Muslims were detained for re-education by China‘s government and made to eat pork and drink alcohol, according to a former internment camp inmate. Omir Bekali, one among perhaps a million people reportedly arrested and held in mass re-education camps, said he was detained without trial or access to a lawyer and forced to disavow his beliefs while praising the Communist Party. Mr Bekali, a Kazakh citizen, said he contemplated suicide after 20 days in the facility – which itself followed seven months in a prison. Since spring last year authorities in Xinjiang region have confined tens or even hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the camps, including some foreign nationals. One estimate put the figure at a million or more.
A US commission called it the “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today” while a leading historian called it “cultural cleansing”.
The Independent has contacted the Chinese foreign ministry for comment. Asked to comment on the camps by the Associated Press, the ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained, it said the Chinese government protected the rights of foreigners in China and that they should also be law abiding. Chinese officials in Xinjiang did not respond to requests for comment. When Mr Bekali refused to follow orders each day in the camp, 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, he claimed.
After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself. “The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking – your own ethnic group,” said Mr 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.” The detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India. 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. [Source: The Independent]
The open season against Muslims continues unabated globally, and not a single leader of an Islamic country is willing to stand up and take action against the perpetrators. Where will the next Salahuddin come from?
