The Silent Genocide Of Uighur Minority
Prison camps inside China to hold the ethnic minority and the horrors that are committed in the name of fighting terrorism
“Don’t cry, mommy. Please don’t cry.”
These are the words of a three-year-old spoken to her mother who breakdown in front of her daughter, reiterating the horrors she faced for the two years she was away from home in a “vocational camp” inside China. It was completely without her consent. The story of this former detainee who was forced to stay away from home sounds something picked out of history books.
These ‘vocational camps’ are very much in demand for the last decade in China. The rules for the staff of those camps include ‘‘strictly manage and control student activities to prevent escapes’’ of these members. Now if this doesn’t sound harrowing enough, let us look into the criteria for qualification to enter this selective training course.
First, you have to belong to a certain ethnic minority group namely “Uighur” located in North-West China. Second, you have to be fortunate enough to be seen observing certain abnormal behavior in public, to be rounded up for selection. To facilitate a better understanding, the Chinese government has been nice enough in stating out these rules clearly. There are ‘75 behavioral indications of religious extremism’ that are used to handpick the members for these camps. The indications would be quite funny if their consequence wasn’t so terrible. Indications like ‘people who smoke large amounts of alcohol but quit so suddenly’ or ‘those who store large amounts of food’ feels like a parody of a least applauded comedy show.
Right now Xinjiang is the most heavily policed area in the world where you can be questioned and detained if you helped a neighbor in changing a car tire out of the blue or seen taking the bulk of junk food into your home. This is all policed by an elaborate and active surveillance system that records every move of citizens for their own ‘protection’ from criminals aka Uighur Muslim minority across China.
The activities in those camps will make your body shiver and rattle your soul if you dare to dig deeper.
Forced abortions, IUDs, and sterilizations are some of the steps readily administered after a person enters the camp.
Keeping them there is their utmost priority, and they are not let out before the ‘criminal tendencies’ have been leeched out of them through extremely elaborated brainwashing procedures that are almost always inclusive of corporal punishment.
The children of this ethnic group are educated in a quite different way from the rest of the Chinese schools. Yes, there are children there too, who are taught to not trust their parents, and how their parents have committed crimes by following their religion and the right thing to do would be to keep an eye on them. The parents are sent hundreds or sometimes a thousand miles away from their children into slave labor and by the time they are reunited-if they are lucky enough-the damage inflicted by the brainwashing is enough to make an estranged family dynamic where children don’t trust the parents and parents cannot live freely on their own because the government is looking through the eyes of their beloved sons and daughters.
What was their crime? To be born in an ethnic group? Or to be Muslim? Or to just exist? Does it not blatantly qualify as genocide?
If so why is no one holding China in contempt of these horrific human rights violations? Human rights end where self-interests begin. Many nations heralded as the voice of the weak and downtrodden are silent. Some voice their concern in whispers just for the sake of doing their part. What is the world coming to? if you ever wished to go back in time to watch the first holocaust and question why no one tried to stop it then, just watch this latest holocaust and see how no one is bothering to stop it now.
I want to write so much more on this topic. But I am afraid it will get too long and it may lose the attention it deserves. I hope to spread this horrific issue out to people so we can be the voice of those whose tongues have been bound into silence. I was hesitant to write about this topic since I was afraid I won’t be able to do it justice with mere words. But people need to speak, and people need to hear.
