China's crimes against humanity

Uyghur refugee tells of death and fear inside East Turkestan camps
By Ivan Watson and Ben Westcott

Washington -- The children's eyes light up when their mother pulls out a photo of her triplets taken shortly after their birth in 2015.
"Moez!" three-year old Moez says, pointing at the infant version of himself.
"Elina!" says his sister Elina.
But when it comes to the third baby in the photograph, the siblings become confused.
When they grow older, their mother Mihrigul Tursun says, she will tell her children about their missing brother Mohaned.
"I will tell them everything," Tursun says.

"I will tell them the Chinese government killed their brother."

Tursun with her two surviving children, Moez (left) and Elina (right).

Tursun says she and her son are victims of Beijing's growing crackdown on Muslim majority Uyghurs in China's East Turkestan colony, where a US State Department official says at least 800,000 and possibly up to two million people may have been detained in huge "re-education centers."
The Urumqi Children's Hospital in East Turkestan, where Tursun says her son died, didn't respond to CNN's requests for comment.
But Tursun's story of detention and torture fits a growing pattern of evidence emerging about the systematic repression of religious and ethnic minority groups carried out by the Chinese government in East Turkestan.
'Cultural genocide': How China is tearing Uyghur families apart in East Turkestan

'Open-air prison'
China's actions in East Turkestan have been fiercely condemned by countries around the world, including in the United States, where lawmakers introduced draft legislation called the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act on Thursday.
"Credible reports found that family members of Uyghurs living outside of China had gone missing inside China, that Chinese authorities were pressuring those outside the country to return, and that individuals were being arbitrarily detained in large numbers," lawmakers wrote.

According to the US State Department, Chinese authorities have indefinitely detained at least 800,000 Uyghur, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities since April 2017.
"The pervasive surveillance in place across East Turkestan today has been frequently described as an 'open-air prison,'" Assistant Secretary of State Scott Busby said on December 4th while testifying before Congress.
Beijing has had a long and fractious history with East Turkestan, a massive colony in the far west of the country that is home to a relatively small population of around 22 million in a nation of 1.4 billion people.
The predominately Muslim Uyghurs, who are ethnically distinct from the country's majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, form the majority in East Turkestan, where they account for just under half of the total population.
Uyghurs have likened China's campaign against their people to a "cultural genocide,"with former internment camp detainees describing forced lessons in Communist Party propaganda and region-wide bans on Uyghur culture and traditions.
China has repeatedly denied it is imprisoning or re-educating Uyghurs in East Turkestan, instead saying that it is undertaking "voluntary vocational training" as part of an anti-extremism program.-
In early January, Chinese authorities took some foreign diplomats and journalists on a carefully supervised tour of some of the "vocational education centers."
Detainees were seen taking language courses in standard Mandarin Chinese, painting, performing ethnic dances and even singing the song, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands," according to a Reuters report.
"All of us found that we have something wrong with ourselves and luckily enough the Communist Party and the government offer this kind of school to us for free," one Uyghur inmate told journalists during the tour.


'Where is my baby?'
When Mihrigul Tursun touched down in Urumqi, East Turkestan, to see her parents on March 13, 2015, she didn't know it was the beginning of three years of pain and loss.
Tursun had grown up in East Turkestan, but like many young Uyghurs moved overseas for employment opportunities. 

She was flying with her eight-week old triplets from Egypt where she had been living and working. Upon arrival at Urumqi airport, she claims Chinese officials began to ask her questions.
"They start to ask me, what you take from Egypt? Who (do) you know in Egypt? How many Uyghurs do you know?" Tursun says.
It was at this point, Tursun claims, that she was detained and her three children taken from her by officials.
CNN contacted multiple Chinese ministries and institutions mentioned by Tursun, including the East Turkestan Prisons Administration Bureau and Urumqi Police, for comment on her story but none responded.
After she was released from detention three months later, doctors told her that her son Mohaned had passed away in the local Urumqi Children's Hospital.
All a doctor told her about Mohaned's death was that he had died at some point after an operation. 

He was less than a year old.

One of Tursun's few pictures of her three triplets together before Mohaned died in 2015.

Tursun says she was never given any reason why her children were admitted to hospital. 

When she questioned why her children had matching scars at the base of their necks, she was told intravenous drips had been necessary to give them nutrition.
Even then Tursun says the Chinese authorities didn't leave her alone. 

Her passport was confiscated, forcing her to remain inside China.
In April 2017, while in her parents' home county of Qarqan, 1,184 kilometers (735 miles) away from Urumqi, she was taken away from her two remaining children and placed in detention by Chinese authorities.

After she was taken into the East Turkestan center, police placed her in an overcrowded cell with more than 50 other women. 

Many of them, she recognized from her hometown.
"I see someone is my doctor, someone is my (middle) school teacher. Some are neighbors. Some studied with me (in the) same school," Tursun says, a single tear running down her cheek. 

Tursun says the inmates ranged in age from 17 to 62.
The room was so crowded that the women had to take turns sleeping in shifts and standing. 

During her time in the centers, Tursun claims she saw nine of the detainees die due to hostile conditions.
One woman, a 62-year-old named Gulsahan, had spent at least six months in the center, says Tursun. "Her legs and her face were swollen and there were rashes," Tursun recalls. 

One day Gulsahan didn't wake up.
"Police tell us 'make her wake up.' When we touch her hand she is cold," Tursun says.
Another casualty was a 23-year-old a mother of two, named Padegun, who had spent thirteen months in prison.
For two months, says Tursun, Padegun suffered from non-stop menstrual bleeding. 

One night, at around 4 a.m., Tursun says Padegun collapsed during a shift when she was among the prisoners standing.
"We all screamed and then police said don't anyone touch her. (Then) they dragged her by her feet," says Tursun.

I don't remember my parents' voices
Tursun's eyewitness accounts are a long distance from the happy, almost utopian image of the camps Beijing has attempted to paint in its official propaganda.
In footage from inside the camps broadcast on Chinese state-run TV in 2018, Uyghur inmates were shown attentively sitting in classes learning standard Mandarin Chinese, and being taught skills such as sewing.
But many Uyghurs whose relatives have disappeared into this detention system call the idea it is a "voluntary vocational training" system absurd.
"My mom (Gulnar Telet) is a mathematics teacher. She graduated from university. She's fluent in Mandarin. I don't know what kind of skill or education she needs," 21-year-old Arfat Aeriken says. "It's just an excuse."

Aerikan has been stranded in the US and forced to drop out of college since his parents disappeared in East Turkestan.

Aeriken grew up in East Turkestan but moved to the US to get a university education overseas in 2015.

Gradually, his parents stopped calling or messaging him until all communication ceased some time in 2017.
"My parents didn't want to 'get disappeared' so they didn't text me too often," he says. 

"It was very apparent that having contact with someone outside of China is dangerous."
He said he only finally learned that both his parents had been detained from a family friend who fled to Kazakhstan last August.
In September, Aeriken posted a desperate plea on YouTube, begging the US government and the United Nations to take notice.
"I don't remember when was the last time I heard my parents' voice," he says in the video. 

"I ask the United States government, United Nations and all other foreign governments to take immediate action to stop this brutal ethnic cleansing."
Afraid to communicate with anyone in East Turkestan, he says he has no information about who may be caring for his 10-year-old younger brother.

Aeriken said his mother Gulnar and father Erkin both had careers and didn't require vocational education.

Aeriken has been granted asylum in the US. 

But with no tuition money coming from his parents he has been forced to drop out of college.
He isn't alone. 

There is an untold number of other international students from East Turkestan similarly stranded in the US, according to Sean Roberts, a professor of development studies at George Washington University and expert in Uyghur language and culture.
"They're terrified. They don't know what to do. They don't necessarily want to declare asylum in the US because that reflects badly on their family," says Roberts. 

"But they've also gotten messages from the region that they shouldn't come back because they'll definitely be put in one of these internment camps."

'When my country is free'
It wasn't until 2018 that Mihrigul Tursun and her children finally escaped China.
She said diplomats from the Egyptian Embassy in Beijing intervened to help secure her release from prison and reunite her with her Egyptian-born children. 

In April, she finally left for Cairo.
Today, she and her children live in a two bedroom apartment in Virginia, on the East Coast of the United States, where they are working through the US asylum process.
The adjustment has not been easy.

Tursun said she will tell her children when they're old enough that the Chinese government "killed their brother"

Her son Moez suffers chronic asthma attacks, that have landed the family in the emergency room twice in recent months.
But without health insurance, Tursun says she cannot afford to take her son to a pediatrician. Meanwhile, she says for the last month her parents' phones have gone silent.
Asked whether she think she'll ever see her parents again, she says "only when my country is free."
"Then maybe I can see them."

China's ethnic cleansing

The cone of silence around China’s Muslim gulags
By Ishaan Tharoor

It’s unclear how many people are living in some sort of detention in East Turkestan, the restive colony in China’s far west.
Last month, a State Department official testified before a Senate committee that Chinese authorities have “indefinitely detained at least 800,000 and possibly more than 2 million Uighurs, ethnic Khazaks and other members of Muslim minorities in internment camps” since April 2017. 

What foreign reporting has been possible in East Turkestan — which Beijing has subjected to a draconian lockdown — has revealed a vast network of “reeducation centers,” barbed-wire-ringed compounds and factories that have housed more than a tenth of the region’s population of Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority.
Chinese authorities wave away the “fake” reports as “hearsay,” arguing that the measures are necessary to curb Islamist extremism among Uighurs and relieve many in the population of their “backwardness.” 

Last week, in a bid to dispel negative headlines, local officials took a handful of journalists on a tour of three facilities in East Turkestan where interned locals were receiving “vocational training” after falling afoul of Chinese authorities.
“In one class reporters were allowed to briefly visit,” noted Reuters, “a teacher explained in Mandarin that not allowing singing or dancing at a wedding or crying at a funeral are signs of extremist thought.” 

In another, the detained “students” were compelled to sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands” in English for the gathered journalists. 

According to Reuters, inmates are allowed to leave these facilities only when they “have reached a certain level with their Mandarin, de-radicalization and legal knowledge.”
Such facilities are part of an apparatus of control Beijing was building over its minorities, forcing them to turn away from their native languages and religious beliefs. 

“Witnesses underscored that what is happening to Turkic Muslims is unprecedented in its scale, technological sophistication and in the level of economic resources attributed by the state to the project,” said a report put out by a Canadian parliamentary committee last month.
This week, the government also passed a law to “Sinicize” Islam within the next five years. Government officials, said the state-run Global Times, have “agreed to guide Islam to be compatible with socialism.” 

Such guidance is simply a project of ethnic cleansing, carried out through all-encompassing surveillance and strict laws against Muslim practices such as the wearing of face veils or refusing to eat pork.
In the West, such acts have provoked months of media outrage — but little else. 

American and European officials have criticized Beijing for its mass detentions and its attacks on religious freedom, to minimal effect. 

More troubling has been the deafening silence of dozens of Muslim-majority countries, many of which have looked away as China cracks down.
The reluctance of these countries — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan — to speak out in defense of the Uighurs is particularly conspicuous when set against their routine protestations on behalf of Palestinians, Kashmiris and the Rohingya of Myanmar.

On one level, this is a clear reflection of China’s growing geopolitical clout. 

Last year, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping pledged some $20 billion in loans to Arab countries — as well as $100 million in financial aid to nations such as Syria and Yemen. 

Xi’s announcement coincided with the 70th anniversary of the unveiling of the U.S. Marshall Plan for war-torn Europe.
Take Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who as prime minister a decade ago blasted China’s “genocide” of the Uighurs during a spike in violence. 

He was a far more circumspect figure last year when he secured considerable Chinese investment for Turkey’s faltering economy. 

Erdogan, never shy to criticize foreign powers, suggested that China was possibly a victim of “fabrications” in the media.
Similar noises were made last month by Mohammad Faisal, the spokesman for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who told reporters that “some section of foreign media are trying to sensationalize the [Uighur] matter by spreading false information.” 

Pakistan has spent decades stirring international grievances about the plight of Kashmiris living under military occupation in India, but its shielding of Beijing should be no surprise: Pakistan is saddled with debt and is ever more beholden to China as its chief financier.
Authoritarians in the Muslim world have some sympathy for Beijing’s methods. 

“The Chinese government crackdown on Uighurs is based on a premise that law and order can be restored by eradicating enemies of the government and traitors within a society,” wrote Turkish scholar and columnist Mustafa Akyol. 

“This is authoritarian language that most Muslim leaders understand well. It is their own language.”

Akyol suggested that Islamists and Muslim autocrats may be drawn to the idea of a “Confucian-Islamic alliance,” even as they seek to still challenge the West. 

“China can look like a great model, in which the economy grows without Western nuisances like human rights, free speech or limited government,” he wrote.
All the while, the noose keeps tightening around the Uighurs. 

A recent report in the New York Times described how dozens of prominent Uighur intellectuals have been rounded up by Chinese authorities.
“Chinese spokesmen sometimes describe Uighur detainees as actual or potential terrorists,” noted a Tuesday editorial in The Washington Post. 

“But the intellectuals the Chinese government has swept up include figures who openly supported the communist regime, such as Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, an expert on medieval poetry at East Turkestan Normal University. Like other scholars, he wrote an open letter declaring his loyalty to the state but was detained anyway.”
They are hardly dissidents, but their work still makes them suspect in the eyes of Beijing. 

“As the guardians of Uighur traditions, chroniclers of their history and creators of their art, the intellectuals were building the Central Asian, Turkic-speaking society’s reservoir of collective memory within the narrow limits of authoritarian rule,” the Times’ Austin Ramzy wrote.
Speaking to Reuters, Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for a leading German-based Uighur exile group, was blunt about what he saw was taking place: “What they are trying to do is destroy Uighur identity."

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.

Why the Muslim world isn't saying anything about China’s repression and ethnic cleansing of its Muslim minority

• Muslim countries have been silent over China's crackdown on its Uighurs, a Muslim-majority ethnic minority in the country's west.
• Because Arab states all fear economic retribution from China.
• Because they also have poor human rights records, and don't want to draw attention to themselves.
• Turkey has tried standing up to China in the past — and Beijing has not forgotten it.

By Alexandra Ma

China's crackdown on its Uighur citizens, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority group, has faced heavy international scrutiny in recent months.
In August the United Nations said it was "deeply concerned" by reports that China had forced as many as 1 million Uighurs into internment camps in East Turkestan. 

In April, the US State Department said it had heard of Uighurs who had "disappeared" or were unexpectedly detained.
Meanwhile, Muslim countries have been deafeningly silent.
Over the past year alone, activists have found evidence of Chinese authorities tracking Uighurs' cellphone activity and forcing them to cut off their beards and dresses. 

China has demanded the Uighur diaspora hand over personal information— and threatened their families if they do not.
Chinese officials have denied the camps exist, though have acknowledged a program of "resettlement" for people it refers to as extremists. 

Business Insider has contacted the Chinese government for further comment.
An ethnic Uighur man has his beard trimmed after prayers in Kashgar, East Turkestan, in June 2017. The circumstances of this trim is not clear.

It's not as if Muslim countries haven't spoken out about human rights in the past. 

As Myanmar's military ramped up its violence against Rohingya Muslims late last year, citizens in Jordan and Iran staged multiple protests in solidarity with the Rohingya.
Saudi Arabia's mission to the UN also condemned the situation online.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, an international consortium which calls itself "the collective voice of the Muslim world," also pledged this May to set up a "proper investigation" into the Rohingya crisis.
So why hasn't anyone said anything about China's Uighur issue?

A mural in Yarkand, East Turkestan, in September 2012. The Chinese words say: "Stability is a blessing, instability is calamity."

Money, money, money
Muslim-majority countries aren't speaking out because they don't want to jeopardize their economic relationships in China.
Several states in Central Asia and the Middle East are part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive project launched in 2013 linking 78 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania through a network of railroads, shipping lanes, and other infrastructure projects.
Many of these deals entail China giving hefty loans to economies with a bad credit rating, which countries such as Pakistan are already finding difficult to repay. 

And these economic partnerships are stopping these countries from speaking out about East Turkestan.
Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, a Chinese politics researcher at University of Technology Sydney, told Business Insider: "Like most states, Muslim-majority countries have increasingly close economic relations with China.
"There is a general consensus that speaking out about the situation in East Turkestan might jeopardize the development of economic ties, and it is therefore not in their interests to do so."
The two dictators: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, China, in September 2016.

Alip Erkin, an activist in Australia who runs the Uyghur Bulletin network, specifically cited BRI as a hindrance. 

He told BI: "Enormous trade and investment opportunities, as well as debt burden from China, through the BRI not only result in the tight lips of Muslim states but also an active cooperation with China in Uighur crackdown."
Egypt, a BRI partner country, has even helped China with its Uighur crackdown.
Last summer, Egypt detained dozens of Uighur students in the country without giving a reason, denied them access to lawyers and their families, Human Rights Watch reported.
Cairo also deported at least 12 Chinese Uighurs back to China around the same time, according to The New York Times.
Peter Irwin, the program manager at the World Uyghur Congress, told BI: "There is a certain expectation that Muslim-majority countries would naturally lend support to Uighurs and criticize China, but we just haven't seen this, and I don't expect we'll see this given China's economic ambitions with the Belt and Road Initiative, however successful the plan may or may not be."
Map showing the projects subsumed under the Belt and Road Initiative as of December 2015.
China's Uighur treatment may not offend Arab states
It may be too simplistic to cite economic dependence on China as the only reason why Muslim countries aren't standing up to China over the Uighurs.
Middle Eastern states also have a poor human rights record, and prioritize social stability over individual rights, much like China does, van Nieuwenhuizen said.
China justifies its crackdown on East Turkestan as protecting the "peace" and preventing "terrorism". Militant Uighurs have been accused of starting deadly ethnic riots in East Turkestan and attacks across the country from 2009 to 2014.
Arab countries "exhibit a similar understanding" of prioritizing social stability over human rights, van Nieuwenhuizen said.
She told BI: "Middle Eastern states have a poor human rights record themselves — including when it comes to the treatment of religious minorities. Many exhibit a similar understanding of human rights to China's — that is, that social stability trumps individual rights.
"This is how the Chinese government has framed the presence of re-education camps and other repressive measures."
Erkin also told BI that although many Gulf states can afford to make a political stand against China, they "are mostly ultra-authoritarian states that advocate non-interference in other states' internal affairs to avoid the same interference in theirs."
He added: "The silence of the Muslim majority countries over the horrific treatment of Uighurs, especially the recent cultural cleansing drive in East Turkestan, is both frustrating and unsurprising."
He continued: "It is frustrating because the principle of Muslim brotherhood has become a selective foreign policy tool that has more to do with the international politics of Muslim countries and less to do with its true message of solidarity."
Business Insider has contacted the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for comment, but received no reply.

A policeman stands guard as Uighur children play in East Turkestan
What happened when Turkey tried to stand up to China
Turkey, which is majority-Muslim, has spoken out against China's treatment of its Uighurs in the past — and China has not forgotten.
In 2009 then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who is now president) described ethnic violence in East Turkestan as a kind of genocide and said: "We have difficulty understanding how China's leadership can remain a spectator in the face of these events."
Shortly after the comments were made, the state-run China Daily newspaper ran an editorial warning Erdogan to take back his remarks, with the headline: "Don't twist facts."
In 2015 Turkey also offered shelter to Uighur refugees fleeing China, which China Daily again warned "may poison ties and derail cooperation."
Although Erdogan has not spoken out recently, Chinese state media has continued to threaten Turkey.
As the country witnessed a dramatic economic crisis this month, the state-run tabloid Global Times published an unsparing editorial offering Chinese economic support, but warned it against making any more "irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in East Turkestan."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Xi Jinping in Beijing in May 2017.

What Uighurs are saying
It's hard to gauge what Uighurs in East Turkestan think about the issue, because the Chinese government severely restricts information flow out of the region, Maya Wang, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told BI.
But many other activists with ties to the region say that, although many Uighurs and diaspora feel helpless, they are still holding out hope for change.
Erkin, the Uyghur Bulletin publisher, told BI: "There is no doubt that Uighurs in East Turkestan as well as in the diaspora feel extremely helpless in the face of the current cultural cleansing campaign in their homeland, and hope that the UN and other powerful countries of the world call China out and defend their basic religious and cultural rights as humans.
"But still, given the past political solidarity and migration support from Turkey, many Uighurs would like to keep their hopes alive about it being the defender of Uighurs when its international relations are stabilized and economic woes are tackled."
Irwin of World Uyghur Congress added: "The Uighur community is obviously disheartened by the lack of support, but it is certainly not something that has been given up on.
"The United States, European Union and others need to remain vocal on human rights and bring on larger contingents of like-minded countries to collectively stand against these policies," he added.
"Although China seemingly flouts international norms of behavior, the country's leadership still remains particularly concerned about how they are perceived internationally."

On China's crimes against humanity

Beijing's horrific ethnic cleansing and Sinification campaign is putting at stake the internal cohesion of Asia's most powerful state.
By Richard Javad Heydarian
Chinese soldiers participate in an anti-terror drill in Hami, East Turkestan on July 8, 2017 

Amid Xi Jinping's consolidation of power in China, there are growing concerns over an ongoing crackdown on religious freedoms and basic rights of minority groups in the country.
China has embarked on an aggressive Sinification campaign to recast various "foreign" religions to reflect the regime's priorities and the country's unique culture.

Abrahamic faiths originating from the Middle East have been the main target of this new policy, which has provoked massive backlash among various ethnic-religious groups.
In particular, the large Muslim Chinese community has resisted coercive "re-education" efforts by the authorities, which have progressively restricted religious minorities from observing the basic articles of their faith. 

According to a report submitted to the United Nations, as many as one million Uighurs from East Turkestan have been forced into internment camps.
Rights groups are accusing China of engaging in an all campaign of ethnic cleansing. 

Ongoing efforts at Sinification of East Turkestan wil only intensify deep ethnic-religious faultlines in modern China. 

What's at stake is no less than the internal coherence in Asia's most powerful state.
In popular imagination, China is often synonymous with authoritarian tranquility. 

Yet, a more careful look reveals intensified socioeconomic fault lines, with religious freedom emerging as a key area of contestation in China.
Over the past decade, there has been an upsurge of resistance, sometimes even armed and violent, against Beijing's marginalisation of the Muslim minority groups. 

The large-scale migration of Han (mainstream Chinese ethnic group) population into previously Muslim-majority regions as well as government restrictions on observance of basic tenets of Islam, including wearing of veil and fasting during Ramadan, has deepened Uighur grievance against the regime.
In mid-2009, a series of violent clashes between Uighurs and Han residents of Urumqi led to the death and injury of as many as 184 individuals. 

The radicalised atmosphere has strengthened the hands of groups such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which has called for armed resistance against Beijing.
In 2013, violence hit the capital, when several Uighurs, using an SUV, ploughed through visitors at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. 

The following year saw several attacks across East Turkestan, one of which claimed the lives of close to hundred individuals as well as an Imam perceived to be China-friendly.
That year also saw a group of suspected Uighur patriots chasing and assaulting Chinese in Kunming, in the province of Yunnan, with knives, provoking fears of widespread attacks across the country.
In response, the communist regime, which derives its legitimacy from bringing about order and prosperity, adopted increasingly draconian measures, reportedly including the establishment of "reeducation camps" for religious recantation, to crash resistance among ethnic minority groups and prevent "terror" attacks across the country.
In a particularly strident editorial, The Global Times, a hard line Chinese government mouthpiece, portrayed the ongoing crackdown on and cultural marginalisation of Uighurs as a justifiable policy to ensure "East Turkestan has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil" and "evil influence" of extremism.

Recent weeks saw the extension of the government's religious crackdown to the historically well-integrated Hui Muslims in northern Ningxia region, reflecting a more aggressive attempt at Sinification of religion. 

A recent government decision to demolish the Weizhou Grand Mosque, supposedly for lack of proper permit but likely because of its more Middle Eastern design, sparked days of massive protests by thousands of Hui Muslims.
China's relations with Muslim-majority Central Asian neighbours have also come under strain. Recently, a Kazakh court ruled in favour of Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, who sought refuge in the central Asian country after exposing the presence of internment "reeducation" camps for Muslim minority groups. 

China sought her extradition for supposedly violating state secrets, an accusation that can carry death penalty.
Her case sparked widespread outrage against China across Kazakhstan, forcing the Beijing-friendly government to protect the asylum-seeking activist. 

Unless the Chinese communist regime reconsiders its current policy towards religious minority groups, it will likely inspire even greater resistance among Muslim groups at home and backlash among neighbouring Muslim countries.

China's crimes against humanity

Ethnic cleansing makes a comeback in China

By Josh Rogin

If ethnic cleansing takes place in China and nobody is able to hear it, does it make a sound? 

That’s what millions of Muslims inside the People’s Republic are asking as they watch the Chinese government expand a network of internment camps and systematic human rights abuses designed to stamp out their peoples’ religion and culture.
Since last year, hundreds of thousands — and perhaps millions — of innocent Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in East Turkestan have been unjustly arrested and imprisoned in what the Chinese government calls “political re-education camps.” 

Thousands have disappeared. 

There are reports of torture and death among the prisoners. 

The government says it is fighting “terrorism” and “religious extremism.” 

Uighurs say they are resisting a campaign to crush religious and cultural freedom in China. 

The international community has largely reacted with silence.
Horrific as they are, the camps constitute just one part of Beijing’s effort. 

The government has destroyed thousands of religious buildings. 

It has banned long beards and many Muslim names. 

People are forced to eat pork against their beliefs. 

The Chinese government’s persecution of innocents continues even after their death. 

Crematoria are being built to literally extinguish the Uighur funeral tradition, which insists on burials.
Add to that the unprecedented security and surveillance state in East Turkestan, which includes all-encompassing monitoring based on identity cards, checkpoints, facial recognition and the collection of DNA from millions of individuals. 

The authorities feed all this data into an artificial-intelligence machine that rates people’s loyalty to the Communist Party in order to control every aspect of their lives.
If that doesn’t bother you, consider that this draconian expansion of Chinese repression is being exported to the United States and around the world. 

Families of U.S. citizens who speak out against Beijing are targeted as part of Beijing’s effort to snuff out all international criticism.
U.S. citizen Gulchehra Hoja, a journalist for Radio Free Asia’s Uighur service, has had more than two dozen family members in China detained in the camps, including her elderly parents and her brother, who has not been heard from since his arrest last September. 

Many of her RFA colleagues have similar stories.
“I hope and pray for my family to be let go and released, but I know if that happens they will still live under a constant threat,” she testified last week before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

“I came to the United States to realize a dream, a dream of being able to tell the truth without fear.”
Despite Beijing’s efforts, mounting evidence of the camps has managed to make its way to the outside world. 

Massive camp construction can be seen from satellites, and advertisements for new construction contracts are publicly available. 

Witnesses have told their stories. 

Yet the world has failed to respond.
Inside the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill, that may finally be changing. 

At last week’s congressional hearing, Ambassador Kelley Currie, a top official at the U.S. United Nations mission, called on the Chinese government to end its repressive policies in East Turkestan and to free all those arbitrarily detained.
The Chinese government is attempting to “Sinocise religion” and “transform religion and ethnicity in Chinese society” in a scheme more ambitious than Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she testified. 

“The scope of this campaign is breathtaking.”
The U.S. government has tools to raise the pressure and costs on China, should it decide to act. Commission Chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called for U.S. corporations to stop selling China items that can be used for repression, including DNA technologies and video surveillance tools. 

The administration can also impose sanctions on senior Chinese officials for human rights abuses under the Global Magnitsky Act. 

East Turkestan Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who honed his repression skills in Tibet and has now expanded them against Muslim minorities, is one obvious target.
“We clearly know horrible things are happening here to the Uighurs. And wherever there are abuses, there are abusers,” Rubio said. 

“It’s working. That’s the saddest part of all.”
The Chinese government’s obsession with its international reputation is its main vulnerability. 

Calling out these atrocities in public and to Beijing directly is key.
The horror in East Turkestan is not a China issue, it’s a global issue. 

China uses its position on the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. Security Council not only to stifle discussion of its actions but also to attempt to rewrite international human rights norms to allow expansion of these practices by any dictatorship with the means.
“The United States advances religious freedom in our foreign policy because it is not exclusively an American right,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week. 

“It is a God-given universal right bestowed on all of mankind.”
Those words mean little if the United States continues to stand by while the situation in East Turkestan worsens. 

We may choose to look away, but we can never say again we didn’t know.