The days reminiscent of Nazi-era Germany were felt more intensely in the homeland of Muslim Uyghurs after 2016. As detailed in Menace – China’s Colonization of the Islamic World & Uyghur Genocide, The Chinese Communist dictate started to build concentration camps in East Turkistan in 2014. In other words, the first camps were established one year after the announcement of the One Belt and Road Initiative. Even in the Muslim Uyghur community, there was a story about an incident told by word of mouth. According to this story, Uyghurs living there were also employed in the construction of these camps. When one of these workers asked the Chinese about the construction, he answered, “Don’t worry, many of you will be work here soon.” Of course, it isn’t easy to verify whether this story actually happened. However, the events that took place later showed that what this Chinese person said came true. Since 2016, Muslim Uyghurs’ connections living in the diaspora with their relatives in their homeland have gradually started to break off. For example, Gulruy Asqar, whose story was featured in a research published in the Financial Times, learned that his nephew Ekram Yarmuhemmed was taken away by the Chinese police a while after moving to America in 2016. What happened to Yarmuhemmed constitutes one of the most striking precedents of Xi’s war against Islam in the eyes of Muslim Uyghurs. Gulyar Asqar thought that his nephew was taken away by the police because of the money he sent from America for him. According to Yarmuhemmed’s friends, the Chinese police found some money with the Holy Quran’s records in a search in the apartment where Yarmuhemmed lived. As a result of the show trial, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Xi and Chen’s Perspectives Reminiscent of the Nazis
The first thing that comes to mind in world history when it comes to concentration camps is when the Nazis set up to destroy Jews. All countries, especially Europe, have promised ‘never again’ so that humanity will not face a black mark like the Holocaust. After 75 years since the Holocaust, the world has again faced genocide and the destruction of concentration camps. This time, the genocide atrocity occurs in East Turkistan, which China occupied, who wants to exploit the world. As explained in previous chapters, the excuse China told the world about the construction of these camps and the real goal it conceals are completely different. Chinese President Xi argued at a meeting after the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported new camp constructions in East Turkistan. According to Xi, camps are necessary and should continue for a long time to educate the people of East Turkistan from the correct (!) Perspective. On the other hand, this perspective is the sinicization of East Turkistan people, either by genocide or by assimilation. As a matter of fact, Xi expressed this situation as follows: “It is necessary to guide all ethnic groups in creating a correct perspective about the country, history, and nationality.” According to President Xi, Uyghurs can show “extremism in religion,” which is detrimental to China’s interests. This, as Roberts explains, is the perpetuation of non-existent facts about an incident constantly brought to the agenda, and these non-existent facts turn into “self-fulfilling prophecy” as a result of the evaluation of unrelated events in the same scope. The concept of “extremism in religion, ” brought to the agenda by Xi and other Chinese rulers is used to heathenize a Muslim society and to justify even genocide for this purpose. For example, according to a new regulation issued in March 2017, the so-called “anti-extremism law” prohibited Muslims from growing their beards. The definitions of crimes such as “growing a beard” and “performing religious practices” in the concentration camp documents in Karakash published by the Uyghur Human Rights Project also show how the Communist dictator views the concept of extremism in religion.
Documents revealing Xi’s authoritarian approach to Muslim Uyghurs in East Turkistan were published in the New York Times, one of America’s leading newspapers, in November last year. These documents also contain Xi’s statement of “no mercy,” recorded as a black mark left in history. The documents, which span about 400 pages, include a series of secret speeches Xi made to government officials. In these conversations, of course, there is no direct instruction on the establishment of concentration camps. According to John Bolton’s Book Xi Jingping had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. However, Xi freed the administrators in the region to apply “dictatorship” methods to eliminate the so-called religious excesses in East Turkistan. According to Xi, who constantly uses the concept of “religious extremism, ” Which is completely ambiguous and whose framework is drawn by the regime, religion is a virus, and this virus must be destroyed. The regime leader, the practitioner of new-era Nazi methods, has again revealed that the Beijing government’s rhetoric against Muslim Uyghurs has changed. Although previous rhetoric has consistently stated that separatist ideas from the outside are effective, Xi has been looking at the matter from the inside. In other words, there is no danger from outside; it is the thoughts of the Uyghurs that are dangerous. Although previous rhetoric has consistently stated that separatist ideas from the outside are effective, Xi has been looking at the matter from the inside. In other words, there is no danger from outside; it is the thoughts of the Uyghurs that are dangerous. Although previous rhetoric has consistently stated that separatist ideas from the outside are effective, Xi has been looking at the matter from the inside. In other words, there is no danger from outside; it is the thoughts of the Uyghurs that are dangerous.
Although Xi’s predecessors thought that the unrest and Uyghur’s struggle in East Turkistan would be resolved by economic development, the new era’s dictatorial leader demands ideological treatment to reshape Muslims’ thoughts. He expressed this at a conference as follows: “The weapons of the democratic dictatorship must be used without hesitation and hesitation.” Xi pointed out that comprehensive surveillance and the intelligence-gathering campaign is needed for East Turkistan to make this region a Chinese land and to eliminate the resistance of the Uyghurs to protect their own culture, language, and religion, and emphasized the transformation of these lands into a prison surrounded by virtual walls and digital wall. Xi, who opened the door to all kinds of methods from face recognition systems to genetic tests and big data collection and surveillance systems in these conversations hidden from the public, also supported blacklisting citizens, as described in the novel 1984. Xi described this as “We communists must be like a people’s war. ” In his speeches during the same period, Xi said that the brainwashing activities in prisons and these camps should continue after leaving the camps. After Xi’s instruction, the thing to do was set up camps and send people there. Xi sent like-minded people, who have a similar style to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda expert Joseph Goebbels, to the region to realize this inhuman plan. Chen Quanguo, who implemented heavy security policies in Tibet, was appointed as party secretary to Xinjiang. Like President Xi.
While the world has not yet forgotten the suffering of the Jewish Holocaust, everyone is wondering why the new method of establishing concentration camps is being faced. As explained at the beginning of this chapter, the main reason is that East Turkistan territory is an obstacle to the Asian Red Giant China’s goals of ruling the world. Although it has been under occupation by the Chinese Communist dictators for more than 70 years, the Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs living there are exposed to this genocide because they never accepted sinicization. According to Xi, who is guaranteed to stay forever as the head of the Communist Party and China with the new law passed in 2018, the blue flag of East Turkistan should be painted with the colors of the red flag of China. Aiming to Sinicize all kinds of beliefs in East Turkistan and all the lands he occupied and gave so-called autonomy, Xi wants to change every religious belief within the framework of communist doctrine. Along with Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, and even Protestantism were put on the target. According to this perspective of the authoritarian Xi regime, if an Uyghur or Kazakh demonstrates any behavior or dress that indicates that they are Muslim, they have not accepted to be Chinese. The punishment for refusing to be Han Chinese is to be sent to concentration camps, be subjected to all kinds of torture and punishment, and undergo brainwashing operations. When looking at the crimes against those sent to the camps, both in the Qarakash documents and in the documents that the public later learned,
In Qarakash documents, concentration camp victims are classified according to their crimes. According to the document, which tells a tiny part of the persecution in East Turkistan, the so-called crimes are listed as follows: “Failure to comply with the birth control program. Sharing unsafe posts on social media, growing a beard, wearing a veil, practicing religious duties, applying for a passport, traveling abroad, being a relative of a prisoner, traveling within China, watching an illegal media channel, having a relative abroad, not listening to the neighborhood committee officials, talking to overseas countries by phone … ”Innocent people were sent to concentration camps for other reasons not listed here. If these articles listed in Qarakash documents are acted upon, everyone in the world should somehow be sent to these concentration camps. The criminalization of even the most natural behaviors of man appears in an authoritarian and dictatorial regime. According to this point of view of the Chinese administration, everyone in the world is guilty and must be punished. Who knows, with the One Belt and Road project, Xi’s goal is to rule such a world.
PRC officials’ statements have always been the same against the allegations that Muslim society was subjected to genocide by Nazi methods with false crimes that shocked humanity. These places are not concentration camps but “holiday education centers,” according to them. What kind of an education center is this? The main elite of East Turkistan people were exiled there first. From poet, academic, lawyer, doctor, singer, fashioner to the businessman, anyone who keeps society afloat is currently in the camps. The Chinese regime also uses a method such as sending the relatives of prominent Uyghurs living abroad to these camps to get revenge. The most dramatic example of this is the abduction of the sister of my wife Rushan Abbas, the founder of the Campaign for Uyghurs. When we heard the news about the camps and the disappearance of my entire family, Rushan Abbas took the rostrum to speak about China’s persecution. Rushan participated on a panel at a think-tank in Washington and was vocal about my family’s disappearance. Six days later, her older sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was abducted by the Chinese regime in Urumchi. For more than 2 years, no one has ever known what happened to Dr. Gulshan Abbas. Someone from the hospital where she used to work said that she was detained when Radio Free Asia reported contacted the hospital. In this case, the following right question arises: If these camps are “vocational training centers” (30), as Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir said, then for what training does Dr. Gulshan Abbas, a retired medical doctor who speaks fluent Chinese language, need? She has not violated the Chinese state’s laws and has not committed a crime. Having spent her life helping the patients, the reason Dr. Abbas was sent to the concentration camp was a retaliatory action by the Chinese regime for Dr. Gulshan Abbas’s sister, my wife Rushan Abbas’ activism and advocacy work in the United States. The survivors of these camps are speaking about what has happened in these camps and stating that those aren’t re-education or vocational training centers but concentration camps in the full sense.
Increase in the Number of Concentration Camps and Forced Labor Centers
German-born Adrian Zenz, who has conducted extensive research on human rights violations in East Turkistan, notes that the sending of people to concentration camps in East Turkistan began in late 2013. The first example of the Chinese regime’s so-called retraining programs for Muslims was seen in the city of Turpan in August 2013. A program was initiated in this city because young men were transformed through education in four subjects, one of which was to grow a beard. Another example is the inclusion of 259 ‘problematic’ people in a closed training program for 10 days in the Kashgar region. A similar practice was seen in the province of Ili in 2015, and a secret training program was implemented on 42 people. The first practice of the so-called retraining program in its present sense in East Turkistan was carried out in 2014. A three-stage training program was initiated in Kashgar’s Konashahar district to “eliminate the excesses,” and those deemed problematic by the regime aligned with the CCP’s line. In this district, 3,515 people were forcibly included in the 203 sessions until the end of 2014. Muslims who participated in this program later returned to “secular life.” In 2015, 3,000 Uyghurs were trained in training centers in Hotan and lost their so-called “religious extremism”. The order established in the facilities here is partially similar to the military order. In the same year, 5,000 people in Ghulja and about 2,000 people in Lopnur participated in the CCP doctrine program. Small groups were sent to the concentration camps until 2017, and after that date, everyone determined “problematic” by the government was taken to these camps. The recruitment of new people in CCP training centers and local governments in 2017 was the first sign of expanding the so-called training centers. For example, it was recorded that 110 retraining center officers and 248 police officers would be employed in Karamay. While the number of those sent to these camps in previous years was expressed in thousands, this number increased to hundreds of thousands and even exceeded millions in 2017.
This brutal operation against Muslim Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other communities does not comply with international law or norms. Zenz notes that certain quotas are set for Muslim-majority regions and that people are imprisoned without legal justification to fill these quotas. In his report dated 2018, the German researcher Adrian Zenz pointed out that with Chen’s appointment to East Turkistan, there was a serious increase in the number of people sent to the camps. On the other hand, the Communist regime transformed some old public buildings into concentration camps and used them. According to the CFR figures in 2017, the number of camps in East Turkistan is 1,200. After the concentration camps came to the forefront in the world, public opinion and the human rights violations in the camps were loudly voiced. The Chinese government made one of its thousands of years of insidious maneuvers. It made an interesting statement to reduce reactions. Shohrat Zakir, the governor of Xinjiang, held a press conference in December 2019 and declared, “Those who stayed in retraining camps are now graduated.” In fact, it was soon understood that this explanation was a distraction. Because neither Dr. Gulshan Abbas nor millions of other oppressed people ever gained their freedom. What actually happened was that after the Chinese communist regime completed its brainwashing activities in the camps, a significant number of these people were sent to factories that were set up next to the camps to work as a slave. Trying to downplay these centers built by the systematic inspiration taken from the Nazis, the Beijing regime continued to build new camps within the borders;
ASPI published the latest report on the continued construction of camps in East Turkistan. According to the ASPI report, while the party officials in East Turkistan made statements about the graduation of the people in the concentration camps, they also built new prisons on the other hand. According to the findings of the institute, more than 380 new facilities have been built recently. These new buildings were determined based on satellite photographs, descriptions of those staying in the camps, and data obtained from the region. The Chinese communist regime has built huge concentration camps in East Turkistan. According to the report, while violence and oppression against Muslim Uyghurs have been increasing since 2017, new camps have been built to send hundreds of thousands of East Turkistan residents behind locked gates. Existing detention centers were expanded both last year and this year, while new detention centers were built simultaneously. The Institute classified camps in East Turkistan from a low-security level to a high level of security. Of the 380 camps identified in the report, 108 were rated in the category of a low-security level. These facilities were formerly school and hospital-like buildings. These buildings have been converted into detention centers with equipment such as wire fences and security cameras. Those held in these facilities are allowed to go home on weekends while working in factories on weekdays. These places are also facilities shown to delegations from abroad for propaganda purposes. The Institute classified camps in East Turkistan from a low-security level to a high level of security. Of the 380 camps identified in the report, 108 were rated in the category of a low-security level. These facilities were formerly school and hospital-like buildings. These buildings have been converted into detention centers with equipment such as wire fences and security cameras. Those held in these facilities are allowed to go home on weekends while working in factories on weekdays. These places are also facilities shown to delegations from abroad for propaganda purposes. The Institute classified camps in East Turkistan from a low-security level to a high level of security. Of the 380 camps identified in the report, 108 were rated in the category of a low-security level. These facilities were formerly school and hospital-like buildings. These buildings have been converted into detention centers with equipment such as wire fences and security cameras. Those held in these facilities are allowed to go home on weekends while working in factories on weekdays. These places are also facilities shown to delegations from abroad for propaganda purposes. These buildings have been converted into detention centers with equipment such as wire fences and security cameras. Those held in these facilities are allowed to go home on weekends while working in factories on weekdays. These places are also facilities shown to delegations from abroad for propaganda purposes. These buildings have been converted into detention centers with equipment such as wire fences and security cameras. Those held in these facilities are allowed to go home on weekends while working in factories on weekdays. These places are also facilities shown to delegations from abroad for propaganda purposes.
The facilities found to be used as “retraining centers” are more than 380. These so-called training centers have been implemented since 2017. As of 2019, the security measures in these centers have been further increased. These buildings are equipped with higher security measures than the places mentioned in the previous paragraph. They have high walls, wire mesh, watchtowers. In these compounds, where there are classes for brainwashing activities and courses about the regime, there are also showcase gardens to make people feel completely imprisoned. These facilities are right next to the factories where Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other work like slaves. In ASPI’s study, 72 settlements are included in the third category. Large thick walls surround these facilities, security guards are stationed at the main entrance gates, and watchtowers and six layers of barbed wire are placed on the walls. The administration buildings are built in a completely separate location from the prisoners’ wards, and entrance and exit to the facilities are provided through a single door. These 107 buildings described in the report are prisons where high-security measures are fully implemented. Those sentenced to long-term imprisonment are kept in these facilities, which were expanded after 2017. Some of these are next to buildings with lower security levels.
Although the Chinese Communist Regime tells the world that there are no human rights violations in East Turkistan and claims that the people in these camps live “happily,” it is a fact that the Regime ruled these places with an iron fist. Since it also does not allow neutral observers to enter the occupied territories, it is impossible to determine the extent of the persecution. However, with the research of ASPI on the camps, it was revealed that new camps were built in the region, and the existing concentration camps were continuously expanded. According to the institute’s research results, the compounds of 61 remand and detention facilities were expanded between July of 2019 and July of 2020. Half of them have been converted into high-security prisons while previously being used as a retraining center. For example, a 100, 000-square-meter detention camp, built on a 60-acre plot in the city of Kashgar, with 13 five-story residential buildings and surrounded by 14-meter-high walls and watchtowers, has been in use since January of this year. The concentration camp in Dabancheng, near Urumqi, the capital of East Turkistan, has been used as one of the largest detention centers. With the new buildings added in 2019, this detention center has reached enormous dimensions and is now 1 kilometer long.
In time, the Beijing government accepted that the numbers in these concentration camps, which were the biggest black mark of the recent period after the Nazis, reached enormous numbers. But while accepting this, they portrayed this system of cruelty, which they started in the name of destroying a society, as a success in the sinicization of people. Documents released by the Beijing government in September of this year contained information about concentration camps. The document also shows the Chinese government’s perspective on the Muslim people living there. According to the Chinese communist regime, this backwardness in some regions of East Turkistan that is not fully developed economically is due to the conservative nature of the region’s people. It is stated in the document that people were sent to concentration camps to eliminate this so-called backwardness. Since 2017, as the Chinese government says, 1.29 million people have been forcibly taken from their homes by the authoritarian communist regime each year and sent to camps. A third of these figures are in the southern part of East Turkistan, a rural part. Considering that almost 1.35 million people are sent to so-called education centers each year, it is thought that almost more than 4.5 million people have been taken to these camps to date. This figure also coincides with the number of organizations reporting human rights violations in East Turkistan.
From “Menace – China’s Colonization of the Islamic World &
Uyghur Genocide” by Abdulhakim Idris
Copyright Center for Uyghur Studies - All Rights Reserved