Oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang/China

johnq

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apnews.com

China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some...
apnews.com
apnews.com
China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

Gulnar Omirzakh and Zumret Dawut speak about their run-ins with Xinjiang's birth control campaign.

After Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh, had her third child, the government ordered her to get an IUD inserted. Two years later, in January 2018, four officials in military camouflage came knocking at her door anyway. They gave Omirzakh, the penniless wife of a detained vegetable trader, three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children.

If she didn’t, they warned, she would join her husband and a million other ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps ¬— often for having too many children.

“God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong,” said Omirzakh, who tears up even now thinking back to that day. “They want to destroy us as a people.”

The result of the birth control campaign is a climate of terror around having children, as seen in interview after interview. Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.

The hundreds of millions of dollars the government pours into birth control has transformed Xinjiang from one of China’s fastest-growing regions to among its slowest in just a few years, according to new research obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication by China scholar Adrian Zenz.

“This kind of drop is unprecedented....there’s a ruthlessness to it,” said Zenz, a leading expert in the policing of China’s minority regions. “This is part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs.”

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo denounced the policies in a statement Monday.

Full Coverage: China
“We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices,” he said.

China’s foreign minister derided the story as “fabricated” and “fake news,” saying the government treats all ethnicities equally and protects the legal rights of minorities.

“Everyone, regardless of whether they’re an ethnic minority or Han Chinese, must follow and act in accordance with the law,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Monday when asked about the AP story.

Chinese officials have said in the past that the new measures are merely meant to be fair, allowing both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities the same number of children.

For decades, China had one of the most extensive systems of minority entitlements in the world, with Uighurs and others getting more points on college entrance exams, hiring quotas for government posts and laxer birth control restrictions. Under China’s now-abandoned ‘one child’ policy, the authorities had long encouraged, often forced, contraceptives, sterilization and abortion on Han Chinese. But minorities were allowed two children — three if they came from the countryside.

Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, those benefits are now being rolled back. In 2014, soon after Xi visited Xinjiang, the region’s top official said it was time to implement “equal family planning policies” for all ethnicities and “reduce and stabilize birth rates.” In the following years, the government declared that instead of just one child, Han Chinese could now have two, and three in Xinjiang’s rural areas, just like minorities.

But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law.

State-backed scholars have warned for years that large rural religious families were at the root of bombings, knifings and other attacks the Xinjiang government blamed on Islamic terrorists. The growing Muslim population was a breeding ground for poverty and extremism which could “heighten political risk,” according to a 2017 paper by the head of the Institute of Sociology at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences. Another cited as a key obstacle the religious belief that “the fetus is a gift from God.”

Outside experts say the birth control campaign is part of a state-orchestrated assault on the Uighurs to purge them of their faith and identity and forcibly assimilate them. They’re subjected to political and religious re-education in camps and forced labor in factories, while their children are indoctrinated in orphanages. Uighurs, who are often but not always Muslim, are also tracked by a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

“The intention may not be to fully eliminate the Uighur population, but it will sharply diminish their vitality,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uighurs at the University of Colorado. “It will make them easier to assimilate into the mainstream Chinese population.”

Some go a step further.

“It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide,” said Joanne Smith Finley, who works at Newcastle University in the U.K. “These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”

For centuries, the majority was Muslim in the arid, landlocked region China now calls “Xinjiang” — meaning “New Frontier” in Mandarin.

After the People’s Liberation Army swept through in 1949, China’s new Communist rulers ordered thousands of soldiers to settle in Xinjiang, pushing the Han population from 6.7% that year to more than 40% by 1980. The move sowed anxiety about Chinese migration that persists to this day. Drastic efforts to restrict birth rates in the 1990s were relaxed after major pushback, with many parents paying bribes or registering children as the offspring of friends or other family members.

That all changed with an unprecedented crackdown starting in 2017, throwing hundreds of thousands of people into prisons and camps for alleged “signs of religious extremism” such as traveling abroad, praying or using foreign social media. Authorities launched what several notices called “dragnet-style” investigations to root out parents with too many children, even those who gave birth decades ago.

“Leave no blind spots,” said two county and township directives in 2018 and 2019 uncovered by Zenz, who is also an independent contractor with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a bipartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “Contain illegal births and lower fertility levels,” said a third.

Officials and armed police began pounding on doors, looking for kids and pregnant women. Minority residents were ordered to attend weekly flag-raising ceremonies, where officials threatened detention if they didn’t register all their children, according to interviews backed by attendance slips and booklets. Notices found by the AP show that local governments set up or expanded systems to reward those who report illegal births.

In some areas, women were ordered to take gynecology exams after the ceremonies, they said. In others, officials outfitted special rooms with ultrasound scanners for pregnancy tests.

“Test all who need to be tested,” ordered a township directive from 2018. “Detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”

Abdushukur Umar was among the first to fall victim to the crackdown on children. A jovial Uighur tractor driver-turned-fruit merchant, the proud father considered his seven children a blessing from God.

But authorities began pursuing him in 2016. The following year, he was thrown into a camp and later sentenced to seven years in prison — one for each child, authorities told relatives.

“My cousin spent all his time taking care of his family, he never took part in any political movements,” Zuhra Sultan, Umar’s cousin, said from exile in Turkey. “How can you get seven years in prison for having too many children? We’re living in the 21st century — this is unimaginable.”

Sixteen Uighurs and Kazakhs told the AP they knew people interned or jailed for having too many children. Many received years, even decades in prison.

Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp — what the government calls “education and training” — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by Zenz confirmed.

In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county. While fines also apply to Han Chinese, only minorities are sent to the detention camps if they cannot pay, according to interviews and data. Government reports show the counties collect millions of dollars from the fines each year.


Gulnar Omirzakh's fine for 17,405 RMB, or $2865, for having a third child.

In other efforts to change the population balance of Xinjiang, China is dangling land, jobs and economic subsidies to lure Han migrants there. It is also aggressively promoting intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uighurs, with one couple telling the AP they were given money for housing and amenities like a washing machine, refrigerator and TV.

“It links back to China’s long history of dabbling in eugenics….you don’t want people who are poorly educated, marginal minorities breeding quickly,” said James Leibold, a specialist in Chinese ethnic policy at La Trobe in Melbourne. “What you want is your educated Han to increase their birth rate.”

Sultan describes how the policy looks to Uighurs like her: “The Chinese government wants to control the Uighur population and make us fewer and fewer, until we disappear.”

___

Once in the detention camps, women are subjected to forced IUDs and what appear to be pregnancy prevention shots, according to former detainees. They are also made to attend lectures on how many children they should have.

Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile.

It’s unclear what former detainees were injected with, but Xinjiang hospital slides obtained by the AP show that pregnancy prevention injections, sometimes with the hormonal medication Depo-Provera, are a common family planning measure. Side effects can include headaches and dizziness.

Dina Nurdybay, a Kazakh woman, was detained in a camp which separated married and unmarried women. The married women were given pregnancy tests, Nurdybay recalled, and forced to have IUDs installed if they had children. She was spared because she was unmarried and childless.

One day in February 2018, one of her cellmates, a Uighur woman, had to give a speech confessing what guards called her “crimes.” When a visiting official peered through the iron bars of their cell, she recited her lines in halting Mandarin.

“I gave birth to too many children,” she said. “It shows I’m uneducated and know little about the law.”

“Do you think it’s fair that Han people are only allowed to have one child?” the official asked, according to Nurdybay. “You ethnic minorities are shameless, wild and uncivilized.”

Nurdybay met at least two others in the camps whom she learned were locked up for having too many children. Later, she was transferred to another facility with an orphanage that housed hundreds of children, including those with parents detained for giving birth too many times. The children counted the days until they could see their parents on rare visits.

“They told me they wanted to hug their parents, but they were not allowed,” she said. “They always looked very sad.”


One of Xinjiang's internment camps in Artux, China.
Another former detainee, Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.

Ziyawudun and the 40 other women in her “class” were forced to attend family planning lectures most Wednesdays, where films were screened about impoverished women struggling to feed many children. Married women were rewarded for good behavior with conjugal visits from their husbands, along with showers, towels, and two hours in a bedroom. But there was a catch – they had to take birth control pills beforehand.

Some women have even reported forced abortions. Ziyawudun said a “teacher” at her camp told women they would face abortions if found pregnant during gynecology exams.

A woman in another class turned out to be pregnant and disappeared from the camp, she said. She added that two of her cousins who were pregnant got rid of their children on their own because they were so afraid.

Another woman, Gulbahar Jelilova, confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their children. She also saw a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant. And she met doctors and medical students who were detained for helping Uighurs dodge the system and give birth at home.

In December 2017, on a visit from Kazakhstan back to China, Gulzia Mogdin was taken to a hospital after police found WhatsApp on her phone. A urine sample revealed she was two months pregnant with her third child. Officials told Mogdin she needed to get an abortion and threatened to detain her brother if she didn’t.

During the procedure, medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body. She was taken home and told to rest, as they planned to take her to a camp.

Months later, Mogdin made it back to Kazakhstan, where her husband lives.

“That baby was going to be the only baby we had together,” said Mogdin, who had recently remarried. “I cannot sleep. It’s terribly unfair.”

The success of China’s push to control births among Muslim minorities shows up in the numbers for IUDs and sterilization.

In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that jumped more than 60 percent to nearly 330,000 IUDs. At the same time, IUD use tumbled elsewhere in China, as many women began getting the devices removed.

A former teacher drafted to work as an instructor at a detention camp described her experience with IUDs to the AP.

She said it started with flag-raising assemblies at her compound in the beginning of 2017, where officials made Uighur residents recite “anti-terror” lessons. They chanted, “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists....That means we have to go to the training centers.”

Police rounded up over 180 parents with too many children until “not a single one was left,” she said. At night, she said, she lay in bed, stiff with terror, as officers with guns and tasers hauled her neighbors away. From time to time police pounded on her door and searched her apartment for Qurans, knives, prayer mats and of course children, she said.

“Your heart would leap out of your chest,” she said.

Then, that August, officials in the teacher’s compound were told to install IUDs on all women of childbearing age. She protested, saying she was nearly 50 with just one child and no plans to have more. Officials threatened to drag her to a police station and strap her to an iron chair for interrogation.

She was forced into a bus with four armed officers and taken to a hospital where hundreds of Uighur women lined up in silence, waiting for IUDs to be inserted. Some wept quietly, but nobody dared say a word because of the surveillance cameras hanging overhead.

Her IUD was designed to be irremovable without special instruments. The first 15 days, she got headaches and nonstop menstrual bleeding.

“I couldn’t eat properly, I couldn’t sleep properly. It gave me huge psychological pressure,” she said. “Only Uighurs had to wear it.”

Chinese health statistics also show a sterilization boom in Xinjiang.

Budget documents obtained by Zenz show that starting in 2016, the Xinjiang government began pumping tens of millions of dollars into a birth control surgery program and cash incentives for women to get sterilized. While sterilization rates plunged in the rest of the country, they surged seven-fold in Xinjiang from 2016 to 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures. The Uighur-majority city of Hotan budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations in 2019 — over 34% of all married women of childbearing age, Zenz found.

Even within Xinjiang, policies vary widely, being harsher in the heavily Uighur south than the Han-majority north. In Shihezi, a Han-dominated city where Uighurs make up less than 2% of the population, the government subsidizes baby formula and hospital birth services to encourage more children, state media reported.

Zumret Dawut got no such benefits. In 2018, the mother of three was locked in a camp for two months for having an American visa.

When she returned home under house arrest, officials forced her to get gynecology exams every month, along with all other Uighur women in her compound. Han women were exempted. They warned that if she didn’t take what they called “free examinations”, she could end up back in the camp.

One day, they turned up with a list of at least 200 Uighur women in her compound with more than two children who had to get sterilized, Dawut recalled.

“My Han Chinese neighbors, they sympathized with us Uighurs,” Dawut said. “They told me, ‘oh, you’re suffering terribly, the government is going way too far!’”

Dawut protested, but police again threatened to send her back to the camp. During the sterilization procedure, Han Chinese doctors injected her with anesthesia and tied her fallopian tubes — a permanent operation. When Dawut came to, she felt her womb ache.

“I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted another son.”

___


Gulnar Omirzakh and her third child, Alif Baqytali.
Looking back, Omirzakh considers herself lucky.

After that frigid day when officials threatened to lock her up, Omirzakh called relatives around the clock. Hours before the deadline, she scraped together enough money to pay the fine from the sale of her sister’s cow and high-interest loans, leaving her deep in debt.

For the next year, Omirzakh attended classes with the wives of others detained for having too many children. She and her children lived with two local party officials sent specially to spy on them. When her husband was finally released, they fled for Kazakhstan with just a few bundles of blankets and clothes.

The IUD still in Omirzakh’s womb has now sunk into her flesh, causing inflammation and piercing back pain, “like being stabbed with a knife.” For Omirzakh, it’s a bitter reminder of everything she’s lost — and the plight of those she left behind.

“People there are now terrified of giving birth,” she said. “When I think of the word ‘Xinjiang,’ I can still feel that fear.”
 

johnq

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How a computer programme helps China select Muslims for arrest in Xinjiang
BEIJING: Muslims in China's Xinjiang were "arbitrarily" selected for arrest by a computer programme that flagged suspicious behaviour, activists said Wednesday, in a report detailing big data's role in repression in the restive province.
The US-based NGO Human Rights Watch said leaked police data that listed over 2,000 detainees from the Aksu prefecture was further evidence of "how China's brutal repression of Xinjiang's Turkic Muslims is being turbocharged by technology."
Beijing has come under intense international criticism over its policies in the resource-rich territory, where rights groups say as many as one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been held in internment camps.
China defends the camps as vocational training centres aimed at stamping out terrorism and improving employment opportunities.
Surveillance spending in Xinjiang has ballooned in recent years, with facial recognition, iris scanners, DNA collection and artificial intelligence deployed across the province in the name of preventing terrorism.
Human Rights Watch said it had obtained the list -- which detailed detentions from mid-2016 to late 2018 -- from an anonymous source that had previously provided audiovisual content taken from inside a facility in Aksu.
The group gave an example of a "Mrs T" -- detained for "links with sensitive countries" who was listed as having received a number of calls from a foreign number which belonged to her sister.
Researchers at the NGO spoke to the woman and learned that police had interrogated her sister in Xinjiang, but she has had no direct contact with her family in the province since.
The people were flagged using a programme called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, which collected data from surveillance systems in Xinjiang, before officials decided whether to send them to camps, according to Human Rights Watch.
But the NGO said its information suggests the "vast majority" of people were flagged to authorities for legal behaviour, including phone calls to relatives abroad, having no fixed address or switching off their phone repeatedly.
Only around 10 percent of the people on the list were detained for the reasons of terrorism or extremism.
The list, parts of which were shown to AFP, described the reason for detention of many of the people as simply being "flagged" by the integrated platform.
The rights group has not published the full contents of the list, citing safety concerns for the person who had leaked it.
The local Aksu government, as well as Xinjiang's regional authorities, did not immediately respond to AFP's requests for comment.

The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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Uighurs forced to eat pork as China expands Xinjiang pig farms
Former detainees claim that the forcible feeding of pork is most rampant in re-education camps and detention centres.

An April 2020 report said that the Xinjiang government has signed a deal to open a hog farm for local consumption in Kashgar, an area that is 90-percent Muslim Uighur [File: How Hwee Young/EPA]

It has been more than two years since Sayragul Sautbay was released from a re-education camp in China’s westernmost region of Xinjiang. Yet the mother of two still suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from the “humiliation and violence” she endured while she was detained.

Sautbay, a medical doctor and educator who now lives in Sweden, recently published a book in which she detailed her ordeal, including witnessing beatings, alleged sexual abuse and forced sterilisation.

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, she shed more light on other indignities to which the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were subjected, including the consumption of pork, a meat that is strictly prohibited in Islam.

“Every Friday, we were forced to eat pork meat,” Sautbay said. “They have intentionally chosen a day that is holy for the Muslims. And if you reject it, you would get a harsh punishment.”

She added that the policy was designed to inflict shame and guilt on the Muslim detainees and that it was “difficult to explain in words” the emotions she had every time she ate the meat.

“I was feeling like I was a different person. All around me got dark. It was really difficult to accept,” she said.

Testimonies from Sautbay and others provide an indication of how China has sought to crack down in Xinjiang by taking aim at the cultural and religious beliefs of the mostly Muslim ethnic minority, implementing widespread surveillance and – from about 2017 – opening a network of camps it has justified as necessary to counter “extremism”.

#Sayragul #Sautbay released a book about her experience at Chinese concentration camp (part 1). Chinese Genocide policy against the Native People of #EastTurkistan #Uygurs #Kazakhs #Kyrgyz #Uzbeks and #Tatars #IndepenceToEastTurkistan #FreeKazakhs pic.twitter.com/otlXJ9X6QQ
— FreeKazakhs (@FreeKazakhs) August 20, 2020
But documents made available to Al Jazeera show that agricultural development has also become part of what German anthropologist and Uighur scholar, Adrian Zenz, says is a policy of “secularisation”.

According to Zenz, the documents and state-approved news articles support talk within Uighur communities that there is an “active” effort to promote and expand pig farming in the region.

In November 2019, Xinjiang’s top administrator, Shohrat Zakir, that the autonomous region would be turned into a “pig-raising hub”; a move that Uighurs say is an affront to their way of life.

One news article published in May that Zenz recorded describes a new farm in the southern Kashgar area, which aims to produce 40,000 pigs every year.

The project is expected to occupy a 25,000-square-metre (82-square-foot) area in an industrial park in Kashgar’s Konaxahar county, renamed Shufu, according to the Chinese-language website, Sina.

Ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang say that the government is deliberately trying to erase their cultural and religious traditions [File: Diego Azubel/EPA]

The deal was formally signed on April 23 this year, the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month and states that the pig farming is not meant for export purposes, but instead “to ensure the supply of pork” in Kashgar.

The Uighurs make up 90 percent of the population in the city and the surrounding area.

“This is part of the attempt to completely eradicate the culture and religion of the people in Xinjiang,” Zenz told Al Jazeera.

“It is part of the strategy of secularisation, of turning the Uighurs secular and indoctrinating them to follow the communist party and become agnostic or atheist,” he added.

‘Three evils’

Beijing has defended its policies in the region, saying the approach is needed to fight the “three evils of extremism, separatism and terrorism”, following deadly riots in the regional capital Urumqi in 2009.

It has denied the existence of the re-education camps in which the United Nations has said more than one million people have been held, instead saying it operates vocational centres that allow it to “retrain” the Uighur population and teach them new skills.

Like Sautbay, Uighur businesswoman Zumret Dawut has first-hand experience of detention. She was picked up in March 2018 in Urumqi, the city where she was born.

According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in September, there are at least 380 re-education camps and detention centres in Xinjiang [File: Thomas Peter/Reuters]

For two months, Dawut said authorities demanded explanations about her links to Pakistan, her husband’s homeland. They questioned her as well about how many children she had, and whether or not they had studied religion and read the Quran.

She says she was humiliated repeatedly and on one occasion was slapped in the face with a rolled paper after displeasing her interrogator.

Another time, she had to beg the camp’s male officers to allow her to go to the restroom, only for them to leave her handcuffed and watch her the whole time she was in the toilet.

She too says she was served pork repeatedly.

“When you sit in a concentration camp, you do not decide whether to eat, or not to eat. To be alive, we had to eat the meat served to us,” she told Al Jazeera through an interpreter.

Zumret Dawut, who is now living in exile in the US, was detained for two months in her hometown of Urumqi and was repeatedly forced to eat pork while in detention [File: Nathan Ellgren/AP)

Yet those experiences could not have prepared her for what would happen next.

She and several other female detainees were sterilised to prevent them from having more children. The controversy was reported earlier this year by the Associated Press news agency, drawing widespread condemnation.

Starting them young

Sautbay, who was from the town of Ili, ended up in another camp after authorities learned that her husband and their two children had left for neighbouring Kazakhstan in early 2016.

She had originally planned to join them but by then authorities had confiscated her passport and that of other civil servants.

Because of her medical background and experience in running preschools, Sautbay was assigned to teach her fellow detainees the Chinese language, allowing her to closely observe what was happening to the Uighurs.

She says the practice of making Muslims eat pork went beyond the detention camps.

In one school in Altay, a city in northern Xinjiang, students were also forced to eat the meat and when many refused and demonstrated against their school administrators, the government sent in soldiers to intervene, Sautbay said.

The Xinjiang government also started an initiative called “free food” for Muslim children in kindergarten, serving them pork dishes without their knowledge, she added.

The idea was that by starting them young, the Muslim children would acquire a taste for non-halal food.

The Xinjiang government has also reportedly started feeding Uighur children pork, with the idea that by starting them young, they would develop the taste for non-halal food [File: Diego Azubel/EPA]

“China is using and will use different tactics to force Uighurs and other Muslim population to eat pork,” Sautbay said.

Last year, the Italy-based AsiaNews alleged that during the Chinese Lunar New Year, which happened to be the “Year of the Pig”, government officials reportedly delivered pork directly to Muslim households in Ili, and insisted that Uighurs decorate their homes for the festive season.

‘Normalising’ the forbidden

Arslan Hidayat, a Turkey-based Uighur rights activist and secretary-general of the Uyghur Revival Association, told Al Jazeera that whether it is breeding pigs, or eating pork and drinking alcohol, the Chinese government is attempting to “normalise” prohibited practices for Muslims in Xinjiang.

In 2018, as part of official state policy, the Xinjiang government also announced that all halal restaurants in the region would be required to “operate normally” during Ramadan, in contrast to previous years when those same establishments were closed during the month-long ritual of fasting.

According to the Xinjiang government website, which published the memorandum containing the provision on Muslim food establishments, the directive was meant to ensure “normal life order during Ramadan.”

But Zenz believes the directive meant the government wanted to make sure “Uighurs eat and don’t fast” during the day.

He also shared two other official documents, written in the Chinese language, which showed the government in Kashgar allotting money for food for their mostly Muslim Uighur staff during Ramadan.

Taken together, this constitutes a pattern of the Chinese government carrying out a “war against halal”, Zenz noted referring to the term used in Islam to describe acceptable food and other daily practices.

In 2018, the Reuters news agency also reported on an “anti-halal campaign” in Urumqi “to stop Islam penetrating secular life and fuelling ‘extremism'”.

‘Radicalised’

Speaking to Al Jazeera about China’s overall policy towards Uighurs, Einar Tangen, a China affairs expert based in Beijing, said that the Chinese government “feels strongly” that many of Xinjiang’s residents have been “radicalised” in recent years.

Exiled Uighur groups living in Turkey hold a protest in Istanbul to call attention to alleged rights abuses by the Chinese government in Xinjiang [File: Yasin Akgul/AFP]

But the activist Hidayat notes that even non-observant Uighurs, many of them government employees who had tried to adopt a lifestyle similar to the Han Chinese, had not escaped punishment. They too were sent to the camps, by virtue of their racial identity alone, he said.

The documents seen by Al Jazeera are among a cache that also detailed the alleged sterilisation programme reported by AP.

The Chinese government has had little to say about the issue, although various state-controlled publications questioned the credibility of both Sautbay and Dawut when they made allegations of other abuses in Xinjiang.

Al Jazeera has sought an official response from China’s foreign ministry but has yet to receive a reply. It has also requested comment from the Institute for Human Rights at China University of Political Science and Law, but it had yet to respond at the time of publication.

Dawut, the Uighur businesswoman now living in exile in the US, says she stands by her story of what happened to her inside the camps.

Meanwhile, Sautbay, the Kazakh medical doctor, said that by sharing her ordeal, she hoped to be a voice for those who remain in captivity.

“The days I have spent in the concentration camp will not be erased from my memory, and I have to live with it my entire life,” she said.

The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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Minority Women In China Endure Appalling Conditions

While the image portrayed by China to the world is of its leaders heading a responsible and concerned nation, reality runs counter to the images often seen.

The most coercive and authoritarian regime in the world, China, under President Xi Jinping, has audaciously deployed forces to implement its repressive policies at home, toughened its control over civil society and the media, installed invasive surveillance technology, and above all imposed cruel controls on ethnic minorities including the Uyghurs, Tibetans and others.

China’s coercive and draconian measures towards ethnic minorities, especially women and girls, demonstrate gross human rights violations and harsh oppression under the deeply patriarchal governance of the Chinese Communist Party.

China’s deep-rooted family planning policy among Uyghur’s in Xinjiang has taken a repressive form in controlling women’s body by way of forced abortion, and secret sterilizations, to over time diminish their vitality.

Its extreme measures to slash birth rates among the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities is employed using a number of intrauterine devices and sterilization processes.

The repression of Uyghur, Kazakhs, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in strictly controlled Xinjiang is well hidden.

However, the egregious human right violations perpetrating under CCP keep mounting.

The state has enacted outrageous policies of mass sterilization and compulsory use of intrauterine devices on minority female populations with a claimed 80% of these procedures being performed on Uyghur women to alter the population balance towards Han Chinese, and work towards the eventual disappearance of other ethnicities in China.

Such policies have been classified as ‘demographical genocide’.

The torturous and horrific abuse of minority women in China’s internment camps reveal a broader picture of the kind of evil occurring in the camps.

Under a dense network of surveillance systems and interpersonal monitoring, women have to live in suffocating prison cells, sleep in turns and use toilets whilst being watched by security cameras.

Moreover, they are forced to take medication including pills that make them faint as well as being made to sing songs that praise China’s Communist Party.

Such brutal actions instill a sense of fear and trauma for life, granting them no freedom to make choices and give birth.

Since the ethnic minority women are regarded as ‘low quality’, they are electrocuted on the basis that being a Uyghur woman is somehow a crime.

More recently, China has been advertising marriage to Uyghur women to Han men, but this move has shown grim signs of the slow, painful and creeping genocide that is taking place.

Xi’s government campaign “pair up and become family” shows a government acknowledgement and allowance, even if not publicly stated, ‘sponsorship’ of mass rape.

Women become vulnerable to sexual abuse when their husbands are sent to forced labor camps.

Women are then sold to Han man and forced into marriage.

Neither the girl nor her family can reject proposals because if they do, they are then viewed as Islamist extremists.

The Han men who marry minority girls are then rewarded with government gratifications such as jobs and money.

China regards minority women as poor, shameless, uneducated and uncivilized – an approach which ‘helps’ Beijing control minorities breeding quickly while keeping them under heinous conditions of extensive physical punishment.

China’s malicious and ruthless oppression has left its footprint in Tibet as well.

The CCP carries out population-controlled measures against Tibetan women, forced abortions, and intrusive monitoring of women’s reproductive cycles.

The government promotes wide-spread prostitution in the region and practices severe gender discrimination to an extent that ‘virginity’ tests become a pre-condition for employment of girls or women.

China regards Tibetan women as inferior, calling them mentally handicapped if they express their political opinions or join protests against them, thus paving the way for Chinese authorities to hide eugenic laws and continue a systematic pattern of grave human rights violations against women.

Xi administration has ushered in a ‘new era’ of aggressive government, devoid of any rules and human rights in its model of development.

Its harsh practices demonstrate utter disregard of basic human dignity and the sanctity of human life.


China must immediately stop its draconian and systematic abuse of minority women, put an end to all forms of inhumane punishments against women, for no development can be achieved without women as equal to men.

That a ‘developed’ society like China, disrespects women and fails to protect women’s rights by not creating room for their effective participation in sociery is utterly unsustainable and grossly unjust.

The global community should join hands, and call on the CCP to end its persecution of any ethnic minority women in China.

It is only by adopting a holistic approach, built on strong morale foundation, that the world can bring about a required change which will itself eventually challenge the CCP’s creeping actions of genocide that for now, are increasingly posing a threat to the wider world.



The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Tibet/Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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China accused of forcing 570,000 people to pick cotton in Xinjiang
China is forcing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs and other minorities to pick cotton by hand, a U.S. think-tank said, sparking calls for governments to ban all cotton imports from the Xinjiang region.

The vast western province, home to about 11 million ethnic Uighurs, produces 85% of China’s cotton and 20% of the global supply, which is used by fashion brands worldwide.

The Washington-based Center for Global Policy said in a report it was very likely a major share of cotton from Xinjiang was “tainted with forced labour”.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin dismissed the allegations.

“Helping people of all ethnic groups secure stable employment is entirely different from ‘forced labour’,” he told a media briefing in Beijing, adding that nearly 3 million people had been lifted out of poverty in the region.

He said all ethnic groups in Xinjiang were free to choose their occupations.

Anti-slavery experts said the report’s findings would be aired in the British and European parliaments this week.


“This evidence underlines why businesses must urgently end all sourcing from the region, and why governments must ban imports from the region. There are no arguments for delay,” Chloe Cranston from campaign group Anti-Slavery International told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The allegations follow long-standing international concern over reports that China has detained 1 million people from Muslim minorities in camps in Xinjiang and is putting them to work, often in textile factories.

China says the camps are vocational training centers needed to fight extremism.

The Center for Global Policy said Chinese government documents and media reports showed at least 570,000 people in three Xinjiang regions were sent to pick cotton under a coercive labour programme targeting ethnic minority groups.

But it said the overall figure was likely to be several hundred thousand higher.

Its report said pickers - including some released from internment camps - were subjected to intrusive government surveillance and political indoctrination sessions.

Author Adrian Zenz said it was clear that the work scheme involved “a very high risk of forced labour”.


“Some minorities may exhibit a degree of consent in relation to this process, and they may benefit financially. However ... it is impossible to define where coercion ends and where local consent may begin,” he wrote.

Earlier this month the United States banned cotton imports from a powerful Chinese quasi-military organisation - the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) - over forced labour concerns involving detained Uighurs.

The XPCC, founded in 1954 to settle China’s far west, produces about a third of Xinjiang’s cotton.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kenneth Cuccinelli has said a region-wide ban was being studied.

Chinese cotton products are used in garment production in numerous Asian countries supplying global fashion brands.

Clothing giants including Gap Inc, Patagonia Inc and Zara owner Inditex said this year that they did not source from Xinjiang factories, but could not confirm their supply chains were free of cotton from the region.

The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Tibet/Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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Xinjiang is a western province in China, home to the Uyghur people. They are an ethnic minority in China, and there is a lot of discussion about the re-education camps that China is setting up, and I decided to interview a Uyghur person about this.
 

johnq

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With just one day left in President Trump's term, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has officially determined that China's campaign of mass internment, forced labor and forced sterilization of over 1 million Muslim minorities in Xinjiang constitutes "genocide" and "crimes against humanity."

Why it matters: The U.S. has become the first country to adopt these terms to describe the Chinese Communist Party's gross human rights abuses in its far northwest.

What they're saying: "After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that since at least March 2017, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), under the direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has committed crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang," Pompeo said in a statement, adding in a second determination that the CCP has also committed "genocide" there.

The latest: During his confirmation hearing Tuesday, President-elect Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, said he agrees with the determination that China is committing "genocide" in Xinjiang.

Details: Pompeo said "these crimes are ongoing" and include:

  • Arbitrary imprisonment of over 1 million people.
  • Forced sterilization.
  • Torture of those detained.
  • Forced labor.
  • Restrictions on religious freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of movement.
Context: Late last year, Pompeo ordered an internal review, to be overseen by Morse Tan, U.S. ambassador-at-large for the Office of Global Criminal Justice, to determine whether China's actions in Xinjiang constituted genocide and crimes against humanity.

  • The effort was the culmination of years of work at the State Department to help raise awareness of China's repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
  • The Biden campaign has previously called China's actions in Xinjiang a "genocide." It had been unclear whether the Trump administration would make this formal determination before Biden assumed office.
  • "If we had been able to do it sooner, we would have," a senior administration official said. "We have been working on this for years now. We have struggled from day one, since we came to see the contours of what is going on in Xinjiang, with what to call it."
What to watch: Though the U.S. is the first country to make this determination, senior administration officials expressed hope that other countries may soon follow suit.

  • Last week, U.K. Foreign Minister Dominic Raab denounced China's "barbarism" in Xinjiang and announced heavy fines for companies that don't prove their supply chains are free of forced labor.
  • The EU recently passed the European Magnitsky Law making it easier to punish human rights violators.
  • The other side: China has pushed its international partners to oppose any criticism of its Xinjiang policies.
Background: China's northwest region of Xinjiang is home to around 11 million Uighurs and several other Muslim-minority ethnic groups who have long faced severe religious and cultural repression at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

  • After ethnic riots in the regional capital Urumqi in 2009 resulted in hundreds of deaths — and especially after the rise of the Islamic State attracted some Uighur adherents — CCP leaders embarked on a campaign to wipe out what they viewed as the root of the problem: the Uighurs' Islamic faith and their loyalty to their own ethnic and cultural identity, distinct from that of China's majority Han ethnic group.
  • In early 2017, China began constructing a string of mass detention centers across Xinjiang capable of holding up to a million or more detainees. Survivor testimonies and Chinese government documents have revealed that detainees are often held in terrible conditions and spend their days enduring political indoctrination and in some cases physical abuse.
  • Growing evidence of forced labor on a mass scale has resulted in calls for companies to extricate themselves from Xinjiang-based supply chains. The U.S. has banned the import of cotton and tomato products made in Xinjiang and has put numerous Chinese companies entities on an export blacklist due to their complicity in mass surveillance, detention and forced labor.
International corporations should be forced to pull out of China altogether by their governments in order to end the slavery, oppression and exploitation of Uyghurs and other victims of forced labor practices in China.
 

Ashok84

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Wheather in Xinjiang ,Kasmir or Assam Muslims with epic mindset should be reducated.Why only Muslims every country should reducated their people able blind Faith and unscientific beloved.I hope our Indian Government learn from China and start educate our uneducated mass if possible Ina democratic way.
 

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Turkey Cuts Water Supply To Chinese Embassy After China Attacks Ankara Mayor Over Uyghur Comments

Ankara Municipality of Turkey on Wednesday (7 April) stopped the water supply to Chinese Embassy in the city after the embassy suggested on Twitter that it could take action against two Turkish politicians who criticised Beijing's treatment of its Muslim Uyghur community.]

 

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It is typical of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bots and supporters to try to equate what CCP has done in Xinjiang to problematic Muslim areas in other countries. But this is a lie, and a trick to justify the horrendous acts of rape, torture and killings done by the CCP to Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians and even common Chinese people throughout the last century. There is absolutely no comparison to what the CCP has done in terms of sheer horror. The forced labor camps are just the tip of the iceberg. And this isn't limited to minorities either. The CCP has killed tens of millions of their own common Chinese people during the cultural revolution. One example is the Guangxi Massacre in which the CCP killed and ate Chinese people:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre#Death_toll
One example is the Guangxi Massacre. Such massacres took place all over China through these years.

Guangxi Massacre - Wikipedia
The Guangxi Massacre (simplified Chinese: 广西大屠杀; traditional Chinese: 廣西大屠殺; pinyin: Guǎngxī Dàtúshā), or Guangxi Cultural Revolution Massacre (广西文革大屠杀; 廣西文革大屠殺; Guǎngxī Wéngé Dàtúshā), was a series of events involving lynching and direct massacre in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).[1][2][3][4][5] The official record shows an estimated death toll from 100,000 to 150,000.[1][4] Methods of slaughter included beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling and disemboweling.[1][6] In certain areas including Wuxuan County and Wuming District, massive human cannibalism occurred even though no famine existed; according to public records available, at least 137 people—perhaps hundreds more—were eaten by others and at least thousands of people participated in the cannibalism.[1][2][3][4][5][7][8] Other researchers have pointed out that 421 victims who could be identified by names were eaten, and there were reports of cannibalism across dozens of counties in Guangxi.[4][7][9]
Human cannibalism occurred in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. According to Zheng Yi (郑义), a scholar who conducted detailed research on the topic in the late 1980s and later smuggled some copies of official documents to the United States, at least 137 people—perhaps hundreds more—were eaten by others and thousands of people participated in the cannibalism.[1][2][3][4][5][7] Documents also record a variety of forms of cannibalism, including eating people as an after-dinner snack, slicing off the meat in big parties, dividing up the flesh so each person could take a large chunk home, barbecuing or roasting the liver, and so on.[5][9][10]

According to Yan Lebin (晏乐斌), a member of the Ministry of Public Security who joined both of the investigation groups:[1]

In 1968, 38 people in Wuxuan County were eaten, and 113 officials of the county participated in eating human flesh, hearts and livers. Chen Guorong (陈国荣), a peasant from Guigang County who happened to pass by Wuxuan, was caught and killed by local militia because he was fat; his heart and liver were taken out while his flesh was distributed to 20 people. A female militia leader ate 6 human livers in total, and cut the genitals of 5 men and soaked them in alcohol which she would drink later, claiming that these organs were beneficial to her health. The behavior of eating human flesh, hearts and livers occurred in many counties of Guangxi including Wuxuan, Wuming, Shangsi, Guigang, Qinzhou, Guiping, and Lingyun ... After the revolutionary committee was established in Shangsi County, a "killing conference" was held at Pingshan Square (平山广场) on September 1, 1968, during which more than 10 officials and civilians were beaten to death. After the conference, a committee member, Li Hao (黎郝), removed the hearts and livers from the corpses, sauteing them and preparing them as dishes for other representatives who attended the conference.
According to Song Yongyi, a Chinese historian who works at the California State University, Los Angeles:[2][4][7][12]

Independent researchers in Guangxi counted a total of 421 people who were eaten. There were reports of cannibalism across 27 counties in Guangxi; that's two-thirds of all the counties in Guangxi. There was one man who was said to be in the so-called fifth category, who was beaten to death where he stood. He had two kids, one of 11 and one of 14. The local officials and armed militia said that it was important to eradicate such people, and so they not only killed those two children: they ate them too. This took place in Pubei county, Guangxi, where 35 people were killed and eaten in total. Most of them were rich landowners and their families. There was one landowner called Liu Zhengjian whose entire family was wiped out. He had a 17-year-old daughter, Liu Xiulan, who was gang-raped by nine people [for 19 times] who then ripped open her belly, and ate her liver and breasts. There were so many incidents like this.
According to Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution of Stanford, and winner of the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize:[13]

Throughout 1967 but also '68, there are factions in the countryside that start not just eliminating each other physically, but literally in a couple of small towns they start ritualistically eating each other. In other words, it is not enough to eliminate your class enemy. You have to eat his heart, so there are very well-documented cases of ritual cannibalism.[14]
There was a hierarchy in the consumption of class enemies. Leaders feasted on the heart and liver, mixed with pork, while ordinary villagers were allowed only to peck at the victims’ arms and thighs.[15]
However, some scholar has pointed out that Wuxuan County, through internal channel, had notified the central leadership about the cannibalism in 1968.[9]
People outside China who are inspired by CCP propaganda simply do not understand the horror of what the CCP has done in the past or continues to do today in order to rule over China through fear. There is no comparison with the internal issues of other countries like India, which have a fundamentally moral grounding in their laws.
 

lixun

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no one is giving up their language you idiot. indians can speak almost 3-4 languages.


says the chinkee that licks the boots of CCPee and gave away their basic rights to live.

how many people died in Tiananmen square?? say that CCP killed a lot of people in Tiananmen square protests if you love your civillisation.
:megusta:
say that. i double dare you mdfka ....
How many Muslims Modi killed during ethnic conflict in Gujarat
 

India Super Power

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How many Muslims Modi killed during ethnic conflict in Gujarat
Seriously u are talking about Muslims
See what you are doing in Xinjiang
In our our country we had Muslim missile man, Muslim vice prez, Muslim tops in neet exam
Many Muslims are serving in our armed forces
See how much minority rights they exert
You fucker don't have logic in any of your statement
 

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