China forcing Muslims to disavow religion in brutal camps

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Day after day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.

When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement and deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days, he wanted to kill himself.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, 42, who broke down in tears while describing the camp. “I still think about it every night, until Residents in Hotan transport goods past a mural depicting current and past top Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong, left, and Xi Jinping, right. The Chinese characters in red read “Building a Chinese Dream Together.” Internment camps in that same region try to indoctrinate captives in deeply nationalistic Chinese thinking.

the sun rises.”

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 U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

The internment program tries to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. Chinese officials have largely avoided comment, but some have said in state media that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs killed hundreds in China in years past.

Three other former internees and a former instructor in different centers corroborated Bekali’s depiction. Taken together, the recollections offer the most-detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education.

The program is a hallmark of China’s emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic,