Drone footage has emerged showing police leading hundreds of blindfolded and shackled Uyghur men from a train in what is believed to be a transfer of inmates in Xinjiang. The video was posted on YouTube last week anonymously by War on Fear and has been verified as authentic by Nathan Ruser, a satellite analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
About one million of Xinjiang’s 24 million inhabitants have been subject to various forms of extrajudicial detention over recent years, in what many western governments have decried as one of the world’s worst ongoing human rights violations. Most of the detainees are Uyghurs, Xinjiang’s largest and mostly Muslim ethnic group.
After initially denying that such detention camps existed, the Chinese government has argued that most are “vocational training centres” aimed at improving economic opportunities for the region’s ethnic minority groups, which also include large numbers of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz.
Nathan Ruser told ABC that the newly released footage “very clearly demonstrates that the impression of Xinjiang that China’s trying to give the world isn’t true. […] this video undercuts that narrative and shows clearly the very inhumane treatment that detained individuals get in the system, in the crackdown that started in 2017 in western China.”
An issue for the UN General Assembly
The issue of the Uighurs could come up during the United Nations General Assembly next week when world leaders gather in New York.
On 23 September, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged countries to reject Chinese government requests to repatriate people from its northwestern region of Xinjiang, as Washington and Beijing prepare for a showdown this week at the UN over China’s controversial policies in Xinjiang.
“China’s repressive campaign in Xinjiang is not about terrorism,” Mr Pompeo said after a meeting at the UN with foreign ministers from five Central Asian republics. “We call on all countries to resist China’s demand to repatriate the Uyghurs.”
Five human rights organisations have called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to condemn the Chinese government’s detention of more than a million Muslims in the Xinjiang region and call for the immediate closure of government detention camps.
In a letter to the UN chief released on Tuesday and reported by the Associated Press, the rights groups said these actions would be an important contribution to addressing
“one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time”.
It was signed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, the International Federation for Human Rights and the World Uyghur Conference.
The Uyghur people
The Uyghurs are a Turkic, Muslim ethnic minority group who live in central and east Asia, mostly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey. The Uyghur community in China are a large percentage of the Xinjiang province, an officially autonomous region, where they make up 45% of the population.
China has recently been engaged in a form of forced assimilation policy, however tensions between Uyghurs and the Chinese have been ongoing for decades. Human rights organisations have previously expressed concerns about the treatment of the Uyghurs in China and most notably the lack of freedom of religious expression or belief that they experience at the hands of the Chinese government.
Religious discrimination
China has imposed a number of policies restricting the religious and cultural practices of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Province. Open displays of religion or any religious symbols such as wearing a headscarf, prayer, fasting or avoiding alcohol or pork are now considered as a ‘sign of extremism’ by the Chinese authorities. Being found carrying out any one of these acts is punishable by detention in one of the internment camps.
In Karamay, a city in Xinjiang, bearded men were banned from boarding buses, women have been restricted on the wearing of veils, women and those under 18 are banned from entering mosques, fasting is prohibited during Ramadan for government workers and students, and private study of the Quran is forbidden.
Religious tensions have also escalated in other parts of China including the Ningxia region where hundreds of Muslims protested to stop the demolition of their mosque. Amnesty have viewed the destruction of the mosque as, “an indication that the government is now looking to extend control over the Muslim ethnic minorities.”
Mass surveillance
The government has also instituted a new system of mass surveillance to monitor the movement and associations of Uyghurs in the territory.
As the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2017, the amount of surveillance equipment used for every 100,000 people in Xinjiang roughly equals what is used to monitor over a million people in other parts of China. All Uyghurs are also required to install a surveillance app on their phones that transfers audio and video files and other personal data to an outside server.
Xinjiang’s public security budget nearly doubled last year according to local government statistics. This is eight times higher than the growth rate for China’s total public security budget.
Internment camps
With unprecedented levels of control over religious practices, local authorities have effectively outlawed Islam in the region and they are currently running two massive “re-education” programmes.
The first is a forcible internment programme, under which an estimated million Uyghurs have been indefinitely detained without due process of law and where Uyghurs are forced to eat pork. The second programme involves mandatory day and evening “education sessions.” Financial Times reported in August 2018 that an estimated 80 percent of adults in urban neighborhoods in southern Xinjiang have been forcibly removed.
Following China’s Universal Periodic Review in April 2019, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon issued a statement where he said:
“I am very concerned about the human rights situation in Xinjiang, including the re-education camps and the widespread surveillance and restrictions targeted at ethnic minorities, particularly the Uyghurs. The UK and many of our international partners have made clear during China’s UPR that this is a priority issue. We recommended that China should implement CERD recommendations in Xinjiang and allow the UN to monitor implementation.”
The International Observatory of Human Rights have campaigned extensively calling for the end of unjust detention of the Uyghur people.
Watch IOHR TV “Revolt in London Against China’s Cultural Genocide of the Uyghur Community”.