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.

Noble prize winner's shame

IN HER 2012 Nobel lecture, Myanmar’s de-facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, made an impassioned appeal to the world not to forget those who are suffering “hunger, disease, displacement, joblessness, poverty, injustice, discrimination, prejudice, bigotry” and war. Aung San Suu Kyi declared, “Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.” This is not the world of the Rohingya in today’s Myanmar.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the same beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner, is presiding over an ethnic cleansing in which villages are burned, women raped and children butchered. Aung San Suu Kyi, the widow who defied Myanmar’s dictators, endured a total of 15 years of house arrest and led a campaign for democracy, was a hero of modern times. Yet today Suu Kyi, as the effective leader of Myanmar, is chief apologist for this ethnic cleansing, as the country oppresses the darker-skinned Rohingya and denounces them as terrorists and illegal immigrants. For shame, Suu Kyi was honored for fighting for freedom and now She uses that freedom to condone the butchery of their own people?

• On Aug. 25, fighters from a small militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, staged surprise raids on 30 police stations and an army base in Rakhine State, where many Rohingya live. The attacks, in which 110 people died, including 10 policemen and many of the militants, triggered a crackdown by Myanmar’s military.
• Since then Buddhist-majority Myanmar has systematically slaughtered civilians belonging to the Rohingya Muslim minority, forcing over 400,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, with Myanmar soldiers shooting at them even as they cross the border.
• And “ethnic cleansing” may be an understatement. Even before the latest wave of terror, the brutality toward the Rohingya might qualify as genocide.
• But Myanmar denies carrying out atrocities against the Muslim minority, consisting of around 1.2 million people in the northern Rakhine state who have been refused citizenship of any country.
• They are raping women, looting homes, burning houses, shooting people, killing children, infants thrown into river, decapitating veterans etc. 
• A reporter covering this described “I’ve covered refugee crises before, and this was by far the worst thing that I’ve ever seen.”
• Suu Kyi genuinely believes that Rohingya are outsiders and troublemakers. But she knows that any sympathy for the Rohingya would be disastrous politically for her party in a country deeply hostile to its Muslim minority.
• Aung San Suu Kyi was applauded when she received her Nobel Prize because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny. Now that she’s in power, she symbolizes cowardly complicity in the deadly tyranny being visited on the Rohingya.
• “My dear sister: If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep” -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote a pained letter to her. 
• Rohingya were confined to concentration camps or to remote villages. Many were systematically denied medical care, and children were barred from public schools. It’s a 21st-century apartheid.
• Suu Kyi and other Myanmar officials refuse to use the word “Rohingya,” seeing them as just illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, but that’s absurd. Evidence exits to prove that Rohingya population was well established even before 1799.
• At the end Myanmar government will respond to pressure, because that’s what won Suu Kyi her freedom. Yet there has been far too little outcry for the Rohingya. Pope Francis being an exception among world leaders and speaking up for them. He said "Strong political leverages need to be exercised to stop this egregious assault on a stateless people." 
• UN has previously dubbed the Rohingyas, who are also denied access to university education and in 2013 were hit with a two-child policy, as “the most oppressed people on Earth”.
• There are petitions online calling for Suu Kyi to be stripped of her Nobel, but there is no mechanism to take away the prize.

Ignoring a possible genocide only encourages the persecutors.

Aung San Suu Kyi presiding over 'ethnic cleansing' and killing and/or driving out ethnic Rohingya doesn't befit her Nobel Prize winner status. Unfortunately Rohingya are without any kind of citizenship and a friendless community and are destined to suffer like Tamils in Sri Lanka. No one in the world is really bothered about them. Bangladesh was kind enough to accommodate them as illegal immigrants and provide shelter, at least for the time being. Modi is attempting to deport 40,000 Rohingya in India just because they are Muslims, labeling them as possible terrorists, despite no crime records against them, ignoring India has accommodated refugees from Tibet, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Sri Lanka etc in the past who are largely Hindus. UNO and the champions of humanity are silent? Why?