CHINA’S STEALTH WAR
SINOMUSLIM HORROR Millions of Uyghurs in China suffer the inhumanity of concentration camps, crematoriums, unrelenting surveillance and forced marriage, leading to genocide BY RUSH A N A BBA S
Twelve million Muslim Uyghurs who make their home in the northwest corner of China differ racially and culturally from the country’s Han Chinese majority. As a result, the Uyghurs have been targeted for ruthless indoctrination aimed at bringing them under the stifling regimentation of the Chinese Communist Party.
Question: When was the last time you spoke to your parents? Answer: More than two years ago. Q: Have you texted or sent pictures of your kids to your family in your hometown? A: No. They told me not to contact them more than two years ago, and now I have no idea where they are. Q: Have you contacted your siblings back home? A: No, I have no idea of their whereabouts. Sadly, these are typical, everyday conversations among the victims of Chinese oppression who have abandoned their homes to take flight in the Uyghur Diaspora. Despite the worldwide proliferation of smartphones and the universal convenience of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, Uyghurs find themselves almost totally cut off from communicating with their loved ones. But that’s just the beginning of the Uyghur horror story. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) combines racism and cutting-edge technology to assert nearly total control over the entire Uyghur population. The Uyghurs dwell in a constant state of terror and endure unrelenting surveillance and censorship. The CCP denies them freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The Uyghurs (pronounced we-gur) have been isolated from the rest of the world since 2017. Even those who have escaped to other countries often fear to speak out because their friends and families back home could face savage retribution. Concentration camps The United States Department of Defense estimates that as many as 3 million Uyghurs—a fourth of the Uyghurs who reside in China—have been herded into concentration
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camps that the CCP euphemistically calls Vocational Education and Training Centers. The camps represent the culmination of decades of repressive policies, and the aim is social reengineering, says Darren Byler, a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Washington. Inside the camps, detainees are indoctrinated with Communist Party propaganda and forced to renounce Islam. They’re raped, tortured and forced to undergo abortions, according to Aiman Umarova, a Kazakh human rights advocate. China’s first concentration camp in Xinjiang was built under the “Strike Hard Campaign” in 2014. The camps have grown in size by almost 500% in the past 24 months alone. The Chinese government is building crematoriums in the camps to alter a culture that doesn’t practice cremation, says Foreign Policy, an American news source. Crematoriums in combination with concentration camps bring to mind the Nazi Holocaust. China’s campaign of despotism also extends far beyond the camps, says New Dawn, a Turkish newspaper. Security that’s tighter than George Orwell dreamed of in his novel 1984 has fostered a massive, high-tech police state in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that most of the world’s Uyghurs call home, the paper says. 24-7 surveillance The streets of Xinjiang’s towns and villages are festooned with cameras equipped with facial recognition software. Iris scans identify residents on the flimsiest of pretenses. Police maintain street-corner checkpoints. GPS tracking devices trace the movements of every vehicle, and QR scanning codes help keep track of daily activities in every home, according to Newsweek. While gathering all that intelli-
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