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Opening Ceremany of a political reeducation camp in Lopnur County, Xinjiang

Internment, indoctrination camps

Reeducation camp (Uyghur: تەربىيەلەش مەركىزى; ) is the official title given to the internment camps operated by the Xinjiang local government since a hardline party leader, Chen Quanguo, took charge of the region in the summer of 2016.

Authorities in China's Xinjiang region are holding thousands of Uyghurs and Muslims from other ethnic minorities incommunicado in re-education camps in a bid to counter extremism.

The camps are known as "Professional Education Schools", and were set up in early 2017 as "Counter-extremism Training Schools".

Chinese authorities have detained possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslims— and even Christians and foreign, especially Kazakhstani, citizens— in mass internment camps. As many as 1 million people are being held in such "reeducation camps" throughout the region.

Background

Xinjiang Province has come to be known as one of the most heavily policed regions of the world, especially since Chen Quanguo(陈全国) was transferred from Tibet in 2016 to apply his hardline securitization strategy to the restive Muslim-majority region. .

Increasingly, it was suspected based on anecdotal reports that massive detention facilities were being used to hold Muslims targeted for their religious practices — but the government has repeatedly denied the existence of reeducation camps.

Former inmates

China’s ‘prison-like re-education camps’ strain relations with Kazakhstan as woman asks Kazakh court not to send her back, On trial is Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who is accused of illegally crossing the border to join her husband and two children in Kazakhstan. But it is the 41-year-old’s testimony about her forced work in the camp system in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region that has drawn the most attention.

Public information

Political re-education camps in Hotan Prefecture, in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, face such severe overcrowding that authorities have been forced to relocate hundreds of Uyghur inmates at a time to alternate facilities, according to a local fireman. Since April last year, ethnic Uyghurs accused of harboring “extremist” and “politically incorrect” views have been detained in re-education camps throughout Xinjiang, where members of the ethnic group have long complained of pervasive discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression under Chinese rule.

Abdurahman Hasan, an Uyghur Businessman, living in Turkey asked Chinese government to kill his 68 years old mother and 22 years old wife after learned inhuman torture in the camp in Kashgar prefecture. His mother and wife are still in re - education camp.

Former employee

A Chinese national on trial for illegally crossing the border into Kazakhstan has pleaded not to be sent back to China, where she fears death for revealing details of the internment of thousands in “re-education camps.”.

on July 13, 2018, Sayragul Sauytbay, 41, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national and former employee of the Chinese state who is accused of illegally crossing the border between the countries to join her family in Kazakhstan, sits inside a defendants' cage during a hearing at a court in the city of Zharkent. Kazakhstan seeks review of detentions of its citizens as woman accused of crossing border illegally tells of forced work at ‘prison’ for 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs.

Secretive 'reeducation camps' that allegedly hold hundreds of thousands of people in a Muslim-majority region of western China have become the focus of a court case in Kazakhstan, which is also testing the country's ties with Beijing.

Number of camps and detainees

Camps

University of British Columbia student Shawn Zhang uses satellite images to track suspected Chinese re-education centres where Uyghurs are imprisoned. He is looking for re-education camps in Xinjiang, the Chinese region where, scholars estimate, hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim people have been forced to undergo political indoctrination. What Mr. Zhang has found has given the Chinese-born University of British Columbia law student, 28, an important role in documenting a system that Chinese authorities call “vocational skills training,” but critics liken to military prisons.

The most important sources are government reports that are often published by local media. These include official government documents, for example travel reports from top officials, or budgetary reports that outline expenditures for facilities.

Detainees

There are reports of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs being detained without trial in “re-education camps” in the province. Beijing has implemented a comprehensive surveillance system, the camps are estimated to hold as much as 10 percent of the Uyghur population. No one knows how many people are imprisoned in these centers. Estimates range from tens of thousands to as many as a million people. In these detention centers, Muslim members of ethnic minority groups are brainwashed, indoctrinated, made to report on neighbors and family members.

Since 2014, Xinjiang has been the frontline of a controversial crackdown on terrorism that has been criticized by human rights advocates for targeting members of the Uyghur ethnic minority, and exacerbating ethnic tensions in the region. Radio Free Asia reported that at least 120,000 members of the Uyghur ethnic minority are currently being held in re-education facilities in Kashgar, Xinjiang.

Treatment

The side effects of those treatments can be very serious, sometimes even causing some celebs', such as scholar Muhammad Salih Hajiand Dolkun Isa's mother Ayhan Memet, and other people's death.

After being arrested and interrogated, people who are dispatched to the camps are forced to study communist propaganda for hours and give thanks to the president by chanting “Long live Xi Jinping.” They also reportedly had to learn the national anthem and sing communist songs. Some inmates have been forced to eat pork which is forbidden in Islam, and “religious extremists” are forced to drink alcohol. If inmates don’t follow the rules, they are placed in handcuffs for hours. They are also subjected to waterboarding or strapped to a metal contraption called “tiger chair” for long periods of time.

It’s been reported that some inmates have even committed suicide

International accusation

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith have sent a letter urging Ambassador to China Terry Branstad to launch an investigation into the reported mass detention of Uyghurs in political re-education camps, and into widespread surveillance and rights repression in Xinjiang.

On 21 May, 2018, during the resumed session of the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations in UN, Kelley Currie, the U.S. representative to the U.N. for economic and social affairs, mentioned that reports of mass incarcerations in Xinjiang were documented by looking at Chinese procurement requests on Chinese websites requesting Chinese companies to tender offers to build “political re-education camps,”.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), an independent agency of the U.S. government which monitors human rights and rule of law developments in the People's Republic of China, released a report that as many as a million people are or have been detained in what are being called “political reeducation” centers, the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic minority population in the world today. There are recent reports of deaths in custody including suicides.

On 3 July 2018, at UK Parliamentary Roundtable, the Rights Practice helped to organise a Parliamentary Round-table on increased repression and forced assimilation in Xinjiang, China. The All-Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group invited parliamentarians to the round-table, in which Nicola Macbean, Executive Director of The Rights Practice, gave opening remarks on the gross human rights violations taking place in Xinjiang and the implications this has for everyone involved in China. Dr. Adrian Zenz, European School of Culture and Theology, Germany, outlined the evidence of a large scale and sophisticated political re-education network designed to detain people for long periods of time and which the Chinese government officially denies. This was followed by a moving personal testimony given by Rahima Mahmut, Uyghur singer and human rights activist, about the violations suffered by the Uyghur community, they fear mass detention and ill treatment.

September 10, 2017, Human Rights Watch released a report that said The Chinese government should immediately free people held in unlawful “political education” centers in Xinjiang and shut them down. Since about April 2017, the authorities have forcibly detained thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities at these centers, where they are subjected to propaganda promoting Chinese identity.

Kazakh authorities are aware of problems for Oralmans in Xinjiang. Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in February 15, the same day Samarkan was freed from custody. Kazakh First Deputy Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi just visited Xinjiang on April 17 to 19 to meet with officials there

. In early November 2017, Kazakh media reported that Kazakhstan’s Ambassador to China Shahrat Nuryshev had met with Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Li Huilai regarding Kazakh diaspora issues.

Chinese reaction

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it "had not heard" of this situation. Clearly, Beijing has ample reason to avoid the topic. The fact that a core region of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is littered with internment camps is not a pretty picture to convey to the global community. After all, the last memorable time that one million or more members of a particular ethnicity or religion were interned in barbed-wire-clad compounds was under Nazi Germany—even though the intention in Xinjiang is political indoctrination rather than extermination.

China's central government authorities have not publicly acknowledged the existence of re-education camps in Xinjiang, and the number of inmates kept in each facility remains a closely guarded secret, but local officials in many parts of the region have in RFA telephone interviews forthrightly described sending significant numbers of Uyghurs to the camps and even described overcrowding in some facilities.

See also Nazi concentration camps Reeducation camp Final Solution Concentration camp Gulag, Soviet Union The Vietnamese Gulag

Laogai (Chinese, "reform through labour")

Re-education through labor

Camp 22, North Korea

Convict lease, chain gang, Federal Prison Industries

References

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