Authorities are believed to have held more than 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” in a vast network of internment camps in the XUAR since April 2017
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 the XUAR regularly detain those they accuse of being “two-faced officials”—a term applied by the government to ethnic minority cadres or other officials who pay lip service to Communist Party rule, but secretly chafe against state policies repressing members of their ethnic group
An Albanian scholar and commentator who traveled to China at Beijing’s invitation this month to disprove what he believed was biased Western media coverage of mass incarcerations of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) said his experience there confirmed the reports as true
U.N. officials and human rights advocates say China continues to step up its persecution of ethnic Uighurs, confining as many as one million members of the largely Muslim ethnic group in conditions that observers describe as similar to concentration camps
Bilash had been under house arrest since being detained in March and flown to the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan—formerly known as Astana—amid accusations from Chinese officials that he had “fabricated” the cases he was documenting, in an arrest that was widely seen as having been made at Beijing’s behest
Writing on Twitter on Saturday morning, Human Rights Watch president Kenneth Roth said that under pressure Qatar had not yet sent him back “to persecution in China.”
These tales of disappearance are easy to find in Uzbekistan, despite the official censorship hanging over the narrative. Farukh is also an ethnic Uighur but holds an Uzbek passport
Ebeydulla is one of many Uyghur professionals and intellectuals who have been identified as detainees in XUAR internment camps, and who defy claims by authorities that those held in the facilities are in need of “vocational training.”
After a visit with Uyghur exiles in Istanbul, Turkey who had fled persecution in the XUAR, Yeung learned that many had left behind children who they believed were being held in facilities akin to orphanages throughout the region that are designed to look like regular schools, but where minders systematically assimilate Uyghur youth into Han Chinese culture