Searching for the Truth: China's Uighur 'Re-education' Camps

What happened to the vanished Uighurs of Xinjiang?

The first report that China was operating a system of internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang began to emerge in 2018. A satellite photo taken on April 22nd, 2018 revealed a massive, highly secure compound, with a 2km-long exterior wall punctuated by 16 guard towers. Just 3 years earlier, satellite photos of that same land, just outside the small town of Dabancheng, showed a patch of empty, untouched, ashen-grey sand. 

A United Nations committee estimated last year that about 1 million Muslims — mostly ethnic Uighurs but also other minorities — in the autonomous Xinjiang territory were being “held incommunicado” without “being charged or tried, under the pretext of countering terrorism and religious extremism.”

China has consistently denied that it is locking up Muslims without trial. But a euphemism for the camps has long existed - education.

Chinese officials say the measures taken are needed for national security. In the Xinjiang region, home to about 10 million Uighurs, thousands of violent incidents — which authorities call “terrorist attacks’’ — have occurred since the early 1990s. Last month, Chinese officials claimed without offering evidence that a majority of the detained Muslims had been released from internment camps and “returned to society,” an assertion met with deep skepticism outside the People’s Republic.

Whatever you want to call them - schools or camps - the intended target is the same. The facilities are exclusively for Xinjiang's Muslim minorities, many of whom do not speak Chinese as their mother tongue. State-run TV, which can be viewed here through a BBC report, has been showing glossy reports, full of clean classrooms and grateful students, apparently willingly submitting themselves to the coursework. The videos suggest the school is operating a dress code - not a single one of the female students is wearing a headscarf.

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. Uighur government officials are prohibited from practicing Islam, from attending mosques or from fasting during Ramadan. 

How much longer will the world continue to look the other way?

By: Rana Al-Fayez