China ‘ holding 1 million Muslims in secret camps’
ONE million Muslims are being held in secret prison camps in China, according to the UN.
Human rights campaigners say detainees are being brought into line with Communist Party thinking in order to ‘break their origins’.
The Muslims are mostly from the Uighur community, who live in the autonomous Xinjiang region in western China.
Beijing claims they are willingly attending training centres aimed at combating extremism. Officials said the group are ‘destitute people’ who are ‘easily led astray’ and have been ‘saved’.
But campaigners dismissed the claims as ‘ludicrous’. Sophie Richardson, of Human Rights Watch, said: ‘We documented torture, we documented ill treatment. China is committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades.’
Gay McDougall, a member of the UN anti-racial discrimination committee, said Muslim minorities are being forced into ‘political camps for indoctrination’. She added: ‘In the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability, [China] has changed the Uighur region into something that resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.’
Uighur Muslims make up under half the region’s 26 million population. Satellite images obtained by the BBC show dozens of suspected prison camps in Xinjiang – many being expanded by the week. The camps, where inmates are often made to work, are ringed with razor wire, watch towers and infrared cameras. Relatives are seen queuing up to visit those inside.
Official documents unearthed yesterday show that thousands of guards equipped with tear gas, Tasers, stun guns and spiked clubs are employed to keep tight control over the ‘students’. The centres should ‘teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison’, according to one edict. Another document, referring to Muslim detainees, said the camps must ‘break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins’. Earlier this year, one of the local government departments in charge of such facilities made purchases that had little to do with education, including police batons and handcuffs. Former detainees have described being tortured, forced to drop their Islamic beliefs and having their children placed in orphanages. Ablet Tursun Tohti, who lived in one of the camps before fleeing overseas, said inmates were woken up an hour before sunrise and made to run in an exercise yard.
‘There was a special room to punish those who didn’t run fast enough,’ Mr Tohti, 29, said.
‘There were two men there, one to beat with a belt, the other just to kick. And they taught us laws. If you couldn’t recite them in the correct way, you’d be beaten.’
Xinjiang has been the scene of unrest in recent years driven by an influx of Han Chinese, the country’s main ethnic group. Uighurs are resentful at the perceived uneven distribution of the proceeds from economic growth.