Muslim Kapo Nations

How China Persuaded Indonesia to Keep Silent on East Turkestan Concentration Camps

By Jon Emont

Muslims demonstrating on Dec. 21 last year in front of China’s embassy in Jakarta, protesting the treatment of members of the mostly Muslim ethnic Uighur minority in East Turkestan. 

JAKARTA, Indonesia—A year ago, clerics here in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country expressed alarm over China’s treatment of ethnic-minority Muslims—around a million of whom have been detained in concentration camps, according to human-rights groups.

Leaders of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second-largest Muslim organization, issued an open letter in December 2018 noting reports of violence against the “weak and innocent” community of Uighurs, who are mostly Muslims, and appealing to Beijing to explain.
Soon after, Beijing sprang into action with a concerted campaign to convince Indonesia’s religious authorities and journalists that the concentration camps in China’s northwestern East Turkestan colony are a well-meaning effort to provide job training and combat extremism.
More than a dozen top Indonesian religious leaders were taken to East Turkestan and visited re-education facilities. 

Tours for journalists and academics followed. 

Chinese authorities gave presentations on terrorist attacks by Uighurs and invited visitors to pray at local mosques. 

In the camps they visited classrooms where they were told students received training in everything from hotel management to animal husbandry.
Views in Indonesia changed. 

A senior Muhammadiyah religious scholar who went on the tour was quoted in the group’s official magazine as saying a camp he visited was excellent, had comfortable classrooms and wasn’t like a prison.

A watchtower at what is a concentration camp on the outskirts of Hotan, in China's northwestern East Turkestan colony. 

China’s effort to shape opinions—bolstered by donations and other financial support—has helped to blunt criticism of its treatment of Uighurs by Muslim-majority nations—in contrast to the outspoken condemnation it has received from the U.S. and other Western nations.
Indonesia has been on the front lines of this effort. 

For months China has worked to persuade clerics, politicians and journalists to support its policies in East Turkestan and courted social-media influencers to promote a more favorable view of China and showcase Islamic culture in the country.
“There’s a problem” with extremism in East Turkestan “and they’re handling it,” said Masduki Baidlowi, an official with Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, who was also visited the region on the tour. 

“They provide a solution: life skills, a vocation,” he said.
He acknowledged he had some concerns—there was no place for detainees to pray, for example—which the delegation raised with officials.
Earlier this month, a top East Turkestan government official said all students learning vocational skills at the centers had graduated. 

Rights activists expressed skepticism that this meant all detained Muslims had been released.
Journalists from Indonesia and Malaysia conducted an interview at an Islamic college in Urumqi, East Turkestan, on March 1, 2019. 

In July, a host of Muslim-majority nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, joined North Korea, Myanmar and others in signing a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council praising China’s governance of East Turkestan.
“Now safety and security has returned to East Turkestan and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded,” the letter said.
Uighur activists, in contrast, condemn China’s actions in East Turkestan, saying China is wrongfully imprisoning large portions of the population, breaking up families, silencing intellectuals and razing holy sites as it seeks to destroy Uighurs’ religion and culture and force them to assimilate into broader Chinese society.
The U.S. government says China has detained more than one million Muslims, and groups such as Human Rights Watch have offered similar estimates. 

Individuals can be targeted for matters as minor as reciting from the Quran at a funeral, according to the U.S. State Department.

A message from a Communist Party commission in charge of East Turkestan security encouraged cadres there in East Turkestan to “promote the repentance and confession of the students for them to understand deeply the illegal, criminal, and dangerous nature of their past behavior,” according to documents uncovered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
China has built up goodwill in Indonesia in recent years through programs like scholarships for students affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama, which has tens of millions of followers and presents itself as a champion of moderate Islam. 

This year, Nahdlatul Ulama’s Beijing branch published a book of essays by supporters who had studied in China, some of which questioned the scale of the camp system and whether Muslims were mistreated.
Nahdlatul Ulama head Said Aqil Siroj —who has broken the fast on Ramadan for years with China’s ambassador—implored readers in the book’s foreword not to rely on media and international television reports to understand East Turkestan.
Siroj didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting comment. 

A senior official at Nahdlatul Ulama didn’t respond to a message asking about China’s possible influence over the organization.
Not all Muslim clerics who have gone on China-sponsored trips to East Turkestan have backed China’s line. 

Muhyiddin Junaidi, head of international relations for Majelis Ulama Indonesia, a powerful Indonesian clerical body, said that his February visit was tightly controlled and that Uighurs he met seemed afraid to express themselves.

A photo from Sept. 13, 2019, shows what used to be a Uighur cemetery, in Kuche, East Turkestan. 

He said Beijing’s frequent invitations to influential Indonesians was designed to “brainwash public opinion,” and criticized Indonesian Muslims he said had become apologists for China.
Still, the blizzard of outreach has made it difficult for more-critical Indonesian Muslim scholars to speak out. 

One prominent Indonesian Islamic scholar opposed to China’s policies in East Turkestan posted a critical report by Human Rights Watch on his Facebook page, only to be accused by other Muslim leaders of amplifying Western propaganda.
The U.S. has countered by having diplomats meet and pose skeptical questions to clerics after East Turkestan tours.
In August, the U.S. sponsored a Facebook Live discussion on China’s mistreatment of Muslim minorities “to draw attention to these abuses,” according to a notice for the event, and invited Indonesians to attend a meeting in a mall.
U.S. diplomats have also lobbied Indonesian counterparts to press Chinese officials to release ethnic minority Muslims, a person familiar with the effort said. 

U.S. officials “realize that the Chinese embassy is doing similar things, with—frustratingly—a bigger budget,” the person said.
“We have expressed our concerns about China’s treatment of its own citizens in meetings with Indonesian officials and members of civil society,” a U.S. Embassy official said.

After locking up as many as a million people in concentration camps in East Turkestan, Chinese authorities are destroying Uighur neighborhoods and purging the region's culture. They say they’re fighting terrorism. Their aim: to engineer a society loyal to Beijing. 

Bayu Hermawan, a journalist for Indonesian newspaper Republika, traveled to East Turkestan on a Beijing-organized tour in February, and wrote articles that cited camp residents who said they weren’t given trials or were brought in for offenses like adhering to a Muslim diet.
Mr. Hermawan received a WhatsApp message from a Chinese embassy employee in Jakarta, saying he was disappointed by the article because it didn’t focus on positive aspects of the trip, according to the message shown to The Wall Street Journal.
Around that time, Republika’s website faced a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack, according to two employees, making the website slow to load and inaccessible from abroad. 

Fitriyan Zamzami, an editor at Republika, said IT workers traced the attack to accounts in places like Bulgaria and Ukraine; still, he said, the timing was suspicious.
China’s Embassy in Indonesia has also supported tours of Indonesian social-media influencers to visit Chinese cities outside of East Turkestan. 

This was a part of a broader effort to limit anti-China sentiment in Indonesia and expose Indonesians to Muslim life in China, according to Riyadi Suparno, the head of Tenggara Strategics, an Indonesian investment research and advisory institute that helped organize a recent tour. 

He said the influencers were paid a per diem of $500 and they were free to post whatever they liked.
“Yes a mosque!” wrote Alya Nurshabrina, a tour participant and former Miss Indonesia to her roughly 86,000 followers on Instagram, outside of one in Beijing. 

“China welcomes every religion.”
A recent report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a nongovernment organization, found that more than 100 mosques have been damaged or destroyed in Beijing’s recent campaign in East Turkestan. 

Cemeteries and other structures with Uighur Islamic architecture also have been destroyed.
When asked if her social-media postings offered a misleading portrait of China’s treatment of Islam, Nurshabrina said her postings reflected her own experiences on the trip.
Omer Kanat, an ethnic Uighur who directs the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, visited Jakarta earlier this year to lobby Islamic leaders to speak out against what he described as China’s use of detention camps to indoctrinate Uighurs and eliminate Islam.
He said some Indonesian Muslims leaders had already been visited by Chinese diplomats, and they were suspicious, asking him whether it was an American conspiracy that China mistreats Uighurs.
“They were so convinced with what the Chinese said,” Mr. Kanat said.

China's crimes against humanity

More Secrets of China's East Turkestan Camps Leaked to Foreign Media

By Reuters


SHANGHAI — Classified Chinese government documents made public by an international group of journalists describe the repressive inner workings of concentration camps in East Turkestan, in a second rare leak in days of secret files concerning the troubled western region.
The publication on Sunday of the documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) follows a New York Times report on Nov. 16 based on a cache of secret papers revealing details of China's clamp-down on ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in the region.
United Nations experts and activists say at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in camps in East Turkestan.
The ICIJ https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/exposed-chinas-operating-manuals-for-mass-internment-and-arrest-by-algorithm says it obtained a 2017 list of guidelines "that effectively serves as a manual for operating the camps", with instructions on how to prevent escapes, maintain secrecy about the camps' existence, indoctrinate internees and "when to let detainees see relatives or even use the toilet".
Other documents it obtained include "intelligence briefings" showing how police have been "guided by a massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories of East Turkestan residents for detention".
Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a news conference on Monday that East Turkestan affairs were an internal matter of China's.
The leaks come amid a rising international outcry over China's broader human rights record in East Turkestan.

The United States has led more than 30 countries in condemning what it called a "horrific campaign of repression".
Beijing denies any mistreatment of Uighurs or others in East Turkestan, saying it is providing "vocational training" to help stamp out Islamist extremism and separatism and to teach new skills.

Die Endlösung der Uigurischefrage

Key Findings in Secret Documents on China’s Concentration Camps

By The Associated Press


The Chinese government has detained more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities for what it calls "voluntary job training".

But a newly revealed classified blueprint shows that the camps Beijing runs in China’s far west are instead forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers, run in secret.
The documents were linked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an anonymous source and independently verified. 

Here are some of their key revelations:
— What Beijing calls "voluntary job training centers" are actually forced political re-education camps. 

“Vocational training” is conducted only after detainees are released from the centers, in separate facilities.
— Officials are ordered to “prevent escapes” by installing guard towers, double-locked doors, alarms, blanket video surveillance and police stations at the front gates. 

Guards monitor detainees 24 hours a day, and even toilet breaks are strictly managed.
— The camps are directly linked to mass surveillance apparatus in the East Turkestan colony. 

A centralized digital system identifies tens of thousands of targets for questioning and potential detention, pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence.
— Individuals are targeted for questioning and potential detention because of what is considered suspicious behavior, which includes going abroad, asking others to pray or using cell phone apps that cannot be monitored by the government.
— Detainees are given scores on everything from how they speak Mandarin to whether they adhere to a strict set of rules governing everything down to bathing and going to the toilet. 

The scores are fed into an elaborate point system that helps determine if they are eventually permitted to leave or punished.
— Detainees are to be kept for a minimum of one year in the centers. 

Independent Chinese legal experts say this is a violation of China’s own laws because it exceeds legal maximum detention times for people who are not formally charged and sentenced for a crime.

China's Final Solution: China Didn’t Want Us to Know. Now Its Own Files Are Doing the Talking.

More disclosures reveal the full impact of the Chinese repression of ethnic minorities — well beyond concentration camps.
By Adrian Zenz

Uighur men having tea in Yarkand County in the northwestern region of East Turkestan.

No more denying, no more dodging. 

The Chinese Communist Party can no longer hide its relentless campaign of mass internment against the ethnic minorities in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan, or claim that the effort is an innocuous "educational" program. 

What was already widely known, vastly reported and confirmed by firsthand accounts has now been proved beyond doubt by the government’s own records — gigabytes of files, reams of reports, thousands of spreadsheets — some of them classified and highly confidential.
Last weekend, The New York Times disclosed and analyzed the contents of a trove of leaked internal Chinese government documents that outline specific policies for how to repress East Turkestan's predominantly Muslim minorities — and reveal that Xi Jinping himself set out the foundation for them.
This Sunday, the contents of two more sets of documents — all of which I have reviewed — are being disclosed. 

Among the first batch, also leaked, is a confidential telegram signed by Zhu Hailun, East Turkestan's deputy party secretary, which details how local authorities should manage and operate the “vocational skills training centers” — a euphemism for the concentration camps. (All translations here are mine.) 

The second set of documents, a large cache of files and spreadsheets from local governments, reveals the internment campaign’s devastating economic and social impact on the families and communities it targets.
The telegram — dated Nov. 5, 2017, and addressed to local political and legal affairs bureaus — is marked “extremely urgent” and bears the second-highest level of secrecy within China’s classified-document scheme. 

It reveals the extent of the security and surveillance measures taken around the camps, partly to shield the camps from external scrutiny. 

The message, a directive, notes that the work conducted there is “strictly confidential” and “highly sensitive” in nature. 

Even staff at the camps are forbidden from aggregating detainee figures.
The authorities’ attempt to enforce absolute secrecy is confirmed by another document dated November 2018, this one from a local government file in Hotan County. 

It chides officials for not “protecting secrets” related to the internment campaign well enough. 

It stipulates that “no person is under any circumstances permitted to disseminate information about detention or re-education via telephone, smartphone, or the internet,” and that officials are “strictly forbidden” from receiving “related media interviews” or make “unauthorized disclosure” about the internment campaign. 

That the Chinese authorities so deliberately sought to shield from external scrutiny information about operations at the East Turkestan camps suggests that they are only too aware of how incriminating their policies and practices are.
I was also able to obtain a massive cache of local government files from within East Turkestan. Among the most revealing documents are thousands of detailed spreadsheets with the names, identification numbers and addresses of tens of thousands of people, mostly Uighurs and many of them in detention, prison or concentration camps.
In Yarkand, a county of about 800,000 people in southwestern East Turkestan, 96 percent of the population is Uighur. 

Six official spreadsheets about six villages dated 2018 show that, on average, nearly 16 percent of the rural adult population was either interned or in prison. 

In two villages in Kosherik Township — which the documents describe as “heavily polluted by extremist ideology” — nearly 60 percent of all households had one person or more interned.
In addition to the extraordinary scale of the internment campaign, the files reveal its devastating impact well beyond the camps — deep into the communities and families of East Turkestan.
The spreadsheets show that the government has primarily targeted middle-age men, most often the heads of the households and main wage-earners. 

Beijing’s occasional tours of its so-called model camps often feature attractive young women. 

In reality, people between 30 and 59 were especially likely to be interned, according to the spreadsheets.
The policy’s socioeconomic fallout is dire — and local governments are keeping a meticulous record of it. 

One spreadsheet from 2017 for one town in Yarkand County, which listed households with low incomes that might qualify for welfare, included a young family with five children between the ages of three and 14. 

The father had been imprisoned, the mother placed in a concentration camp and the children, in effect, orphaned.
In another, hardly unusual, case, a household’s two working-age parents were detained, leaving elderly grandparents — including a grandmother described as “seriously ill” — to care for two toddlers. 

In a column with the header “reason for poverty,” the relevant spreadsheet offers this explanation: “lacks labor force and finances.” 

The toddlers’ father isn’t scheduled to be released until 2030.
Another spreadsheet from September 2018 shows lists of loan defaulters in Pilal Township, Akto County. 

In 80 percent of the cases where the reason for default was listed as “internment,” most of the borrowed funds were shown to still be in the bank.
A particularly depressing example comes from a village in Yarkand County. 

A Uighur farmer and head of a family of five was interned in 2017. 

In October 2016, he had received a loan of 40,000 renminbi (nearly $5,700) to purchase agricultural machinery. 

The equipment went unused during his detention — no other family member knew how to operate it — and the loan could not be repaid as scheduled. 

The government directed the family to rent out the equipment and send its oldest child, a son, to work. 

The family was then officially marked as having been “poverty-alleviated by benefiting from policies.” 

In June 2018, after his release, the farmer applied for financial assistance so he could repay the loan and related interest. 

In January 2019, he started to work in the Yarkand County textile industrial park, earning just 800 RMB (about $113) a month. 

By then, the son, age 20, had somehow become disabled and was listed on government forms as unable to work.
Thanks to these new document disclosures, we now have hard evidence — and the government’s own evidence — that in addition to implementing a vast internment program in East Turkestan, the Chinese Communist Party is deliberately breaking up families and forcing them into poverty and a form of indentured labor. 

For all its efforts at secrecy, the Chinese government can no longer hide the extent, and the reach, of its campaign of repression in East Turkestan.
Some important elements are still unknown. 

The total internment figure remains a well-guarded secret. (Based on the new evidence, I have revised my own estimate: I think that between 900,000 and 1.8 million people have been detained in East Turkestan since the spring of 2017.) 

Also missing from the official documents that have surfaced so far are precise records of how the detainees are treated and how, exactly, the process of "re-education" works. (About those things, however, we have witness accounts.) 

The confidential telegram and local files do not mention the use of physical violence — but for one notable exception. 

The telegram states that people who resist brainwashing must be singled out for “assault-style re-education.” 

Yet another sinister understatement, and it suggests that force and torture are, in fact, widely used.
In a way, though, we already know all that we really need to know. 

The documents that have been disclosed these past few weeks reveal the staggering scale of the repression in East Turkestan and its ruinous effects on the region’s ethnic communities, well beyond the camps themselves. 

Consider this: Official statistics show that the combined net population growth rates of Hotan and Kashgar, two of the largest Uighur regions, dropped by about 84 percent between 2015 and 2018.
The Chinese Communist Party set out, it claimed, to “transform through education” ethnic minorities in East Turkestan. 

In fact, it is ripping apart entire communities and subjugating them on a colossal scale. 

And this, at the direction of Xi Jinping himself.

'1984' and Wannseekonferenz in China

Communist leaders engage in modern-day totalitarian brainwashing, bizarre lies and industrial-level indoctrination to suppress Muslims.
The New York Times


“Ying shou jin shou” — “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.”
The echo of “1984,” “Brave New World” or “Fahrenheit 451” is unmistakable.

But this is not dystopian fiction. 

It’s a real bureaucratic directive prepared by the Chinese leadership, drawing on a series of secret speeches by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, on dealing ruthlessly with Muslims who show “symptoms” of religious radicalism.
There’s nothing theoretical about it: Based on these diktats, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in the East Turkestan colony have been rounded up in concentration camps to undergo months or years of indoctrination intended to mold them into secular and loyal followers of the Communist Party.

This modern-day totalitarian brainwashing is revealed in a remarkable trove of documents leaked to The New York Times by an anonymous Chinese official. 

The existence of these concentration camps has been known for some time, but nothing before had offered so lucid a glimpse into the thinking of China’s bosses under the fist of Xi, from the obsessive determination to stamp out the “virus” of unauthorized thought to cynical preparations for the pushback to come, including how to deal with questions from students returning to empty homes and untended farms.
The latter script is eerily Orwellian: Should students ask whether their missing parents had committed a crime, they are to be told no, “it is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts. Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.”
That someone from within the unforgiving, secretive Chinese leadership would take the enormous risk of leaking 403 pages of internal documents to a Western newspaper is in itself amazing, especially since the documents include an 11-page report summarizing the party’s investigation into the activities of Wang Yongzhi, an official who was supposed to manage a district where Uighur militants had staged a violent attack but who eventually developed misgivings about the mass detention facilities he had built. 

“He refused,” said the report, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.” 

After September 2017, Mr. Wang disappeared from public view.
It becomes clear from the documents that Xi is far more concerned by any challenge to the Communist Party’s image of strength than foreign reaction. 

Already in May 2014 he told a leadership conference, “Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of East Turkestan.” 

Accordingly, the Chinese government made no effort to deny the leaked documents, but rather portrayed the crackdown in East Turkestan as a major success against terrorism and accused The Times of smearing China’s “antiterrorism and de-extremism capabilities.”
What the documents really reveal is not an effective antiterrorism campaign, but rather the paranoia of totalitarian leaders who demand total fealty in thought and deed and recognize no method of control other than coercion and fear. 

Xi and other top government officials reveal in these papers a conviction that the Soviet Union collapsed because of ideological laxity and spineless leadership, and a top security official attributed terrorist attacks in Britain to the British government’s “excessive emphasis on ‘human rights above security.’” 

And Xi argued that new technology must be part of the broad campaign of surveillance and intelligence-gathering to root out dissidence in Uighur society, anticipating Beijing’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in East Turkestan.
Whoever leaked these revealing documents obviously disagreed and had the courage to do something about it. 

His or her brave action is a cry to the world.
International outrage could turn that into a wake-up call for China’s leaders, despite their totalitarian swagger, if the world begins to see them as pariahs, not just trading partners. 

The whistle-blower, and the untold thousands of Chinese Muslims suffering under the yoke of Xi, deserve that.

Chinazism

In China, every day is Kristallnacht
By Fred Hiatt

In China, every day is Kristallnacht.
Eighty-one years ago this week, in what is also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” hundreds of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Nazi Germany were damaged or destroyed, along with thousands of Jewish-owned businesses.
It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka.

In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.
Before                                                                      After: Dome removed
The dome of a Uighur mosque in Artush, East Turkestan, was removed in 2018.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

In a cultural genocide with few parallels since World War II, thousands of Muslim religious sites have been destroyed. 

At least 1 million Muslims have been confined to concentration camps, where aging imams are shackled and young men are forced to renounce their faith. 

Muslims not locked away are forced to eat during the fasting month of Ramadan, forced to drink and smoke in violation of their faith, barred from praying or studying the Koran or making the pilgrimage to Mecca.
And — in the most astonishing feature of this crime against humanity — China has managed to stifle, through 21st century repression and age-old thuggery, virtually any reporting from the crime scene.
Which makes all the more significant the publication last week of a heartrending compendium of evidence: “Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques and Shrines,” by Bahram K. Sintash.

Before                                                                      After: Cemetery demolished
The site of Sultanim cemetery in Hotan, East Turkestan, in December, 2018 and March 2019.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

Sintash, 37, lives in the United States but grew up in what is now, he says, “a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known.” 

Sintash knows: Chinese police took his father into custody in February 2018, and Sintash has not heard from him since.
Unable to help his father — who, if he is still alive, turned 69 last month — Barham has channeled his anguish into documenting the destruction of the Uighur heritage.
Uighurs — Barham, his father and millions of other Chinese citizens — are an ethnically Turkic and religiously Muslim people. 

For decades, they found a place in Communist China. 

In fact, the Chinese Communist Party vetted imams, approved their sermons and authorized the study of Uighur culture.

Before                                                                     After: Mosque destroyed
A mosque in Aksu was replaced by a parking lot in 2017.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

But in the increasingly intolerant rule of Xi Jinping, nothing that competes with party loyalty can be tolerated. 

Previously vetted clerics, even octogenarians, receive 20-year sentences. 

Anything that looks too “Islamic” — even a dome atop a department store — is flattened.
Based on satellite imagery and interviews with recent exiles — escapees might be an apter term — Sintash estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites have been destroyed, he told a conference at the National Endowment for Democracy last week.
Many of these are village mosques, too small to stand out in Google satellite imagery, and no one on the ground will send pictures, because to do so would guarantee confinement in the camps. 

But Sintash has documented the destruction of more than 150 larger mosques in before-and-after, shrine-to-parking-lot photographs. 

In big cities, one mosque may be spared, for tourism or propaganda purposes, but even that one will have its dome and minarets removed, its religious inscriptions displaced by party banners.
Even starker are the images of cemeteries, such as the centuries-old Sultanim burial ground in Hotan, replaced by what look like giant fields of mud.
“My father and my grandfather were also buried in this cemetery,” one exiled Uighur scholar told Sintash. 

“The cemetery was the most important holy place for millions of people to go and visit in Hotan every year.”
Workers in the world of human rights tend to be highly reticent when it comes to Nazi analogies. 

The Holocaust was a unique event.
Yet at the unveiling of the report last week, the Holocaust kept pushing itself into the conversation as the only adequate point of comparison. 

Omer Kanat, director and co-founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, noted the Kristallnacht anniversary.
Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, likened the brave reporters of Radio Free Asia to Jan Karski, the Pole who tried to alert the West to Nazi atrocities. 

Those RFA reporters are living in exile, since China does not let them in, but dozens of their family members in western China have been imprisoned in retribution for RFA’s groundbreaking journalism on this cultural genocide.

Before                                                                     After: Mosque demolished
The site of the Grand Mosque in Wusu,  East Turkestan, in 2017 and 2019.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

And what is the impact of such destruction of sacred spaces?
Rahile Dawut is a respected scholar who in 2017 was preparing to travel to Beijing from her home in Urumqi when she was taken away. 

Years before she disappeared, she said, “If one were to remove these . . . shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”
Sintash himself says he fears this is China’s “final solution” to destroy the Uighur people.
“I don’t know if my father died or is alive right now,” he says. 

“But I can see the mosque where we prayed is gone.”

Western Civilization vs. Chinese Barbarity

China watchdog reveals monstrous allegations of mass forced organ-harvesting

By Martin M. Barillas

GENEVA — A human rights group reported to the U.N. that China harvests human organs from imprisoned dissidents, especially members of the proscribed Falun Gong religious group and Uighur Muslims.
Lawyer Hamid Sabi of the London-based China Tribunal told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday that China takes skin, kidneys, lungs, and hearts from members of the persecuted groups. 

He described the atrocity of “cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.” 

Sabi told the assembled U.N. delegates that his group has proof of the atrocities and claimed that it has evidence of China’s crimes against humanity.

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” Sabi said in a video published on the China Tribunal website.
Sabi told the U.N. council that China’s organ-harvesting has led to “hundreds of thousands of victims” in “one of the worst mass atrocities of this century.” 

China Tribunal did not specify how many organs have been harvested by China, nor how many victims came from each of the targeted groups. 

In June, China Tribunal published a report that found that a “very substantial number” of prisoners were “killed to order” by the Chinese government. 

The report claimed that prisoners were “cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.”
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said. 

He added, “Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph, but killing the donor is criminal.”
Speaking at the council’s headquarters in Switzerland, Sabi said the U.N. and other organizations should examine China Tribunal’s findings “not only in regard to the charge of genocide, but also in regard to crimes against humanity.” 

According to Sabi, member-states of the U.N. have a “legal obligation” to act in view of the release of the tribunal’s June report that uncovered “the commission of crimes against humanity against the Falun Gong and Uighur [minorities] had been proved beyond reasonable doubt.”
Sabi said in a speech that the targeting of minority groups, such as Uighur Muslims and members of the Falun Gong religion, makes possible a charge of genocide. 

Comparing it to other instances of extermination, he said, “Victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse” than what China is doing. 

Saib told the U.N. Human Rights Council, “It is the legal obligation of UN Member States to address this criminal conduct.”
For its part, China denies that it is harvesting organs en masse. 

However, China has admitted to harvesting organs from executed criminals but claimed that it ceased the practice in 2015, according to Reuters. 

However, China Tribunal’s report said the organs are used for medical purposes. 

It cited short wait times for organ transplants in Chinese hospitals as evidence that China engages in harvesting. 

Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, an attorney who led prosecutors in the trial of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, chaired the tribunal, which heard testimony from witnesses, medical experts, and human rights investigators. 

According to its findings, China has been extracting organs from victims for at least 20 years and continues to this day.
The report asserted that there is evidence of organ extraction among Tibetans and some Christian communities. 

More than a million mostly Muslim Uighurs are currently subjected to “re-education” in prison camps managed by the Chinese government in northwestern East Turkestan colony. 

The tribunal reported that they are “being used as a bank of organs” and subjected to regular medical testing.
Speaking at a separate event on Tuesday, Sir Geoffrey Nice said the governments of the world “can no longer avoid what it is inconvenient for them to admit.” 

Israel, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan, as well as other countries, have placed restrictions on persons wishing to travel to China for organ transplant surgery. 

The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) charity, which founded the China Tribunal, expects that legislation will emerge in the British parliament next month to halt unethical organ tourism.

The profit motive
Concerns over organ-harvesting date back more than a decade. 

In 2006, when hundreds of thousands of members of the outlawed Falun Gong group were imprisoned, the matter was raised by foreign ministers at a China–European Union summit meeting held that year. 

This came after Canadian human rights lawyers David Matas and David Kilgour investigated the deaths of Falun Gong members who were killed despite not having been sentenced to death by any court. 

They estimate that of 60,000 transplant operations in China between 2000 and 2005, only 18,000 organ donations in that period came from official sources, which is to say from posthumous donations or from formally executed death row prisoners. 

This leaves a shortfall of some 40,000 organ donations, which Matas and Kilgour supposed may come from forced organ extraction.
The profit motive is evident in the trafficking of human body parts. 

In 2006, the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang carried a list of prices for body parts wherein a kidney was listed at $62,000, a liver or heart at $130,000, and a lung at $150,000. 

Currently, according to China Tribunal, the trade surpasses $1 billion each year.

China's crimes against humanity

U.N. urged to investigate monstrous live organ harvesting in China

By Emma Batha


LONDON -- A senior lawyer called on Tuesday for the top United Nations human rights body to investigate evidence that China is murdering members of the Falun Gong spiritual group and harvesting their organs for transplant.
Hamid Sabi called for urgent action as he presented the findings of the China Tribunal, an independent panel set up to examine the issue, which concluded in June that China’s organ harvesting amounted to crimes against humanity.
Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations by human rights researchers and scholars that it forcibly takes organs from prisoners of conscience and said it stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.
But Sabi, Counsel to the China Tribunal, told the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that forced organ harvesting had been committed “for years throughout China on a significant scale ... and continues today”.
The harvesting has involved “hundreds of thousands of victims”, mainly practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, he said, adding that detainees from China’s ethnic Uighur minority were also targeted.
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said.
“Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph. But killing the donor is criminal.”
Falun Gong is a spiritual group based around meditation that China banned 20 years ago after 10,000 members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. 

Thousands of members have since been jailed.
Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal’s chairman, told a separate U.N. event on the issue that governments, U.N. bodies and those involved with transplant surgery, could no longer turn a blind eye to the “inconvenient” evidence.
Nice, who was lead prosecutor in the trial of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, said the tribunal’s findings required immediate action.
“The time of convenient ‘uncertainty’, when all these entities could say the case against (China) was not proved, is past.”
Transplant recipients in China include Chinese nationals as well as overseas patients who travel to China in order to receive an organ at a substantial cost, but with a greatly reduced waiting time.
The tribunal said in June its findings were “indicative” of genocide, but it had not been clear enough to make a positive ruling.

China’s Brutality Can’t Destroy Uighur Culture

The Turkic people has an ancient language and traditions. Even Mao didn’t expect to erase it.
By S. Frederick Starr

A police vehicle patrols in Kashgar, East Turkestan, June 25, 2017. 

Daily headlines tell the story of China’s mass internment of Uighurs in its East Turkestan colony, along with the closing and destruction of Uighur mosques and the demolition of their neighborhoods. But the press largely ignores other aspects of their identity, notably their significant cultural and intellectual achievements. 

These details matter, because Uighurs’ resilient culture may ultimately frustrate China’s efforts to stamp them out.
Uighurs are one of the oldest Turkic peoples and were the first to become urbanized. 

When the ancestors of modern Turks were still nomadic, Uighurs were settling into sophisticated cities. 

One of their branches, known today as the Karakhanids, had a capital at Kashgar, near China’s modern border with Kyrgyzstan. 

When Karakhanids conquered the great Silk Road city of Samarkand, they established a major hospital and endowed not only the doctors’ salaries but the cost of heating, lighting and food. 

That was 1,000 years ago, before the Normans conquered England.
Uighurs were active experimenters in religion. 

Besides their traditional animism, they embraced Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and finally Islam. 

They were also among the first Turkic peoples to develop a written language. 

And with writing came literature and science.
Yusuf of Balasagun (c. 1020-70) was chancellor of the Karakhanid state. 

His “Wisdom of Royal Glory” celebrates the active and civic life. 

Rejecting mystic Sufism, Yusuf embraced the here and now, proclaiming that “the next world is won through this world.” 

The widely read text helped popularize a literary version of the Turkic language, the equivalent of the works of Chaucer in English or Dante in Italian. 

His rhymed couplets bemoaning the disenchantments that come with the passage of time reach across the centuries.
A contemporary of Yusuf was Mahmud of Kashgar, a pioneer linguist, ethnographer and geographer. 

Mahmud spent much of his career in Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. 

He knew that the Arab Caliph was totally dependent on Turkic soldiers and civil servants, but saw how the Arab rulers scorned and segregated them as second-class citizens. 

Mahmud’s mission was to promote Turkic peoples and to encourage Arabic and Persian speakers to learn Turkic languages.
Both Yusuf and Mahmud have been considered saints in Uighur culture, and they remain part of the public consciousness. 

The Chinese government doesn’t dare touch their grand mausoleums near Kashgar, so instead it seeks to strip the two Uighur heroes of their religion and ethnicity, regarding their monuments as undifferentiated landmarks in a Chinese world.
Meanwhile, Kashgar itself, which was 99% Turkic when Mao Zedong conquered it in 1949, is rapidly being transformed into a Han Chinese city. 

The government has bulldozed much of the old city and entire districts of traditional Uighur homes, replacing them with generic Chinese high rises. 

In Ürümqi, the capital of East Turkestan, the Han are now an overwhelming majority, and Kashgar is fast following suit.
Beijing hopes its ruthless “Strike Hard” campaign will stamp out the Uighurs as a distinct group. 

But sheer numbers will make that effort near impossible. 

Official data put the Turkic population of East Turkestan at 8.6 million, but it is likely well over 10 million. 

To exterminate them would require a double Holocaust.
Beijing’s alternative to genocide is to destroy the language and culture, but a culture’s identity cannot be so easily destroyed.

 Memories of Yusuf, Mahmud, scores of other poets and saints, the language, folklore, cuisine and way of life are simply too deeply rooted. 

The Uighurs also have developed coping mechanisms.

 While the government demands that boys be sent to Chinese schools, girls are continuing the study of their native language. 

Efforts to suppress the Uighurs’ culture will further radicalize them and drive their lives deeper underground.
The Uighur tragedy now holds the world’s attention. 

Beijing has managed to bribe Saudi Arabia, Turkey and all other Muslim countries into silence, but the gag order cannot be sustained for long. 

Meanwhile, multiple countries near and far now host large, well-educated and active communities of Uighur expatriates.

 They report on developments in East Turkestan that might otherwise pass unnoticed and provide Uighurs at home a channel to communicate with the world. 

They also translate books and articles into Uighur, which helps their co-nationals in East Turkestan overcome their isolation.
Even Mao recognized the distinctness and resilience of the Uighur people. 

Faced with the vast territory of East Turkestan that was overwhelmingly Turkic and Muslim, he named it the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. 

He thus acknowledged the Uighurs’ identity and proposed to grant them a degree of self-government.
Three-quarters of a century later, the only workable solution is still for Beijing to give Uighurs and the other Turkic peoples of East Turkestan more political and cultural autonomy. 

If China’s other provinces demand the same treatment, Xi Jinping can remind them that he is simply following Mao’s lead on the issue and not advancing a new model for Chinese governance as a whole. 

It might seem unlikely that Beijing would back down in such a way.

 But its alternative is to continue a costly conflict that brings shame at home and abroad and is unlikely ever to subdue the proud and ancient Uighur people.

China's Final Solution

East Turkestan: China's actions could be precursors to genocide

Campaign group urges foreign governments to halt ‘business as usual’ relations with Beijing until action is taken
By Kate Lyons

A gate of what is officially known as a ‘vocational skills education centre’ in Dabancheng, in East Turkestan

Uighur leaders have called on democratic governments to confront China over its treatment of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, saying the government’s actions against the ethnic minority group are “precursors to genocide”.
On a visit to Australia, leaders of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), based in Washington, said governments, businesses, academics and thinktanks all had a responsibility to stop “business as usual” relations with China.
They also warned of China’s “extra-territorial reach”, which saw coercion and threats against Australian Uighurs, who were unable to escape the reach of the Chinese state.
“It’s time for action, something horrific is happening on our watch,” said Nury Turkel, chair of the board for the UHRP.
An estimated one million Muslims are being held in detention camps in East Turkestan by the Chinese government as part of a sweeping crackdown on the rights of the minority group.
The authorities in Beijing call the camps “vocational training centres”, saying those detained within them are taught language, culture and vocational skills.
In August, the UN called for the immediate release of people from the camps, saying they had received many credible reports that a million ethnic Uighurs were held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.

Mass murder cannot be ruled out
Turkel cited James Millward, a historian at Georgetown University, who called cultural cleansing of Uighurs “Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the East Turkestan problem”. 

Turkel said: “those of us who are students of history know what that means. We’ve seen how it ends when a government or an authoritarian leader promotes that sort of ideology”, saying the Communist party of China had likened Uighurs to “a cancerous tumour”.
Asked whether he thought the Holocaust was the best historical comparison for the situation in East Turkestan, Turkel said: “The Chinese have not publicly shown any sign of gassing Uighurs” but that the few reports coming out of the camps suggested people were dying inside them. 

He added: “We may see mass murder.”
Louisa Greve, director for external affairs for the UHRP, said: “Academics believe that when you look at the progression of policies that dehumanise ethnic groups, you have to say that mass murder cannot be ruled out. We see many, many of the precursors of cultural and physical genocide.”
Thomas Cliff, research fellow at the ANU college of Asia and the Pacific said what was going on in East Turkestan was “a form of genocide, although it’s not killing everybody”.
“The objective seems to be to wipe out all traces of what’s distinct about being a Uighur,” he said.
Some people are coming out of the camps and saying ‘kill me, I don’t want to bear this anymore’,” he said.
Greve said government action needed to be taken in response to the repression of Uighurs, which included forcible separation of children from their parents, reports of forced marriage between Uighurs and Han Chinese, and the banning of Uighur language and culture.
Greve said Uighurs, including herself and fellow panellists, had received threats and coercion from the Chinese government to infiltrate or spy upon members of the Uighur community in the US and had been threatened with reprisals against their families in China if they didn’t stop their activism.
Australian Uighurs told the Guardian of China’s extra-territorial reach, with one woman saying a Chinese spy came to her business in Sydney where he quizzed her about her political views, her opinion on the situation in East Turkestan and the ethnicity of her employees.
Another Australian permanent resident said she is required by Chinese police to take a photo of herself holding her passport and the day’s paper and send it to them every few weeks.
Sultan Hiwilla, a prominent Australia-Uighur activist based in Sydney, said he had not been able to speak to his family in East Turkestan since 2014 and does not know what has happened to them, but a message reached him a few months ago through a friend telling him to stop his activism because it was affecting his family.
But he said he could not stop his work: “It’s not only affecting my family it’s affecting all Uighur people, if I stop, it will keep going, some one needs to make this sacrifice.”

Final Solution

China holds one million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps
The world's next major human disaster is in the making in China. This time, we should act before it's too late.

By Khaled A Beydoun
Uighur Muslim worshipers attend an early afternoon prayer session at the Kashgar Idgah mosque in East Turkestan. Photo taken August 5, 2008.

Rwanda. East Timor. Myanmar. 

The world has a cruel habit of ignoring humanitarian disasters until it's too late. 

Old habits die hard, and the people targeted by state-led ethnic cleansing programs even harder. 

But the reports of mass concentration camps and the criminalisation of Islam inflicted upon China's Uighur Muslims should alarm anyone and everyone. 

Right now.
In August, a United Nations human rights panel reported that up to one million Uighur Muslims were forced into grounds that resemble massive internment camps in East Turkestan -- the colony in western China home to approximately 10 million Uighur Muslims. 

Gay McDougall, who sits on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, claimed that up to two million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were forced into "political camps for indoctrination".
The scale of China's internment is staggering, with at least one in every 10 Uighur Muslim living in East Turkestan "disappearing into internment camps". 

The figure is even more staggering for those that have family or friends locked away for no other crime but practising a faith -- Islam -- in a region where this religion is categorically associated with subversion, separatism and terrorism.
But the internment of one million people in East Turkestan is only the tip of the ominous state architecture of ethnic cleansing against Uighur Muslims. 

The very phrases "internment" and "concentration camps" instantly conjure up images of the Holocaust or the rounding up of Jews during World War II. 

Potent analogies that spurred the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Intercept to publish recent pieces documenting China's designation of Islam as a "mental illness," and its merciless objective to annihilate it by way of a sweeping system of ethnic cleansing, of which mass internment is only one part.
Yet, much of the world remains unaware of the horrors unfolding in East Turkestan. 

And even more, entirely unacquainted with a people trapped within the belly of a superpower bent on destroying them.

Who Are the Uighurs?
A portrait of Uighur Muslim history and identity highlights why China, a communist nation that enshrines atheism and privileges its majority-Han ethnic population, is committed to eliminating these people. 

The Uighurs are a stigmatised minority on two fronts: ethnicity and religion, and trapped within the precarious crosshairs of an Orwellian police state that views Islam as an affront to state-sponsored atheism and Uighur identity an obstacle to Han ethnic supremacy.
Uighur Muslims are indigenous to East Turkestan, a Chinese colony in northwest China that borders Mongolia to the northeast, and a myriad of Muslim-majority nations to its left. 

After briefly declaring independence in the early 20th century, East Turkestan -- and a sizable population of Uighur Muslims -- was annexed by communist China in 1949, and remains under its authoritarian control until this day.
In addition to religious affinity, Uighur ethnicity resembles and overlaps with that of its Central Asian neighbours, such as Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and other countries populated with predominantly Turkic peoples. 

Uighur Muslims also have their own language, Uighur, formerly known as Eastern Turki, which is only spoken by the Uighur inhabitants of East Turkestan and populations in the diaspora.
Elements within the Uighur population in China have sought to reclaim their independence, claiming indigenousness and persecution as bases for secession from China. 

In response, China promoted the mass movement of Han Chinese into the country's hinterland, including East Turkestan, which has effectively reduced Uighur Muslims into a minority on their native land, strategically preempting the possibility of independence.
The 9/11 terror attacks in the United States created new possibilities for China to suppress its Uighur Muslim population beyond demographic engineering. 

Lockstep, Beijing adopted the American Islamophobia enshrined by the Bush administration, and seized upon a "War on Terror" that conflated Islam with terrorism. 

With much of the world suspicious of Islam and the Global War on Terror fully deployed, China seized upon a ripe geopolitical landscape that enabled a relentless and robust crackdown on Uighur Muslims -- honing in on Islam as the pathway to destroy a people refusing to trade in their faith, language and customs for the alternatives forced upon them by Beijing.

Criminalising Islam
Islam is central to Uighur identity, and religious expression intimately tied to language and culture. But the War on Terror enabled Beijing to target the religious identity of Uighur Muslims to not only stifle aspirations for independence, but push towards full-scale ethnic cleaning. 

The universal policing of Muslim expression, in Western and Eastern nations, allowed China to first "throw the Uighurs under the geopolitical bus." 

And in recent years, completely run them over with an interconnected set of policies that make western Islamophobia look pedestrian.
Yet, understanding the broad scale and depth of China's persecution of Uighur Muslims is fully revealed by its genuine objective: which is transformation and annihilation, not ferreting out terrorists. 

Criminalising and closely policing Islam, the most conspicuous and sacred identifier of Uighur identity, is how Beijing seeks to bring about that goal. 

In 2015, China restricted Uighur Muslim students, teachers and other civil servants in East Turkestan from observing the fast during the month of Ramadan, which extended beyond the public sphere by way of police intimidation and surveillance within households during the holy month. 

This ban was accompanied by routine state vetting of Uighur imams, close surveillance of mosques, the removal of religious teachers and students from schools, restrictions placed on Uighur Muslims to communicate with family or friends living overseas, and the screening of literature assigned to students in schools in East Turkestan.
While East Turkestan has rapidly devolved into an open-air prison for Uighur Muslims in recent years, the open observance of Islam would lead one directly to the most vile type of Chinese prison: an internment camp designed to "cure" one from Islam and crush the Uighur people.

Internment and the architecture of ethnic cleansing
Suppressing the observance of Ramadan sent a clear message to Uighurs during the most emblematic period of Muslim life: that expression of Islam will be punished with impunity. 

In turn, the state ban on Ramadan bludgeoned a cornerstone of Uighur culture and life, and beyond the holy month, pushed forward the state view that Islam is "an ideological illness" that must be more than just criminally prosecuted, but pathologically cured.
Internment camps, called "re-education centres" by the state, grew in size and number beginning in 2013. 

Within these overpopulated camps, state agents are commissioned to heal the illness (Islam) through a litany of horrors, including forcing Uighur Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol (both of which are restricted by Islam), memorise and recite Communist Party songs, forced into grueling work, enroll in Mandarin language courses and comprehensive trainings devised to extract their religion and culture from out of them.
Locked up, uprooted far from home and family, 10-20 percent of the Uighur Muslim population in East Turkestan are currently experiencing or have endured the horrors of the largest network of internment camps since World War II. 

Those who resist while inside are tortured, and reports of deaths from family members and outright disappearances are widely documented. 

The majority of those interned have been men, and the Chinese have supplemented the disproportionate incarceration of men with a policy forcing Uighur Muslim women to marry (non-Muslim) Han men. 

Further diluting the Uighur Muslim population and entrenching Han hegemony.
The threat of internment is a fear that hovers over East Turkestan like a black cloud and looms heavy in the mind of every Uighur Muslim. 

Indeed, "the detentions and the fear of detention have become an unavoidable fact of daily life." 

This fear is a weapon that the Chinese government has wielded to deter and intimidate Uighurs from exercising their faith, enforced by way of ubiquitous police in Uighur Muslim communities, tapping the neighbours, classmates and colleagues of Uighurs to serve as data gatherers and spies, and perhaps most nefariously, deputising Uighur children to monitor and implicate their own parents. 

Big Brother would be a severe understatement, as Chinese authorities in East Turkestan have enlisted virtually anybody and everybody inside of Uighur Muslim communities to partake in the project of uprooting Islam.

The crux of ethnic cleaning: Brainwashing children
Last week in The Atlantic, Sigal Samuel wrote, "China's crackdown has Uighurs in East Turkestan worried that their own children will incriminate them, whether accidentally or because teachers urge kids to spy on their parents." 

Samuel's work helped spur discussion about the horrors taking place in East Turkestan beyond the internment camps, which created an entryway to learn about the other tentacles of China's ethnic cleansing programme; particularly those targeting Uighur children.
China's project of breaking up the family unit, the building block of Uighur Muslim society in East Turkestan, is achieved through the routine programme of marshalling children to report on the religious activities of their parents to state-controlled teachers. 

But also the formal institution of state-run orphanages, where the sons and daughters of interned Uighurs undergo a programme of cultural brainwashing and assimilation tailored for children.
Within the walls of these orphanages, where "[children] between the ages of six months and 12 years are locked up like farm animals," Chinese authorities carry out what is perhaps the crux of their ethnic cleansing program: engineering an entire generation of Uighur Muslims to turn their back on their parents, religion and culture, in favour of the atheism, Mandarin language and Han customs privileged by Beijing. 

In turn, stripping the Uighur people from its very lifeline, its children, and paving a pathway towards the utter decimation of 10 million Uighur Muslims, and a nation that existed before the creation of the modern Chinese state.

Waiting for the world
On Tuesday, September 4, I released a tweet about the internment of one million Uighur Muslims that went viral, but more importantly, caught the attention of Uighur Muslims in the diaspora. 

A Uighur graduate student (whose name I will not share for fear of China seeking retribution against him or his family) in England contacted me, sharing intimate stories about the trials his family members and friends endured in the internment camps. 

Like so many, I took to the crisis because of the string of headlines documenting the internment of one million Uighur Muslims, alarmed by how scant coverage of it was in the mainstream media -- and how the world was not only idle to respond, but largely unaware.
"We are waiting for the world," the student told me on Twitter, prefacing a statement that would reveal the gravity of the state violence unleashed on his people: "We are waiting for the world to know who we are," he finished. 

A basic plea that China efficiently seeks to keep concealed while systematically policing and punishing every trace of Uighur Muslim life. 

In order to comprehend the design of extermination China has placed upon Uighur Muslims, we must first know who they are as a people. 

They are a proud people, whose only crimes are living on a land that has always been their own and expressing a faith and culture rooted deep in that soil.
Acknowledging their existence, as a global community, thwarts the very essence of China's ethnic cleansing program: to reject Uighur Muslim identity, and remove them from memory. 

It is still not too late for us, all of us, to know who the Uighur are, and next, help to prevent the world's next human disaster.

Chinazism

U.S. Weighs Sanctions Against Chinese Officials Over Muslim Detention Camps

By Edward Wong

The Id Kah mosque in China’s East Turkestan colony. The mass detentions in East Turkestan are the worst collective human rights abuse in China in decades.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese senior officials and companies to punish Beijing’s detention of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs and other minority Muslims in large internment camps, according to current and former American officials.
The economic penalties would be one of the first times the Trump administration has taken action against China because of human rights violations. 

United States officials are also seeking to limit American sales of surveillance technology that Chinese security agencies and companies are using to monitor Uighurs throughout northwest China.
Discussions to rebuke China for its treatment of its minority Muslims have been underway for months among officials at the White House and the Treasury and State Departments. 

But they gained urgency two weeks ago, after members of Congress asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on seven Chinese officials.
Until now, Trump has largely resisted punishing China for its human rights record, or even accusing it of widespread violations. 

If approved, the penalties would fuel an already bitter standoff with Beijing over trade and pressure on North Korea’s nuclear program.
Last month, a United Nations panel confronted Chinese diplomats in Geneva over the detentions. 

The camps for Chinese Muslims have been the target of growing international criticism and investigative reports, including by The New York Times.
Human rights advocates and legal scholars say the mass detentions in the northwest colony of East Turkestan are the worst collective human rights abuse in China in decades. 

Since taking power in 2012, Xi Jinping has steered China on a hard authoritarian course, which includes increased repression of large ethnic groups in western China, notably the Uighurs and Tibetans.
On Sunday, Human Rights Watch released a detailed report that concluded that the violations were of a “scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.” 

The report, based on interviews with 58 former residents of East Turkestan, recommended that other nations impose targeted sanctions on Chinese officials, withhold visas and control exports of technology that could be used for abuses.
Any new American sanctions would be announced by the Treasury Department after governmentwide consultations, including with Congress.

Chinese Muslims in the camps are forced to attend daily classes, denounce aspects of Islam, study mainstream Chinese culture and pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. 

Some detainees who have been released have described torture by security officers.

Uighurs and their supporters near the United Nations in March protested Chinese surveillance of the ethnic group throughout northwest China.

Chinese officials have labeled the process “transformation through education” or “counter-extremism education.” 

But they have not acknowledged that large groups of Muslims are being detained.
The discussions over the mass detentions in East Turkestan highlight American efforts on issues that diverge from the president’s priorities. 

Trump has rarely made statements criticizing foreign governments for human rights abuses or anti-liberal policies, and in fact has praised authoritarian leaders, including Xi.
The Trump administration has confronted China over economic issues — the two countries are in the middle of a prolonged trade war — but has said little about rampant abuses by its security forces.
“The scale of it — it’s massive,” Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said of the Muslim detention centers in an interview. 

“It involves not only intimidating people on political speech, but also a desire to strip people of their identity — ethnic identity, religious identity — on a scale that I’m not sure we’ve seen in the modern era.”
Ethnic Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking group that is mostly Sunni Muslim. 

With a population of around 11 million, Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in East Turkestan. 

Some of the desert oasis towns and villages that they consider their homeland are being emptied out as security officers force many Uighurs into large detention centers for weeks or months.
Gulchehra Hoja, a Uighur-American journalist who works for Radio Free Asia, which is financed by the United States government, said at a congressional hearing in July that two dozen of her family members in East Turkestan were missing, including her brother.
“I hope and pray for my family to be let go and released,” Ms. Hoja said. 

“But I know even if that happens, they will still live under constant threat.”
A Chinese law student in Canada, Shawn Zhang, has compiled satellite images that show the scale of some of the detention centers.
In their demand last month, Mr. Rubio and other lawmakers urged officials at the State and Treasury Departments to impose sanctions on Chinese companies that have profited from building the camps or the regionwide surveillance system, which includes the collection of biometric and DNA data. They singled out Hikvision and Dahua Technology for the surveillance.
Mr. Rubio said the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, of which he is a chairman, will also ask the Commerce Department to prevent American companies from selling technology to China that could contribute to the surveillance and tracking.
Congressional lawmakers singled out Chen Quanguo, who became party chief of East Turkestan in 2016, for sanctions among seven Chinese officials.

For many years, Chinese officials have talked about the need to suppress what they call "terrorism", separatism and religious extremism in East Turkestan. 

In 2009, ethnic violence began soaring in the region. 

Security forces carried out mass repression in response, but large-scale construction of the camps, which now hold as many as one million people, did not begin until the arrival of Chen Quanguo, who became party chief of East Turkestan in August 2016, after a stint in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The congressional demand, outlined in an Aug. 28 letter, singles out Mr. Chen among the seven Chinese officials who would be sanctioned.
In Washington, officials grappling with the plight of the Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims are doing so in the shadow of the mass murders, rapes and forced displacement of Rohingya Muslims by Burmese military forces that began in Myanmar in August 2017. 

More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh and live in squalid camps.
American officials see the actions of the Chinese government as another form of the genocide that occurred in Myanmar, according to people with knowledge of the continuing discussions.
Sam Brownback, the State Department’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom and former governor of Kansas, supports taking a hard line against the Chinese government on the issue of East Turkestan, they said. 

Mr. Brownback declined to be interviewed.
In April, Laura Stone, an acting deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told reporters on a visit to Beijing that the United States could impose sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the East Turkestan abuses under the Global Magnitsky Act. 

The law allows the American government to impose sanctions on specific foreign officials who are gross violators of human rights.
That same month, Heather Nauert, the chief spokeswoman for the State Department, called on China to release all those “unlawfully detained” after meeting in Washington with Ms. Hoja and five other ethnic Uighur journalists who work in the United States for Radio Free Asia. 

The journalists shared details of the mass detentions and of harassment of their own family members in the region.
The issue of the Uighurs was raised in July at the first international minister-level forum on global religious freedom, over which Mr. Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence presided. 

Ahead of it, Mr. Pompeo wrote an op-ed that listed the Uighurs among several groups suffering religious persecution. 

“These episodes and others like them are abhorrent,” he wrote.
In a statement to The Times, the State Department said officials “are deeply troubled by the Chinese government’s worsening crackdown” on Muslims.
“Credible reports indicate that individuals sent by Chinese authorities to detention centers since April 2017 number at least in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions,” the statement said.
The Trump administration has used an executive order tied to the Magnitsky Act once to impose sanctions on a Chinese official. 

In December, the White House announced sanctions against Gao Yan, who was a district police chief in Beijing when a human-rights activist died in detention.

Chinazism: The Next Holocaust

China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No End in Sight

1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come.
BY RIAN THUM

Local police patrol a village in Hotan prefecture, in China's East Turkestan colony, on Feb. 17. The Uighur area has become one of the most terrorized places in the world.
Last summer, online links between China’s East Turkestan colony and the rest of the world began to go dark.
Uighurs, who make up the largest ethnic group in East Turkestan, started cutting friends and family members abroad from their contacts on WeChat, the dominant online communication platform in China.
Many asked their family members not to call them by phone.
One family I spoke to smuggled a final communication through the chat function integrated into a video game.
In 2009, the government had shut down the internet entirely for almost a year, but this was something different.
Entire minority groups were cutting themselves off from the outside world, one contact deletion at a time.
As Uighurs were disappearing from cross-border conversations, distinctive new building complexes began cropping up throughout the region: large construction projects surrounded by double fences and guard towers, all clearly visible on satellite imagery. 
Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity.
As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. 
Contact with the outside world is one of those signs of purported untrustworthiness.

Given the dark consequences for communication with foreigners, it is surprising how much those of us outside of China have been able to discover about the mass-internment program for minorities in East Turkestan.
Based in part on leaks by an unusually forthcoming police official in Kashgar (now himself incommunicado), scholars have estimated that about 5 to 10 percent of the adult Uighur population has been interned without criminal charge. 
In one township, police told reporters from Radio Free Asia that they were expected to send 40 percent of the population, including nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 50, to the internment system.
For international audiences, the Chinese state has denied the existence of what have come to be known as “re-education camps,” but local officials continue to build new compounds, and openly call for construction contracts online, providing details on everything from camp sizes (up to 883,000 square feet) to the types of materials (“bomb-proof surfaces”) required. 
A few internees have been released for one reason or another and shared their stories of camp life with reporters, with conditions ranging from uncomfortable to literally torturous.
But questions remain, including the crucial matters of what the internment network is designed to do and what is in store for its victims.
The range of interpretations is wide.
Local media in East Turkestan present the camps as short-term rehabilitation facilities.

The Next HolocaustUighurs with family members and friends now gone for six months and more fear much worse.
And the appearance of a recruitment notice for 50 “stouthearted” guards at a crematorium outside of Urumqi, the regional capital, has fed fears that the Chinese government is preparing for mass killing.
While the intent behind policy choices is never fully knowable, particularly in an opaque state like China, the last year has produced leaked data, online traces, and eyewitness reports that provide clues about the motives of decision-makers in East Turkestan.
Viewed in the context of the long history of resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan and the Chinese attempts to eliminate it, some motives become clear.
Since the Qing dynasty’s conquest of the region in 1759, China-based states have confronted the difficulties of outsider rule in the region they dubbed Xinjiang—the “new frontier”—including rebellions in 1864, 1933, and 1945 that led to the establishment of short-lived independent states.
At the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, only 6 percent of East Turkestan’s population was Han Chinese, and the Chinese authorities tended to view the indigenous inhabitants, particularly the majority Uighur ethnic group, with condescension and suspicion.
By 1982, pro-settler policies had increased the proportion of ethnic Chinese in East Turkestan to 40 percent, but authorities continued to worry about indigenous resistance as a threat to their state’s territorial aspirations.
Even after two centuries of China-based rule, the indigenous inhabitants of East Turkestan had more in common culturally with Central Asia and the Middle East than with China, and resistance, both peaceful and violent, was common.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made sense of this resistance in different ways over the years.
In the 1990s, it was mostly seen as ethno-nationalist “separatism” fueled by pan-Turkic ideology. After 2001, when the PRC aligned itself with the U.S. “global war on terror,” authorities began to speak more often of “terrorism” supposedly bred by religious “extremism,” borrowing heavily from Islamophobic discourses in the West. 
What the two approaches share is an assumption that belief systems and ideas are what cause people to resist, not restrictive cultural policies, economics, or relative status within society, and certainly not unfair treatment by a colonizing state.
Until recently, official explanations for acts of resistance dealt with the unsettling prospect of discontent by insisting that only a handful of bad apples held beliefs opposed to CCP rule.
Authorities in East Turkestan invested their energy in controlling those “evil forces” through security measures.
This approach peaked in the response to the deadly protests-turned-riots of 2009.
In July of that year, Uighurs in Urumqi protested the deadly beating of Uighur factory workers outside Shenzhen.
When police tried to break up an initially peaceful protest, it degenerated into rioting, and Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese.
State media blamed a purported plot by Uighur exiles in Europe and the United States.
The People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary security force, flooded the region, setting up checkpoints and fortified guard posts throughout East Turkestan.
Convoys of olive-green troop transports paraded continuously around town centers.
Not forgetting the importance of Uighur hearts and minds, they bore banners promoting “ethnic unity.”
In the following years, authorities blanketed cities with security cameras and placed restrictions on travel for rural Uighurs.
The early 2000s had seen a steady tightening of state controls on Uighur movement, religious practices, and expression, but the fallout of the 2009 uprising accelerated the transformation of East Turkestan into a full-bore racist police state.
Today’s internment camp system reflects a shift in official ideas about the scale of ideological threats. Under Chen Quanguo, East Turkestan’s top official since August of 2016, state policy treats all Uighurs as inherently opposed to the party, an implicit recognition that huge numbers of Uighurs are not, in fact, grateful for Chinese rule. 
In this view, not only are wrong beliefs the root of Uighur dissatisfaction with the party, but those wrong beliefs are endemic to Uighur, Kazakh, and other minority groups.
It is not surprising, then, that the most common officially cited purpose for the internment camps is to purify people’s thoughts, “eliminating extremism” and instilling a love for the party.
A recorded announcement leaked this month from East Turkestan’s Communist Party Youth League, designed to calm rampant fears about the re-education camps, explained that camps “treat and cleanse the virus from their brains.” 
The names used for camps have varied widely, both for the same camp over time and from one camp to the next, but most have included the word “transformation”—for example, “concentrated education transformation center.”
The handful of people released from the camps and able to share their stories describe a variety of indoctrination techniques aimed to instill love for the Communist Party of China and its leader, Xi Jinping.
“Teachers” and guards compel internees to chant slogans, watch videos on how to identify Islamic extremism, study Confucian texts, give thanks to Chairman Xi Jinping before meals, renounce Islam, write self-criticisms, and denounce fellow internees. 
Some of these, particularly self-criticisms and denunciations, are staples of CCP indoctrination programs as old as the People’s Republic itself, techniques that gave the English language the word “brainwashing,” a direct translation of the Chinese xi nao.
These go-to CCP techniques are combined with what are presented as modern psychological approaches, as re-education centers recruit staff with psychological training.
The content of the indoctrination reflects a new emphasis on nationalism throughout the PRC.
State media outlets tout the party as China’s savior as they always have, but “China” is now more tightly linked to the culture of the ethnic majority, the Han Chinese. 
In this view, religions deemed foreign, for example Islam and Christianity, are seen as threats, as is the purportedly Chinese religion of Buddhism when it is practiced by non-Han people such as Tibetans. 
More than any leader since Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping has promoted the idea that he himself is the embodiment and protector of the Chinese nation.
Outside of China, it is difficult to find informed observers who think that forced indoctrination, limits on cultural expression, and restricting religious practice are likely to do anything other than breed anger at the party.
In East Turkestan however, faith in these techniques seems to run high, and there is very little room for those officials who doubt them to voice concerns.
Before 2016, local officials enjoyed some room for improvisation as they attempted to implement central policies.
In many counties they created programs clearly aimed at compelling ideological transformation.
The strangest of these were the coerced line-dancing competitions that spread across the region in 2014. 
These were supposed to move people away from “extremist” forms of Islam that forbid dance. 
In other places they pushed children to sign promises not to believe in God and arranged public ceremonies for pledging loyalty to the CCP.
But the internment camps play other important roles. They allow police to physically remove whole classes of people from society. 
In at least three counties, police have reported that they interned all Uighurs born between 1980 and 2000, calling them an “untrustworthy generation.” 
Interned Uighurs are physically unable to engage in public resistance to CCP rule.
Physical removal also bolsters CCP programs to assimilate Uighur children to Chinese culture, by removing them from the care of their parents. 
One Kashgar-area county alone has seen the construction of 18 new orphanages over the last year to accommodate children left behind by interned parents, where they will be taught entirely in Chinese.
At a wider scale, the camps serve as the punitive threat behind the state’s cultural and ideological re-engineering of Uighur society.
Without the need for legal charges, authorities can arbitrarily disappear any member of an ethnic minority group for the smallest perceived disobedience. 
In January, an instructor at a daytime re-education course told his students that they would be sent to the internment camps if they could not memorize both the oath of allegiance to the Communist Party and the national anthem in Chinese within three days, according to village police who spoke to Radio Free Asia.
The day before the deadline, a class member in his 40s who was having difficulty memorizing the text hanged himself.
The threat of internment is magnified by a surveillance apparatus of unprecedented scale, marrying old-fashioned manpower—such as armed police and neighborhood committees of the sort that fueled East Germany’s police state—with high-tech, networked surveillance equipment.
Uighurs are subject to regular mandatory home visits by “work teams” composed of party members and other “loyal” state representatives. 
These visits range in duration from daytime visits to multi-day stays, during which the visitors interview their hosts about their thoughts and habits and inspect their homes for prohibited items. 
The results of these interviews are normally kept secret, but in one case a visiting team boasted online of their effectiveness: they sent one-fifth of a village population for internment and indoctrination. 
Children assist in the policing of private spaces, as schools encourage them to report on their parents’ religious practices in the home.
Cities are blanketed with surveillance cameras. 
Checkpoints at market entrances, train stations, and even book stores scan people’s faces and check them against their identification cards using facial recognition software.
Smartphone owners are required to install government spyware that reports on content stored in the phone. 
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the enormous amounts of data generated by these electronic monitoring systems are combined with the information from work teams’ home visits and entered into an “integrated joint operations platform” that employs big-data analysis to predict which individuals will engage in acts of disloyalty.
Police at checkpoints regularly check phones for “illegal” content.
Attempts to drop out of this surveillance web are dangerous; one police station reported interning people who stopped using their phones.
The near-complete eradication of privacy and the massive scale of internment appears to be changing Uighurs’ behavior.
Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable.
Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common.
Today Uighurs rush to burn their books and strain to guess what will make their home visitors view them as loyal, out of fear that they will join the many family members and friends whom they have personally seen disappear over the last 18 months.
The re-education camps also cast their shadows beyond East Turkestan and even China’s borders.
East Turkestan security personnel have been calling Uighurs working in the rest of China back to their hometowns, where, more often than not, they disappear. 
Police track the activities of Uighurs from their locales even when they reside abroad, demanding photographic evidence of their presence at universities or offices. 
Some are commanded to return home to certain detention.
Uighurs comply out of fear for their families.
Some who have spoken out about the situation in their homeland have seen large numbers of relatives disappear. 
Depression is rampant among Uighur exiles.
All known cases of Uighurs returning to China in the last year have resulted in the returnee’s disappearance.
Across the world, Uighurs with expiring passports or visas are currently weighing whether to claim asylum in foreign lands and never see their families again, or to face near-certain internment upon their return to East Turkestan.

A Uighur woman walks by a closed Islamic school in the old town of Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony on July 1, 2017. 

The most widely circulated estimate of the number of people interned in re-education camps—several hundred thousand to just over 1 million—was developed by Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology from leaks that surfaced in January and February.
In the half-year since then, Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others have continued to disappear.
Uighurs with family in East Turkestan and academics who have visited in the past few months have only rarely reported individual releases, usually of older people with health problems.
Officials in one Kucha district have told reporters that none of the approximately 5,000 to 6,000 residents sent to the camps over the last two years have been released. 
Tellingly, the state has continued to invest in camp construction.
In response to growing global scrutiny, the Chinese state has deleted its existing online bid solicitations for re-education camp construction and ceased posting new announcements. 
Even so, public solicitations from March and April suggest that new camps will open later this year or early next year.
The expanding re-education internment system is interconnected with the ordinary prison system, which has seen its own expansion.
Last year, East Turkestan accounted for 13 percent of China’s indictments, despite having only 1.5 percent of the country’s population.
The number of arrests is even larger, accounting for 21 percent of China’s total. 
For many detainees, the first stop is a kanshousuo, a temporary detention center.
Shawn Zhang, a Chinese graduate student in Canada who has used Google satellite images to document the “construction boom” of re-education centers and other detention facilities across East Turkestan, notes that the kanshousuo account for many facilities.
Google imagery from April 22 shows one such structure near Khotan being expanded by 150 percent.
An official in Karakash explained that re-education camps also act as gateways to the formal prison system.
He reported that some districts have quotas for a percentage of internees who must be sent to prisons after evaluation of their performance at re-education camps.
The construction of new re-education camps suggests that the space freed up by the prison transfers is not sufficient to house the continued influx of internees sent for forced indoctrination.
The February numbers may have been eclipsed in the months since, but they are historically significant nonetheless.
At the upper end of the Zenz estimate, East Turkestan’s re-education camp population exceeds the peak daily inmate numbers of Nazi concentration camps (714,211 in 1945, according to Nikolaus Wachsmann’s 2015 book, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps), is several times the number of the Japanese citizens interned by the United States during World War II, and amounts to about half the capacity of the Soviet gulag system, which held around 2 million people.
It remains to be seen which of these precedents the massive East Turkestan internment infrastructure will ultimately most resemble.
The permanent construction style of the re-education camps, visible in satellite images that clearly document their building process, suggests that the Chinese state, left to its own devices, intends to maintain the camp system for the foreseeable future. 
Barring a complete abandonment of the camp system, the most moderate plausible outcome is that at some point authorities dramatically reduce the number of internees, maintaining recalcitrant inmates in the camps, and preserving the capacity to return huge numbers to extrajudicial internment.
In this outcome, the camps would continue to uphold East Turkestan’s racist police state and support the CCP’s assimilationist program of cultural and ideological cleansing.
Such a dire prediction could, however, turn out to be optimistic.
Historically, extrajudicial internment systems have often deviated from their original purposes.
A lack of due process, combined with the immense power that mass-internment programs give states to control the fates of minority populations, makes camps like those in East Turkestan easy to adapt to new goals.
The eruption of war, acts of violence by oppressed minorities, guards’ long inurement to abusive treatment of prisoners, and ideological shifts at the top of the bureaucracy all have the potential, alone or in interaction, to turn the camps to darker purposes.

The Final Solution
Local officials have already expressed dehumanizing outlooks on the role of the re-education camps as “eradicating tumors” and “spraying chemicals on the crops to kill the weeds.” 
Should authorities decide that forced indoctrination has widely failed, much of East Turkestan’s minority population will be framed as irredeemable.
And with the state-controlled Global Times claiming, in response to the recent U.N. condemnation of China’s racist policies in East Turkestan, that “all measures can be tried” in the pursuit of China’s “stability,” mass murder and genocide do not look like impossible outcomes.