Page 168 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
166

But because Mao Zedong could not allow any citizen of China to hold alle-
giance to any authority outside the Communist Party, under Mao these
government-run bodies allowed no religious activity. Throughout the
three decades that Mao ruled China, the organizations of the "three self
movement" worked with the Chinese Communist Party to eliminate reli-
gion and to promote the ideology of the Communist Party. Maoism be-
came China's only legal religion, and Mao's "Little Red Book" its primary
religious text. 125
Both the Uyghur Muslims in eastern Turkestan and the Buddhists
of Tibet became targets of bloody brutality. The Chinese Communist
Party tried to control them by reducing their populations and destroy-
ing their religious beliefs. Other Communist regimes in Asia continued
Mao's hostility to religion. In the genocide committed against their own
people in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge targeted the minority Cham
community of Muslims with particular cruelty. The Black Book of
Communism describes the brutality they inflicted against the Cham:
In 1973, mosques were destroyed and prayers banned in the liberated
zones. Such measures became more widespread after May 1975. Korans
were collected and burned, and mosques were either transformed into
other buildings or razed. Thirteen Muslim dignitaries were executed in
June, some for having gone to pray rather than attending a political rally,
others for having campaigned for the right to religious wedding cere-
monies. . . . The more fervent were all but wiped out: of the 1,000 who had
made the pilgrimage to Mecca, only 30 survived these years. Unlike other
Cambodians, the Cham frequently rebelled,
and large number of them died in the mas-
sacres and reprisals that followed these up-
risings. After mid-1978 the Khmer Rouge
began systematically exter-
minating a number of Cham

A Chinese propaganda poster
shows Albanian dictator Enver
Hoxha with Mao.