Report details plight of Uighurs

China separates parents, kids in ‘state campaign’

Khalida Akytkan has long worried about the fate of her 14 grandchildren after all three of her sons and their wives were detained for praying at their home and taking part in Friday prayers at a mosque more than a year ago.

Evidence has emerged that 64-year-old Akytkan’s grandchildren — and many other youngsters whose parents have been detained in China’s vast system of “re-education camps” — are likely to be in state boarding schools, regardless of whether there is a family guardian available to care for them.

There is evidence of a “co-ordinated state campaign to promote different forms of intergenerational separation,” wrote Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has focused on the expansion of camps in the Xinjiang region of north-west China where Uighurs, Kazakhs and other primarily Muslim minorities are being detained.

“Children whose parents are in prison, detention, re-education or ‘ training’ are classified into a specialneeds category that is eligible for state subsidies and for receiving ‘ centralized care’,” he wrote in a study published in the Journal of Political Risk.

Zenz found that in parts of southern Xinjiang, preschool enrolment has more than quadrupled in recent years, exceeding the national average by 12 times, with the youngest child in state custody only 15 months old.

Their parents are, at times, detained for months, even years, without official charges being pressed. In one township where ethnic Uighurs constitute a majority of the population, government data shows that more than 400 minors have both parents in detention, with many others having one interned, the report claims.

Former detainees interviewed by The Daily Telegraph have told of torture and political indoctrination, though China has maintained that its camps are to help curb Islamic extremism and prevent terrorism. U.S. officials estimate as many as two million people are being held in the camps.

Using evidence gathered from witness accounts, government plans, official documents and construction bids, Zenz concluded that an rising number of facilities were being built to deal with the children whose parents were in some form of internment. However, this did not mean conditions in the schools were good, reports suggested.

Testimony, posted on the Jiangxi Teacher’s College website, from a Han Chinese volunteer teacher who worked at a rural primary school in southern Xinjiang suggested that the Uighur children were in a pitiful state, unwashed and wearing thin clothes in freezing temperatures.