The Mosque Rectification drive, part of a series of hardline policies under top leader Xi Jinping, predates the mass incarceration of as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a vast network of internment camps in the XUAR that began in April 2017
In its new report, entitled “Kashgar Coerced: Forced Reconstruction, Exploitation, and Surveillance in the Cradle of Uyghur Culture,” the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) outlines what it calls the Chinese government’s “campaign to stamp out tangible aspects of Uyghur culture,” using the ancient Silk Road trading center as a model.
The 2017 detention marked Mahsum’s fifth, and his Istanbul-based relatives recently published a verdict issued on April 12, 2004 by the Hotan Prefectural Intermediate People’s Court stemming from his fourth arrest in January that year, sentencing him to five years in prison for “publishing illegal religious teaching materials” and “storing Arabic books at home for the sake of inciting his family.”
The imprisonment of Abdulla demonstrates how not even long-time civil servants are safe amid a campaign of mass incarceration in the XUAR that has seen an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas detained in a vast network of internment camps since April 2017
A five-year-old Uyghur boy who was left in the care of grandparents because his parents are incarcerated for religious and political reasons was found frozen to death in a ditch in Hotan (Hetian, in Chinese) prefecture in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), residents told RFA’s Uyghur Service. RFA confirmed that both parents of Nesrulla Yusuptohti, …
Continue reading “Uyghur Boy Dies in Ditch in Hotan While Parents in Jail, Internment Camp”
Uyghurs in exile say that the charges against Ayup and his partners were politically motivated, after the U.S.-educated linguist’s essays and lectures on maintaining the Uyghur language in schools drew widespread support in China’s Uyghur community
Mass incarcerations in the XUAR, as well as other policies seen to violate the rights of Uyghurs and other Muslims, have led to increasing calls by the international community to hold Beijing accountable for its actions in the region
Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have detained up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in as many as 1,300 to 1,400 internment camps, one of the world’s foremost experts on mass incarcerations in the region said in a paper released Sunday
Tohti, a former professor at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, was sentenced to life in prison following his conviction on a charge of “separatism” by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) on Sept. 23, 2014
China recently organized two visits to monitor internment camps in the XUAR—one for a small group of foreign journalists, and another for diplomats from non-Western countries, including Russia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Thailand—during which officials dismissed claims about mistreatment and poor conditions in the facilities as “slanderous lies.”