FIRSTHAND ACCOUNTS FROM XINJIANG CAMPS
A massive, long-running security crackdown in Xinjiang has included the detention of an estimated 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a series of internment camps across the region. Two recent reports from Human Rights Watch–one on the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (IJOP) predictive policing system used to fill the camps from last year, and another released this month detailing how police interact with the IJOP –help to explain how authorities are filling those camps. Several recent reports, meanwhile, provide a glimpse into the conditions inside the camps. At CNN, Matt Rivers and Lily Li relay horrific stories of abuse and indoctrination of inmates in a Xinjiang internment camp from a former camp employee . Sayragul Sauytbay, a 41-year-old ethnic Kazakh woman who served as a teacher at a Xinjiang camp, fled Xinjiang for Kazakhstan with forged papers last year to unite with her family, and stood trial there for illegal border crossing (she was found guilty, but the judge decided to block her extradition to China).
“I knew that all people there were not guilty of anything,” she said. “I could do nothing to help them avoid suffering. That’s why I decided that one day I would publicize what’s happening there.”
[…] “They told me to tell them, ‘The Communist Party has led you to this day. The fact that you are living is thanks to the Communist Party. You have made a mistake by failing to know the Chinese language. The lack of your knowledge of the Chinese language is a treachery of the state’,” she said.
[…] Sauytbay said there were severe punishments for those who did not make enough “progress” in learning the language or even traditional Chinese terms for things like burials and holidays.
“Those who cannot learn fast enough or meet daily goals are deprived of food. The food itself is so bad. For three meals they give rice porridge, one ladle of it, and one piece of bread … They are also subject to sleep deprivation,” she said.
For those who were not easily taught or who fought back against the ideology, Sauytbay claimed, even darker methods of coercion were used. […] [ Source ]
Wired’s Isobel Cockerell offers a comprehensive summary of the many aspects of the ongoing rights crisis in Xinjiang. After providing context on the massive surveillance state that Xinjiang has become in recent years and the way that widely popular Chinese messaging app WeChat has been used to surveil at home and implicate those with connections abroad, Cockerell provides another former camp inmate’s account of her internment :
One of the things I find so strange about this is the lack of outrage from the world's 50+ Muslim countries. I am really puzzled as to why this is so...???
Great question. Here’s one example...
How China Persuaded One Muslim Nation to Keep Silent on Xinjiang Camps
Also ...
Islamic Leaders Have Nothing to Say About China’s Internment Camps for Muslims
So it's the old story of money talks
I should have known. Disgusting.
You got it Perrie.