China's 're-education camps' for Uighur Muslims in Xinjian region

[BlackShadow]

BEIJING — Kayrat Samarkand says his only “crime” was being a Muslim who had visited neighboring Kazakhstan. On that basis alone, he was detained by police, aggressively interrogated for three days, then dispatched in November to a “reeducation camp” in China’s western province of Xinjiang for three months.

There, he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, he said in an interview, was forced to study Communist propaganda for hours every day, and chant slogans giving thanks and wishing long life to President Xi Jinping.

“Those who disobeyed the rules, refused to be on duty, engaged in fights or were late for studies were placed in handcuffs and ankle cuffs for up to 12 hours,” he said. Further disobedience would result in waterboarding or long periods strapped in agony in a metal contraption known as a “tiger chair,” he said, a punishment he said he suffered.

Between several hundred thousand to just over 1 million Muslims have been detained inside China’s mass “reeducation” camps in the restive province of Xinjiang, Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, said in a report released Tuesday. Zenz is a leading authority on the current crackdown in Xinjiang.
In a region of 21 million people, including 11 million Muslims, the number of those he reports to be detained would be a significant proportion of the population, especially of young adult men.

“China’s pacification drive in Xinjiang is, more than likely, the country’s most intense campaign of coercive social re-engineering since the end of the Cultural Revolution,” Zenz wrote, referring to the chaos unleashed by Mao Zedong in the 1960s.

“The state’s proclaimed ‘war on terror’ in the region is increasingly turning into a war on religion, ethnic languages and other expressions of ethnic identity.”

China has blamed violent attacks in Xinjiang in recent years on Islamic extremists bent on waging holy war on the state, with radical ideas said to be coming from abroad over the Internet and from visits to foreign countries by Uighurs, the region’s predominant ethnic group.

In response, Beijing has turned the entire region into a 21st-century surveillance state, with ubiquitous checkpoints and widespread use of facial recognition technology, and has even forced Muslims to install spyware on their phones that allows the authorities to monitor their activity online, experts say. Long beards and veils have been banned, and overt expression of religious sentiment is likely to cause immediate suspicion.

In an extension of the already pervasive program of human surveillance, more than 1 million Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to spend days on end staying in the homes of (mostly Muslim) families throughout Xinjiang, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released this week, where they carry out political indoctrination, and report back on anything from the extent of religious beliefs to uncleanliness and alcoholism.
“Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The latest drive adds to a whole host of pervasive — and perverse — controls on everyday life in Xinjiang.”

But reeducation camps that appear to have opened all across the region have sparked the greatest global concern.

Samarkand said 5,700 people were detained in just one camp in the village of Karamagay, almost all ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs, and not a single person from China’s Han majority ethnic group. About 200 were suspected of being “religious extremists,” he said, but others had been abroad for work or university, received phone calls from abroad, or simply been seen worshiping at a mosque.

The 30-year-old stayed in a dormitory with 14 other men. After the room was searched every morning, he said, the day began with two hours of study on subjects ranging from “the spirit of the 19th Party Congress,” where Xi expounded his political dogma in a three-hour speech, to China’s policies on minorities and religion. Inmates would sing Communist songs, chant “Long live Xi Jinping” and do military-style training in the afternoon, before writing an account of their day, he said.

His account was corroborated by Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who was working in a tourism company in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, until he was arrested by police on a visit to his parents in the village of Shanshan in March 2017. Four days of interrogation, during which he was prevented from sleeping, were followed by seven months in a police cell and 20 days in a reeducation camp in the city of Karamay, he said. He was given no trial, he said, nor granted access to a lawyer.

He described a day that would begin with a flag-raising ceremony at 6:30 a.m. followed by a rendition of one or more “red” songs praising the Communist revolution. After breakfast, inmates would spend 10 minutes thanking the Communist Party and Xi for providing everything for people, from food and drink to their livelihoods.

Inmates had to learn the national anthem and red songs, he said, as well as slogans condemning the “three evil forces” of separatism, extremism and terrorism.

“There were so many things to recite, and if you couldn’t recite them, they wouldn’t allow you to eat, sleep or sit,” he said. “They brainwash you, you must become like a robot. Listen to whatever the party says, listen to the party’s words, follow the party.”

Some inmates committed suicide, he said.

Both men said the food was poor, with meat rare and food poisoning not uncommon. Inmates were sometimes forced to eat pork, forbidden in Islam, as punishment, while Bekali said those accused of being “religious extremists” were also forced to drink alcohol.

Bekali, 42, had emigrated to Kazakhstan in 2006 and become a Kazakh citizen, and said the Kazakh government eventually won his release. Samarkand said he was allowed to leave for Kazakhstan to join his wife and children after having his house and savings, worth about $190,000, confiscated by the government. He was given 500 yuan, equivalent to $80, by police at the border as he departed.

Both men, interviewed by phone, are now in Kazakhstan.

Although the Chinese government has officially denied the existence of these camps, Zenz gathered evidence of 73 government procurement and construction bids valued at more than $100 million, along with public recruitment notices and other documents, pointing to the establishment of camps across the region.

He dates the onset of widespread detentions to March 2017, and a government campaign of “de-extremification” through education. That followed the appointment of Chen Quanguo as party secretary in Xinjiang in August 2016, and his transfer from Tibet, where he oversaw a similar program of intense social control, surveillance and securitization.

Many procurement bids, Zenz noted, mandate the installation of comprehensive security features that turn existing facilities into prisonlike compounds, with walls, security fences, barbed wire, reinforced security doors, surveillance systems, secure access systems, watchtowers, and guard rooms for police.

“While there is no published data on reeducation detainee numbers, information from various sources permit us to estimate internment figures at anywhere between several hundred thousand and just over one million,” Zenz wrote in a report first published by the Jamestown Foundation.

“The latter figure is based on a leaked document from within the region’s public security agencies, and, when extrapolated to all of Xinjiang, could indicate a detention rate of up to 11.5 percent of the region’s adult Uighur and Kazakh population.”

Bekali said he met doctors, lawyers and teachers in the camps, while Radio Free Asia (RFA) has reported that wealthy businessmen, 80-year-olds and even breast-feeding mothers have been among the detainees.

One of the most well-known detainees is a Uighur soccer player, Erfan Hezim, 19, a former member of China’s youth soccer team and now a forward for Chinese Super League team Jiangsu Suning. Hezim, also known by his Chinese name Ye Erfan, was detained in February while visiting his parents in Xinjiang, according to RFA, on the pretext that he had visited foreign countries, although he had reportedly traveled abroad only to train and take part in soccer matches.

Also detained have been dozens of family members of journalists from the Washington-based RFA, who have been at the forefront of reporting on the deepening crackdown in Xinjiang and the reeducation camps. At least two of the affected reporters, both naturalized U.S. citizens, have reason to believe their family members were detained directly because of their reporting, RFA said.

In one report, RFA quoted a Chinese official as justifying the widespread detentions in blunt terms.

“You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all,” the official was quoted as saying. “Reeducating these people is like spraying chemicals on the crops. That is why it is a general reeducation, not limited to a few people.”

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/were...-camps-1853220

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.941ed9ea262d

Shame on Chinese and shame on rest of the world for not speaking out against this. Why is Muslim world silent on this?!

[JaDed]

How come the Muslims posters/world don't pounce on China is beyond me.

[BlackShadow]

How come the Muslims posters/world don't pounce on China is beyond me.

Specially when the number of Muslims detained in such camps is reported to be upto a million! Several of them are going crazy, committing suicide.. and the world is silent !

[Slog]

Ofcourse this is reprehensible and barbaric but this isnt Islam-specific. China is an equal-opportunity offender in this regard.

There are reports of Christian persecution at times too. Same or worse would happen to other religions if they were global.

[Varun]

"This news cannot possibly be true, because Chinese media didn't report it." # @KingKhanWC

In fact, a change.org petition to dispel such fake news is much needed.

[big_gamer007]

Chinese have a goal to become the biggest economy they have realised religion might hamper that and divert issues so they have curbed every religion similarly..

It’s a violation of human rights.. Question is do majority of Chinese people want development where human rights of their fellow citizens are violated?

[BlackShadow]

Ofcourse this is reprehensible and barbaric but this isnt Islam-specific. China is an equal-opportunity offender in this regard.

There are reports of Christian persecution at times too. Same or worse would happen to other religions if they were global.

Ok, so religious persecution is what Chinese do, fair. Why do you think Muslim world is silent about all this? Are Chinese that scary or powerful?

[yasir]

Pakistanis have special love for China and Saudi Arab. If India, Isreal, US or any western country does even discrimination, there is so much hue and cry. In Arab world for last 40 years(this is the time our labor force is going in big numbers there), in arab there is no protection of Muslims labor, they are treated like dirt, there is open discrimination. We keep calling them our muslim brothers, they don't consider you anything, you barely have any rights, forget about equal to other Arabs. In West you get equal rights, you can get land and marry here with pretty much any body. How many Pakistanis have got land there are married their women(or men)?? - Why all this muslim/muslim bhai bhai is only empty slogan by poor muslims?? - Rich ones, don't consider you equal, they don't give a ****, when we are going to open our eyes

Now China has got this one sided favorite nation tag. Everything about CPEC is mystery and as secretive as we do for anything that is important. We will focus on all kind of meaningless junk but never talk about policy and vision matters, again public is too dumb to discuss this, Army is deciding that behind the door for you. We are just emotional fools, emotion is last thing you focus on when it comes to future

[Bosanquet]

China has always been extremely secretive & tries to keep this sort of information out of the world's knowledge. It does not allow media companies access to troubled regions. It views most religions with suspicion & feels that strict religious observance is a threat to security (remember it's treatment of the Dalai lama & Tibetan buddhist monks). They consider religious leaders as threatening the monolithic power of the communist party leadership.

They HATE the outside world obtaining any negative information about China. They will not allow loss of face for their leaders. Their economic power & clout ensures that those who want to trade with them are very careful about openly criticising China & her leaders. Honestly, in recent times it has only been D Trump who has openly called out the Chinese over their trade practices.

Historically they have been so secretive that it took the world many decades to discover that during Chairman Mao's "great leap forward" the greatest famine in world history happened as a result with 30 million deaths in 5 years.

Seriously, if they managed to hide that - what's the lives of a million muslims to their leadership?

[www787]

It seems everyone in the world is so insecure about Islam, be it India, China or western world.

[James]

Not a good moment for China’s treatment of its minorities.

[Madplayer]

It seems everyone in the world is so insecure about Islam, be it India, China or western world.

Its a phase. Earlier it was the jews who were expelled from 109 empires throughout their history, then the non-whites in general who needed to be civilised, then blacks in particular who were considered as "beasts", and now it is the muslims. Tomorrow it will be someone else. Wait for it.

[Snowed]

Everybody treats minorities badly, why single out China? It's a human failure, I mean you have people getting killed in India just because of eating beef, or Pakistani Christians being targeted by extremists just because of their faith.

China is not perfect, but in the long run it is one country that can actually civilize interior parts of Pakistan, which are very backwards. It is the only hope of Pakistan to be honest. India can never be trusted because their only end goal is take over Pakistan and make it hindu, at least the current government defiantly has that goal

[akki]

Its a phase. Earlier it was the jews who were expelled from 109 empires throughout their history, then the non-whites in general who needed to be civilised, then blacks in particular who were considered as "beasts", and now it is the muslims. Tomorrow it will be someone else. Wait for it.

There is a big difference. How many muslim countries are there in world ? How many are secular? How many treats their kaafir people well ? I dnt think there are many. Many muslim population when present in majority in muslim countries they have their own laws ,forget about countries what about kashmir and all..all the hue and cry is because muslims are large in number there so they want different state.
We live in a world these days where no one want to listen to anyone...no one wants to do favour tgese days....you want to enjoy democratic rights and all rights when living in western countries or like countries like india. But when you in majority then you hardly give them rights.
This cannot happen these days. So treatment about black and all is irrelevant. I am talking about practical thing ,which is in front of everyone to see.

[HussainRx8]

Shame on Chinese and shame on rest of the world for not speaking out against this. Why is Muslim world silent on this?!

The reality is a bit more nuanced than what you're led to believe. For a better understanding, see the article by the Economist below:

China’s other Muslims
By choosing assimilation, China’s Hui have become one of the world’s most successful Muslim minorities

https://www.economist.com/china/2016...-other-muslims

[HussainRx8]

I won't dispute China's richly deserved reputation for religious intolerance, but people here need to understand:

China has two big Muslim groups, the Uighur of Xinjiang and the more obscure Hui. Each group has about 10 million people. Though the Uighur suffer, the Hui are thriving in China.

The number of mosques in Ningxia (cradle of the Hui, as one of their number puts it) has more than doubled since 1958, from 1,900 to 4,000, says Ma Ping, a retired professor at Northern Nationalities University. New ones are being built across the province. The Hui are economically successful. They are rarely victims of Islamophobia. Few Muslim minorities anywhere in the world can say as much.

One sign of how far the government tolerates the Hui is that they are even able to practice Islamic (sharia) law to a limited extent. Sharia is not recognised by the Chinese legal code. Yet at the Najiahu mosque, the ahong and the local county court share the same mediation office. Every week or so, the ahong adjudicates in family disputes using sharia. Only if he fails do civil officials step in.

[PakLFC]

This is why I never say China is Pak's "friend". The relationship is based on enmity with India and business opportunities. China oppresses Muslim more then India does. They are no lovers of Muslim's at all and never have been. Just makes me thank Allah even more for the Pakistan military.

[DeadlyVenom]

the selective morality is astounding. The same Indian posters like Varun who condone raping and killing of children by the apparatus of the Hindu state now call out other countries for poor treatment of Muslims.

Please for the sake of human decency drop this charade. it's getting quite tedious.

[Varun]

the selective morality is astounding. The same Indian posters like Varun who condone raping and killing of children by the apparatus of the Hindu state now call out other countries for poor treatment of Muslims.

Eh, when? I only mention constantly that I'm bored of Kashmir related news. Nothing else.

[Madplayer]

There is a big difference. How many muslim countries are there in world ? How many are secular? How many treats their kaafir people well ? I dnt think there are many. Many muslim population when present in majority in muslim countries they have their own laws ,forget about countries what about kashmir and all..all the hue and cry is because muslims are large in number there so they want different state.
We live in a world these days where no one want to listen to anyone...no one wants to do favour tgese days....you want to enjoy democratic rights and all rights when living in western countries or like countries like india. But when you in majority then you hardly give them rights.
This cannot happen these days. So treatment about black and all is irrelevant. I am talking about practical thing ,which is in front of everyone to see.

Most muslim countries treat non-muslims well. I am not going to delve into individual hate crimes done by people because that happens in India and the western countries as well. Also, people of the book who form the larger minority in most muslim countries are not considered Kafirs in the first place.

Secondly, the western countries claim to be liberal while most muslim countries don't. Now if you are saying that western countries should leave their liberal values to discriminate against muslims because muslim countries arent liberal, then thats a fallacy and weakness of western values. Thirdly, Chinese atrocities against muslims isnt about muslims in particular. They will target any ideology not in line with the state ideology. Even if you are a hindu or a christian, they will target you if you are in big numbers.

Whatever i have said about it being a phase is absolutely relevant and you will see this in next two decades. There will be a new boogyman to whip when the fuss around muslims begins to lose strength.

[KingKhanWC]

"This news cannot possibly be true, because Chinese media didn't report it." # @KingKhanWC

In fact, a change.org petition to dispel such fake news is much needed.

Sure they lets take the word of people we have no idea who they are. We know China has issues with a certain sect of Muslims but to suggest they hate and persecute all Muslims is just false.

There are millions of Muslims in China and many mosques , all practicing their religion openly and in peace.

[Sirris]

I won't dispute China's richly deserved reputation for religious intolerance, but people here need to understand:

China has two big Muslim groups, the Uighur of Xinjiang and the more obscure Hui. Each group has about 10 million people. Though the Uighur suffer, the Hui are thriving in China.

The number of mosques in Ningxia (cradle of the Hui, as one of their number puts it) has more than doubled since 1958, from 1,900 to 4,000, says Ma Ping, a retired professor at Northern Nationalities University. New ones are being built across the province. The Hui are economically successful. They are rarely victims of Islamophobia. Few Muslim minorities anywhere in the world can say as much.

One sign of how far the government tolerates the Hui is that they are even able to practice Islamic (sharia) law to a limited extent. Sharia is not recognised by the Chinese legal code. Yet at the Najiahu mosque, the ahong and the local county court share the same mediation office. Every week or so, the ahong adjudicates in family disputes using sharia. Only if he fails do civil officials step in.

There is a easy reason why Chinese have this double standard:

China is a racist country.

Uyghur are a turkish nation. China invaded their lands about 200 years ago. Now they fear that perhaps Uyghur might start an independence movement which a small group of them already has. Hence they are trying to forcefully take away the identity of the natives and encouraging other Chinese to migrate to the region so that the natives lose their dominance population wise. It is like the British colonialising south Asia and then never leaving.

Historically Uyghur aren't know for their religious extremism. However extremism breeds extremism. Due to the extreme actions of Chinese government some Uygher youth especially those residing abroad see in the Islamic jihadist moments a chance to get freedom. By striving for a global caliphate and what not.

The "Hui" people are ethnically and historically related to the Han Chinese.

[Varun]

Sure they lets take the word of people we have no idea who they are. We know China has issues with a certain sect of Muslims but to suggest they hate and persecute all Muslims is just false.

There are millions of Muslims in China and many mosques , all practicing their religion openly and in peace.

Replace 'China' with 'India' and your post holds just as true.

Yet.

[akki]

Sure they lets take the word of people we have no idea who they are. We know China has issues with a certain sect of Muslims but to suggest they hate and persecute all Muslims is just false.

There are millions of Muslims in China and many mosques , all practicing their religion openly and in peace.

Bnde ki tone hi chamge hojati hi vese...thdi b understanding rkhe toh....waaah...kya bat hi..

[CricketCartoons]

Replace 'China' with 'India' and your post holds just as true.

Yet.

It is really cute that indians are showing concern for chinese muslims. When it comes to china, they become muslim well wishers.

[Sirris]

There is no point in arguing about which oppressor is more oppressive than the other.

It is true most Muslims have no clue about Uyghur and their oppression. Forget Muslims even the prideful, nationalists and seculars amongst the Turks who are so proud of their ethnicity and heritage are for the most part unaware of the state of their fellow turkish cousins.

Admitting this short coming doesn't make the issue less relevant nor does it make the Indian oppression of Kashmiris more acceptable.

[Abdullah719]

Inside the camps where China tries to brainwash Muslims until they love the party and hate their own culture

Long article so added in spoiler:

->Spoiler<-

Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticise themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.

When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand by a wall for five hours at a time.

A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking – your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp.

“I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”

Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese – and even foreign citizens – in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a US commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some have been quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uygurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment programme aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork.

Detainees who most vigorously criticise the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education camps.

The Associated Press also conducted rare interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in other centres who corroborated Bekali’s depiction. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.

Bekali’s case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of Kazakhstan, who was seized by China’s security agencies and detained for eight months last year without recourse.

Although some details are impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for seven months and then sent for re-education.

The detention programme is a hallmark of China’s emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hardline rule of President Xi Jinping.

It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education – taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channelled by Xi.

“Cultural cleansing is Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem,” said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown University in Washington.

Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China’s re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in history.

“The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will leave long-term, psychological effects,” Thum said. “This will create a multigenerational trauma from which many people will never recover.”

Asked to comment on the camps, China’s Foreign Ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained, it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in China and they should also be law-abiding.

Chinese officials in Xinjiang did not respond to requests for comment.

However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the confidence Xinjiang officials hold in methods that they say work well to curb religious extremism.

China’s top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged Xinjiang’s authorities this month to extensively expand what the government calls the “transformation through education” drive in an “all-out effort” to fight separatism and extremism.

In a June 2017 paper published by a state-run journal, a researcher from Xinjiang’s Communist Party School reported that most of 588 surveyed participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent to re-education. But by the time they were released, nearly all – 98.8 per cent – had learned their mistakes, the paper said.

Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, “is a permanent cure.”

On the chilly morning of March 23, 2017, Bekali drove up to the Chinese border from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, got a stamp in his Kazakh passport and crossed over for a work trip, not quite grasping the extraordinary circumstances he was stepping into.

Bekali was born in China in 1976 to Kazakh and Uygur parents, moved to Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. He was out of China in 2016, when authorities sharply escalated a “People’s War on Terror” to root out what the government called religious extremism and separatism in Xinjiang, a large Chinese territory bordering Pakistan and several Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan.

The Xinjiang he returned to was unrecognisable. All-encompassing, data-driven surveillance tracked residents in a region with around 12 million Muslims, including ethnic Uygurs and Kazakhs. Viewing a foreign website, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or growing a beard could land one in a political indoctrination camp, or prison, or both.

The new internment system was shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly available data on the numbers of camps or detainees. The US State Department estimates those being held are “at the very least in the tens of thousands.”

A Turkey-based TV station run by Xinjiang exiles said almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents.

Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just over 1 million.

Government bids and recruitment ads studied by Zenz suggest that the camps have cost more than US$100 million since 2016, and construction is ongoing.

Bekali knew none of this when he visited his parents on March 25. He passed police checkpoints and handed over his decade-old Chinese identity card.

The next day, five armed policemen showed up at Bekali’s parents’ doorstep and took him away.

They said there was a warrant for his arrest in Karamay, a frontier oil town where he lived a decade earlier. He couldn’t call his parents or a lawyer, the police added, because his case was “special.”

Bekali was held in a cell, incommunicado, for a week, and then was driven 800 kilometres (500 miles) to Karamay’s Baijiantan District public security office.

There, they strapped him into a “tiger chair,” a device that clamped down his wrists and ankles. They also hung him by his wrists against a barred wall, just high enough so he would feel excruciating pressure in his shoulder unless he stood on the balls of his bare feet. They interrogated him about his work with a tourist agency inviting Chinese to apply for Kazakh tourist visas, which they claimed was a way to help Chinese Muslims escape.

“I haven’t committed any crimes!” Bekali yelled.

They asked for days what he knew about two dozen prominent ethnic Uygur activists and businessmen in Kazakhstan. Exhausted and aching, Bekali coughed up what he knew about a few names he recognised.

The police then sent Bekali to a 10 by 10-metre (32 by 32ft) cell in the prison with 17 others, their feet chained to the posts of two large beds. Some wore dark blue uniforms, while others wore orange for political crimes. Bekali was given orange.

In mid-July, three months after his arrest, Bekali received a visit from Kazakh diplomats. China’s mass detention of ethnic Kazakhs – and even Kazakh citizens – has begun to make waves in the Central Asian country of 18 million.

Kazakh officials say China detained 10 Kazakh citizens and hundreds of ethnic Kazakh Chinese in Xinjiang over the past year, though they were released in late April following a visit by a Kazakh deputy foreign minister.

Four months after the visit, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed a release paper.

But he was not yet free.

Bekali was driven from jail to a fenced compound in the northern suburbs of Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees receiving political indoctrination, he said.

He walked in, past a central station that could see over the entire facility, and received a tracksuit. Heavily armed guards watched over the compound from a second level. He joined a cell with 40 internees, he said, including teachers, doctors and students. Men and women were separated.

Internees would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7.30am. They gathered back inside large classrooms to learn “red songs” like Without the Communist Party, there is no New China, and study Chinese language and history.

They were told that the indigenous sheepherding Central Asian people of Xinjiang were backward and yoked by slavery before they were “liberated” by the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to chant: “Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!”

Discipline was strictly enforced and punishment could be harsh. Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet.

Cameras were installed in toilets and even outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands and feet, which internees were told was equated with Islamic ablution.

Bekali and other former internees say the worst parts of the indoctrination programme were forced repetition and self-criticism. Although students didn’t understand much of what was taught and the material bordered on the nonsensical to them, they were made to internalise it by repetition in sessions lasting two hours or longer.

“We will oppose extremism, we will oppose separatism, we will oppose terrorism,” they chanted again and again. Almost every day, the students received guest lecturers from the local police, judiciary and other branches of government warning about the dangers of separatism and extremism.

In four-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.

“Do you obey Chinese law or sharia?” instructors asked. “Do you understand why religion is dangerous?”

One by one, internees would stand up before 60 of their classmates to present self-criticisms of their religious history, Bekali said. The detainees would also have to criticise and be criticised by their peers. Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings, he said.

“I was taught the Holy Koran by my father and I learned it because I didn’t know better,” Bekali heard one say.

“I travelled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to extremist thoughts abroad,” Bekali recalled another saying. “Now I know.”

A Uygur woman told AP she was held in a centre in the city of Hotan in 2016. She said she and fellow prisoners repeatedly were forced to apologise for wearing long clothes in Muslim style, praying, teaching the Koran to their children and asking imams to name their children.

Praying at a mosque on any day other than Friday was a sign of extremism; so was attending Friday prayers outside their village or having Quranic verses or graphics on their phones.

While instructors watched, those who confessed to such behaviour were told to repeat over and over: “We have done illegal things, but we now know better.”

Other detainees and a re-education camp instructor tell similar stories.

In mid-2017, a Uygur former on-air reporter for Xinjiang TV known as Eldost was recruited to teach Chinese history and culture in an indoctrination camp because he spoke excellent Mandarin. He had no choice.

The re-education system, Eldost said, classified internees into three levels of security and duration of sentences.

The first group typically consisted of illiterate minority farmers who didn’t commit any ostensible crimes other than not speaking Chinese. The second class was made up of people who were caught at home or on their smartphones with religious content or so-called separatist materials, such as lectures by the jailed Uygur intellectual Ilham Tohti.

The final group was made up of those who had studied religion abroad and came back, or were seen to be affiliated with foreign elements.

In the latter cases, internees were often were sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years, Eldost said.

While he was teaching, Eldost once saw through the window 20 students driven into the courtyard. Two rows of guards waited for them and beat them as soon as they got out of the police van. He later heard that the internees were recent arrivals who had studied religion in the Middle East.

Violence was not regularly dispensed, but every internee AP spoke to saw at least one incident of rough treatment or beatings.

Eldost said the instruction was aimed at showing how backward traditional Uygur culture is and how repressive fundamentalist Islam is compared to a progressive Communist Party. The internees’ confessions of their backwardness helped drive the point home.

“Internees are told to repeat those confessions to the point where, when they are finally freed, they believe that they owe the country a lot, that they could never repay the party,” said Eldost, who escaped from China in August after paying a bribe.

Eldost said he tried in little ways to help his internees. Tasked with teaching the Three Character Classic, a Confucian standard taught widely in junior schools, he would make up mnemonic devices to help his students – including elderly or illiterate Uygur farmers who barely knew their own language – recite a few lines.

He also advised students to stop habitually saying “praise God” in Arabic and Uygur because other instructors punished them for it.

Every time he went to sleep in a room with 80 others, he said, the last thing he would hear was the sound of misery.

“I heard people crying every night,” he said. “That was the saddest experience in my life.”

Another former detainee, a Uygur from Hotan in southern Xinjiang, said his newly built centre had just 90 people in two classes in 2015. There, a government instructor claimed said that Uygur women historically did not wear underwear, braided their hair to signal their sexual availability, and had dozens of sexual partners.

“It made me so angry,” the detainee said. “These kinds of explanations of Uygur women humiliated me. I still remember this story every time I think about this, I feel like a knife cut a hole in my chest.”

Kayrat Samarkan, a Chinese Kazakh from Astana who was detained while running errands in a northern Xinjiang police station in December, was sent to an internment camp in Karamagay in northern Xinjiang with 5,700 students.

Those who did not obey, were late to class or got into fights were put for 12 hours in a loose body-suit that was made of iron and limited their movement, he said. Those who still disobeyed would be locked in a tiger chair for 24 hours. As one form of punishment, he said, instructors would press an internee’s head in a tub of ice and water.

After three months, Samarkan couldn’t take the lessons any more, so he bashed his head against a wall to try to kill himself. He merely fell unconscious.

“When I woke up, the staff threatened me, saying if I did that again they would extend my sentence to seven years there,” he said.

After 20 days, Bekali also contemplated suicide. Several days later, because of his intransigence and refusal to speak Mandarin, Bekali was no longer permitted to go into the courtyard. Instead, he was sent to a higher level of management, where he spent 24 hours a day in a room with 8 others.

A week later, he went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He saw a local judicial official walking into the building on an inspection tour and yelled at the top of his lungs. He thought even his former detention centre, with the abuse he suffered, would be better.

“Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison,” he shouted. “I can’t be here any more.”

He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours, ending late in the afternoon on November 24.

That was when Bekali was released, as suddenly as he was detained eight months earlier.

A policemen from Baijiantan who had always gone easy on Bekali during interrogation appeared and checked him out of the facility.

“You were too headstrong, but what the department did was unjust,” he told Bekali as he drove him to his sister’s home in Karamay.

Bekali was free.

The next morning, a Saturday, the police opened their immigration office for Bekali to pick up a unique, 14-day Chinese visa. His original had long expired. Bekali left China on December 4.

Seeking compensation from the Chinese government is out of the question. But Bekali keeps a plastic folder at home of evidence that might prove useful someday: his passport with stamps and visas, travel records and a handwritten Chinese police document dated and imprinted with red-ink seals.

The document is the closest thing he has to an official acknowledgement that he suffered for eight months. It says he was held on suspicion of endangering national security; the last sentence declares him released without charge.

At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to re-education.

But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. A week later, on March 19, his mother Amina Sadik was led away. In early April, Bekali called his father, Ebrayem. He told Bekali to take good care of himself, as if to bid farewell before the inevitable.

Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story, no matter the consequences.

“Things have already come this far,” he said. “I have nothing left to lose.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/polic...-muslims-until

[Sirris]

Inside the camps where China tries to brainwash Muslims until they love the party and hate their own culture

Long article so added in spoiler:

->Spoiler<-

Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticise themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.

When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand by a wall for five hours at a time.

A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking – your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp.

“I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”

Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese – and even foreign citizens – in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a US commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some have been quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uygurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment programme aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork.

Detainees who most vigorously criticise the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education camps.

The Associated Press also conducted rare interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in other centres who corroborated Bekali’s depiction. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.

Bekali’s case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of Kazakhstan, who was seized by China’s security agencies and detained for eight months last year without recourse.

Although some details are impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for seven months and then sent for re-education.

The detention programme is a hallmark of China’s emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hardline rule of President Xi Jinping.

It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education – taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channelled by Xi.

“Cultural cleansing is Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem,” said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown University in Washington.

Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China’s re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in history.

“The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will leave long-term, psychological effects,” Thum said. “This will create a multigenerational trauma from which many people will never recover.”

Asked to comment on the camps, China’s Foreign Ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained, it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in China and they should also be law-abiding.

Chinese officials in Xinjiang did not respond to requests for comment.

However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the confidence Xinjiang officials hold in methods that they say work well to curb religious extremism.

China’s top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged Xinjiang’s authorities this month to extensively expand what the government calls the “transformation through education” drive in an “all-out effort” to fight separatism and extremism.

In a June 2017 paper published by a state-run journal, a researcher from Xinjiang’s Communist Party School reported that most of 588 surveyed participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent to re-education. But by the time they were released, nearly all – 98.8 per cent – had learned their mistakes, the paper said.

Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, “is a permanent cure.”

On the chilly morning of March 23, 2017, Bekali drove up to the Chinese border from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, got a stamp in his Kazakh passport and crossed over for a work trip, not quite grasping the extraordinary circumstances he was stepping into.

Bekali was born in China in 1976 to Kazakh and Uygur parents, moved to Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. He was out of China in 2016, when authorities sharply escalated a “People’s War on Terror” to root out what the government called religious extremism and separatism in Xinjiang, a large Chinese territory bordering Pakistan and several Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan.

The Xinjiang he returned to was unrecognisable. All-encompassing, data-driven surveillance tracked residents in a region with around 12 million Muslims, including ethnic Uygurs and Kazakhs. Viewing a foreign website, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or growing a beard could land one in a political indoctrination camp, or prison, or both.

The new internment system was shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly available data on the numbers of camps or detainees. The US State Department estimates those being held are “at the very least in the tens of thousands.”

A Turkey-based TV station run by Xinjiang exiles said almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents.

Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just over 1 million.

Government bids and recruitment ads studied by Zenz suggest that the camps have cost more than US$100 million since 2016, and construction is ongoing.

Bekali knew none of this when he visited his parents on March 25. He passed police checkpoints and handed over his decade-old Chinese identity card.

The next day, five armed policemen showed up at Bekali’s parents’ doorstep and took him away.

They said there was a warrant for his arrest in Karamay, a frontier oil town where he lived a decade earlier. He couldn’t call his parents or a lawyer, the police added, because his case was “special.”

Bekali was held in a cell, incommunicado, for a week, and then was driven 800 kilometres (500 miles) to Karamay’s Baijiantan District public security office.

There, they strapped him into a “tiger chair,” a device that clamped down his wrists and ankles. They also hung him by his wrists against a barred wall, just high enough so he would feel excruciating pressure in his shoulder unless he stood on the balls of his bare feet. They interrogated him about his work with a tourist agency inviting Chinese to apply for Kazakh tourist visas, which they claimed was a way to help Chinese Muslims escape.

“I haven’t committed any crimes!” Bekali yelled.

They asked for days what he knew about two dozen prominent ethnic Uygur activists and businessmen in Kazakhstan. Exhausted and aching, Bekali coughed up what he knew about a few names he recognised.

The police then sent Bekali to a 10 by 10-metre (32 by 32ft) cell in the prison with 17 others, their feet chained to the posts of two large beds. Some wore dark blue uniforms, while others wore orange for political crimes. Bekali was given orange.

In mid-July, three months after his arrest, Bekali received a visit from Kazakh diplomats. China’s mass detention of ethnic Kazakhs – and even Kazakh citizens – has begun to make waves in the Central Asian country of 18 million.

Kazakh officials say China detained 10 Kazakh citizens and hundreds of ethnic Kazakh Chinese in Xinjiang over the past year, though they were released in late April following a visit by a Kazakh deputy foreign minister.

Four months after the visit, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed a release paper.

But he was not yet free.

Bekali was driven from jail to a fenced compound in the northern suburbs of Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees receiving political indoctrination, he said.

He walked in, past a central station that could see over the entire facility, and received a tracksuit. Heavily armed guards watched over the compound from a second level. He joined a cell with 40 internees, he said, including teachers, doctors and students. Men and women were separated.

Internees would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7.30am. They gathered back inside large classrooms to learn “red songs” like Without the Communist Party, there is no New China, and study Chinese language and history.

They were told that the indigenous sheepherding Central Asian people of Xinjiang were backward and yoked by slavery before they were “liberated” by the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to chant: “Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!”

Discipline was strictly enforced and punishment could be harsh. Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet.

Cameras were installed in toilets and even outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands and feet, which internees were told was equated with Islamic ablution.

Bekali and other former internees say the worst parts of the indoctrination programme were forced repetition and self-criticism. Although students didn’t understand much of what was taught and the material bordered on the nonsensical to them, they were made to internalise it by repetition in sessions lasting two hours or longer.

“We will oppose extremism, we will oppose separatism, we will oppose terrorism,” they chanted again and again. Almost every day, the students received guest lecturers from the local police, judiciary and other branches of government warning about the dangers of separatism and extremism.

In four-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.

“Do you obey Chinese law or sharia?” instructors asked. “Do you understand why religion is dangerous?”

One by one, internees would stand up before 60 of their classmates to present self-criticisms of their religious history, Bekali said. The detainees would also have to criticise and be criticised by their peers. Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings, he said.

“I was taught the Holy Koran by my father and I learned it because I didn’t know better,” Bekali heard one say.

“I travelled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to extremist thoughts abroad,” Bekali recalled another saying. “Now I know.”

A Uygur woman told AP she was held in a centre in the city of Hotan in 2016. She said she and fellow prisoners repeatedly were forced to apologise for wearing long clothes in Muslim style, praying, teaching the Koran to their children and asking imams to name their children.

Praying at a mosque on any day other than Friday was a sign of extremism; so was attending Friday prayers outside their village or having Quranic verses or graphics on their phones.

While instructors watched, those who confessed to such behaviour were told to repeat over and over: “We have done illegal things, but we now know better.”

Other detainees and a re-education camp instructor tell similar stories.

In mid-2017, a Uygur former on-air reporter for Xinjiang TV known as Eldost was recruited to teach Chinese history and culture in an indoctrination camp because he spoke excellent Mandarin. He had no choice.

The re-education system, Eldost said, classified internees into three levels of security and duration of sentences.

The first group typically consisted of illiterate minority farmers who didn’t commit any ostensible crimes other than not speaking Chinese. The second class was made up of people who were caught at home or on their smartphones with religious content or so-called separatist materials, such as lectures by the jailed Uygur intellectual Ilham Tohti.

The final group was made up of those who had studied religion abroad and came back, or were seen to be affiliated with foreign elements.

In the latter cases, internees were often were sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years, Eldost said.

While he was teaching, Eldost once saw through the window 20 students driven into the courtyard. Two rows of guards waited for them and beat them as soon as they got out of the police van. He later heard that the internees were recent arrivals who had studied religion in the Middle East.

Violence was not regularly dispensed, but every internee AP spoke to saw at least one incident of rough treatment or beatings.

Eldost said the instruction was aimed at showing how backward traditional Uygur culture is and how repressive fundamentalist Islam is compared to a progressive Communist Party. The internees’ confessions of their backwardness helped drive the point home.

“Internees are told to repeat those confessions to the point where, when they are finally freed, they believe that they owe the country a lot, that they could never repay the party,” said Eldost, who escaped from China in August after paying a bribe.

Eldost said he tried in little ways to help his internees. Tasked with teaching the Three Character Classic, a Confucian standard taught widely in junior schools, he would make up mnemonic devices to help his students – including elderly or illiterate Uygur farmers who barely knew their own language – recite a few lines.

He also advised students to stop habitually saying “praise God” in Arabic and Uygur because other instructors punished them for it.

Every time he went to sleep in a room with 80 others, he said, the last thing he would hear was the sound of misery.

“I heard people crying every night,” he said. “That was the saddest experience in my life.”

Another former detainee, a Uygur from Hotan in southern Xinjiang, said his newly built centre had just 90 people in two classes in 2015. There, a government instructor claimed said that Uygur women historically did not wear underwear, braided their hair to signal their sexual availability, and had dozens of sexual partners.

“It made me so angry,” the detainee said. “These kinds of explanations of Uygur women humiliated me. I still remember this story every time I think about this, I feel like a knife cut a hole in my chest.”

Kayrat Samarkan, a Chinese Kazakh from Astana who was detained while running errands in a northern Xinjiang police station in December, was sent to an internment camp in Karamagay in northern Xinjiang with 5,700 students.

Those who did not obey, were late to class or got into fights were put for 12 hours in a loose body-suit that was made of iron and limited their movement, he said. Those who still disobeyed would be locked in a tiger chair for 24 hours. As one form of punishment, he said, instructors would press an internee’s head in a tub of ice and water.

After three months, Samarkan couldn’t take the lessons any more, so he bashed his head against a wall to try to kill himself. He merely fell unconscious.

“When I woke up, the staff threatened me, saying if I did that again they would extend my sentence to seven years there,” he said.

After 20 days, Bekali also contemplated suicide. Several days later, because of his intransigence and refusal to speak Mandarin, Bekali was no longer permitted to go into the courtyard. Instead, he was sent to a higher level of management, where he spent 24 hours a day in a room with 8 others.

A week later, he went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He saw a local judicial official walking into the building on an inspection tour and yelled at the top of his lungs. He thought even his former detention centre, with the abuse he suffered, would be better.

“Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison,” he shouted. “I can’t be here any more.”

He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours, ending late in the afternoon on November 24.

That was when Bekali was released, as suddenly as he was detained eight months earlier.

A policemen from Baijiantan who had always gone easy on Bekali during interrogation appeared and checked him out of the facility.

“You were too headstrong, but what the department did was unjust,” he told Bekali as he drove him to his sister’s home in Karamay.

Bekali was free.

The next morning, a Saturday, the police opened their immigration office for Bekali to pick up a unique, 14-day Chinese visa. His original had long expired. Bekali left China on December 4.

Seeking compensation from the Chinese government is out of the question. But Bekali keeps a plastic folder at home of evidence that might prove useful someday: his passport with stamps and visas, travel records and a handwritten Chinese police document dated and imprinted with red-ink seals.

The document is the closest thing he has to an official acknowledgement that he suffered for eight months. It says he was held on suspicion of endangering national security; the last sentence declares him released without charge.

At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to re-education.

But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. A week later, on March 19, his mother Amina Sadik was led away. In early April, Bekali called his father, Ebrayem. He told Bekali to take good care of himself, as if to bid farewell before the inevitable.

Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story, no matter the consequences.

“Things have already come this far,” he said. “I have nothing left to lose.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/polic...-muslims-until

Thanks for sharing.

This is spreading atheism by force no doubt. I am against it to the same extent I am against spreading religion by force.

Longterm I only see an increase in violence and extremism in that region. Chinese are deluded.

[KingKhanWC]

Chinese are equal in their ill treatment of any sepratists, it has nothing do with religion and we cannot take the words of a couple of people as the truth. Yes they do punish Muslims in this area but in other areas Muslims are flourhising more than any other religious minority, it can be argued Muslims have it easier than anyone else in China.

[Sirris]

Chinese are equal in their ill treatment of any sepratists, it has nothing do with religion and we cannot take the words of a couple of people as the truth. Yes they do punish Muslims in this area but in other areas Muslims are flourhising more than any other religious minority, it can be argued Muslims have it easier than anyone else in China.

Please do read the following article and reconsider your position.

Inside the camps where China tries to brainwash Muslims until they love the party and hate their own culture

Long article so added in spoiler:

->Spoiler<-

Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticise themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.

When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand by a wall for five hours at a time.

A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking – your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp.

“I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”

Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese – and even foreign citizens – in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a US commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some have been quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uygurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment programme aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork.

Detainees who most vigorously criticise the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education camps.

The Associated Press also conducted rare interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in other centres who corroborated Bekali’s depiction. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.

Bekali’s case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of Kazakhstan, who was seized by China’s security agencies and detained for eight months last year without recourse.

Although some details are impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for seven months and then sent for re-education.

The detention programme is a hallmark of China’s emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hardline rule of President Xi Jinping.

It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education – taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channelled by Xi.

“Cultural cleansing is Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem,” said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown University in Washington.

Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China’s re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in history.

“The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will leave long-term, psychological effects,” Thum said. “This will create a multigenerational trauma from which many people will never recover.”

Asked to comment on the camps, China’s Foreign Ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained, it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in China and they should also be law-abiding.

Chinese officials in Xinjiang did not respond to requests for comment.

However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the confidence Xinjiang officials hold in methods that they say work well to curb religious extremism.

China’s top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged Xinjiang’s authorities this month to extensively expand what the government calls the “transformation through education” drive in an “all-out effort” to fight separatism and extremism.

In a June 2017 paper published by a state-run journal, a researcher from Xinjiang’s Communist Party School reported that most of 588 surveyed participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent to re-education. But by the time they were released, nearly all – 98.8 per cent – had learned their mistakes, the paper said.

Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, “is a permanent cure.”

On the chilly morning of March 23, 2017, Bekali drove up to the Chinese border from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, got a stamp in his Kazakh passport and crossed over for a work trip, not quite grasping the extraordinary circumstances he was stepping into.

Bekali was born in China in 1976 to Kazakh and Uygur parents, moved to Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. He was out of China in 2016, when authorities sharply escalated a “People’s War on Terror” to root out what the government called religious extremism and separatism in Xinjiang, a large Chinese territory bordering Pakistan and several Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan.

The Xinjiang he returned to was unrecognisable. All-encompassing, data-driven surveillance tracked residents in a region with around 12 million Muslims, including ethnic Uygurs and Kazakhs. Viewing a foreign website, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or growing a beard could land one in a political indoctrination camp, or prison, or both.

The new internment system was shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly available data on the numbers of camps or detainees. The US State Department estimates those being held are “at the very least in the tens of thousands.”

A Turkey-based TV station run by Xinjiang exiles said almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents.

Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just over 1 million.

Government bids and recruitment ads studied by Zenz suggest that the camps have cost more than US$100 million since 2016, and construction is ongoing.

Bekali knew none of this when he visited his parents on March 25. He passed police checkpoints and handed over his decade-old Chinese identity card.

The next day, five armed policemen showed up at Bekali’s parents’ doorstep and took him away.

They said there was a warrant for his arrest in Karamay, a frontier oil town where he lived a decade earlier. He couldn’t call his parents or a lawyer, the police added, because his case was “special.”

Bekali was held in a cell, incommunicado, for a week, and then was driven 800 kilometres (500 miles) to Karamay’s Baijiantan District public security office.

There, they strapped him into a “tiger chair,” a device that clamped down his wrists and ankles. They also hung him by his wrists against a barred wall, just high enough so he would feel excruciating pressure in his shoulder unless he stood on the balls of his bare feet. They interrogated him about his work with a tourist agency inviting Chinese to apply for Kazakh tourist visas, which they claimed was a way to help Chinese Muslims escape.

“I haven’t committed any crimes!” Bekali yelled.

They asked for days what he knew about two dozen prominent ethnic Uygur activists and businessmen in Kazakhstan. Exhausted and aching, Bekali coughed up what he knew about a few names he recognised.

The police then sent Bekali to a 10 by 10-metre (32 by 32ft) cell in the prison with 17 others, their feet chained to the posts of two large beds. Some wore dark blue uniforms, while others wore orange for political crimes. Bekali was given orange.

In mid-July, three months after his arrest, Bekali received a visit from Kazakh diplomats. China’s mass detention of ethnic Kazakhs – and even Kazakh citizens – has begun to make waves in the Central Asian country of 18 million.

Kazakh officials say China detained 10 Kazakh citizens and hundreds of ethnic Kazakh Chinese in Xinjiang over the past year, though they were released in late April following a visit by a Kazakh deputy foreign minister.

Four months after the visit, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed a release paper.

But he was not yet free.

Bekali was driven from jail to a fenced compound in the northern suburbs of Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees receiving political indoctrination, he said.

He walked in, past a central station that could see over the entire facility, and received a tracksuit. Heavily armed guards watched over the compound from a second level. He joined a cell with 40 internees, he said, including teachers, doctors and students. Men and women were separated.

Internees would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7.30am. They gathered back inside large classrooms to learn “red songs” like Without the Communist Party, there is no New China, and study Chinese language and history.

They were told that the indigenous sheepherding Central Asian people of Xinjiang were backward and yoked by slavery before they were “liberated” by the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to chant: “Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!”

Discipline was strictly enforced and punishment could be harsh. Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet.

Cameras were installed in toilets and even outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands and feet, which internees were told was equated with Islamic ablution.

Bekali and other former internees say the worst parts of the indoctrination programme were forced repetition and self-criticism. Although students didn’t understand much of what was taught and the material bordered on the nonsensical to them, they were made to internalise it by repetition in sessions lasting two hours or longer.

“We will oppose extremism, we will oppose separatism, we will oppose terrorism,” they chanted again and again. Almost every day, the students received guest lecturers from the local police, judiciary and other branches of government warning about the dangers of separatism and extremism.

In four-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.

“Do you obey Chinese law or sharia?” instructors asked. “Do you understand why religion is dangerous?”

One by one, internees would stand up before 60 of their classmates to present self-criticisms of their religious history, Bekali said. The detainees would also have to criticise and be criticised by their peers. Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings, he said.

“I was taught the Holy Koran by my father and I learned it because I didn’t know better,” Bekali heard one say.

“I travelled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to extremist thoughts abroad,” Bekali recalled another saying. “Now I know.”

A Uygur woman told AP she was held in a centre in the city of Hotan in 2016. She said she and fellow prisoners repeatedly were forced to apologise for wearing long clothes in Muslim style, praying, teaching the Koran to their children and asking imams to name their children.

Praying at a mosque on any day other than Friday was a sign of extremism; so was attending Friday prayers outside their village or having Quranic verses or graphics on their phones.

While instructors watched, those who confessed to such behaviour were told to repeat over and over: “We have done illegal things, but we now know better.”

Other detainees and a re-education camp instructor tell similar stories.

In mid-2017, a Uygur former on-air reporter for Xinjiang TV known as Eldost was recruited to teach Chinese history and culture in an indoctrination camp because he spoke excellent Mandarin. He had no choice.

The re-education system, Eldost said, classified internees into three levels of security and duration of sentences.

The first group typically consisted of illiterate minority farmers who didn’t commit any ostensible crimes other than not speaking Chinese. The second class was made up of people who were caught at home or on their smartphones with religious content or so-called separatist materials, such as lectures by the jailed Uygur intellectual Ilham Tohti.

The final group was made up of those who had studied religion abroad and came back, or were seen to be affiliated with foreign elements.

In the latter cases, internees were often were sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years, Eldost said.

While he was teaching, Eldost once saw through the window 20 students driven into the courtyard. Two rows of guards waited for them and beat them as soon as they got out of the police van. He later heard that the internees were recent arrivals who had studied religion in the Middle East.

Violence was not regularly dispensed, but every internee AP spoke to saw at least one incident of rough treatment or beatings.

Eldost said the instruction was aimed at showing how backward traditional Uygur culture is and how repressive fundamentalist Islam is compared to a progressive Communist Party. The internees’ confessions of their backwardness helped drive the point home.

“Internees are told to repeat those confessions to the point where, when they are finally freed, they believe that they owe the country a lot, that they could never repay the party,” said Eldost, who escaped from China in August after paying a bribe.

Eldost said he tried in little ways to help his internees. Tasked with teaching the Three Character Classic, a Confucian standard taught widely in junior schools, he would make up mnemonic devices to help his students – including elderly or illiterate Uygur farmers who barely knew their own language – recite a few lines.

He also advised students to stop habitually saying “praise God” in Arabic and Uygur because other instructors punished them for it.

Every time he went to sleep in a room with 80 others, he said, the last thing he would hear was the sound of misery.

“I heard people crying every night,” he said. “That was the saddest experience in my life.”

Another former detainee, a Uygur from Hotan in southern Xinjiang, said his newly built centre had just 90 people in two classes in 2015. There, a government instructor claimed said that Uygur women historically did not wear underwear, braided their hair to signal their sexual availability, and had dozens of sexual partners.

“It made me so angry,” the detainee said. “These kinds of explanations of Uygur women humiliated me. I still remember this story every time I think about this, I feel like a knife cut a hole in my chest.”

Kayrat Samarkan, a Chinese Kazakh from Astana who was detained while running errands in a northern Xinjiang police station in December, was sent to an internment camp in Karamagay in northern Xinjiang with 5,700 students.

Those who did not obey, were late to class or got into fights were put for 12 hours in a loose body-suit that was made of iron and limited their movement, he said. Those who still disobeyed would be locked in a tiger chair for 24 hours. As one form of punishment, he said, instructors would press an internee’s head in a tub of ice and water.

After three months, Samarkan couldn’t take the lessons any more, so he bashed his head against a wall to try to kill himself. He merely fell unconscious.

“When I woke up, the staff threatened me, saying if I did that again they would extend my sentence to seven years there,” he said.

After 20 days, Bekali also contemplated suicide. Several days later, because of his intransigence and refusal to speak Mandarin, Bekali was no longer permitted to go into the courtyard. Instead, he was sent to a higher level of management, where he spent 24 hours a day in a room with 8 others.

A week later, he went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He saw a local judicial official walking into the building on an inspection tour and yelled at the top of his lungs. He thought even his former detention centre, with the abuse he suffered, would be better.

“Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison,” he shouted. “I can’t be here any more.”

He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours, ending late in the afternoon on November 24.

That was when Bekali was released, as suddenly as he was detained eight months earlier.

A policemen from Baijiantan who had always gone easy on Bekali during interrogation appeared and checked him out of the facility.

“You were too headstrong, but what the department did was unjust,” he told Bekali as he drove him to his sister’s home in Karamay.

Bekali was free.

The next morning, a Saturday, the police opened their immigration office for Bekali to pick up a unique, 14-day Chinese visa. His original had long expired. Bekali left China on December 4.

Seeking compensation from the Chinese government is out of the question. But Bekali keeps a plastic folder at home of evidence that might prove useful someday: his passport with stamps and visas, travel records and a handwritten Chinese police document dated and imprinted with red-ink seals.

The document is the closest thing he has to an official acknowledgement that he suffered for eight months. It says he was held on suspicion of endangering national security; the last sentence declares him released without charge.

At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to re-education.

But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. A week later, on March 19, his mother Amina Sadik was led away. In early April, Bekali called his father, Ebrayem. He told Bekali to take good care of himself, as if to bid farewell before the inevitable.

Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story, no matter the consequences.

“Things have already come this far,” he said. “I have nothing left to lose.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/polic...-muslims-until

I can't imagine any self-respecting Muslim after reading this being ok with what the Chinese are doing to their fellow brothers in Islam.

I find it necessary to raise concern about these issue because I know that the Islamic Jihadist movements will be the first to take this issue and justify their path. If average Muslim chose to ignore those issues they won't. I known that the failure of Muslim leaders to handle these issues with dignity is a big cause to why young Muslim find men like Baghdadi and Zwahirir more appealing.

[KingKhanWC]

Please do read the following article and reconsider your position.

I've been following this situation for the last 20 years. Give me something more reliable and concrete than statements from unkown persons and I will reconsider my answer. Chinese are communists who dont discriminate against any particular religion but persecute any who oppose them.

[Varun]

I've been following this situation for the last 20 years. Give me something more reliable and concrete than statements from unkown persons and I will reconsider my answer.

So you've been following a situation in an unknown part of China for two decades worth while residing 4,800 miles away? Pray tell us what sources of information have you perused? What sort of image did you have of China at the start of this 20 year time period compared to now? How many angry Internet posts have you crafted on the Xinjiang people? How many sermons have you heard on this issue at your local mosque? How many Uyghurs do you know personally?

Further, you claim everybody else religious in China is discriminated as well - have you ever cared to spare them in any of your thoughts? I thought so.

[s28]

You know China's repression of Muslims is bad in Xinjiang when China tries to stop this Uighur activist from entering the UN to describe it. https://t.co/xIut200jT2 pic.twitter.com/pTh3x320iC

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) 25 May 2018

[Abdullah719]

The Uighur Muslim crisis is worse than you think

China is sparing no effort in its attempt to erase any proof of its Uighur Muslim population in what the Communist state calls Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The area, known affectionately as East Turkistan by its 12 million Uighurs, was an independent nation state Until China began occupying and colonising it in 1949.

For the past several years, barely more than a trickle of information has seeped out of the tightly controlled Chinese occupied territory, but what we do know suggests China is using an array of brutal measures to eradicate any vestige of Uighur culture.

These measures include a total ban on any form of expression of Islam in Xinjiang. China has not only shut down mosques, but also has banned all Islamic texts, including the Quran, while Muslim sounding names are also outlawed, as are beards and clothing that suggest adherence to the Islamic faith.

More recently, China has made it mandatory for all Uighur Muslims to have their motorbikes and cars fitted with a GPS tracking device, so that authorities can pinpoint any Uighur at any given moment.

If you're thinking this sounds like the making a dystopian futuristic novel, then consider also the fact that Chinese police in the province have been fitted out with "smart glasses," which use facial recognition software to identify Uighur Muslims on trains, buses and in public places.

Linked to a central database, the "smart glasses" are designed to notify a patrolling officer when a Uighur Muslim has moved beyond his orher 'safe area', that is home or place of work.

These hardline measures form just the tip of the iceberg, however. Uighur Muslims who refuse to give up their Muslim identity are forced into what China calls "reeducation camps", which are designed to convert Uighur Muslims to the official ideology of the state: Atheism.

"We target people who are religious… for example, those who grow beards despite being young," one Chinese government officer admitted in a report.

According to reports from human rights watchers, China has ordered its officials in Xinjiang to send almost half of its population to "re-education camps." For those who stubbornly defy China's indoctrination programme, prison or forced disappearance awaits.

Alarmingly, these reports do little to convey the extent of the horror taking place against Uighur Muslims in East Turkistan today.

Interviews I have conducted with several Uighur Muslim refugees who have escaped persecution and likely death at the hands of the Chinese government have confirmed as such.

When I spoke with Sadam Musapir, a Uighur Muslim who successfully applied for asylum seeker status in 2017 while on a student visa in Australia, he told me China is now incarcerating any Uighur Muslim who attempts to travel abroad. His wife and nine-month-old child suffered just that, as the authorities fear the world will learn the full depth and breadth of China's orchestrated campaign to culturally eradicate the Uighur people.

"In 60 days time from now, when my baby son, who I haven't seen yet turns one year of age, China will imprison my wife for five years, and then sell my baby to adoption agencies," Musapir told me.

When I asked why China was taking this action against his wife and child, he explained that they arrested her for trying to leave the country to join him in Australia. "China is desperate for the world not to know what is happening there [Xinjiang]," said Musapir.

His account tallies with that of Seven Zhang, a Hui Muslim who now resides in the United States. Zhang explained to me that his wife was arrested and falsely accused of illegally crossing the border on 18 January, 2016, and taken to Jinwuhzen Police Department. Less than four weeks after her arrest, Zhang's cancer-stricken wife fell into a coma after being subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

In the weeks and months following his wife's death, Zhang demanded justice from his government, but instead of compensation or even a hearing, Zhang alleges Chinese authorities tried to kill him in what he described as a "motorcycle accident manipulation".

When I asked what he meant by "traffic accident manipulation," he told me a common method deployed by Chinese authorities to silence critics, is to dress up an assassination to look like a motor accident.

Fearing for his life, Zhang fled China for the United States in 2017, where he still lives today, but in constant fear his home country will come seeking vengeance.

This effort by China to keep a lid on what is taking place under its watch in Xinjiang was also recently documented by The Washington Post, detailing the lengths Chinese authorities are willing to go to in order to silence those who threaten to expose their efforts to ethnically cleanse the Uighur Muslim population.

"China's security services have detained several close relatives of four US-based reporters working for Radio Free Asia in an apparent attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage of the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region," writes The Washington Post. One of the relatives of those arrested said, "Chinese authorities have contacted family members living in Xinjiang, urging them to ask him to stop calling and reporting on events in the region."

Despite what the international community knows about China's grave injustices against the Uighur people, international bodies, such as the United Nations, have failed to intervene or even offer stern condemnation.

This global silence can be partly blamed on China attempting to anchor Uighur Muslim aspirations for liberation with "War on Terror" discourse, with China successfully convincing the United States and its allies that it, like them, was at war with "radical Islam".

With that said, there are signs the world is now waking up to China's game, with the United States representative to the UN for economic and social affairs, accusing the Chinese government of blocking a Uighur activist entering the UN headquarters in New York in May, as reported by Foreign Policy.

"This is a very sad and disappointing day," Kelly Currie, the US representative, told UN delegates, accusing China of attempting to silence the persecuted Uighur minority by accusing the Uighur activist, Dolkun Isa, of being a terrorist.

Currie scoffed at China's ridiculous assertion, saying, "If Mr Isa were in fact an actual terrorist… do you seriously think we would be inviting [him] into this country and giving him free rein to travel about? Give me a break!" - while noting that the US had granted the Uighur activist a 10-year multiple-entry visa.

The US had seen the Asian power as an ally in the "war on terror," but the tide has now turned, and one can only hope that the international community will soon pressure China into allowing 12 million Uighur Muslims to live on their land in peace.

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/co...than-you-think

[JaDed]

No one can pressure China lol, they will do what's good for them.

They are like the Empire from Star Wars bringing order to the world/China.

[enkidu_]

China's communism - like that of Lenin/Stalin - may have pushed them at the forefront of the economic powerhouses - mainly the state-capitalism or the euphemistic "socialism with Chinese characteristics" of Deng Xiaoping - but this is again a proof of how toxic communism can be for the national culture and traditions of all peoples, incl. the dominant Han's of China ; in fact, the "cultural revolution" enacted by Mao Zedong, officially to destroy the fossils of "bourgeois culture" (Confucianism, traditional painting, ...) but unofficially to discard his rising rivals like Liu Shaoqi, has been so destructive that specialists say even Europeans didn't do such damage, even when the English and French looted/destroyed the Summer Palace, itself so traumatic that Jackie Chan still makes a movie out of it.

So if they can't respect the dominant Han culture, what do you think they'll do of the Uyghurs or Tibetans ?

Now that thanks to the PR job of the US the West has lost all credibility in the MENA region, China invests itself more and more, esp. with all its surplus of capital to invest ; so I think that over the time they'll become more pragmatic while dealing with the Uyghurs, perhaps a bit like the Hui's, who are "ethnic converts", even if they themselves might have some problems.

[Adil_94]

The Chinese government has been committing human rights abuses for years against Uygurs granted there is a separatist movement in the region that has committed terrorist attacks but this form.of.collective punishment is sickening. Uygurs are forced to eat during Ramadan. Forced to eat Pork women forcibly stripped down
Mens beard forcibly shaved. People beaten and killed with impunity by security forces. There is already BDS to.boycott Israel but what the Chinese are doing deserves a greater boycott. Why is there not more outcry about the treatment of Uygurs. You would expect the Pakistani govt and Turkey to raise an issue with this. Its only for Palestine and Syria people seem to get a voice.

[Varun]

The Chinese government has been committing human rights abuses for years against Uygurs granted there is a separatist movement in the region that has committed terrorist attacks but this form.of.collective punishment is sickening. Uygurs are forced to eat during Ramadan. Forced to eat Pork women forcibly stripped down
Mens beard forcibly shaved. People beaten and killed with impunity by security forces. There is already BDS to.boycott Israel but what the Chinese are doing deserves a greater boycott. Why is there not more outcry about the treatment of Uygurs. You would expect the Pakistani govt and Turkey to raise an issue with this. Its only for Palestine and Syria people seem to get a voice.

I've wondered since I first heard this story - how does 'forced to eat' even work? Leave alone pork, etc.

[BlackShadow]

No one can pressure China lol, they will do what's good for them.

They are like the Empire from Star Wars bringing order to the world/China.

Growing up with Tibetans, I always hated Chinese for the way they go about these human rights violations, but now in my 20s, I also have a strange respect for what they have achieved with their method. They get the job done and no one in the world has balls to call them out for it.

[Adil_94]

@Varun literally they have people either shoving food down you. You get intimidated to eat the food or all other food options are removed so u have to eat whats in front of you. The spanish inquisition did the same thing to Jews and Muslims in Spain who had nominally converted to catholicism to prove that they had really left their old religions behind.

[Cpt. Rishwat]

The Chinese government has been committing human rights abuses for years against Uygurs granted there is a separatist movement in the region that has committed terrorist attacks but this form.of.collective punishment is sickening. Uygurs are forced to eat during Ramadan. Forced to eat Pork women forcibly stripped down
Mens beard forcibly shaved. People beaten and killed with impunity by security forces. There is already BDS to.boycott Israel but what the Chinese are doing deserves a greater boycott. Why is there not more outcry about the treatment of Uygurs. You would expect the Pakistani govt and Turkey to raise an issue with this. Its only for Palestine and Syria people seem to get a voice.

Pakistan and Turkey are being pragmatic when it comes to China in the same way India is being pragmatic when dealing with Afghanistan, a country which has a more conservative Islamic lifestyle than Pakistan. If you want a less pragmatic approach you would need a theocracy which I personally would prefer not to have.

[Napa]

Its a phase. Earlier it was the jews who were expelled from 109 empires throughout their history, then the non-whites in general who needed to be civilised, then blacks in particular who were considered as "beasts", and now it is the muslims. Tomorrow it will be someone else. Wait for it.

Which century in the last 13 do you consider to have been the most peaceful between Muslims and non-Muslims?

[Napa]

There is a easy reason why Chinese have this double standard:

China is a racist country.

Uyghur are a turkish nation. China invaded their lands about 200 years ago. Now they fear that perhaps Uyghur might start an independence movement which a small group of them already has. Hence they are trying to forcefully take away the identity of the natives and encouraging other Chinese to migrate to the region so that the natives lose their dominance population wise. It is like the British colonialising south Asia and then never leaving.

Historically Uyghur aren't know for their religious extremism. However extremism breeds extremism. Due to the extreme actions of Chinese government some Uygher youth especially those residing abroad see in the Islamic jihadist moments a chance to get freedom. By striving for a global caliphate and what not.

The "Hui" people are ethnically and historically related to the Han Chinese.

This is the important distinction between Uyghur and Hui. The Chinese government also uses the Hui to suppress the Uyghur.

As long as the Uyghur is the common enemy, the Hui and Han will collaborate. If the Uyghurs are able to break away and form their own nation, in short order you will find the majority Han oppressing the minority Hui.

[TM Riddle]

But but China equally persecutes all religions so it's all fine.
It's not like they are targeting Muslims alone.
And even if they are what about missiles?
(Goes to complain about Kashmir in the next thread).

[James]

This is what happens in a nation that is controlled by State Communism - conform, or suffer. It is just another form of Fascism, which has historically been associated with the Right but actually is not a concept owned exclusively by them.

[Abdullah719]

Muslims in China's Linxia region fear eradication of Islam

Green-domed mosques still dominate the skyline of China’s “Little Mecca”, but they have undergone a profound change – no longer do boys flit through their stone courtyards en route to classes and prayers.

In what locals told AFP they fear is a deliberate move to eradicate Islam, the atheist ruling Communist Party has banned minors under 16 from religious activity or study in Linxia, a deeply Islamic region in western China that had offered a haven of comparative religious freedom for the ethnic Hui Muslims there.

China governs Xinjiang, another majority Muslim region in its far west, with an iron fist to weed out what it calls “religious extremism” and ‘separatism’ in the wake of deadly unrest, throwing ethnic Uighurs into shadowy re-education camps without due process for minor infractions such as owning a copy of the Holy Quran or even growing a beard.

“The winds have shifted” in the past year, explained a senior imam who requested anonymity, adding: “Frankly, I’m very afraid they’re going to implement the Xinjiang model here.”

Local authorities have severely curtailed the number of students over 16 officially allowed to study in each mosque and limited certification processes for new imams.

They have also instructed mosques to display national flags and stop sounding the call to prayer to reduce “noise pollution” – with loudspeakers removed entirely from all 355 mosques in a neighbouring county.

“They want to secularise Muslims, to cut off Islam at the roots,” the imam said, shaking with barely restrained emotion. “These days, children are not allowed to believe in religion: only in Communism and the party.”

More than 1,000 boys used to attend his mid-sized mosque to study Quranic-basics during summer and winter school holidays but now they are banned from even entering the premises.

His classrooms are still full of huge Arabic books from Saudi Arabia, browned with age and bound in heavy leather. But only 20 officially registered pupils over the age of 16 are now allowed to use them.

Parents were told the ban on extracurricular Quranic study was for their children’s own good, so they could rest and focus on secular coursework. But most are utterly panicked.

“We’re scared, very scared. If it goes on like this, after a generation or two, our traditions will be gone,” said Ma Lan, a 45-year-old caretaker, tears dripping quietly into her uneaten bowl of beef noodle soup.

Inspectors checked her local mosque every few days during the last school holiday to ensure none of the 70 or so village boys were present.

Their imam initially tried holding lessons in secret before sunrise but soon gave up, fearing repercussions.

Instead of studying five hours a day at the mosque, her 10-year-old son stayed home watching television. He dreams of being an imam, but his schoolteachers have encouraged him to make money and become a Communist cadre, she said.

The Hui number nearly 10 million, half of the country’s Muslim population, according to 2012 government statistics.

In Linxia, they have historically been well integrated with the ethnic Han majority, able to openly express their devotion and centre their lives around their faith.

Women in headscarves dish out boiled lamb in mirror-paneled halal eateries while streams of white-hatted men meander into mosques for afternoon prayers, passing shops hawking rugs, incense and “eight treasure tea,” a local speciality including dates and dried chrysanthemum buds.

But in January, local officials signed a decree – obtained by AFP – pledging to ensure that no individual or organisation would “support, permit, organise or guide minors towards entering mosques for Quranic study or religious activities”, or push them towards religious beliefs.

Imams there were all asked to comply in writing, and just one refused, earning fury from officials and embarrassment from colleagues, who have since shunned him.

“I cannot act contrary to my beliefs. Islam requires education from cradle to grave. As soon as children are able to speak we should begin to teach them our truths,” he explained to AFP.

“It feels like we are slowly moving back towards the repression of the Cultural Revolution,” a nationwide purge from 1966 until 1976 when local mosques were dismantled or turned into donkey sheds, he said.

Other imams complained authorities were issuing fewer certificates required to practise or teach and now only to graduates of state-sanctioned institutions.

“For now, there are enough of us, but I fear for the future. Even if there are still students, there won’t be anyone of quality to teach them,” said one imam.

Local authorities failed to answer repeated calls from AFP seeking comment but Linxia’s youth ban comes as China rolls out its newly revised Religious Affairs Regulations.

The rules have intensified punishments for unsanctioned religious activities across all faiths and regions.

Beijing is targeting minors “as a way to ensure that faith traditions die out while also maintaining the government’s control over ideological affairs,” charged William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International.

Another imam said the tense situation in Xinjiang was at the root of changes in Linxia.

The government believes that “religious piety fosters fanaticism, which spawns extremism, which leads to terrorist acts – so they want to secularise us,” he explained. But many Hui are quick to distinguish themselves from Uighurs.

“They believe in Islam too, but they’re violent and bloodthirsty. We’re nothing like that,” said Muslim hairdresser Ma Jiancai, 40, drawing on common stereotypes.

Sitting under the elegant eaves of a Sufi shrine complex, a young scholar from Xinjiang explained that his family had sent him alone aged five to Linxia to study the Quran with a freedom not possible in his hometown.

“Things are very different here,” he said with knitted brows. “I hope to stay.”

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1759273...ication-islam/

[BreadPakoda]

If China is doing this then there must be some reason for doing it.

[Napa]

Muslims in China's Linxia region fear eradication of Islam

Green-domed mosques still dominate the skyline of China’s “Little Mecca”, but they have undergone a profound change – no longer do boys flit through their stone courtyards en route to classes and prayers.

In what locals told AFP they fear is a deliberate move to eradicate Islam, the atheist ruling Communist Party has banned minors under 16 from religious activity or study in Linxia, a deeply Islamic region in western China that had offered a haven of comparative religious freedom for the ethnic Hui Muslims there.

China governs Xinjiang, another majority Muslim region in its far west, with an iron fist to weed out what it calls “religious extremism” and ‘separatism’ in the wake of deadly unrest, throwing ethnic Uighurs into shadowy re-education camps without due process for minor infractions such as owning a copy of the Holy Quran or even growing a beard.

“The winds have shifted” in the past year, explained a senior imam who requested anonymity, adding: “Frankly, I’m very afraid they’re going to implement the Xinjiang model here.”

Local authorities have severely curtailed the number of students over 16 officially allowed to study in each mosque and limited certification processes for new imams.

They have also instructed mosques to display national flags and stop sounding the call to prayer to reduce “noise pollution” – with loudspeakers removed entirely from all 355 mosques in a neighbouring county.

“They want to secularise Muslims, to cut off Islam at the roots,” the imam said, shaking with barely restrained emotion. “These days, children are not allowed to believe in religion: only in Communism and the party.”

More than 1,000 boys used to attend his mid-sized mosque to study Quranic-basics during summer and winter school holidays but now they are banned from even entering the premises.

His classrooms are still full of huge Arabic books from Saudi Arabia, browned with age and bound in heavy leather. But only 20 officially registered pupils over the age of 16 are now allowed to use them.

Parents were told the ban on extracurricular Quranic study was for their children’s own good, so they could rest and focus on secular coursework. But most are utterly panicked.

“We’re scared, very scared. If it goes on like this, after a generation or two, our traditions will be gone,” said Ma Lan, a 45-year-old caretaker, tears dripping quietly into her uneaten bowl of beef noodle soup.

Inspectors checked her local mosque every few days during the last school holiday to ensure none of the 70 or so village boys were present.

Their imam initially tried holding lessons in secret before sunrise but soon gave up, fearing repercussions.

Instead of studying five hours a day at the mosque, her 10-year-old son stayed home watching television. He dreams of being an imam, but his schoolteachers have encouraged him to make money and become a Communist cadre, she said.

The Hui number nearly 10 million, half of the country’s Muslim population, according to 2012 government statistics.

In Linxia, they have historically been well integrated with the ethnic Han majority, able to openly express their devotion and centre their lives around their faith.

Women in headscarves dish out boiled lamb in mirror-paneled halal eateries while streams of white-hatted men meander into mosques for afternoon prayers, passing shops hawking rugs, incense and “eight treasure tea,” a local speciality including dates and dried chrysanthemum buds.

But in January, local officials signed a decree – obtained by AFP – pledging to ensure that no individual or organisation would “support, permit, organise or guide minors towards entering mosques for Quranic study or religious activities”, or push them towards religious beliefs.

Imams there were all asked to comply in writing, and just one refused, earning fury from officials and embarrassment from colleagues, who have since shunned him.

“I cannot act contrary to my beliefs. Islam requires education from cradle to grave. As soon as children are able to speak we should begin to teach them our truths,” he explained to AFP.

“It feels like we are slowly moving back towards the repression of the Cultural Revolution,” a nationwide purge from 1966 until 1976 when local mosques were dismantled or turned into donkey sheds, he said.

Other imams complained authorities were issuing fewer certificates required to practise or teach and now only to graduates of state-sanctioned institutions.

“For now, there are enough of us, but I fear for the future. Even if there are still students, there won’t be anyone of quality to teach them,” said one imam.

Local authorities failed to answer repeated calls from AFP seeking comment but Linxia’s youth ban comes as China rolls out its newly revised Religious Affairs Regulations.

The rules have intensified punishments for unsanctioned religious activities across all faiths and regions.

Beijing is targeting minors “as a way to ensure that faith traditions die out while also maintaining the government’s control over ideological affairs,” charged William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International.

Another imam said the tense situation in Xinjiang was at the root of changes in Linxia.

The government believes that “religious piety fosters fanaticism, which spawns extremism, which leads to terrorist acts – so they want to secularise us,” he explained. But many Hui are quick to distinguish themselves from Uighurs.

“They believe in Islam too, but they’re violent and bloodthirsty. We’re nothing like that,” said Muslim hairdresser Ma Jiancai, 40, drawing on common stereotypes.

Sitting under the elegant eaves of a Sufi shrine complex, a young scholar from Xinjiang explained that his family had sent him alone aged five to Linxia to study the Quran with a freedom not possible in his hometown.

“Things are very different here,” he said with knitted brows. “I hope to stay.”

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1759273...ication-islam/

Difficult situation for Pakistan here. No doubt they would like to support their fellow Muslims, but China's support is now critical to Pakistan's economy.

[Abdullah719]

Thread is not about Kashmir.

Stay on topic.

[Abdullah719]

A long read from The Guardian on the topic.

--------------------------

‘We’re a people destroyed’: why Uighur Muslims across China are living in fear

->Spoiler<-

It was about a year ago that I first walked into Karim’s restaurant, intending to write about it as part of the food guide I was putting together about ethnic Uighur restaurants in the traditionally Chinese “inner China” of the country’s east and south. Having already spent a decade researching the Uighurs – a largely Muslim ethnic minority group based mainly in the westernmost Xinjiang region, outside inner China – this food-guide project was intended as a fun spin-off from my usual linguistic studies. Or even a “treasure hunt”, you might say, given the rarity of Uighur restaurants in such major inner-China cities as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, where the Uighurs are migrants and where the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group that account for more than 90% of China’s population, are the great majority.

While my travels for the guide would involve visiting almost 200 restaurants in more than 50 cities, Karim’s was particularly memorable. I found the usual pilau rice and hand-pulled laghmen noodles – central-Asian dishes that are staples of Uighur cuisine, and which Karim’s kitchen did very well. More important, though, were the sense of warmth and feeling of community, which made sitting there for an additional hour or two a real pleasure. Karim was a great host, and his diners would often chat with each other across the tables, touching upon serious issues while maintaining a certain levity and humour.

During one of my visits, the conversation turned to the discrimination that Uighurs faced in this large, Han-majority city. Several diners mentioned the difficulty of finding accommodation, as local hotels frequently rejected Uighur visitors by claiming there were no rooms available. Even a Uighur policeman had been denied a room, someone pointed out with a laugh. Karim, a worldly polyglot who could have easily passed for a Middle Easterner, mentioned how he would sometimes go to a hotel and speak to the front-desk staff in English. Mistaking him for a foreigner, they would tell him that there were rooms available, and then backtrack after asking him for his documents and seeing the word Uighur on his Chinese identification card.

As would soon become clear, however, such “mild” discrimination was to be the least of the Uighurs’ problems. While the regulars at Karim’s were having this discussion in the spring of 2017, their home region of Xinjiang – home to more than 10 million ethnic Uighurs – was already being subjected to what the Chinese state described as an “all-out offensive” against religious extremism and terrorism. The hard-line policies started shortly after the appointment of Chen Quanguo as Xinjiang’s party secretary, a strongman who had previously pursued similar policies in Tibet. While the government has justified its use of force as a response to a number of violent incidents, critics have claimed the measures are aimed at destroying Uighur identity.

Things would worsen considerably over the coming year, as Xinjiang was turned into an Orwellian police state and hundreds of thousands of Uighurs were gradually locked away in concentration camps for what the state calls “transformation through education”. Others have been thrown in prison or “disappeared”. Witness reports of life inside the camps and detention centres have told not only of unhealthy living conditions, but also of regular violence, torture and brainwashing. Writing in the New York Times in February, James A Millward, a scholar who has researched Xinjiang for three decades, argued that the “state repression in Xinjiang has never been as severe as it has become since early 2017”.

For many, last spring would mark the start of a period of great loss – the loss of rights, livelihoods and identities. Some would also lose their lives. Karim was particularly vulnerable, as Uighurs like him, who have lived abroad in Muslim-majority countries, have been especially targeted in the government crackdown. When I returned to the neighbourhood earlier this year, I was told that Karim had been handcuffed, taken away and jailed – and that he had “died after prolonged heavy labour”.

At least, that’s the politically proper way of putting it. You could also say that he was murdered by the state.

The state, for its part, has shut down all criticism of its actions in Xinjiang. Earlier this year, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, declared that concerns about the mistreatment of the Uighurs were “unjustified” and criticism amounted to “interference in China’s internal affairs”. In a memorable statement last summer, Xinjiang’s deputy foreign publicity director, Ailiti Saliyev, went so far as to suggest that “the happiest Muslims in the world live in Xinjiang”.

While it is probably best to let the Uighurs speak for themselves regarding their happiness, hearing their voices has been difficult, given the state’s determined efforts to turn Xinjiang into an information vacuum. Journalists, in particular, have been under very heavy scrutiny, with anyone they have managed to interview often too scared to speak honestly. The risks and retributions have been significantly higher for Uighur journalists abroad. In February, four Uighurs working for Radio Free Asia in the US learned that some of their close relatives in Xinjiang had been detained. It was, wrote the Washington Post, “an apparent attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage”.

Many foreign tourists I have spoken to in Xinjiang this year have reported being interrogated on the train into the region, as well as at checkpoints between cities. Two academic scholars told me stories of being denied entry or transportation to towns that have traditionally been accessible, without being provided with any real reason. While residing in Xinjiang’s westernmost city of Kashgar, an oasis town not far from the borders with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, I was effectively chased out: the hostel where I was staying was suddenly closed for “fire safety” reasons, and I found myself blacklisted at every other place that could have offered me accommodation. After leaving Xinjiang, I spent a month in Yiwu, an international trade hub about 5,000km to the east, not far from Shanghai, but even here, my daily contact with the city’s Uighur population attracted special attention. On two occasions, the local police warned me to “obey Chinese law” and to “not go hanging out with any bad Xinjiang people” – a euphemism for Uighurs.

But nevertheless, between my linguistic research and the food guide, I spent the best part of 18 months precisely among those “bad Xinjiang people”, both in Xinjiang itself, and in inner China. During that time, I spoke to hundreds of Uighurs, the majority of them male restaurant workers, businessmen, small-time traders and street-food cooks, as well as their families. In the vast majority of cases, we did not talk about politics. Even so, almost everyone I talked to was affected by the repression in Xinjiang, and sometimes the only alternative to talking about it would have been not talking at all – and so we talked.

In synthesising what I have observed, I realise that I ultimately cannot speak for the Uighurs – that task should of course be left to the Uighurs themselves, in an environment that is free of fear. Still, I hope the image I present will allow the reader a glimpse of how the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the rest of China are reacting to the present situation.

On a certain alley in Xinjiang stands a diner I particularly like, popular for its pigeon shish kebab and milk tea. I would always try to stop there when I was in the neighbourhood. The last time I did, I came with apologies, having not visited for a long time. But, far from being angry, the owner was just surprised that I was still in the region. “I was sure that you had gone back to your country,” he told me.

Almost a year had passed since our previous meeting, and a lot had changed. Most of his staff, about 10 of them in all, had been forced to return to their hometowns in southern Xinjiang, either for “re-education” or for “hometown arrest”. Gone were the shish kebabs and the tea, together with most of the clientele. Uighur kitchen staff were extremely scarce now, the owner said, and it was almost impossible to find substitutes.

I asked him about his nephew – another old friend – but was told that he was in jail for having previously spent a year in a Middle Eastern country. “Our mood is shattered,” the owner admitted to me.

This sense of gloom was also evident in the frank negativity I started to notice in many Uighur business-owners. While Uighurs generally consider it bad etiquette to complain when asked how they are doing, more and more often in recent times, I heard people telling me that things were “not that great” because “business was horrible”. When I ran into a tour guide acquaintance last year, I remarked to him that he had got really thin since I had last seen him. “We’ve all got really thin this past year,” he told me.

Equally pervasive was the constant sense of fear. On one evening in Kashgar, I watched five or six police snatch a drunken man off the streets just for waving his arms, without asking any questions, and even though he was with his wife and son. In inner China, young restaurant workers could seem relaxed one day and then visibly worried the next: it would emerge that the police had given them orders to go back to their hometowns in Xinjiang immediately – a three- or four-day train journey for most.

There was also the fear of always being watched. Once I sat down with a manager of a restaurant in eastern China and, unable to avoid the topic, spoke to him about how oppressive things had become in Xinjiang, telling him about a friend who had been sentenced to a decade in jail for owning the “wrong” books. No sooner did I say the word “jail” than the manager’s head began to twitch in the direction of the table behind ours. “There’s a policeman here!” he whispered, before standing up and walking away.

Concerned for their safety, many Uighurs have deleted all foreign contacts on China’s (highly monitored) WeChat app. At one point last year, I made an effort to see a friend in Xinjiang who had deleted me, by first getting in touch through a proxy, and then meeting in person. In retrospect, I almost wish I hadn’t. Our lunch together was silent and awkward. There was so much to say, but everything felt taboo, and there were whole minutes when we just sat there in silence. It didn’t seem like anyone was monitoring us, but my friend looked worried all the same. When I passed him samples of a book I was working on, he cast them a glance but didn’t flip through the pages. When I asked him if a mutual acquaintance of ours was still around, he told me that he “didn’t know” that person anymore, before adding: “Right now, I don’t even know you.”

When talking about the situation in Xinjiang, it is standard to use euphemisms. The most common by far is the word yoq, which means “gone” or “not around”. “Do you get what I’m saying?” a friend asked me once, as I tried to figure out what had happened to a person he was telling me about. “That guy is yoq. He’s got another home now.”

The phrase adem yoq (“everybody’s gone”) is the one I’ve heard the most this past year. It has been used to describe the absence of staff, clients and people in general. When referring to people who have been forced to return to their hometowns (for hometown arrest, camp or worse), it is typical to say that they “went back home”.

The concentration camps are not referred to as “concentration camps”, naturally. Instead, the people there are said to be occupied with “studying” (oqushta/öginishte) or “education” (terbiyileshte), or sometimes may be said to be “at school” (mektepte).

Likewise, people do not use words like “oppression” when talking about the overall situation in Xinjiang. Rather, they tend to say “weziyet yaxshi emes” (“the situation isn’t good”), or describe Xinjiang as being very “ching” (“strict”, “tight”).

Despite the euphemisms, there is no getting away from what is actually happening. It hit me just how unavoidable the topic was when, while chatting with an old friend in inner China, I made a genuine effort to avoid politics and talk about more normal or even mundane things. It proved impossible. When I asked him what he had done earlier that day, he brought up a political meeting that all the Uighurs in that city had to attend. When I asked him if he still tried to read books in his spare time, he told me that the police had cracked down on that, too, and that reading any book would invite unwanted attention. When I asked him about his aspirations for the future, he told me that, ideally, he would love to become a chef of Turkish food and open up his own restaurant, but, unfortunately, that act alone would get him jailed in Xinjiang, as the state continues to discourage and destroy all contact between the Uighurs and other Turkic and Muslim peoples abroad.

On a few occasions, I encountered people who seemed to have reached a degree of desperation, and just wanted to let everything out. The first such time was in Kashgar, in autumn last year, when a uniformed public-security worker – the mostly Uighur, lowest-rank uniformed authority in southern Xinjiang – invited me to sit across from him at a table in a teahouse. He was off duty that afternoon, having just returned from a medical checkup.

The conversation that followed was tense. He asked me what I knew of Uighur history, and then asked me what I thought of the Uighurs as a people. The latter question is one I have been asked several times during my years in Xinjiang, and has often struck me as a way of searching for some sort of outside verification of Uighurs’ identity. Unsure of how to reply, I tried to be noncommittal: “The Uighurs are a people like any other, with their good and bad.”

“You’re hiding what you really think,” he confronted me. “Just look all around you. You’ve seen it yourself [here in Kashgar]. We’re a people destroyed.”

Given my general distrust of uniformed people in China, I wasn’t ready to share any political views at the time, but have since come to see our conversation as a true moment of desperation. His words, I believe, were genuine. His post was close to Kashgar’s night market, but as of a few days after our meeting, I never saw him there, or anywhere else, ever again.

The other conversation that will always stay with me took place in inner China, while visiting a restaurant I had been to a few times before. With the exception of a single waiter, all of the old staff were gone. As soon as that waiter saw me, he dropped everything to sit down and chat. My telling him that I had been kicked out of Kashgar seemed to trigger him, and he would go on to say many things about the situation there, virtually all of them taboo.

“Millions of Uighurs” were being held in camps, he told me, where they were being fed 15-year-old leftover rice and subjected to beatings. (Precise numbers are hard to verify, but witness testimonies have confirmed both poor nutrition and violence in the camps.) He said that the Uighurs in this inner-China city now had to attend political meetings, and that they might soon have to take a test on political subjects such as the 19th party congress. Those who didn’t pass would be sent back to Xinjiang.

“When the police talk to us,” he said, “they are suspicious about everything: ‘Do you smoke? Do you drink?’ If you don’t, they’ll ask you why not. They’ll ask you if you pray. They’ll ask you if you want to go abroad, or if you’ve previously applied for or had a passport. If you look at the policeman, he’ll ask you what you’re looking at him for; if you look down at the floor, he’ll ask you why you’re looking down at the floor. Whenever we take a train, there’s always a separate room that we have to go through before we’re allowed to leave the station, where they check our documents and question us.”

I worried about him talking to me so openly, but it seemed he understood the risks, or perhaps had already concluded that he was going to be taken soon anyway. When another crackdown came a week later, sweeping a good chunk of the city’s Uighur youth with it, he would be among those forced to leave. “Back to his hometown.”

Occasionally, I did encounter people who had more positive things to say about the situation. At the risk of passing off my subjectivity as fact, the vast majority of these comments struck me as marked by a mix of cognitive dissonance, Stockholm syndrome and self-delusion – often evidenced by self-contradiction and an apparent lack of conviction behind the words.

At a time when I was still absorbing Xinjiang’s new reality, one of the hardest “rude awakening” moments came while catching up with a Uighur friend who worked in Xinjiang’s tourism industry. After chatting for a bit, I remarked on the city’s increasingly intense security procedures, in a manner that suggested that I found it all over the top. He, too, had his complaints about the new system, saying how he would be forced to stop and have his ID checked seven times while travelling just 2-3km on his electric scooter. Still, he was quick to add: “But the people all feel really safe now. Before, I used to worry about letting my daughter go to school alone, but now I don’t have to worry.”

Those words – which almost sounded prepared – stunned me, given that we were just speaking one-on-one. He then went on to say that this was all to protect the people from terrorism, and that as soon as Russia and the US hurried up and defeated Isis, all of this would be over. However, when I said that I didn’t think that terrorism could be defeated with force like this, he was quick to agree with that as well.

Another friend in another city complained to me about the arbitrary inspections that the local police carried out with regard to the Uighurs. I still remember how angry he got as he talked – saying that the individual policemen acted like they were the law – but nevertheless added that the upper layers of the government were good.

A curious phenomenon took place online at the time of the 19th party congress last October, when Uighur friends who hardly spoke any Mandarin suddenly started posting long messages in fluent Mandarin praising Xi Jinping and the congress. A few months later, I heard about a WeChat app that allowed users to “fasheng liangjian” (“to clearly demonstrate one’s stance” or, literally, “to speak forth and flash one’s sword”), by plugging their name into a prepared Mandarin- or Uighur-language statement. The statement pledged their loyalty to the Communist party and its leaders, and expressed, among other things, their determination in upholding “ethnic harmony” and standing opposed to terrorism. The generated image file could then be readily posted on their social network of choice as a show of loyalty.

In many of the inner-China restaurants I visited, this loyalty was much more visual than verbal. As a rule, Uighur restaurants would be the only ones on their street covered with Chinese flags and, occasionally, red banners proclaiming a determined struggle against terrorism. Sometimes, the interiors too would have little flags, as well as photos of Xi or plates bearing his image, or “ethnic harmony” slogans such as those calling for all of China’s ethnic groups to be “as tight as seeds in a pomegranate”. Some restaurants even had Uighur-language books about Xi and the party at the front counter. I never asked if such demonstrations were voluntary or mandated by the law, but suspect that, like China’s censorship in general, they were a mix of the two – some being anticipatory, some being forced.

Obedience and appeasement appear to have saved some people from the camps and prisons. Other factors – money, connections, Han-Chinese spouses and a formal Chinese education – although never an ironclad guarantee, appear to help also. Beyond that, bribing police or officials to avoid having one’s passport confiscated or being sent back to one’s hometown is an option that several people I spoke to had taken – a crack in a system that often feels hopelessly inescapable.

For the majority, however, the detentions and the fear of detention have become an unavoidable fact of daily life. Most, I would say, cope by simply enduring and “plodding along”. Despite the missing relatives, the financial losses and the fear that one day soon it could be their turn to go, many of my friends and acquaintances have done their best to focus on how they earn their livelihood, and to continue doing just that. For many, what seems most important now is their children’s future. Those without children are focusing on simpler and more concrete goals, such as graduating from university, finding a job or buying an apartment.

One friend manages a small shop in inner China where local police have recently confiscated entire shelves of import products for “not having Chinese labels”. He was able to stop them from confiscating more, he says, by telling them that he wasn’t feeling well and had to close the shop. With half the shelves empty and business having seen a sharp decline, he believes that it won’t be long now before the store is closed.

But, even as he describes how the state has started to target young Uighur men indiscriminately, he says he is not afraid. “I’ve already experienced a lot in life. So if they come and arrest me – fine. Whatever happens, happens.”

When talking of the situation in general, he takes a broader, grander view. “This is a trial for the Muslim world right now,” he says. “If you look at what’s happening in Syria, or in other places, the Muslim world as a whole is undergoing a test. But Allah knows everything that’s happening. We just have to get through this.” With praying all but forbidden for the Uighurs, he has found ways that the authorities won’t notice, such as praying covertly while sitting in a chair, or praying under one of the trees that line the sidewalk.

For others, hope exists simply by necessity, and many Uighurs have told me that “things will get better soon” without offering any reason for believing this. Some seem to think that a friend or relative will be released in the near future “because they’ve been held for so many months already”. Others seem to think that the situation will revert to normal “once terrorism is defeated”. In some of the conversations I have had in inner China’s Uighur restaurants – which, again, have lost huge portions of their staff – I have been told that the staff would “come back soon after finishing their education”.

But time has been cruel to these optimistic voices. As the months have turned into a year, and more, the people interned are still interned, the restaurants are losing ever more staff and clients, and the situation only continues to worsen.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...living-in-fear

[Abdullah719]

U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps

GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations human rights panel said on Friday that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China are held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that 2 million Uighurs and Muslim minorities were forced into “political camps for indoctrination” in the western Xinjiang autonomous region.

“We are deeply concerned at the many numerous and credible reports that we have received that in the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability (China) has changed the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internship camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of ‘no rights zone’,” she told the start of a two-day regular review of China’s record, including Hong Kong and Macao.

China has said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions between the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home and the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

A Chinese delegation of some 50 officials made no comment on her remarks at the Geneva session that is scheduled to continue on Monday.

The U.S. mission to the United Nations said on Twitter that it was “deeply troubled by reports of an ongoing crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslims in China.”

“We call on China to end their counterproductive policies and free all of those who have been arbitrarily detained,” the U.S. mission said.

The allegations came from multiple sources, including activist group Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which said in a report last month that 21 percent of all arrests recorded in China in 2017 were in Xinjiang.

Earlier, Yu Jianhua, China’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said it was working toward equality and solidarity among all ethnic groups.

But McDougall said that members of the Uighur community and other Muslims were being treated as “enemies of the state” solely on the basis of their ethno-religious identity.

More than 100 Uighur students who returned to China from countries including Egypt and Turkey had been detained, with some dying in custody, she said.

Fatima-Binta Dah, a panel member, referred to “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” and asked the Chinese delegation, “What is the level of religious freedom available now to Uighurs in China, what legal protection exists for them to practice their religion?”

Panelists also raised reports of mistreatment of Tibetans in the autonomous region, including inadequate use of the Tibetan language in the classroom and at court proceedings.

“The U.N. body maintained its integrity, the government got a very clear message,” Golok Jigme, a Tibetan monk and former prisoner living in exile, told Reuters at the meeting.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1KV1SU

[Bewal Express]

U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps

GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations human rights panel said on Friday that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China are held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that 2 million Uighurs and Muslim minorities were forced into “political camps for indoctrination” in the western Xinjiang autonomous region.

“We are deeply concerned at the many numerous and credible reports that we have received that in the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability (China) has changed the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internship camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of ‘no rights zone’,” she told the start of a two-day regular review of China’s record, including Hong Kong and Macao.

China has said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions between the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home and the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

A Chinese delegation of some 50 officials made no comment on her remarks at the Geneva session that is scheduled to continue on Monday.

The U.S. mission to the United Nations said on Twitter that it was “deeply troubled by reports of an ongoing crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslims in China.”

“We call on China to end their counterproductive policies and free all of those who have been arbitrarily detained,” the U.S. mission said.

The allegations came from multiple sources, including activist group Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which said in a report last month that 21 percent of all arrests recorded in China in 2017 were in Xinjiang.

Earlier, Yu Jianhua, China’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said it was working toward equality and solidarity among all ethnic groups.

But McDougall said that members of the Uighur community and other Muslims were being treated as “enemies of the state” solely on the basis of their ethno-religious identity.

More than 100 Uighur students who returned to China from countries including Egypt and Turkey had been detained, with some dying in custody, she said.

Fatima-Binta Dah, a panel member, referred to “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” and asked the Chinese delegation, “What is the level of religious freedom available now to Uighurs in China, what legal protection exists for them to practice their religion?”

Panelists also raised reports of mistreatment of Tibetans in the autonomous region, including inadequate use of the Tibetan language in the classroom and at court proceedings.

“The U.N. body maintained its integrity, the government got a very clear message,” Golok Jigme, a Tibetan monk and former prisoner living in exile, told Reuters at the meeting.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1KV1SU

Disgusting by the Chinese. IA the Chinese will get their cumupence one day

[Pakistanian]

I don't like China. Kashgar was historically a great city amd the Uighurs are heirs of their rich Turkic heritage.

[TM Riddle]

Communism destroyed China.
Can't believe it's the same land which gave the world beautiful philosophies of Zen and Taoism as well as being a leading civilization for several millennia.

[James]

Aye, another example of the misery that is caused by state communism.

[TM Riddle]

Aye, another example of the misery that is caused by state communism.

China used to be a highly tolerant and progressive society up until the middle ages. It's contribution to World in terms of trade, technology, art and culture remains unparalleled.

Scientific thinking and rationality was promoted which led to inventions of great many things chief of them being silk rearing, glass making, paper, gunpowder etc which led to growth of trade and business leading to prospering of economy and overall living standard even though it was under a autocratic despotic rule as it was norm back then.

It was only after they decided along the lines of Japan to shut off their country to foreigners that their real demise began.
By doing so they shielded themselves from the revolutionary ideologies of Renaissance and Enlightenment which were holding sway in Europe thus pushing themselves further into abyss.

Rest of the damage was done by the Europeans and Japanese and Americans in the 19th century when they strove to grab a bite of the Chinese mainland and ports leading to complete collapse of the ancient civilization. This unfortunately gave rise to growth of communism in the agrarian Chinese society which by then had become extremely wary of Western capitalists and sought to completely reform the country so as to build a strong China which could hold on it's own in the age of aggressive militarism and this is what we are left to deal with now.

[Slog]

Communism destroyed China.
Can't believe it's the same land which gave the world beautiful philosophies of Zen and Taoism as well as being a leading civilization for several millennia.

Why do you think that Chinese who have a lot of exposure to western societies still don't campaign for or fight for democracy, freedom of expression and other ideas of liberalism?

Ive noticed this with many Chinese in America. People from other countries evolve and change ideas on this but they seem rigid

[Abdullah719]

'Oppressing Uighur Muslims prevents Chinese Syria,' says Chinese newspaper

A Chinese newspaper has justified Bejing's repression of Uighur Muslims by saying the assault has prevented the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang from "becoming 'China's Syria' or 'China's Libya'", after the UN expressed concern for the 1 million Muslims being trapped in concentration camps.

The editorial, written by The Global Times, an official Communist Party paper, came after a UN anti-discrimination committee raised concerns Friday over China's deplorable treatment of Uighurs, citing reports of mass detentions that is said "resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy".

Following attacks by Muslim separatists, hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur and Kazakh Muslim minorities in Xinjiang have been arbitrarily detained in "indoctrination camps", where they are forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the party.

The Global Times said the intense regulations in the region were merely "a phase that Xinjiang has to go through in rebuilding peace and prosperity".

The editorial did not directly admit to the existence of the internment camps.

Denouncing what it called "destructive Western public opinions", the paper said, "peace and stability must come above all else".

"Through the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, the national strength of the country and the contribution of local officials, Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil," the paper said.

"It has avoided the fate of becoming 'China's Syria' or 'China's Libya.'"

Comment: China's Uighur oppression runs deeper than Islamophobia

The Chinese government has cracked down on the Xinjiang region for years, especially since a deadly anti-government riot broke out in the regional capital of Urumqi in 2009.

Over recent months, monitoring groups and witnesses say Uighurs have been summoned from abroad and across China and sent into detention and indoctrination centers.

The roughly 10 million Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of China's almost 1.4 billion people and there has never been an insurgency that could challenge the central government's overwhelming might.

When the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination started reviewing China's report in Geneva on Friday, Chinese delegation leader Yu Jianhua highlighted economic progress and rising living standards among other things.

Committee vice-chairwoman Gay McDougall said members are "deeply concerned" by "numerous and credible reports that we have received that, in the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability, (China) has turned the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy".

McDougall said there were estimates that more than a million people "are being held in so-called counter-extremism centers and another 2 million have been forced into so-called re-education camps for political and cultural indoctrination".

She did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing.

The Geneva-based committee continues its hearing Monday, with conclusions expected later. Yu, China's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said China will respond to the main questions raised in Friday's session on Monday.

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/ne...nese-newspaper

[BlackShadow]

Denouncing what it called "destructive Western public opinions", the paper said, "peace and stability must come above all else".

"Through the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, the national strength of the country and the contribution of local officials, Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil," the paper said.

"It has avoided the fate of becoming 'China's Syria' or 'China's Libya.'"

Wow, most countries would go on a defensive and attempt damage control after such reports, but Chinese respond in a counter-attacking mode ! It seems Uighur Muslims have no choice now but to "re-educate" themselves.

[KingKhanWC]

Wow, most countries would go on a defensive and attempt damage control after such reports, but Chinese respond in a counter-attacking mode ! It seems Uighur Muslims have no choice now but to "re-educate" themselves.

We dont know if the writer is writing behalf of the Chinese government. China hasnt confirmed this to be true & the UN official still hasnt revealed her source or any evidence . What we do know is Chinese troops arent raping schoolgirls as we see in IOK so please dont pretend to be concerned.

[Cpt. Rishwat]

We dont know if the writer is writing behalf of the Chinese government. China hasnt confirmed this to be true & the UN official still hasnt revealed her source or any evidence . What we do know is Chinese troops arent raping schoolgirls as we see in IOK so please dont pretend to be concerned.

It may not be concern, many Indians look to 're-education' as an alternative to ethnic cleansing as a final solution to their own Muslim population.

[BlackShadow]

We dont know if the writer is writing behalf of the Chinese government. China hasnt confirmed this to be true & the UN official still hasnt revealed her source or any evidence . What we do know is Chinese troops arent raping schoolgirls as we see in IOK so please dont pretend to be concerned.

Need official Chinese confirmation on them torturing millions of Uighur Muslims? That's some next level bootlicking, but hardly a surprise.

[Major]

so wait, during the Holocaust if the nazi party confirmed the genocide only then it was true?

Wow, just love the logic.

Nazi party was treating all minorities badly, thus that justified their act aswell?

[Varun]

so wait, during the Holocaust if the nazi party confirmed the genocide only then it was true?

Wow, just love the logic.

Nazi party was treating all minorities badly, thus that justified their act aswell?

You need to be the 'right' Muslim to invite tears from @KingKhanWC.

If you're born in China or Afghanistan, to hell with you.

[Cpt. Rishwat]

You need to be the 'right' Muslim to invite tears from @KingKhanWC.

If you're born in China or Afghanistan, to hell with you.

You also need to be the right 'Muslim' to agree with hardcore Hindutvas shedding crocodile tears over Chinese Muslims. Won't name any names here but you can hear the clinking of ankle bells when they post.

[Romali_rotti]

We dont know if the writer is writing behalf of the Chinese government. China hasnt confirmed this to be true & the UN official still hasnt revealed her source or any evidence . What we do know is Chinese troops arent raping schoolgirls as we see in IOK so please dont pretend to be concerned.

Good lord this one takes the cake, out of all you silly posts over the years, this post takes the kingdom lol....

[enkidu_]

Why don't peoples treat the Ughuyr and Hui cases differently ? Both are Muslim majority, both are at around 10 millions, but while the Ughuyrs define themselves as a Turkic nation and seek secession from the Han-majority Chinese state, the Hui's are basically Han converts (with Persian or Arab input here and there), and they're in fact more integrated than all other Chinese minorities, providing scholars from the Ming dynasty onward (Wang Dayu in the 16th century was respected by neo-Confucian intellectuals) to famous soldiers (read about the "Ma clique" at the beginning of the last century), and also their single most important explorer, Zheng He.

To blur the distinction between the Uyghurs and the Hui's would be like to say "there's no problem in Kashmir... look at how happy Muslims are in Bollywood or Tamil Nadu".

Ofc Uyghurs themselves should be heard and treated with dignity but to say that "China is at war against Islam" (mind you, at a time when they want to re-establish the Silk road with Muslim-majority countries) like we can read from our Indian friends is purposefully misguiding, even if no one doubts the perennial Indian gravitation towards universal humanism, and all these pristine sentiments are born out of undifferentiated concerns for sheer human suffering and nothing else.

[Musakhel]

What Chinese do with ughers is what Right wing Indians wish their government could do with muslims.

As for a solution it is the same for any oppressed people, leave and move eleswhere, but if they wish to fight it out than they have my respect, but no point in fighting a fight you can't win.

[Loralai]

If the same was happening in Kashmir or Palestine, then it would be plastered over the twitter account of every Pakistani and the likes of Khadim Rizvi and co would be attacking these countries in their sermons.

[Cpt. Rishwat]

Ankle bells resume clinking....

[KingKhanWC]

Indians are as slow as their pacers .

Its an ethnic issue not a religious one . Millions of other Muslims are living a good life in China . China doesnt allow septatists to flourish , Muslims or Bhuddists which is why the Dalai Lama is hiding in India.

Indians wish & want the chinese to oppress all muslims because that what they are doing in Kashmir .

[Varun]

Indians are as slow as their pacers .

Its an ethnic issue not a religious one . Millions of other Muslims are living a good life in China . China doesnt allow septatists to flourish , Muslims or Bhuddists which is why the Dalai Lama is hiding in India.

Indians wish & want the chinese to oppress all muslims because that what they are doing in Kashmir .

Bottomline? No. of tears shed over:

Palestinian Muslims: 500,000
Kashmiri Muslims: 250,000
Burmese Muslims: 100,000
Chinese Muslims: 0
Afghan Muslims: 0
Yemeni Muslims: 0

At least be like the rest of us and live to hate every person, animal and thing rather than being selective like this.

[troodon]

Indians are as slow as their pacers .

Its an ethnic issue not a religious one . Millions of other Muslims are living a good life in China . China doesnt allow septatists to flourish , Muslims or Bhuddists which is why the Dalai Lama is hiding in India.

Indians wish & want the chinese to oppress all muslims because that what they are doing in Kashmir .

LOOOOOOL

Same with India or any other country. Nobody lets separatists have a free hand in their land. At least India have not flooded the separatists land with majority like Chinese did.

Dalai lama is fighting for Tibet. He is not supplying arms to Tibetians to fight Chinese. He is using peaceful means to get to his goal unlike some who supply arms and training to disgruntled youth and brain wash them into believing in Us vs Them.

[BlackShadow]

Indians are as slow as their pacers .

Its an ethnic issue not a religious one . Millions of other Muslims are living a good life in China . China doesnt allow septatists to flourish , Muslims or Bhuddists which is why the Dalai Lama is hiding in India.

Indians wish & want the chinese to oppress all muslims because that what they are doing in Kashmir .

So they are allowed to oppress millions of Muslims fearing a separatist movement that doesn't exist?

I recall your emotional chest-thumping in a thread about some random cartoon contest in the Netherlands. And look at you now, millions of Muslim lives at stake, and all you seem to be doing is defending the oppressor. Pathetic, laanat.

[IAJ]

Could this nation be where Gog and Magog will appear?

[Abdullah719]

China hits back after damning UN report on Uyghur 're-education camps'

(CNN) China has accused the United Nations of relying on "unsubstantiated and irresponsible information" after an international committee released a damning report into the treatment of Uyghurs in China's far-west region of Xinjiang.

In a report Thursday, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed alarm at the "numerous reports of detention of large numbers of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities held incommunicado and often for long periods, without being charged or tried, under the pretext of countering terrorism and religious extremism."

Responding to the allegations at a regular press conference Friday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the allegations were "not true."

"Maintaining lasting peace and security in Xinjiang is the common wish of all ethnicities," she said. "The policies and measures in Xinjiang are aimed at preserving stability, promoting development and unity, and improving livelihood."

The UN report cited evidence from Xinjiang that tens of thousands of Uyghurs and other minorities were being held in "long-term detention or who have been forced to spend varying periods in political 're-education camps' for even non- threatening expressions of Muslim ethno-religious culture like daily greetings."

Some unconfirmed estimates from Uyghur groups based in the US claim the number of people detained in this fashion is over one million.

The UN Committee called for the immediate release of wrongfully detained individuals and the undertaking of "prompt, thorough and impartial investigations into all allegations of racial, ethnic and ethno-religious profiling."

This week, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers called for Chinese officials involved in alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang to be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act.

"The detention of as many as a million or more Uyghurs and other predominately Muslim ethnic minorities in 'political reeducation' centers or camps requires a tough, targeted, and global response," they said in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

In response to the letter, MOFA spokeswoman Hua said that on the issue of human rights "the Chinese record is better than even the US so the US is really not in a position to judge China on this issue in this regard."

"China is committed to ensuring the religious freedom of the Chinese citizens," she said, adding she hoped US lawmakers "can stop this kind of bias and stop hurting the mutual trust and cooperation between the China and the US."

Tensions have increased between Washington and Beijing in recent months over an ongoing trade war, with both sides imposing heavy tariffs on each other's imports.

US President Donald Trump has also accused China of interfering in stalled denuclearization talks on the Korean Peninsula, though this week Pyongyang blamed Washington for the status of the negotiations and called on Trump to honor commitments made during his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/31/a...ntl/index.html

[Mamoon]

The resident champions of Islam, the flag-bearers of Kashmir and Palestine have been brutally exposed in this thread.

China are among the worst nations in the world when it comes to human rights and Muslim rights, but since they hold Pakistan by the balls, our people cannot bring themselves to utter a single word against them.

The best excuse so far is that the Chinese government has not confirmed anything yet, as if these people wait for the governments of India and Israel before criticizing them for not respecting the rights of others.

Humanity and humanitarian concerns will always be selective. Chinese Muslims are of little importance to our champions of Islam, and it is fine if they are persecuted as long as our friendship with atheist Chinese reaps economic benefits.

[Wonderwoman]

China's friendship: deeper than oceans, higher than mountains sweeter than honey" They will never do this.

This all RAW/Mossad/ CIA propoganda, I will trust it when i see it on Xinhua.net

[Wonderwoman]

So they are allowed to oppress millions of Muslims fearing a separatist movement that doesn't exist?

I recall your emotional chest-thumping in a thread about some random cartoon contest in the Netherlands. And look at you now, millions of Muslim lives at stake, and all you seem to be doing is defending the oppressor. Pathetic, laanat.

Our Khan Saab is selective about his battles like his moral compass.

[noonebetterthanPappu]

Isn't it strange when there are protests in Pakistan against blasphemy contest in far away Netherlands but no outrage about daily struggle of close to million Muslims in nearby China....pretty unbelievable.