A schools in Xinjiang teaches Mandarin Chinese to Uighur students. (Getty Images/Servais Mont)

“No Separation at All”: China Denies Muslim Separation Camp in Xinjiang

Kinanty Nadia Putri
Politics & Economic
International
Jul 08, 2019
1850
China has been denying the international accuse of abusing the Uighur minority ethnic group in western Xinjiang over the past three years. While at the same time, the Chinese government has also launched a separation campaign to isolate children from their Muslim parents and communities, the BBC reports.

According to the evidence gathered by BBC, there are more than 400 children had lost both of their parents detained and sent to some form of internment in Xinjiang township alone. After parents are detained, the children will be having a formal assessment to determine whether they need ‘centralized care’—which the Chinese authorities called as boarding schools. One local official claimed that the children who are sent to these boarding schools are looked after well and provided with accommodation, food, and clothes.

However, a researcher who commissioned by the BBC Dr. Adrian Zenz said that the existence of the boarding schools itself provides the ideal context to sustain the cultural re-engineering for minority societies. In this case, separating children and parents systematically is a clear indication that the Chinese government attempts to disconnect the Muslim children from their own original roots, religion, and culture in order to raise them as a new generation that embraces the same Chinese political and cultural ideology.

In response to this, Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming dismissed the evidence in his interview with the BBC, saying there is no separation of children from their parents at all.

Even though the Chinese government has always claimed the Uighur are sent to vocational training centers designed to combat extremism, but Dr. Zenz research showed that the government statements are not aligned with what stated in its official documents and related reports.

In numerous government documents, he found phrases like ‘detained trainees’ and ‘persons detained in re-education’ frequently, in contrast with propaganda efforts that paint them as attending voluntarily. In addition, the government also issued construction bids that required the ‘training centers’ to feature heavily guarded buildings with high walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, internal camera systems, police stations, and even bases for special police units.

In spite of the propaganda and claims, International communities have been accusing and condemning China’s move that detained thousands of Uighurs for simply expressing their faith or having connections to Islamic places like Turkey.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48899475

China , Uighur , Separation , Campaign , BBC , AdrianZenz , Xinjiang , Politics