Persecution of Uyghur Muslims by the communist China.

By UMAR Abdurrahman

Since the spring of 2017, China has adopted a clandestine policy of sending many Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to concentration camps aimed at erasing their religious identities and teaching them to worship the Chinese Communist Party.

There are over one million Muslims who have been detained in these camps where they are forced to denounce their religion and pledge allegiance to the Chinese government.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnicity who live in East and Central Asia. Today, Uyghurs live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, China’s northwest that borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia, boosting of over 20 million in population. It has been under Chinese control since 1949, when the communist People’s Republic of China was established. They are one of fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities. Uyghurs primarily are Muslims.

Recently various reports of human right violations have been documented. "The persecution of Uyghur Muslims is very well documented',’ said Omer Kanat, director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. ‘More than one million Uyghurs are being kept in these so-called reeducation camps, and the first thing they are forced to do in these camps is renounce Islam.

Earlier this month, the region’s top party official said that religion must be “ sinicized ” in order to serve the unification of the country. 

In the days leading up to the last holy month of Ramadān, official notices published on government websites, as yearly done, demand that Uyghurs who are party members, civil servants, teachers, and students forgo fasting.

Similarly, Uyghur's are made to take oaths that was made by Mihrigul which goes thus:  "I swore, I am a citizen of China. I love China. I will never do anything to harm China. China has raised me. The police never interrogated or tortured me, or even detained me.” I read the statement and signed it.

Mihrigul Tursun (Now relocated to the US) is a 29-year-old Uyghur woman  from northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) who was arrested at the airport on returned to China to raise her healthy triplets shortly after delivery in Egypt, in 2015. She was released on “parole” weeks later after learning that her children were suffering from a severe respiratory illness that required surgery, but one of her sons died under mysterious circumstances while being cared for in a local.

Prominent Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti was also sentenced to life in prison for his measured critiques of the Communist Party. A professor at Beijing’s Minzu University of China, he had long championed efforts to bridge differences between Uyghur and Han. Before his arrest, in a video interview with the New York Times in 2010, Tohti lamented the Chinese government’s full-fledged assault on Uyghur identity. “The Chinese government is trying to cultivate the Uyghurs,” he said. “Because you are a Uyghur, you are not allowed to keep your identity. Because you are a Uyghur, I will have to shave your beard. I can burn the Koran. You’d better let go.”

Inmates and relatives say the camps impose military-style discipline and punishments and force detainees to renounce their religion and culture while swearing loyalty to China’s president, Xi Jinping, and the ruling Communist Party.

One former inmate said Muslims were forced to denounce Islam and made to eat pork and drink alcohol - acts forbidden by their religion.

Xinjiang is oil and resource rich. As it developed along with the rest of China, the region attracted more Han Chinese , a migration encouraged by the Chinese government.

But that demographic shift inflamed ethnic tensions, especially within some of the larger cities. In 2009, for example, riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, after Uighurs protested their treatment by the government and the Han majority. About 200 people were killed and hundreds injured during the unrest.

The Chinese government, however, blamed the protests on violent separatist groups — a tactic it would continue to use against the Uighurs and other religious and ethnic minorities across China.

Xinjiang is also a major logistics hub of Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative , a trillion-dollar infrastructure project along the old Silk Road meant to boost China’s economic and political influence around the world.

Xinjiang’s increasing importance to China’s global aspirations is likely a major reason Beijing is tightening its grip.

All of which means China has increasingly tried to draw Xinjiang into its orbit, starting with a crackdown in 2009 following riots in the region and leading up to the implementation of repressive policies in 2016 and 2017 that have curbed religious freedom and increased surveillance of the minority population, often under the guise of combating terrorism and extremism.

The Chinese government justifies its clampdown on the Uyghurs and Muslim minorities by saying it’s trying to eradicate extremism and separatist groups. China's foreign affairs minister responded to a letter signed by 15 Western ambassadors, including the envoys of Britain, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and the EU saying Ambassadors should not “interfere in the internal affairs of other countries”.

Haven been forsaken by the Muslim neighboring state brethren ( Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Mongolia...), the incapacitated Asian states of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria among others are of no help, the rich Arab gulf state are sold out while the Muslim world are in slumber, UN and world super powers have failed.

What's the fate of Poor Uyghur Muslim children in state-run orphanages whose parents are alive but sent to concentration camps where they are being forced to denounce Islam and embrace 'Chinese Nationalism' -China's state run religion-?