China putting minority Uighur Muslims in concentration camps

China is accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Muslims without trial in its western region of Xinjiang. The government denies the claims, saying people willingly attend special “vocational schools” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. A BBC investigation has found important evidence of the reality. The first reports that China was operating a system of internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang began to emerge last year (2017). The facilities are exclusively for Xinjiang's Muslim minorities, many of whom do not speak Chinese as their mother tongue.

What's happened to the vanished Uighurs of Xinjiang? 

The United States accused China on May 3, 2019 of putting more than a million minority Muslims in concentration camps. Former detainees have described of being tortured during interrogation at the camps, living in crowded cells and being subjected to a brutal daily regimen of party indoctrination that drove some people to suicide. The Chinese Communist Party is using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps. The estimated number of detained Muslims could be “closer to 3 million citizens.” An assistant secretary of defense, defended the use of a term normally associated with Nazi Germany as appropriate, under the circumstances.

There are more than 10 million Uighurs in Xinjiang. Resentment among Uighurs over the perceived uneven distribution of the proceeds of that growth has simmered. In the past decade hundreds of lives have been lost to a mixture of riots, inter-community violence, premeditated attacks and the police response.

Over the past four years, Xinjiang has been the target of some of the most restrictive and comprehensive security measures ever deployed by a state against its own people. These include the large-scale use of technology - facial recognition cameras, monitoring devices that read the content of mobile phones and the mass collection of bio-metric data. Harsh new legal penalties have been introduced to curtail Islamic identity and practice - banning, among other things, long beards and headscarves, the religious instruction of children, and even Islamic-sounding names. Uighurs are now subject to ethnic profiling at thousands of pedestrian and vehicle checkpoints while Han Chinese residents are often waved through. They face severe travel restrictions with an edict forcing residents to surrender all passports to the police for “safe keeping”. Uighur government officials are prohibited from practicing Islam, from attending mosques or from fasting during Ramadan. Cross-referencing information with other media sources, at least several hundred thousand and possibly over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities could have been interned for re-education. The documents never refer to the facilities as internment camps, but as education centers, or more accurately, “re-education centers”. Academics and journalists have documented grid-style police checkpoints across Xinjiang and mass DNA collection, and human rights advocates have decried martial law-type conditions there.

The Chinese government wants to delete Uighur identity from the world.