The Debate

The World Must Salvage the Uyghurs

Long-standing repression of the Uyghur culture has reached stunning new lows. What happened to "Never again"?

The World Must Save the Uyghurs

People from the Uyghur community living in Turkey, conveying flags of what ethnic Uyghurs call "East Turkestan," chant slogans during a protest in Istanbul, Nov. vi, 2018.

Credit: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis

"Son, they are taking me." Those were the last words 34-yr-former Kuzzat Altay heard from his father, in a WeChat message well-nigh exactly a year agone. His male parent, a 67-yr-old Uyghur in Xinjiang, is believed to exist among the estimated 1 meg people forced into political prison camps, sometimes referred to equally re-education camps, in China'south northwestern region, in the most astringent crackdown on human rights since the Cultural Revolution.

"I don't know if he is notwithstanding alive," Altay added. "None of my relatives at present are outside the concentration camps."

In the Uyghur cultural eye Altay runs in the U.S. state of Virginia, he asked a gathering of 300 Uyghurs who has family members in the camps. Every unmarried hand went up. "The master centers in our cities – our equivalent of New York's Times Square or London'southward Trafalgar Square – are empty," he explained.

Claims that a million, perhaps equally many as 3 million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic groups have been rounded up and driven into these camps accept been fabricated past credible human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Sentinel, and accepted by the Un and others. Satellite images show the scale of the camps, and British diplomats visited Xinjiang in Baronial last yr and confirmed that reports are "broadly accurate." The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Bigotry has described Xinjiang every bit "a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of a no rights zone… [where] members of the Uyghur minority, forth with others who are identified every bit Muslim, are existence treated as enemies of the State based solely on their ethno-religious identity."

Although as Altay says, Xinjiang is "as closed as North Korea now," making it "very difficult to gather tangible testify," news is trickling out about the scale of repression:

At that place are checkpoints every hundred meters, every mobile phone is checked and monitored, and there is no mode to send pictures or videos over the phone. Tens of thousands of children, some as young as three years erstwhile, are rounded up and placed in country-run orphanages where they are subjected to brainwashing. They are denied the right to speak their own language, do their organized religion, eat their food, and volition probably never come across their parents once again. Our women are being forced to marry Chinese Communist Party officials. People don't even have the freedom to exhale.

Uyghurs are arrested and sent to the camps for acts as basic as having WhatsApp downloaded on their mobile phones, having relatives living abroad, accessing religious materials online, having visited particular countries, or engaging in religious activities – sometimes no reason is given at all. They have no access to legal counsel, no machinery for appeal, and often the family are non told where the detainee is held or when they volition be released.

Detainees in these camps are held in dangerously unsanitary and overcrowded atmospheric condition, where torture, beatings, slumber deprivation, and lone confinement are common. Terminal year Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur who had managed to escape, testified at a hearing in the United states of america Congress. She described her ordeal:

I was taken to a cell, which was built underground with no windows … At that place were around 60 people kept in a 430 square feet jail cell … We had vii days to memorize the rules of the concentration camp and 14 days to memorize all the lines in a book that hails the Communist ideology ….They forced us to accept some unknown pills and drink some kind of white liquid. The pill acquired us to lose consciousness … I conspicuously remember the torture …. I was taken to a special room with an electrical chair … There were belts and whips hanging on the wall. I was placed in a high chair that clicked to lock my arms and legs in place and tightened when they press a button. My head was shaved … The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head. Each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I could feel the pain in my veins. I thought I would rather die than go through this torture and begged them to kill me.

As if incarcerating a one thousand thousand people in torture chambers was not enough, in that location are increasing concerns that Uyghurs are subjected to Dna tests, and an unknown number of Uyghurs have been forcibly transported to other parts of the country, including Heilongjiang province in northeast Cathay. These twin practices agitate suspicion that Uyghurs may be targeted for forced organ harvesting, or biometric surveillance.

The persecution of the Uyghurs is not new. For decades they have faced repression at the hands of the Chinese Communist Political party. Altay recalls beingness arrested at the age of 18 because, despite beingness the nephew of exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, he had managed to obtain a passport and was planning to leave the country. "The guard told me: 'The only thing that will come up out of the cell is your rotten corpse,'" he said.

Merely it has escalated to an entirely new scale. "There are reports that the phrase 'final solution' is beingness used," claims Altay. "They have jailed all the leading intellectuals, academics and fifty-fifty Uyghurs who had been loyal to the Chinese Communist Party – the former chief of intelligence, the one-time chief of police, people who had served the Communist Party's propaganda department for years: merely because they are Uyghur. China does not accept our beingness."

China's state media has publicly stated that the goal in regard to the Uyghurs is to "pause their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and pause their origins." As the Washington Mail service put information technology in a recent editorial, "It'southward hard to read that every bit anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent."

If information technology is not yet a genocide in legal terms, all the show points to a cultural genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities on a grave scale. For this reason, it is time for the international customs to human activity. Last calendar week a group of homo rights organizations called on the Un to establish an international fact-finding mission to investigate, and countries should unite to put pressure on China to stop this horrific entrada of terror. Too many governments are scared to stand up upwardly to Cathay, considering of economical interests, only there must come up a point where plenty is plenty.

"China is a paper dragon. Information technology looks strong from the outside, but internally they are bleeding. If countries come up together and take a stand, it will salve lives," believes Altay.

Failure to human activity now will not only pb to the destruction of the Uyghurs, but information technology will requite Xi Jinping's regime a green light to motion on to its next targets. While the Uyghurs are currently facing the most egregious persecution, it is in the context of the worst crackdown on man rights more than broadly in China – confronting Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, man rights lawyers, dissidents, civil gild, and the erosion of Hong Kong's basic freedoms and autonomy too – and the Chinese authorities's increasingly aggressive attitude toward critics beyond its borders.

"In Red china, soon in that location will only exist one religion immune," says Altay. "The worship of Xi Jinping. Not content with existence president for life, or emperor, he now seems to want to be God. His flick is displayed everywhere – in schools, in homes, even in places of worship."

It is therefore in no one's interests to turn a blind middle to the unfolding tragedy in Xinjiang. After the genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Darfur, we were told: "Never again," too late. We take but marked International Holocaust Memorial Mean solar day. Let us non find ourselves saying in a few years' time of the Uyghurs those words "Never again" all again.

Benedict Rogers is a homo rights activist and writer, working for the international human rights organisation CSW.