By Emely Abreu '21
A couple days ago, news broke out about a massive leak of official government documents about China and its concentration camps. Although there had been some knowledge of these camps before, these classified documents serve as proof for the human rights abuses China has been systematically committing towards ethnic minorities, especially Muslims.
Although the Chinese government has labeled these camps as “voluntary job training,” the documents and other sources from the camps have revealed that they are “forced ideological and behavioral re-education camps” run secretly by the Chinese government.
Those who are targeted the most are the Uighurs, a Muslim-Turkish minority comprised of millions with their own separate language and culture. This group has been massively discriminated against and subjected to ethnic repression with attempts to destroy their heritage, language and Islamic practices. This is has all stemmed over decades of China’s inability to control Xinjiang, a place where Uighurs have resented Beijing’s rule for hundreds of years. The Chinese claimed that young Uighurs were susceptible to Islamic extremism and, thus, deemed it necessary to fight off terroism by "re-educating" them. After a bomb attack set off by Uighur militants, China’s “War on Terror” became a mass detention campaign using military style technology. The government believes this has worked, since there has not been a terrorist attack in Xinjiang in the past few years.
No matter what the circumstances, the Chinese government has claimed that the classified documents that were released are “false news”, “a fabrication”, and they do not reflect their intentions in these “re-education camps”. But how could this all be false if evidence keeps appearing? In fact, these new official documents describe exactly what goes on in these concentration camps, and numerous brave witnesses and victims have shared their stories.
An example is Erzhan Qurban. An ethnic Kazakh who
moved back to Kazakhstan, he was captured by the police on a trip to China and was accused of committing crimes abroad for simply having traveled to Kazakhstan. He was then detained for nine months, in conditions where he "was treated like an animal.” People who have shared their experiences have said that they could not speak, were put into solitary confinement, were forced to squat for hours if they were disobedient, were denied communication with the outside world, were separated into different living quarters if they were sick, and much more.
Experts say that this situation is a clear violation of China’s constitution, in spite of Chinese refusal to admit to these claims. No matter what China says, people are still being taken against their will and forced into highly-monitored concentration camps in horrible conditions. Uighur Muslims are being tortured, sexually assaulted, and being coerced to renounce their religion, and no one is doing anything about this. Poor media coverage, little to no acknowledgement by foreign governments, overwhelming silence from the United Nations, and overall global disregard for this situation demonstrates that, once again, powerful countries are able to get away with ethnic and religious discrimination in today’s world.
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