization” of a vulnerable China. Public opinion has turned hostile toward Muslims, with anti-Islamic memes often picked up from far-right European and US media and repackaged on social media for a Chinese audience.

Yet China’s Muslims are unlikely to face wide-scale persecution — at least from the government. Even as the authorities cracked down in Xinjiang over Ramadan, Leibold noted to me in an email that the central government had issued notices calling for officials to “respect and uphold the cultural customs and legal rights of ethnic minorities” and redoubled propaganda efforts (such as the white paper) to preach China’s tolerance of religious freedom.

Unsurprisingly, Beijing is doing this not out of concern for religious rights but for political ends. Beijing is currently pursuing an ambitious geopolitical plan known as the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Here’s a really good basic description of it from Scott Kennedy and David A. Parker, two experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (a DC-based think tank) who have studied the policy:

Often referred to jointly as the “One Belt, One Road,” details released so far by China’s official media outlets show the “Belt” as a planned network of overland road and rail routes, oil and natural gas pipelines, and other infrastructure projects that will stretch from Xi’an in central China, through Central Asia, and ultimately reach as far as Moscow, Rotterdam, and Venice.

Perhaps awkwardly named, the “Road” is its maritime equivalent: a network of planned port and other coastal infrastructure projects that dot the map from South and Southeast Asia to East Africa and the northern Mediterranean Sea.

It’s a massive project, and one on which China’s president, Xi Jinping, has effectively staked his own political legacy. Showing support for the project is mandatory for Chinese academics and officials trying to prove their loyalty to Xi or advance their own careers.

To make it happen, China needs the cooperation of a whole bunch of countries — including a substantial number of Muslim ones. This means the central government in Beijing has a pretty strong incentive to make sure it’s not perceived as persecuting Muslims all over China, as that would almost certainly infuriate many of its Islamic partner nations.

Indeed, right after scathing reports about the Ramadan restrictions on Uighur in Xinjiang began making headlines in Pakistan and Indonesia, the Chinese government invited officials from both countries to come visit the region and then took them on very carefully controlled, government-guided tours to convince them that Uighur have religious freedom.

On the other hand, though, many of these Muslim countries also have strong incentives to keep up political and trade relations with a powerful neighbor like China, even if that means looking the other way at its repression of their Muslim brethren. For instance, following their Potemkin tours, those Pakistani and Indonesian officials seemed eager to parrot the official Chinese government line about religious freedom in Xinjiang.

There are a lot of Muslims in the world, and China doesn’t want to piss them off; unfortunately, there just aren’t very many Uighur.

James Palmer is a writer and historian living in Beijing.