Why ARE we turning a blind eye to state sponsored persecution worse than the Stasi?

As China threatens 12 million Muslims with ethnic cleansing...

THIS might sound like some macabre piece of science fiction; an Orwellian nightmare in which an ordinary person can be selected for ‘re-education’, on the flimsiest of pretexts, and hurled into a parallel universe of brutal subjugation.

Except it is no dark fantasy. As a growing body of evidence makes abundantly clear, this is real life for as many as a million Uighur Muslims in the remote Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Thanks to the testimony of a handful of escapees, a few very brave dissidents and a series of leaked documents, the West is gradually coming to acknowledge the existence of a programme of state-sponsored persecution which eclipses the cruelty of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the reign of the Stasi in communist East Germany.

Little wonder that the Chinese government is so determined to keep a lid on what it furiously dismisses as ‘fake news’.

There isn’t much else they can say in response to the first-hand accounts of female prisoners who have been gang-raped in front of other inmates; of mental and physical torture; of prisoners being force-fed pork, compelled to make confessions and to spend hours chanting in praise of the Chinese Communist Party.

More sinister still are reports, as yet unsubstantiated, of sterilisation experiments and even allegations of organ-harvesting, based on the discovery of hastily emptied mass graves.

Abandoned

Yet those who speak out about this dystopia do so at their peril, as the Arsenal footballer Mesut Ozil is fast discovering.

The club’s highest-paid player, on £300,000 a week, is of Turkish descent, as are the Uighur Muslims. Last week, he posted a message on Instagram in their defence, praising those ‘resisting the persecutors’ while condemning the Chinese authorities.

‘They burn their Qurans. They shut down their mosques. They ban their schools. The men are forced into camps and women are forced to marry Chinese men. But Muslims are silent. They won’t make a noise. They have abandoned them,’ he wrote. These are not new charges. Organisations across the world, from Amnesty International to the U.S. Congress, have verified claims of systemic torture and brainwashing by the Chinese authorities; of the existence of a network of ‘re-education’ camps crammed with as many as a million men and women, some as young as 13.

China, however, has wasted no time in expressing its displeasure towards Ozil.

Sunday’s live game between Arsenal and Manchester City was suddenly erased from the television schedules of China’s state broadcaster, while the Chinese Football Association said it was ‘outraged’.

Chinese football fans have deluged the internet with vitriol aimed at Ozil. ‘If you intend to attack China, you are as insignificant in our hearts as dirty ants,’ wrote one.

If their aim was to intimidate British football bosses, they have done an excellent job.

For Arsenal’s response was both swift and pusillanimous, as the club posted its own statement on Weibo, China’s state-controlled social media website, disowning its player’s criticism.

‘The content published is all Ozil’s personal opinion,’ it said. ‘Arsenal, as a football club, has always adhered to the principle of not involving itself in politics.’

Strangely, the club had felt no need to say anything at all when another player, Spain’s Hector Bellerin, attacked the Tories on polling day, tweeting: ‘F*** Boris.’

If one player is to be slapped down for defending people of his own faith from prima facie brutality while another is at liberty to express partisan obscenities about our democratically elected PM, Arsenal’s management may have mislaid their moral compass.

Barbaric

Then again, on reflection, I suppose they are doing exactly what their local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, has done so often during his career: if in doubt, suck up to the bad guys.

In Arsenal’s case, there is a commercial imperative for doing so, since the club — like all Premier League teams — is trying to build up a lucrative fan-base in China, as it is doing across the Far East, Middle East and Africa.

For example, Arsenal pocketed £30 million from the Rwandan government to put the country’s name on players’ shirts and is sponsored by Fly Emirates, the United Arab Emirates’ state airline, which paid to have the club’s £390million stadium named after it.

Just think of the replica shirt sales in China’s nation of 1.4 billion relative newcomers to English football.

So when Chinese fans started talking about burning their Arsenal shirts, the club had no qualms about going on bended knee.

Does any of this matter? What business is it of ours if a Turkish player wants to have a spat with Beijing about a minority in a part of the world few of us have ever heard of until recently?

Isn’t every major country on earth accused of some human rights infringements?

Perhaps. But none is quite so systematically barbaric as the fate of the Uighurs.

Here is an ethnic minority of about 12 million who face not merely discrimination but ethnic cleansing.

The Chinese state has done its best to keep the eyes of the outside world away from Xinjiang, in the north-west of China, which borders Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

However, a clear picture has emerged of a profoundly disturbing programme of persecution, with echoes of Nazism, Maoism and Stalinism, all pursued using the latest surveillance techniques. It was in the 1990s that a new wave of industrialisation began in this region of desert and farmland populated mainly by the Uighurs.

As the factories went up, so did the numbers of incoming Han Chinese (the racial group that makes up 91 per cent of China’s population).

Grotesque

At the same time, the Communist Party began to clamp down on local Uighur culture. Children had to learn Mandarin Chinese (there have been credible reports of those who spoke minority languages having their mouths taped at school).

Mosques were closed and land appropriated. Following serious civil unrest ten years ago — including sectarian riots in which 200 people, mostly Han Chinese, were killed — the state moved up a gear.

An extensive network of internment camps took shape, supported by a legion of informers, facial-recognition cameras and kidnapping squads. People were interned for having a long beard, for making casual remarks about the dangers of alcohol, for having relatives overseas or for being caught using WhatsApp.

People have been apprehended for using more water than their neighbour (a sure sign of undeclared visitors) or for using too much petrol.

As reports have trickled

through to the outside world, Beijing initially denied them before admitting that these camps existed — but solely for the purpose of ‘vocational education’. Move along now, pesky Western do-gooders.

Except that a growing number of refugees have testified to grotesque acts of barbarism, including rape and torture on an industrial scale.

In recent weeks, leaked official documents have surfaced that detail the requisite design and management structures for all new ‘education’ camps.

Prisoners must serve at least a year in an entry-level camp before they can be even be considered for transfer up one notch to a ‘labour skills training’ camp. There are incentives — credits for ‘ideological transformation’ and a monthly video call to the family — and ruthless punishment for any sign of dissent.

The official Chinese response is that these documents are forgeries. Uighurs are an Islamic terrorist threat who are merely being subjected to ‘re-education’. Any talk of brutality, let alone ‘ethnic cleansing’ or rape, is simply ‘fake news’.

The merciless clampdown helps to explain recent scenes in Hong Kong, where disturbing images of police crushing student riots horrified the world.

With people banged up just for using WhatsApp in one part of China, it’s not surprising that some students in Hong Kong are feeling revolutionary.

And let us not forget that Britain pledged this former colony a safe 50-year transition period when the Union Flag was lowered in 1997. In other words, we are not mere bystanders in this saga.

‘I was monitoring the recent Hong Kong elections and time and again I heard them express solidarity with the Uighurs,’ says Lord [David] Alton, the crossbench peer and vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on the plight of the Uighurs.

‘This is a wake-up call and I really don’t think we have taken seriously enough the threat which China presents to the free world.’

He asks why the British Government is still seriously considering allowing Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, to re-wire the UK with the same technology it uses to monitor and control the Uighurs.

He also points to recent legislation going through the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions on Chinese officials held responsible for the persecution of the Uighurs. There are demands for the new British Government to follow suit.

‘Here is an opportunity to stand alongside Muslim people in urgent need of support,’ says Lord Alton. ‘So why don’t we hear academics or people like Jeremy Corbyn speaking out?’

Perhaps, now he has time on his hands, Corbyn might stand up for the Uighurs? I wouldn’t hold my breath.