China reportedly holding thousands of Muslims in internment camps

[Swordsmyth]

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.


“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp. “I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”
Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.
The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.
The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education camps. The Associated Press also conducted rare interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in other centers who corroborated Bekali’s depiction. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.

Bekali’s case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of Kazakhstan, who was seized by China’s security agencies and detained for eight months last year without recourse. Although some details are impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for seven months and then sent to re-education.
The detention program is a hallmark of China’s emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hard-line rule of President Xi Jinping. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education — taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channeled by Xi.

More at: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/...ernment-camps/

[Swordsmyth]

A breaking report based on findings of a United Nations human rights panel accuses China of holding up to one million ethnic Uighurs in what the report says resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.
The minority ethno-religious group concentrated in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang has found itself under increased persecution and oversight by Chinese authorities of late as their collective Sunni Islamic identity and separatist political movements have resulted in historic tensions with the Communist government.


Most notable is the ethnic Uighur-founded and led East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM, also commonly called the Turkestan Islamic Party, or TIP), a Muslim separatist group based Xinjiang known to have conducted dozens of terror attacks in Chinese cities like Shanghai and Yunnan, but also in places like Afghanistan, and as far as Syria, where it's believed up to 5,000 Uighurs fight alongside al-Qaeda.
Beijing has in recent years been accused of practicing collective punishment and broad crackdowns on the Uighur population in Xinjiang, which is numbered in total at 11 million (with some estimates of up to 15 million; China's total Muslim population is at about 21 million). The minority ethnic group is also found in sizable numbers in neighboring Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan.
The new UN statements come after a number of recent cases of prominent Uighur Chinese citizens and dissidents being "disappeared".
According to Reuters:

A U.N. human rights panel said on Friday that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China are held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.
Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that another 2 million Uighurs and Muslim minorities are forced into so-called “political camps for indoctrination”.

The UN panel began its work Friday and is expected to go through Monday examining China's human rights record. As Reuters also notes a Chinese delegation of about 50 officials present at the proceedings made no immediate comment.
Historically throughout parts of the 20th century, the strict Islamic strand of Wahhabi thought and practice has made deep inroads among the Uighurs, with a number of recent historical analysis papers documenting an uptick in Saudi money and influence in Xinjiang province in the 1990s — something which flies in the face of China's official Communist party and ideology.

Commenting further on the UN meeting, the South China Morning Post highlighted Chinese officials' silence concerning the growing accusations of mass Uighur internment:

Chinese delegation leader Yu Jianhua highlighted economic progress and rising living standards, among other things, but did not directly address the report on the Uygurs.
Monitoring groups say the Uygurs have been targeted in a surveillance and security campaign that has sent thousands into detention and indoctrination centers.

The initial UN statement issued from Geneva follows on the heels of a Friday New York Times report which details the case of 52-year old Uighur professor Rahile Dawut, who disappeared while traveling to Beijing sometime during or after last December. She hasn't been heard from since.
Professor Dawut's close friends and family members told the Times they believe she's been secretly detained as part of the severe crackdown on the Muslim minority group. Dawut herself has become somewhat famous as an ethnographer known for chronicling the Uighur's unique and varied historical traditions.
A fuller UN report and statements are expected next week, and it will be interesting to see both any concrete evidence that's produced to back the significant charge of one million "disappeared" and interned persons, as well as the Chinese delegation's response to the accusation.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...king-un-report

[Swordsmyth]

More proof has emerged confirming that China has erected expansive 're-education centers' for up to a million or more ethnic Uighurs in what a recent United Nations statement said resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.
The minority Turkic speaking ethno-religious group concentrated in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang has found itself under increased persecution and oversight by Chinese authorities of late as their mostly Sunni Islamic identity and separatist politics have resulted in historic tensions with the Communist government.
A U.N. panel examining human rights inside China wrapped up last week and included a Chinese delegation of about 50 officials which formally denied that prisons have been set up for the Uighur population.


However, a senior Chinese official, Hu Lianhe of the United Front Work Department, for the first time acknowledged the existence of Uighur-focused facilities in response to the U.N. panel, claiming according to the WSJ that they were actually "vocational training centers" and that no "arbitrary detention" was taking place.
But the WSJ has gathered satellite imagery showing guard towers and other security measures, as well as testimony that contradicts the claim of mere "vocational" programs — evidence which goes so far as to demonstrate that China was constructing camps even as the U.N. rights panel was preparing to convene.
The Wall Street Journal presents the images as follows:

Satellite images reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and a specialist in photo analysis show that camps have been growing. Construction work has been carried out on some within the past two weeks, including at one near the western city of Kashgar that has doubled in size since Journal reporters visited in November.
The full extent of the internment program was long obscured because many Uighurs feared speaking out. Now more are recounting experiences, including six former inmates interviewed by the Journal who described how they or other detainees had been bound to chairs and deprived of adequate food.

Top above shows a camp near Kashgar, China on April 17, 2017 according to the WSJ.
Below shows same camp on August 15, 2018, which appears to have doubled in size.
Image source: Wall Street Journal






The Uyghur American Association via Buzzfeed: "A satellite photo of a Chinese reeducation camp near Korla city in central Xinjiang. GPS coordinates were provided by a Uighur exile who had visited the camp."



Satellite image of a re-education camp in Makit, Xinjiang (above).
Source: Shawn Zhang via Medium.



A satellite image of a re-education camp in Payzawat, Xinjiang (above).
Source: Shawn Zhang via Medium.






Another view of the Shule camp near Kashgar, China which the WSJ profiled as part of its investigation. Image source: Shawn Zhang, Mediu.


More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...injiang-region

[goldenequity]

when the MSMs get 'behind' something (like this) you KNOW
it's being 'crafted' out of Langley and UK/MI6
and part of a larger (and older) design
to justify future aggression, subversion and hegemony.

The very LAST thing they care about
is the Uighur (Wahabbist) population.
don't
make
me
puke.

Xinjiang is a vast training loci for subversion and terror recruiting
perfectly situated in the heart of China and Russia.

When you begin to see John Bolton crying for the poor Uighurs...

[Swordsmyth]

when the MSMs get 'behind' something (like this) you KNOW
it's being 'crafted' out of Langley and UK/MI6
and part of a larger (and older) design
to justify future aggression, subversion and hegemony.

The very LAST thing they care about
is the Uighur (Wahabbist) population.
don't
make
me
puke.

Xinjiang is a vast training loci for subversion and terror recruiting
perfectly situated in the heart of China and Russia.

When you begin to see John Bolton crying for the poor Uighurs...

Yup, but it is also good to remind the China lovers that their favorite little demigods have dirty hands.

[Swordsmyth]

China’s restive far-western Xinjiang region has revised its legislation to allow local governments to "educate and transform" people influenced by extremism at “vocational training centres” – a term used by the government to describe a network of internment facilities known as "concentration re-education camps", the SCMP reported.

“Governments above the county level can set up education and transformation organizations and supervising departments such as vocational training centers, to educate and transform people who have been influenced by extremism,” the revised legal clause says, which should provoke howls of fury from liberal western democracies at Beijing's gross abuse of human rights, unless of course said crusaders for global justice are busy...
The revised law, which kicked in on Tuesday, comes amid rising international outcry on the secretive camps in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, in which up to 1 million ethnic Uygurs and other Muslims are reported to have been detained and subjected to enforced political re-education.
Chinese officials had earlier denied the existence of such arbitrary detention and enforced political re-education bases, but said "some citizens had been sent to vocational centers for minor criminal misdemeanours."

The revision, issued by the regional legislature, recognizes the use of such centres as part of the government’s efforts to eliminate “religious extremism”, which in recent years have also included a massive security crackdown in Xinjinag and sweeping restrictions on Islamic practices.

Apart from teaching vocational skills, the centres are required to provide education on spoken and written Chinese, and aspects of the law and other regulations. They must also organize "ideological education to eliminate extremism", carry out psychological treatment and behavior correction, in order to “help trainees to transform their thoughts and return to society and their families”.
The old version of the law was passed in March 2017. It bans a wide range of acts deemed manifestations of extremism, including wearing veils or “abnormal” beards, refusing to watch state television or listen to state radio, and preventing children from receiving national education, according to the SCMP.
* * *

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...ducation-camps

[presence]

seems like China is treating Uighur Muslims much like the US treats drug users:


parents in abusive reeducation camps for crimeless statutory bull$#@!;
kids in state sanctioned foster care for proper brainwashing;
cultural restrictions;
surveillance measures;
every good citizen a spy on his neighbor


Freedom of religion; so long as it is a state approved deity.

“You grow up as a ward of the state,” he said.

“They’re told to be patriotic citizens,
told that the identity and religion of their parents was abnormal, if not radical,
and thus needs to be eradicated.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8548341.html

[tod evans]

$#@! Muslims and $#@! the Chinese.

[Swordsmyth]

Uninvited, more than one million Han Chinese people have reportedly moved into the homes of Uighur Muslim families to report on whether they display Islamic or unpatriotic beliefs.
Sent to homes in Xinjiang province by the Chinese government, American anthropologist Darren Byler said they were tasked with watching for signs that their hosts’ attachment to Islam might be “extreme”.

The informants, who describe themselves as "relatives" of the families they are staying with, are said to have received specific instructions on how to get them to let their guard down.


As devout Muslims would refuse cigarettes and alcohol. this is seen as one way of finding out whether they were extreme.

“Had a Uighur host just greeted a neighbour in Arabic with the words ‘Assalamu Alaykum’? That would need to go in the notebook,” said Dr Byler, in research published by Asia Society's Centre on US-China Relations. “Was that a copy of the Quran in the home? Was anyone praying on Friday or fasting during Ramadan? Was a little sister’s dress too long or a little brother’s beard irregular?”


Dr Byler said more than a million Chinese civilians, who refer to themselves as "relatives", were assigned to the homes of Muslims for a series of week-long stays in 2017.
His claim appeared to be confirmed in the Communist Party's official newspaper, the People's Daily, which reported thatmore than 1.1 million people paired up with 1.69 million ethnic minority citizens in China by the end of September this year.
They often focus on families of those who have been detained in the "re-education" centres.


China was also said to be trying to prevent people from fasting during Ramadan in Xinjiang last year.
According to the World Uighur Congress (WUC), officials in the region ordered all restaurants to remain open and a series of measures were put in place seemingly designed to prevent people observing the holy month.

Chinese authorities have also been accused of putting Uighur children and those from other ethnic minority groups into state-run orphanages across the western Xinjiang region, even if their parents were not dead, as some one million adults in their families were sent to internment camps.
Dilxat Raxit, of the exile World Uighur Congress, has also claimed officials in Xinjiang warned them that they must surrender religious items such as the Quran or face “harsh punishments”.

More at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8648561.html

[Swordsmyth]

AN award-winning Chinese photographer who candidly documented the dark side of the country's booming economy has mysteriously vanished.
Lu Guang, a three-time World Press Photo award winner, disappeared in China's Xinjiang region last month while documenting the country's oppression of Muslims and may have been detained by state security officers, his wife said.


Lu, who lives in New York, was invited to Xinjiang to take part in photography events in the regional capital in October but his wife Xu Xiaoli revealed she last heard from him on November 3.
According to social media posts, Lu was travelling alone in the southern city of Kashgar at the time of his disappearance and his wife was later told that national security officers in the heavily-controlled region had taken him away.
In a detailed letter posted on Twitter, Xu revealed she had not received any official notice of her husband's arrest and had so far been unable to contact Xinjiang police.
She said: "He has been lost for more than 20 days. Dec. 4 is our 20th wedding anniversary. He was meant to celebrate with us together."


Lu's award-winning work gained international acclaim for his gripping photos of sensitive social and environmental issues in China, which include pollution, drug addiction and people living with AIDS.
He had reportedly intended to document the Xinjiang region which is home to a large Muslim population being held in internment camps.
Citing the United Nations estimates, the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uyghers and other Muslim minorities in the extrajudicial camps.
Despite routine outcries from activists, academics, foreign governments and U.N. rights experts over the mass detention and strict surveillance in the area, authorities have expressed its measures are needed to combat the influence of religious extremism.

More at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/791194...tate-vanishes/

[Swordsmyth]

But here's the essential question no one is asking... could this backfire in spectacular fashion?
Could China one day face — even if years or decades from now — an uncontrollable and swelling militant Islamic insurgency seeking revenge on Communist Beijing? Could China's brutal and unprecedented crackdown fuel the future rise of an Islamic State of Xinjiang?


East Asian affairs and Middle East expert Dr. James Dorsey previously argued in an investigative report issued once mass detention allegations became increasingly proven that China is perilously ignoring the lessons of history, which "risks letting a genie out of the bottle." His full report is below.
* * *
A Chinese campaign to forcibly assimilate ethnic Uyghurs in its north-western province of Xinjiang in a bid to erase nationalist sentiment, counter militancy, and create an ‘Uyghur Islam with Chinese characteristics’ ignores lessons learnt not only from recent Chinese history but also the experience of others.
The campaign, reminiscent of failed attempts to undermine Uyghur culture during the Cultural Revolution, involves the creation of a surveillance state of the future and the forced re-education of large numbers of Turkic Muslims. In what amounts to an attempt to square a circle, China is trying to reconcile the free flow of ideas inherent to open borders, trade and travel with an effort to fully control the hearts and minds of it population.
In doing so, it is ignoring lessons of recent history, including the fallout of selective support for militants and of religion to neutralize nationalism that risks letting a genie out of the bottle. Recent history is littered with Chinese, US and Middle Eastern examples of the backfiring of government support of Islamists and/or militants.
No example is more glaring than US, Saudi, Pakistani and Chinese support in the 1980s for militant Islamists who fought and ultimately forced the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. The consequences of that support have reverberated across the globe ever since. Some analysts suggest that China at the time was aware of the radicalization of Uyghurs involved in the Afghan jihad and may have even condoned it.


Thousands of Chinese Muslim extremists are currently in Idlib, Syria... what happens when they return?

Journalist John Cooley reported that China, in fact, had in cooperation with Pakistan trained and armed Uyghurs in Xinjiang as well as Pakistan to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The notion that Islam and/or Islamists could help governments counter their detractors was the flavour of the era of the 1970s and 1980s.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat saw the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as an anti-dote to the left that was critical of both his economic liberalization and outreach to Israel that resulted in the first peace treaty with an Arab state. Saudi Arabia funded a four-decade long effort to promote ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam and backed the Brotherhood and other Islamist forces that helped create the breeding ground for jihadism and wreaked havoc in countries like Pakistan.
China’s experience with selective support of militancy and the use of religion to counter nationalist and/or other political forces is no different. China’s shielding from designation by the United Nations as a global terrorist of Masood Azhar complicates Pakistani efforts to counter militancy at home and evade blacklisting by an international anti-money laundering and terrorism finance watchdog.
Mr. Azhar, a fighter in Afghanistan and an Islamic scholar who graduated from a Deobandi madrassah, Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town in Karachi, the alma mater of numerous Pakistani militants, is believed to have been responsible for a 2016 attack on India’s Pathankot Air Force Station.
Back in the 1980s, then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping saw his belief that what China expert Justin Jon Rudelson called a “controlled revival” of religion would foster economic development and counter anti-government sentiment boomerang. The revival that enabled an ever larger number of Uyghurs to travel to Mecca via Pakistan for the haj made Saudi Arabia and the South Asian state influential players in Uyghur Islam. Uyghurs, wanting to perform the haj, frequently needed Pakistani contacts to act as their hosts to be able to obtain a Chinese exit visa.
The opening, moreover, allowed Muslim donors to provide financial assistance to Xinjiang. Saudi Arabia capitalized on the opportunity as part of its global promotion of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism to put money into the building of mosques and establishment of madrassas.


Receptivity for more conservatives forms of Islam, particularly in southern parts of Xinjiang that were closest to Central and South Asia, suggested that the closure of Xinjiang’s borders during the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s and 1960s and the cultural revolution in the 1960s and 1970s had done little to persuade Uyghurs to focus their identity more on China than on Central Asia.
In fact, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent states in Central Asia coupled with rising inequality rekindled Uyghur nationalism. The rise of militant Islamist and jihadist Uyghurs constituted in many ways a fusion of Soviet and Western-inspired secular nationalist ideas that originated in Central Asia with religious trends more popular in South Asia and the Gulf in an environment in which religious and ethnic identity were already inextricably interlinked.
The juxtaposition, moreover, of exposure to more orthodox forms of Islam and enhanced communication also facilitated the introduction of Soviet concepts of national liberation, which China had similarly adhered to with its support for various liberation movements in the developing world. The exposure put Xinjiang Uyghurs in touch with nationalist Uyghur groups in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan that fed on what political science PhD candidate Joshua Tschantret terms “ideology-feeding grievances.”
Nationalists, dubbed ‘identity entrepreneurs’ by Gulf scholar Toby Matthiesen, built on the presence of some 100,000 Uyghurs who had fled to Central Asia in the late 1950s and early 1960 during Mao Zedong’s social and economic Great Leap Forward campaign that brutally sought to introduce industrialization and collectivization and the descendants of earlier migrations.
With Pakistan’s political, economic and religious elite, ultimately seduced by Chinese economic opportunity and willing to turn a blind eye to developments in Xinjiang, Uyghurs in the South Asian country had little alternative but to drift towards the country’s militants. Militant madrassas yielded, however, to Pakistani government pressure to stop enrolling Uyghurs. The militants were eager to preserve tacit Chinese support for anti-Indian militants operating in Kashmir.


Pakistan’s foremost Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, went as far as signing in 2009 a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese communist party that pledged support for Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang. Despite eagerness to address Chinese concerns, Pakistan and China’s selective support of militants is likely to continue to offer radicalized Uyghurs opportunity.
“Jihadis and other religious extremists will continue to benefit from the unwillingness of the military and the judiciary to target them as well as the temptation of politicians to benefit from their support,” said former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani, discussing overall Pakistani policy rather than official attitudes towards the Uyghurs.
Cultural anthropologist Sean R. Roberts noted that Central and South Asia became with the reopening of the borders in the second half of the 1980s “critical links between the inhabitants of Xinjiang and both the Islamic and Western worlds; and politically, they have become pivotal but contentious areas of support for the independence movement of Uyghurs."
The 1979 inauguration of the of the 1,300-kilometre-long Karakoram highway linking Kashgar in Xinjiang to Abbottabad in Pakistan, one of the highest paved roads in the world, served as a conduit for Saudi-inspired religious ultra-conservatism, particularly in southern Xinjiang as large numbers of Pakistanis and Uyghurs traversed the border.
Pakistani traders doubled as laymen missionaries adding Islamic artefacts, including pictures of holy places, Qurans and other religious literature to their palette of goods at a time that Islamist fighters were riding high with their defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan and the emergence of the Taliban. Increased religiosity became apparent in Xinjiang.
Women donned veils in what was traditionally a more liberal land. Students of religion made their way to madrassas or religious seminaries in Pakistan where they came into contact with often Saudi-inspired Pakistani and Afghan militants – trends that China is trying to reverse with the construction of an Orwellian type surveillance state coupled with stepped-up repression and intimidation.
“The cross-border linkages established by the Uyghurs through access provided by the highway, Beijing’s tacit consent to expand Uyghur travel and economic links with Pakistan through Reform Era policies, and Beijing’s explicit consent in supporting anti-Soviet operations – all prompted the radicalization of a portion of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs,” concluded China scholar Ziad Haider more than a decade ago.
The process was fueled by the recruitment in the 1990s of Uyghur students in Pakistani madrassas by the Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, both of which were linked to Al Qaeda. Some 22 Uyghurs captured by US forces in Afghanistan ended up in Guantanamo Bay.
The eruption of protests in Xinjiang in the late 1990s and late 2000s against rising income differences and the influx of Han Chinese put an end to official endorsement of a religious revival that was increasingly seen by authorities as fueling nationalism and facilitating Islamists.

Seemingly stubborn insistence on a Turkic and Muslim identity is likely one reason that China’s current assimilation drive comes as Xinjiang’s doors to its neighbors are being swung open even wider with the construction of new road and rail links as part of the People’s Republic’s infrastructure-centred Belt and Road initiative.
Forced assimilation is designed to bolster China’s expectation that increased economic ties to South and Central Asia will contribute to development of its north-western province, giving Uyghurs a stake that they will not want to put at risk by adhering to nationalist or militant religious sentiment.
The crackdown and forced assimilation is further intended to reduce the risk of a flow of ideas and influences through open borders needed for economic development and cementing Xinjiang into the framework of China’s infrastructure-driven Belt and Road initiatives that spans Eurasia
The assimilation effort is enabled by China’s Great Fire Wall designed to wall the country off of free access to the Internet. In doing so, China hoped in Xinjiang to halt cultural exchanges with Central Asia such as political satire that could reinforce Uyghurs’ Turkic and Central Asian identity.
The breadth of the more recent crackdown has complicated but not halted the underground flow of cultural products enabled by trade networks. Mr. Roberts noted as early as 2004 that Chinese efforts aiming to regulate rather than reshape or suppress Islam were backfiring.
“Interest in the idea of establishing a Muslim state in Xinjiang has only increased with recent Chinese policies that serve to regulate the practice of Islam in the region,” Mr. Roberts said at the time.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...-spectacularly

[euphemia]

China is threatened by any religion at all. Christians have been imprisoned and killed for a hundred years or more.

[Swordsmyth]

Clothes made by detained Chinese Muslims living in a mass detention camp have been traced to a US sportswear company, according to AP, which tracked "recent, ongoing shipments" from a privately-owned, state-sponsored "internment" sweatshop.

The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory — Hetian Taida Apparel — inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. Badger’s clothes are sold on college campuses and to sports teams across the country, although there is no way to tell where any particular shirt made in Xinjiang ends up.
The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would halt shipments while it investigates. -AP

The CEO of Hetian Taida Apparel, Wu Hongbo, confirmed the existence of a factory inside of a re-education compound - one of many across China where some 1 million Muslims, known as Uighurs, are estimated to live in detention where they are forced to give up their language and religion as they are politically indoctrinated.

"We’re making our contribution to eradicating poverty," Wu told the AP via phone.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, pushed back against the "many untrue reports" about the reeducation camps, though she did not elaborate.
"Those reports are completely based on hearsay evidence or made out of thin air," Chunying added.
A dozen people AP interviewed who had either been in a camp or had friends or family in one beg to differ - telling the news agency that detainees are given no choice but to work at the factories.

Most of the Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile, also said that even people with professional jobs were retrained to do menial work.
Payment varied according to the factory. Some got paid nothing, while others earned up to several hundred dollars a month, they said — barely above minimum wage for the poorer parts of Xinjiang. A person with firsthand knowledge of the situation in one county estimated that more than 10,000 detainees — or 10 to 20 percent of the internment population there — are working in factories, with some earning just a tenth of what they used to earn before. The person declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

Former Xinjiang TV reporter currently living in exile said that during his month-long detention he saw young people who were taken away in the mornings for work in carpentry and at a cement factory without pay.
"The camp didn’t pay any money, not a single cent," said the man, only identified as Elyar due to fear of retaliation against his relatives still living in Xinjiang. "Even for necessities, such as things to shower with or sleep at night, they would call our families outside to get them to pay for it."
A Washington DC based Uighur, Rushan Abbas, said that her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, is currently detained at a camp after being taken to what the Chinese government calls a "vocational center."
"American companies importing from those places should know those products are made by people being treated like slaves," said Rushan. "What are they going to do, train a doctor to be a seamstress?"


More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...hinese-muslims

[Swordsmyth]

Turkey on Saturday condemned China's treatment of its Muslim ethnic Uighur people as "a great embarrassment for humanity," adding to rights groups' recent criticism over mass detentions of the Turkic-speaking minority."The systematic assimilation policy of Chinese authorities towards Uighur Turks is a great embarrassment for humanity," Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement.


"It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uighur Turks, -- who are exposed to arbitrary arrests -- are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in concentration centres and prisons," Aksoy said in the Turkish foreign ministry statement.
"Uighurs who are not detained in the camps are also under great pressure," he added.
Turkey called on the international community and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres "to take effective steps to end the human tragedy in Xinjiang region."
Most mainly Muslim countries have not been vocal on the issue, not criticising the government in China which is an important trading partner.
Aksoy also said Turkey had learned of the "tragic" death in custody Saturday of Uighur poet and musician Abdurehim Heyit.
"We've learned with great sorrow that dignified poet Abdurehim Heyit, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for his compositions, died in the second year of his imprisonment," he said.
"This tragic incident has further strengthened the Turkish public's reaction to the serious human rights violations in Xinjiang Region."

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/chinas-treatm...213401370.html

[Swordsmyth]

Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’’s crown prince, on Friday defended China’s use of concentration camps for Muslims, saying it was Beijing’s “right”.
"China has the right to carry out anti-terrorism and de-extremisation work for its national security,” Prince Mohammed, who has been in China signing multi-million trade deals much to the annoyance of his Western allies, was quoted as saying on Chinese state television.
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, told the crown prince the two countries must strengthen international cooperation on de-radicalisation to “prevent the infiltration and spread of extremist thinking”.


Uighur groups had appealed to Saudi’s powerful young prince to take up their cause, as the ultraconservative kingdom has traditionally been a defender of the rights of Muslims worldwide.
But Muslim leaders have so far not broached the issue with China, which has in recent years become an important trading partner with the Middle East.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, became the first to condemn Beijing, however, describing China's treatment of its Uighur population as "a great cause of shame for humanity" last month and asking it to close the "concentration camps".
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had once accused China of "genocide" but has since established closer diplomatic and economic relations with Beijing.
Imran Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, where Prince Salman has just visited, said he “did not know” much about the conditions of the Uighurs.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/saudi-crown-p...203233929.html

[timosman]

Clothes made by detained Chinese Muslims living in a mass detention camp have been traced to a US sportswear company, according to AP, which tracked "recent, ongoing shipments" from a privately-owned, state-sponsored "internment" sweatshop.

Related?

[Swordsmyth]

Related?

Could be.

[Swordsmyth]

https://twitter.com/SaraCarterDC/sta...14126106718209

[GunnyFreedom]

I remember this when it broke. I don’t think they understand how badly this will blow up in their face one day. Not just the Uyghurs, but Falun Gong, and now the same kettle turning up in Hong Kong.

They are going to have violent disaffection in all directions, and that’s going to agitate all the people. They could either break and open up or snap and crack down. You can bet on crack down. China never met an authority it didn’t like. Problem comes in it’s never been that bad in a data age. When all that comes out on black market video instead of whispered rumors I don’t think the aftermath is going to go down how they think it will.

[harryjosh]

The most worse part china did lied to cover their footprint.