For the first time, a representative of China’s Communist Party has commented on allegations that Muslims in Xinjiang are interned in re-education camps. The government relies on appeasement.
„Institutions like Training Internets“
Whether all the witnesses would lie in their reports of ill-treatment, Tom Cheshire of Sky News asks Xinjiang’s second-most powerful politician, Shohrat Zakir. „The training and education centers are not what some media claim,“ replies Zakir. „There are no people abused or deprived of their liberty, in reality, these facilities are like boarding schools, some say we have something like concentration camps or reeducation camps, but that’s fictional, absurd and ridiculous.“
Trivializing, appeasing, denying, is China’s strategy – despite numerous and well-documented reports of the regime of control and re-education against Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. According to reports by victims, journalists, scientists, Western governments, the UN and human rights organizations, as many as 1.5 million Muslims are interned in camps in northwestern China. These include, above all, Uighurs, who, with around ten million people, make up half of the population in Xinjiang.
Struggle for interpretive sovereignty
„This is China’s response to growing international pressure in recent months,“ says Patrick Poon of Hong Kong-based Amnesty International, about China’s appeasement strategy.
„The Chinese government claims they are only there to educate people, but de facto indoctrinating ethnic minorities, accepting that they are Chinese, but forcing the people in the camps to learn, and if they do Refusing to be mistreated and tortured, we know that from former inmates, which is very worrisome because there is no transparency at all. “
After China had initially denied the existence of reeducation camps for a long time, now raging the battle for interpretive sovereignty. According to the so-called „de-radicalization“ regulations, local authorities in Xinjiang are explicitly allowed to re-educate Muslims classified as extremist. Detention without trial, ideological reeducation and forced behavioral corrections – all this is possible afterwards.
Number of inmates should decrease
Zakir assuaged: „Everyone in the training and education centers is learning to write and has a language course, they are learning Chinese and making great progress, but the number of people in these institutions is getting smaller and smaller and if our society does not should need more, these facilities disappear. “
For the first time, a senior Chinese official suggests that the number of inmates may drop. Perhaps also because international pressure on China continues to rise: The US Special Envoy for Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, called a few days ago for an independent investigation and release of Muslims detained in Xinjiang. Similar demands last week, the UN Special Envoy for Religious Freedom.
