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Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

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    Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China (OP)


    Saturday 3 June 2017

    Children under 16 told ‘overly religious’ names such as Saddam, Hajj and Jihad must be changed amid pro-Communist rallies across Xinjiang region

    Muslim children in China’s far western Xinjiang region are being forced to change their “religious” names and adults are being coerced into attending rallies showing devotion to the officially atheist Communist party.

    During Ramadan, the authorities in Xinjiang have ordered all children under 16 to change names where police have determined they are “overly religious”. As many as 15 names have been banned, including Islam, Quran, Mecca, Jihad, Imam, Saddam, Hajj, Medina and Arafat, according to Radio Free Asia.

    In April authorities banned certain names for newborns that were deemed to have religious connotations, but the new order expands forced name changes to anyone under 16, the age at which Chinese citizens are issued a national identity card.

    The order coincided with millions gathering at 50,000 individual rallies across Xinjiang this week to pledge allegiance to the Communist party. More than a quarter of the region’s population sang the national anthem at 9am on 29 May and pledged allegiance to the Communist party, according to state media reports.

    Xinjiang’s Muslims mostly belonging to the Uighur ethnic group, a Turkic people. The region has occasionally seen sporadic violence which China blames on international terrorist groups. But overseas observers say the vast majority of incidents are a result of local grievances.

    Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-western-china
    Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    From Occupied Palestine:

    We have suffered too much for too long. We will not accept apartheid masked as peace. We will settle for no less than our freedom.




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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

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    Allah grant all the muslims in China sabar
    Ameen
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update,



    long detailed article.

    ‘We’re a people destroyed’: why Uighur Muslims across China are living in fear


    Gene A Bunin has spent the past 18 months talking to Uighur restaurant workers all over China. These conversations reveal how this Muslim minority feel the daily threat of arrest, detention and ‘re-education’

    It was about a year ago that I first walked into Karim’s restaurant, intending to write about it as part of the food guide I was putting together about ethnic Uighur restaurants in the traditionally Chinese “inner China” of the country’s east and south. Having already spent a decade researching the Uighurs – a largely Muslim ethnic minority group based mainly in the westernmost Xinjiang region, outside inner China – this food-guide project was intended as a fun spin-off from my usual linguistic studies. Or even a “treasure hunt”, you might say, given the rarity of Uighur restaurants in such major inner-China cities as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, where the Uighurs are migrants and where the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group that account for more than 90% of China’s population, are the great majority.

    While my travels for the guide would involve visiting almost 200 restaurants in more than 50 cities, Karim’s was particularly memorable. I found the usual pilau rice and hand-pulled laghmen noodles – central-Asian dishes that are staples of Uighur cuisine, and which Karim’s kitchen did very well. More important, though, were the sense of warmth and feeling of community, which made sitting there for an additional hour or two a real pleasure. Karim was a great host, and his diners would often chat with each other across the tables, touching upon serious issues while maintaining a certain levity and humour.

    During one of my visits, the conversation turned to the discrimination that Uighurs faced in this large, Han-majority city. Several diners mentioned the difficulty of finding accommodation, as local hotels frequently rejected Uighur visitors by claiming there were no rooms available. Even a Uighur policeman had been denied a room, someone pointed out with a laugh. Karim, a worldly polyglot who could have easily passed for a Middle Easterner, mentioned how he would sometimes go to a hotel and speak to the front-desk staff in English. Mistaking him for a foreigner, they would tell him that there were rooms available, and then backtrack after asking him for his documents and seeing the word Uighur on his Chinese identification card.

    As would soon become clear, however, such “mild” discrimination was to be the least of the Uighurs’ problems. While the regulars at Karim’s were having this discussion in the spring of 2017, their home region of Xinjiang – home to more than 10 million ethnic Uighurs – was already being subjected to what the Chinese state described as an “all-out offensive” against religious extremism and terrorism. The hard-line policies started shortly after the appointment of Chen Quanguo as Xinjiang’s party secretary, a strongman who had previously pursued similar policies in Tibet. While the government has justified its use of force as a response to a number of violent incidents, critics have claimed the measures are aimed at destroying Uighur identity.

    Things would worsen considerably over the coming year, as Xinjiang was turned into an Orwellian police state and hundreds of thousands of Uighurs were gradually locked away in concentration camps for what the state calls “transformation through education”. Others have been thrown in prison or “disappeared”. Witness reports of life inside the camps and detention centres have told not only of unhealthy living conditions, but also of regular violence, torture and brainwashing. Writing in the New York Times in February, James A Millward, a scholar who has researched Xinjiang for three decades, argued that the “state repression in Xinjiang has never been as severe as it has become since early 2017”.

    For many, last spring would mark the start of a period of great loss – the loss of rights, livelihoods and identities. Some would also lose their lives. Karim was particularly vulnerable, as Uighurs like him, who have lived abroad in Muslim-majority countries, have been especially targeted in the government crackdown. When I returned to the neighbourhood earlier this year, I was told that Karim had been handcuffed, taken away and jailed – and that he had “died after prolonged heavy labour”.

    At least, that’s the politically proper way of putting it. You could also say that he was murdered by the state.

    The state, for its part, has shut down all criticism of its actions in Xinjiang. Earlier this year, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, declared that concerns about the mistreatment of the Uighurs were “unjustified” and criticism amounted to “interference in China’s internal affairs”. In a memorable statement last summer, Xinjiang’s deputy foreign publicity director, Ailiti Saliyev, went so far as to suggest that “the happiest Muslims in the world live in Xinjiang”.

    While it is probably best to let the Uighurs speak for themselves regarding their happiness, hearing their voices has been difficult, given the state’s determined efforts to turn Xinjiang into an information vacuum. Journalists, in particular, have been under very heavy scrutiny, with anyone they have managed to interview often too scared to speak honestly. The risks and retributions have been significantly higher for Uighur journalists abroad. In February, four Uighurs working for Radio Free Asia in the US learned that some of their close relatives in Xinjiang had been detained. It was, wrote the Washington Post, “an apparent attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage”.

    Many foreign tourists I have spoken to in Xinjiang this year have reported being interrogated on the train into the region, as well as at checkpoints between cities. Two academic scholars told me stories of being denied entry or transportation to towns that have traditionally been accessible, without being provided with any real reason. While residing in Xinjiang’s westernmost city of Kashgar, an oasis town not far from the borders with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, I was effectively chased out: the hostel where I was staying was suddenly closed for “fire safety” reasons, and I found myself blacklisted at every other place that could have offered me accommodation. After leaving Xinjiang, I spent a month in Yiwu, an international trade hub about 5,000km to the east, not far from Shanghai, but even here, my daily contact with the city’s Uighur population attracted special attention. On two occasions, the local police warned me to “obey Chinese law” and to “not go hanging out with any bad Xinjiang people” – a euphemism for Uighurs.

    But nevertheless, between my linguistic research and the food guide, I spent the best part of 18 months precisely among those “bad Xinjiang people”, both in Xinjiang itself, and in inner China. During that time, I spoke to hundreds of Uighurs, the majority of them male restaurant workers, businessmen, small-time traders and street-food cooks, as well as their families. In the vast majority of cases, we did not talk about politics. Even so, almost everyone I talked to was affected by the repression in Xinjiang, and sometimes the only alternative to talking about it would have been not talking at all – and so we talked.

    In synthesising what I have observed, I realise that I ultimately cannot speak for the Uighurs – that task should of course be left to the Uighurs themselves, in an environment that is free of fear. Still, I hope the image I present will allow the reader a glimpse of how the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the rest of China are reacting to the present situation.

    On a certain alley in Xinjiang stands a diner I particularly like, popular for its pigeon shish kebab and milk tea. I would always try to stop there when I was in the neighbourhood. The last time I did, I came with apologies, having not visited for a long time. But, far from being angry, the owner was just surprised that I was still in the region. “I was sure that you had gone back to your country,” he told me.

    Almost a year had passed since our previous meeting, and a lot had changed. Most of his staff, about 10 of them in all, had been forced to return to their hometowns in southern Xinjiang, either for “re-education” or for “hometown arrest”. Gone were the shish kebabs and the tea, together with most of the clientele. Uighur kitchen staff were extremely scarce now, the owner said, and it was almost impossible to find substitutes.

    I asked him about his nephew – another old friend – but was told that he was in jail for having previously spent a year in a Middle Eastern country. “Our mood is shattered,” the owner admitted to me.

    This sense of gloom was also evident in the frank negativity I started to notice in many Uighur business-owners. While Uighurs generally consider it bad etiquette to complain when asked how they are doing, more and more often in recent times, I heard people telling me that things were “not that great” because “business was horrible”. When I ran into a tour guide acquaintance last year, I remarked to him that he had got really thin since I had last seen him. “We’ve all got really thin this past year,” he told me.

    Equally pervasive was the constant sense of fear. On one evening in Kashgar, I watched five or six police snatch a drunken man off the streets just for waving his arms, without asking any questions, and even though he was with his wife and son. In inner China, young restaurant workers could seem relaxed one day and then visibly worried the next: it would emerge that the police had given them orders to go back to their hometowns in Xinjiang immediately – a three- or four-day train journey for most.

    There was also the fear of always being watched. Once I sat down with a manager of a restaurant in eastern China and, unable to avoid the topic, spoke to him about how oppressive things had become in Xinjiang, telling him about a friend who had been sentenced to a decade in jail for owning the “wrong” books. No sooner did I say the word “jail” than the manager’s head began to twitch in the direction of the table behind ours. “There’s a policeman here!” he whispered, before standing up and walking away.

    Concerned for their safety, many Uighurs have deleted all foreign contacts on China’s (highly monitored) WeChat app. At one point last year, I made an effort to see a friend in Xinjiang who had deleted me, by first getting in touch through a proxy, and then meeting in person. In retrospect, I almost wish I hadn’t. Our lunch together was silent and awkward. There was so much to say, but everything felt taboo, and there were whole minutes when we just sat there in silence. It didn’t seem like anyone was monitoring us, but my friend looked worried all the same. When I passed him samples of a book I was working on, he cast them a glance but didn’t flip through the pages. When I asked him if a mutual acquaintance of ours was still around, he told me that he “didn’t know” that person anymore, before adding: “Right now, I don’t even know you.”

    When talking about the situation in Xinjiang, it is standard to use euphemisms. The most common by far is the word yoq, which means “gone” or “not around”. “Do you get what I’m saying?” a friend asked me once, as I tried to figure out what had happened to a person he was telling me about. “That guy is yoq. He’s got another home now.”

    The phrase adem yoq (“everybody’s gone”) is the one I’ve heard the most this past year. It has been used to describe the absence of staff, clients and people in general. When referring to people who have been forced to return to their hometowns (for hometown arrest, camp or worse), it is typical to say that they “went back home”.

    The concentration camps are not referred to as “concentration camps”, naturally. Instead, the people there are said to be occupied with “studying” (oqushta/öginishte) or “education” (terbiyileshte), or sometimes may be said to be “at school” (mektepte).

    Likewise, people do not use words like “oppression” when talking about the overall situation in Xinjiang. Rather, they tend to say “weziyet yaxshi emes” (“the situation isn’t good”), or describe Xinjiang as being very “ching” (“strict”, “tight”).

    Despite the euphemisms, there is no getting away from what is actually happening. It hit me just how unavoidable the topic was when, while chatting with an old friend in inner China, I made a genuine effort to avoid politics and talk about more normal or even mundane things. It proved impossible. When I asked him what he had done earlier that day, he brought up a political meeting that all the Uighurs in that city had to attend. When I asked him if he still tried to read books in his spare time, he told me that the police had cracked down on that, too, and that reading any book would invite unwanted attention. When I asked him about his aspirations for the future, he told me that, ideally, he would love to become a chef of Turkish food and open up his own restaurant, but, unfortunately, that act alone would get him jailed in Xinjiang, as the state continues to discourage and destroy all contact between the Uighurs and other Turkic and Muslim peoples abroad.

    On a few occasions, I encountered people who seemed to have reached a degree of desperation, and just wanted to let everything out. The first such time was in Kashgar, in autumn last year, when a uniformed public-security worker – the mostly Uighur, lowest-rank uniformed authority in southern Xinjiang – invited me to sit across from him at a table in a teahouse. He was off duty that afternoon, having just returned from a medical checkup.

    The conversation that followed was tense. He asked me what I knew of Uighur history, and then asked me what I thought of the Uighurs as a people. The latter question is one I have been asked several times during my years in Xinjiang, and has often struck me as a way of searching for some sort of outside verification of Uighurs’ identity. Unsure of how to reply, I tried to be noncommittal: “The Uighurs are a people like any other, with their good and bad.”

    “You’re hiding what you really think,” he confronted me. “Just look all around you. You’ve seen it yourself [here in Kashgar]. We’re a people destroyed.”

    Given my general distrust of uniformed people in China, I wasn’t ready to share any political views at the time, but have since come to see our conversation as a true moment of desperation. His words, I believe, were genuine. His post was close to Kashgar’s night market, but as of a few days after our meeting, I never saw him there, or anywhere else, ever again.

    The other conversation that will always stay with me took place in inner China, while visiting a restaurant I had been to a few times before. With the exception of a single waiter, all of the old staff were gone. As soon as that waiter saw me, he dropped everything to sit down and chat. My telling him that I had been kicked out of Kashgar seemed to trigger him, and he would go on to say many things about the situation there, virtually all of them taboo.

    “Millions of Uighurs” were being held in camps, he told me, where they were being fed 15-year-old leftover rice and subjected to beatings. (Precise numbers are hard to verify, but witness testimonies have confirmed both poor nutrition and violence in the camps.) He said that the Uighurs in this inner-China city now had to attend political meetings, and that they might soon have to take a test on political subjects such as the 19th party congress. Those who didn’t pass would be sent back to Xinjiang.

    “When the police talk to us,” he said, “they are suspicious about everything: ‘Do you smoke? Do you drink?’ If you don’t, they’ll ask you why not. They’ll ask you if you pray. They’ll ask you if you want to go abroad, or if you’ve previously applied for or had a passport. If you look at the policeman, he’ll ask you what you’re looking at him for; if you look down at the floor, he’ll ask you why you’re looking down at the floor. Whenever we take a train, there’s always a separate room that we have to go through before we’re allowed to leave the station, where they check our documents and question us.”

    I worried about him talking to me so openly, but it seemed he understood the risks, or perhaps had already concluded that he was going to be taken soon anyway. When another crackdown came a week later, sweeping a good chunk of the city’s Uighur youth with it, he would be among those forced to leave. “Back to his hometown.”

    Occasionally, I did encounter people who had more positive things to say about the situation. At the risk of passing off my subjectivity as fact, the vast majority of these comments struck me as marked by a mix of cognitive dissonance, Stockholm syndrome and self-delusion – often evidenced by self-contradiction and an apparent lack of conviction behind the words.

    At a time when I was still absorbing Xinjiang’s new reality, one of the hardest “rude awakening” moments came while catching up with a Uighur friend who worked in Xinjiang’s tourism industry. After chatting for a bit, I remarked on the city’s increasingly intense security procedures, in a manner that suggested that I found it all over the top. He, too, had his complaints about the new system, saying how he would be forced to stop and have his ID checked seven times while travelling just 2-3km on his electric scooter. Still, he was quick to add: “But the people all feel really safe now. Before, I used to worry about letting my daughter go to school alone, but now I don’t have to worry.”

    Those words – which almost sounded prepared – stunned me, given that we were just speaking one-on-one. He then went on to say that this was all to protect the people from terrorism, and that as soon as Russia and the US hurried up and defeated Isis, all of this would be over. However, when I said that I didn’t think that terrorism could be defeated with force like this, he was quick to agree with that as well.

    Another friend in another city complained to me about the arbitrary inspections that the local police carried out with regard to the Uighurs. I still remember how angry he got as he talked – saying that the individual policemen acted like they were the law – but nevertheless added that the upper layers of the government were good.

    A curious phenomenon took place online at the time of the 19th party congress last October, when Uighur friends who hardly spoke any Mandarin suddenly started posting long messages in fluent Mandarin praising Xi Jinping and the congress. A few months later, I heard about a WeChat app that allowed users to “fasheng liangjian” (“to clearly demonstrate one’s stance” or, literally, “to speak forth and flash one’s sword”), by plugging their name into a prepared Mandarin- or Uighur-language statement. The statement pledged their loyalty to the Communist party and its leaders, and expressed, among other things, their determination in upholding “ethnic harmony” and standing opposed to terrorism. The generated image file could then be readily posted on their social network of choice as a show of loyalty.

    In many of the inner-China restaurants I visited, this loyalty was much more visual than verbal. As a rule, Uighur restaurants would be the only ones on their street covered with Chinese flags and, occasionally, red banners proclaiming a determined struggle against terrorism. Sometimes, the interiors too would have little flags, as well as photos of Xi or plates bearing his image, or “ethnic harmony” slogans such as those calling for all of China’s ethnic groups to be “as tight as seeds in a pomegranate”. Some restaurants even had Uighur-language books about Xi and the party at the front counter. I never asked if such demonstrations were voluntary or mandated by the law, but suspect that, like China’s censorship in general, they were a mix of the two – some being anticipatory, some being forced.

    Obedience and appeasement appear to have saved some people from the camps and prisons. Other factors – money, connections, Han-Chinese spouses and a formal Chinese education – although never an ironclad guarantee, appear to help also. Beyond that, bribing police or officials to avoid having one’s passport confiscated or being sent back to one’s hometown is an option that several people I spoke to had taken – a crack in a system that often feels hopelessly inescapable.

    For the majority, however, the detentions and the fear of detention have become an unavoidable fact of daily life. Most, I would say, cope by simply enduring and “plodding along”. Despite the missing relatives, the financial losses and the fear that one day soon it could be their turn to go, many of my friends and acquaintances have done their best to focus on how they earn their livelihood, and to continue doing just that. For many, what seems most important now is their children’s future. Those without children are focusing on simpler and more concrete goals, such as graduating from university, finding a job or buying an apartment.

    One friend manages a small shop in inner China where local police have recently confiscated entire shelves of import products for “not having Chinese labels”. He was able to stop them from confiscating more, he says, by telling them that he wasn’t feeling well and had to close the shop. With half the shelves empty and business having seen a sharp decline, he believes that it won’t be long now before the store is closed.

    But, even as he describes how the state has started to target young Uighur men indiscriminately, he says he is not afraid. “I’ve already experienced a lot in life. So if they come and arrest me – fine. Whatever happens, happens.”

    When talking of the situation in general, he takes a broader, grander view. “This is a trial for the Muslim world right now,” he says. “If you look at what’s happening in Syria, or in other places, the Muslim world as a whole is undergoing a test. But Allah knows everything that’s happening. We just have to get through this.” With praying all but forbidden for the Uighurs, he has found ways that the authorities won’t notice, such as praying covertly while sitting in a chair, or praying under one of the trees that line the sidewalk.

    For others, hope exists simply by necessity, and many Uighurs have told me that “things will get better soon” without offering any reason for believing this. Some seem to think that a friend or relative will be released in the near future “because they’ve been held for so many months already”. Others seem to think that the situation will revert to normal “once terrorism is defeated”. In some of the conversations I have had in inner China’s Uighur restaurants – which, again, have lost huge portions of their staff – I have been told that the staff would “come back soon after finishing their education”.

    But time has been cruel to these optimistic voices. As the months have turned into a year, and more, the people interned are still interned, the restaurants are losing ever more staff and clients, and the situation only continues to worsen.

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/07/why-uighur-muslims-across-china-are-living-in-fear
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    format_quote Originally Posted by AllahIsAl-Malik View Post
    Where did I say anything about monarchies or Arabic names?



    Being white doesn't entitle you to casually make genocidal threats. I believe that white people are human so I believe they're capable of abstaining from such grotesque behavior.



    Wow that's depressing. I honestly feel almost violent watching that. It seriously disturbs me to see that.



    Yes, Communism is kufr.
    I have a question to ask. How come Muslim countries are not doing anything about it?
    Last edited by xboxisdead; 08-10-2018 at 06:24 AM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    format_quote Originally Posted by xboxisdead View Post
    I have a question to ask. How come Muslim countries are not doing anything about it?
    post #40 gives you good information why, too many other issues to deal with at the moment. For instance Pakistani leadership is busily prostituting itself to obtain Chinese investment so they are not going to protest much.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Salaam

    Another update

    U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps

    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”.

    She was addressing the start of a two-day regular examination of the record of China, including Hong Kong and Macao.

    A Chinese delegation of some 50 officials made no immediate comment on her remarks at the Geneva session that continues on Monday.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-un/u-n-says-it-has-credible-reports-that-china-holds-million-uighurs-in-secret-camps-idUSKBN1KV1SU?il=0
    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-11-2018 at 03:13 PM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update

    China's state media defends Xinjiang Muslim crackdown

    More than one million Uighurs are estimated to be in detention in 'counter-extremism centres' in China's far west.


    An official Communist Party newspaper said China's campaign of pressure against its Uighur Muslim minority has prevented the Xinjiang region from becoming "China's Syria" or "China's Libya".

    The Global Times editorial on Monday came after a United Nations anti-discrimination committee raised concerns on Friday over China's treatment of Uighurs, citing reports of mass detentions that it said "resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy".

    More than one million Uighur Muslims are estimated to be in detention in "counter-extremism centres" in China's far western region, said Gay McDougall vice chairperson of a UN anti-discrimination committee.

    Following attacks by separatists, members of the Uighur and Kazakh Muslim minorities in Xinjiang have been arbitrarily detained in indoctrination camps where they are forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the party.

    Global Times said the intense regulations in the region were merely "a phase that Xinjiang has to go through in rebuilding peace and prosperity".

    The editorial did not directly mention the existence of the internment camps.

    'Salvaged from turmoil'

    Denouncing what it called "destructive Western public opinions", the paper said, "peace and stability must come above all else".

    "Through the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, the national strength of the country and the contribution of local officials, Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil," the newspaper said. "It has avoided the fate of becoming 'China's Syria' or 'China's Libya'."

    Xinjiang has been enveloped in a suffocating blanket of security for years, especially since a deadly anti-government riot broke out in the regional capital of Urumqi in 2009. Over recent months, monitoring groups and eyewitnesses say Uighurs have been summoned from abroad and across China and sent into detention and indoctrination centres.

    The roughly 10 million Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of China's almost 1.4 billion people and there has never been an uprising that could challenge the central government's overwhelming might.

    Re-education camps

    When the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination started reviewing China's report in Geneva on Friday, Chinese delegation leader Yu Jianhua highlighted economic progress and rising living standards among other things.

    McDougall also said there were estimates another two million have been forced into so-called re-education camps for political and cultural indoctrination.

    She did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing.

    The Geneva-based committee continued its hearing on Monday and China vehemently denied allegations that one million people were being held in internment camps while insisting all ethnic groups are treated equally.

    McDougall said China "didn't quite deny" that re-education programmes were taking place.

    "You said that was false, the 1 million. Well, how many were there? Please tell me," she said. "And what were the laws on which they were detained, the specific provisions?"

    There was no direct response to that in Monday's session.

    A Chinese official told the committee tough security measures in Xinjiang were necessary to combat "extremism and terrorism", but they did not target any specific ethnic group or restrict religious freedoms.

    "Xinjiang citizens, including the Uighurs, enjoy equal freedom and rights," Ma Youqing, director of China's United Front Work Department, told the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

    Another Chinese delegate, Hu Lianhe, said his country just "assisted those who are deceived by religious extremism through resettlement and education".

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/china-state-media-defends-xinjiang-muslim-crackdown-180813055304359.html
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update



    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-17-2018 at 11:40 PM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update



    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-18-2018 at 12:28 AM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update



    Blurb

    This week on China Watch: the Chinese Communist Party’s Plan to de-Uyghurize and Sinicize Xinjiang In this special edition of China Watch we look at perhaps the most extreme exercise in ethnic assimilation ever attempted: the People’s Republic of China’s campaign to Sinicize its far west holding, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, through bleeding edge security and demographic measures. The PRC’s Xinjiang program has attracted the critical interest of the Western world as an egregious violation of human rights, focusing on an apparently extensive campaign of extralegal detention and indoctrination in re-education camps of hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as a million Uyghurs.

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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update.

    Why the Muslim world isn't saying anything about China’s repression and 'cultural cleansing' of its downtrodden Muslim minority

    • Muslim countries have been silent over China's crackdown on its Uighurs, a Muslim-majority ethnic minority in the country's west.
    • Experts and activists say it is because countries fear economic retribution from China.
    • Many also say it's because many Arab states also have poor human rights records, and don't want to draw attention to themselves.
    • Turkey has tried standing up to China in the past — and Beijing has not forgotten it.


    China's crackdown on its Uighur citizens, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority group, has faced heavy international scrutiny in recent months.

    In August the United Nations said it was "deeply concerned" by reports that China had forced as many as 1 million Uighurs into internment camps in Xinjiang, western China. In April, the US State Department said it had heard of Uighurs who had "disappeared" or were unexpectedly detained.

    Meanwhile, Muslim countries have been deafeningly silent.

    Over the past year alone, activists have found evidence of Chinese authorities tracking Uighurs' cellphone activity and forcing them to cut off their beards and dresses. Others say China has demanded the Uighur diaspora hand over personal information — and threatened their families if they do not.

    Chinese officials have denied the camps exist, though have acknowledged a program of "resettlement" for people it refers to as extremists. Business Insider has contacted the Chinese government for further comment.

    It's not as if Muslim countries haven't spoken out about human rights in the past. As Myanmar's military ramped up its violence against Rohingya Muslims late last year, citizens in Jordan and Iran staged multiple protests in solidarity with the Rohingya.

    Saudi Arabia's mission to the UN also condemned the situation online.

    The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, an international consortium which calls itself "the collective voice of the Muslim world," also pledged this May to set up a "proper investigation" into the Rohingya crisis.

    So why hasn't anyone said anything about China's Uighur issue?

    Money, money, money

    Many Muslim-majority countries aren't speaking out because they don't want to jeopardize their economic relationships in China, experts say.

    Several states in Central Asia and the Middle East are part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive project launched in 2013 linking 78 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania through a network of railroads, shipping lanes, and other infrastructure projects.

    Many of these deals entail China giving hefty loans to economies with a bad credit rating, which countries such as Pakistan are already finding difficult to repay. And it appears that these economic partnerships are stopping these countries from speaking out about Xinjiang.

    Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, a Chinese politics researcher at University of Technology Sydney, told Business Insider: "Like most states, many Muslim-majority countries have increasingly close economic relations with China.

    "There is a general consensus that speaking out about the situation in Xinjiang might jeopardize the development of economic ties, and it is therefore not in their interests to do so."

    Alip Erkin, an activist in Australia who runs the Uyghur Bulletin network, specifically cited BRI as a hindrance. He told BI: "Enormous trade and investment opportunities, as well as debt burden from China, through the BRI not only result in the tight lips of Muslim states but also an active cooperation with China in Uighur crackdown."

    Egypt, a BRI partner country, has even appeared to help China with its Uighur crackdown.

    Last summer, Egypt detained dozens of Uighur students in the country without giving a reason, denied them access to lawyers and their families, Human Rights Watch reported.

    Cairo also deported at least 12 Chinese Uighurs back to China around the same time, according to The New York Times.

    Peter Irwin, the program manager at the World Uyghur Congress, told BI: "There is a certain expectation that Muslim-majority countries would naturally lend support to Uighurs and criticize China, but we just haven’t seen this, and I don’t expect we’ll see this given China’s economic ambitions with the Belt and Road Initiative, however successful the plan may or may not be."

    China's Uighur treatment may not offend Arab states

    It may be too simplistic to cite economic dependence on China as the only reason why Muslim countries aren't standing up to China over the Uighurs.

    Many Middle Eastern states also have a poor human rights record, and prioritize social stability over individual rights, much like China does, van Nieuwenhuizen said.

    China justifies its crackdown on Xinjiang as protecting the peace and preventing terrorism. Militant Uighurs have been accused of starting deadly ethnic riots in Xinjiang and terrorist attacks across the country from 2009 to 2014.

    Many Arab countries "exhibit a similar understanding" of prioritizing social stability over human rights, van Nieuwenhuizen said.

    She told BI: "Many Middle Eastern states have a poor human rights record themselves — including when it comes to the treatment of religious minorities. Many exhibit a similar understanding of human rights to China's — that is, that social stability trumps individual rights.

    "This is how the Chinese government has framed the presence of re-education camps and other repressive measures."

    Erkin also told BI that although many Gulf states can afford to make a political stand against China, they "are mostly ultra-authoritarian states that advocate non-interference in other states' internal affairs to avoid the same interference in theirs."

    He added: "The silence of the Muslim majority countries over the horrific treatment of Uighurs, especially the recent cultural cleansing drive in East Turkestan, is both frustrating and unsurprising."

    East Turkestan is the Uighur term for Xinjiang.

    He continued: "It is frustrating because the principle of Muslim brotherhood has become a selective foreign policy tool that has more to do with the international politics of Muslim countries and less to do with its true message of solidarity."

    Business Insider has contacted the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for comment, but received no reply.

    What happened when Turkey tried to stand up to China

    Turkey, which is majority-Muslim, has spoken out against China's treatment of its Uighurs in the past — and China has not forgotten.

    In 2009 then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who is now president) described ethnic violence in Xinjiang as "a kind of genocide" and said: "We have difficulty understanding how China's leadership can remain a spectator in the face of these events."

    Shortly after the comments were made, the state-run China Daily newspaper ran an editorial warning Erdogan to take back his remarks, with the headline: "Don't twist facts."

    In 2015 Turkey also offered shelter to Uighur refugees fleeing China, which China Daily again warned "may poison ties and derail cooperation."

    Although Erdogan has not spoken out recently, Chinese state media has continued to threaten Turkey.

    As the country witnessed a dramatic economic crisis this month, the state-run tabloid Global Times published an unsparing editorial offering Chinese economic support, but warned it against making any more "irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in Xinjiang."

    What Uighurs are saying

    It's hard to gauge what Uighurs in Xinjiang think about the issue, because the Chinese government severely restricts information flow out of the region, Maya Wang, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told BI.

    But many other activists with ties to the region say that, although many Uighurs and diaspora feel helpless, they are still holding out hope for change.

    Erkin, the Uyghur Bulletin publisher, told BI: "There is no doubt that Uighurs in East Turkestan as well as in the diaspora feel extremely helpless in the face of the current cultural cleansing campaign in their homeland, and hope that the UN and other powerful countries of the world call China out and defend their basic religious and cultural rights as humans.

    "But still, given the past political solidarity and migration support from Turkey, many Uighurs would like to keep their hopes alive about it being the defender of Uighurs when its international relations are stabilized and economic woes are tackled."

    Irwin of World Uyghur Congress added: "The Uighur community is obviously disheartened by the lack of support, but it is certainly not something that has been given up on.

    "The United States, European Union and others need to remain vocal on human rights and bring on larger contingents of like-minded countries to collectively stand against these policies," he added.

    "Although China seemingly flouts international norms of behavior, the country's leadership still remains particularly concerned about how they are perceived internationally."

    http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-muslim-countries-arent-criticizing-china-uighur-repression-2018-8
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  14. #50
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update

    China to UN rights chief Bachelet: 'Respect our sovereignty'

    Beijing pushes back against new high commissioner for human rights who decried crackdown of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

    China called on the UN's human rights chief to respect its sovereignty after she highlighted "deeply disturbing" allegations of mass detentions of Muslim Uighur minorities in Xinjiang.

    On Monday, High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet denounced China's ongoing crackdown on the Uighur community in her first remarks as head of the UN rights watchdog in Geneva.

    The two-time president of Chile also urged Beijing to allow monitors into the restive far western region to investigate the situation there.

    Bachelet should "scrupulously abide by the mission and principles of the UN charter", China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Tuesday.

    Geng added she should "respect China's sovereignty, fairly and objectively", and "not listen to one-sided information" while carrying out her duties.

    Bachelet's appeal for access came as Human Rights Watch reported the Turkic-speaking Uighurs face arbitrary detentions, restrictions on religious practice, and "forced political indoctrination" in a mass security clampdown.

    A United Nations rights panel said last month it had received credible reports that up to one million Uighurs may be held in extra-legal detention in the northwestern province of China, and called for them to be freed.

    China rejected the latest UN report.

    China said tough security measures in Xinjiang were necessary to combat "extremism and terrorism" but added it did not target specific ethnic groups or restrict religious freedoms.

    Xinjiang is home to at least eight million Muslim Uighurs.

    In a region that shares borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, minority Muslim groups face regulations banning beards and veils, as well as the unauthorised distribution of the Quran.

    During the past two years, authorities have dramatically stepped up security and surveillance in Xinjiang, likened by critics to near martial law conditions with police checkpoints, re-education camps, and mass DNA collection.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/...091916726.html





    Protests



    Update

    Chinese official says China is educating, not mistreating, Muslims

    China is not mistreating Muslims in Xinjiang province but is putting some people through training courses to avoid extremism spreading, unlike Europe, which had failed to deal with the problem, a Chinese official told reporters on Thursday. Reports of mass detentions of ethnic Uighurs and other ethnic Muslims in China’s far western region have sparked a growing international outcry, prompting the Trump administration to consider sanctions against officials and companies linked to allegations of human rights abuses.

    “It is not mistreatment,” said Li Xiaojun, director for publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office. “What China is doing is to establish professional training centers, educational centers.”

    “If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so, in dealing with religious Islamic extremism,” Li told reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. Human Rights Council session in Geneva.

    “Look at Belgium, look at Paris, look at some other European countries. You have failed.”

    China frequently comes under fire for its human rights policies. On Wednesday, it was accused by U.N. chief Antonio Guterres of reprisals against activists, including the alleged torture of a human rights lawyer. Critics say its surveillance in Xinjiang approaches martial law conditions.

    “As to surveillance, China is learning from the UK,” Li said. “Your per capita CCTV is much higher than that for China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region.”

    Europe’s top rights court ruled on Thursday that Britain had violated privacy and free speech with a “Big Brother” electronic surveillance program.

    Li said it was normal practice for Xinjiang police to use closed-circuit television for the public good, especially after ethnic riots in 2009, which were blamed on “foreign forces”.

    He said the Xinjiang education centers were not “detention centers or re-education camps”, which he dismissed as “the trademark product of eastern European countries”, an apparent reference to Soviet Gulag detention camps during the Cold War.

    “To put it straight, it’s like vocational training ... like your children go to vocational-training schools to get better skills and better jobs after graduation.

    “But these kind of training and education centers only accept people for a short period of time – some people five days, some seven days, 10 days, one month, two months.”

    He rejected the idea of having a U.N. expert visit the region, saying there was no need.

    He said the poorest people in remote areas were most susceptible to radicalization, and that mosques were being used to that effect.

    Islam was a good thing in China’s view, but Islamic extremists were the common foes of mankind, he said.

    “They are very bad elements. You can see that in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Pakistan, in Iraq, and many other countries.”

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKCN1LT1LV
    Last edited by سيف الله; 09-14-2018 at 08:20 PM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update.



    China mounts propaganda campaign to make its Muslim detention camps seem ok, or good even

    • China is mounting an increasingly sophisticated counterattack to criticism of its policies in the restive, heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang, courting foreign media and running opinion pieces abroad as it seeks to spin a more positive message.
    • Beijing has faced an outcry from activists, scholars, foreign governments and U.N. rights experts over mass detentions and strict surveillance of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang.
    • A Chinese official even said that Europe had failed to integrate Muslims, and that it's approach of detaining them en masse was better.

    China is mounting an increasingly sophisticated counterattack to criticism of its policies in the restive, heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang, courting foreign media and running opinion pieces abroad as it seeks to spin a more positive message.

    Beijing has faced an outcry from activists, scholars, foreign governments and U.N. rights experts over mass detentions and strict surveillance of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups who call Xinjiang home.

    The United States is even looking at sanctions on senior Chinese officials and companies linked to allegations of human rights abuses there, which would further ratchet up tension amid their blistering trade war.

    China says Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists and has rejected all accusations of mistreatment in an area where hundreds have been killed in recent years in unrest between Uighurs and members of the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

    Officials say they are putting some people through "vocational" style courses to rein in extremism, and have denounced hostile foreign forces for sowing misinformation.

    In an opinion piece last week in the Jakarta Post entitled "Xinjiang, what a wonderful place," China's ambassador to Indonesia, Xiao Qian, wrote that religious rights were respected and protected there and attacks were "anti-religion in nature".

    He added, "But regrettably, a few institutions and people from the West pursue double standards, deliberately distorting the facts, speculating on the so-called 're-education camps' and misrepresenting (the) Chinese government's efforts to prevent religious extremism and promote deradicalisation."

    China's ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming, has also written to the Financial Times and the Economist to defend its policy on Xinjiang.

    Privately, however, China has not been so willing to discuss Xinjiang with foreign diplomats, say two diplomats who have attended meetings with Chinese officials.

    "They just shut you down," said one of the diplomats.

    Last month, the Chinese government invited a small group of foreign reporters to a briefing on the sidelines of a U.N. human rights meeting in Geneva, to put its side of the story in unusually strong and outspoken terms.

    Li Xiaojun, publicity director at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office, which is the office of the Chinese cabinet's spokesman, denied mistreating Muslims in Xinjiang, and said China was trying to avoid the problems of radicalization Europe had experienced.

    "Look at Belgium, look at Paris, look at some other European countries," Li said, referring to recent terror attacks in these locations blamed on Islamic extremists. "You have failed."

    Government officials at the Geneva event were accompanied by five Chinese academic experts, who all remained silent when asked if they had any criticism of China's human rights record.

    The five said they had not been to Xinjiang recently.

    Asked how they knew about conditions there, Wang Xiaolin, a professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, said there were a lot of information channels, such as television broadcasts, social media, and information shared by business people, tourists and academics and friends who traveled there.

    It is hard to quantify whether anyone is paying attention to what China has been saying on Xinjiang. Ambassador Xiao's piece for the Jakarta Post was roasted by followers of the paper's Facebook and Twitter pages as Chinese "propaganda".

    Asked about China's efforts to put its side of the story and whether its messaging had been effective, the Foreign Ministry said the region was stable and prosperous, with no attacks for more than a year.

    "On Xinjiang matters, the Chinese people have the most right to speak," it said in a short statement sent to Reuters.

    Foreign human rights groups and exiles have been unimpressed with China's defense, and held their own panel in Geneva.

    "What we are seeing now in East Turkestan is more than just repression: it is an intentional campaign of assimilation by the Chinese government targeting the Uighur identity," said Dolkun Isa, president of the exiled World Uyghur Congress, using the term the community employs to refer to Xinjiang.

    China has sought to cast its security crackdown in resource-rich Xinjiang - strategically located on the borders of Afghanistan, central Asia, India and Pakistan - as part of the wider global "war on terror".

    All countries have a responsibility to protect their security and that of their citizens, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told the Financial Times in an interview published last week, whose transcript was released by the foreign ministry.

    "The Chinese government will not permit Xinjiang to become a second Syria, Libya or Iraq," said Le, an increasingly influential voice in China's diplomacy, whom diplomatic sources in Beijing say is tipped as a possible future foreign minister.

    "If upheaval in Xinjiang spreads outside the borders, it will affect the stability of central Asia and the Middle East, and maybe spread to Europe."

    http://uk.businessinsider.com/chinas-propaganda-campaign-to-rehab-muslim-detention-camps-image-2018-10

    This needs to be confirmed but I can believe it.





    Last edited by سيف الله; 10-05-2018 at 06:07 PM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update.

    Xinjang watch

    As the repression of the Muslim population intensifies in Chinas western province of Xinjiang, the Uyghur Muslims have found an unlikely defender in. . . . .Donald Trump.

    His state department has denounced China's 'awful abuses'; and with pockets deep enough to wage a trade war against China, in this instance Trumps silence cannot be bought. His alone, it seems.

    Human Rights Watch see Xinjang as a key test for the United Nations, to which China is the third largest contributor. In April, Dolkum Isa, an Uyghur-rights activist and accredited NGO participant, was ejected from UN HQ in New York without explanation.

    Last year, French president Emmanuel Macron said France would never tolerate human rights abuses for the sake of trade; but he did not raise a single rights issue on his visit to China this January. In June, Greece, which has substantial Chinese trade ties, vetoed EU condemnation of the country. And Theresa May won glowing praise from Chinese state media for resisting calls to comment on human rights questions when she visited in February.

    Xinjiang is now a police state. Last year it spent $9bn on surveillance kit, including $8.7m on DNA - analysing equipment, building a database of ethnic Uyghurs. QR codes have been installed on their homes, giving instant access to their personal details. Since de - extremification regulations' were issued in March 2017, 21 percent of all arrests in China have been from Xinjiang, which represents just 1.5 percent of the population. One in 10 of Xinjiangs Uyghur Muslims, more than a million people, are now detained in re-education camps and denied legal representation, with some subjected to stress positioning, electrocution and waterboarding. In July the Financial Times reported on the building of multiple orphanages for children of the detained. Gene Bunin, an academic documenting Uyghur culture, says a security officer told him 'we are a people destroyed'.

    The missing include

    Uyghur ethnographer Rahile Dawut
    Footballer Erfan Hezim
    Religious scholar Muhammad Salih Hajim
    Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Tiyip
    Singer Ablajan Awut Ayup.

    China claims camps are 'education and employment training centers' for criminals, but simply looking at foreign websites, receiving international calls, praying regularly or having the wrong sort of beard can all justify the label, says the Associated Press. Its impossible to practice Islam - China demands that religious observance is brought in line with 'traditional' Chinese culture. Amnesty calls it 'forced cultural assimilation'.

    The crackdown goes beyond Xinjiang, with even Uyghur exiles coerced to sow discord in the west and spy for China. Refusal means detention for those left behind: Gulchehra Hoja, a Radio Free Asia journalist, has multiple family members detained, including her elderly parents and her brother. Meanwhile BuzzFeeds Megha Rajagopalan, who has been covering the repression in detail, has just had her visa revoked.

    In Boris Johnson first big speech as foreign secretary at Chatham House in December 2016 he rambled on about everything from Afghanistan to elephants, painting a vision of post brexit Britain as a global force for good. our approach to repression in China, he insisted would 'go beyond the quest for exports', because people around the world were 'looking for a lead from Britain'. It seems they will look in vain; but who would have thought that President Trump, the least politic of polticians, would be the last decent man standing.

    PE No 1480

    Trumps has little interest personally in the Uyghurs, he's using them as leverage in his trade war against China.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update.



    Mahathir: Uighurs “have done nothing wrong”

    Horror stories have trickled out of China’s Xinjiang province for years. Now research points to a flood of human suffering and disturbing human rights abuses. Yet with threats of China’s economic retribution, many countries have been reluctant to voice concern against Beijing. With this backdrop, it was a welcome note that this week, the world’s oldest statesman stood up and pushed back.

    Uighurs, the indigenous Muslim population of Xinjiang, have long suffered the ire of Beijing. In Xinjiang, Orwellian population controls have been increasingly scaled up since 2014 when China launched its “people’s war on terror”. Today, the United Nations calls Xinjiang a “no-rights zone”.

    Recent reports cited by UN human rights experts suggest that a million Uighurs are currently detained in re-education camps. Xinjiang party secretary and politburo member, Chen Quanguo, previously in charge of establishing the police state in Tibet, has ramped up the campaign of mass surveillance and re-education in Xinjiang since taking over the position in 2016. Stories of those released from the camps are deeply concerning. Unsurprisingly, these reports are changing the calculus for some countries’ diplomatic relations with China on the issue.

    Mahathir Mohamad, the 93-year-old who won a remarkable victory in May to once again become Malaysia’s Prime Minister, is a fearless plain speaker. In August, he warned of a “new version of colonialism”, while standing next to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. Upon taking office, one of his first actions was to cancel $23 billion in Chinese BRI projects. If there was a man to stand up to China, it was him.

    Last week, Malaysian prosecutors dropped the charges against 11 Uighurs, who arrived in Malaysia after escaping a Thai jail. China had demanded their extradition. On the subject, Mahathir was brief:

    They have done nothing wrong in this country, so they are released.

    Beijing’s response was strong, saying it “resolutely” opposed the move. After their release, the men flew to Turkey, a country that has a kinship with the Uighur and a long history of supporting the ethnic group.

    Mahathir’s decision is a significant shift in policy from his predecessor. During the term of the embattled Najib Razak, dozens of Uighurs were arrested in Malaysia and deported to China including those with pending refugee applications.

    The 11 were lucky. In recent years, the list has continued to grow of countries willing to extradite Uighurs back to China – among them Egypt, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Even Turkey, a natural ally of Uighurs, has erred recently.

    In 2009 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called incidents in Xinjiang a “genocide”, angering Beijing. In 2012, he stopped in Xinjiang on his way to Beijing. Since then, courted by Beijing and particularly since the 2016 coup – when relations with the EU and the US soured – his advocacy for the Uighur has quietened. As a result, a strong, natural advocate for the Uighur has been largely silenced.

    Turkey is not alone in struggling to navigate the sensitivities of the issue – trying to please Beijing, local constituents, the Uighur community, while also meeting human rights obligations.

    In 2015, Thailand, one of several Southeast Asian countries with an extradition treaty with China, “repatriated” 109 Uighur refugees to China. As Federica Mogherini, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Chief, noted at the time:

    This is a breach of the principle of non-refoulement, which is a core tenet of international humanitarian law.

    The incident provoked violent reactions with protesters attacking the Thailand Consulate in Istanbul. A month later, a blast ripped through central Bangkok killing 20 and injuring over 100. Two Uighur suspects are accused of carrying out the bombings; they deny the charges.

    Thailand is a key transit destination for extremist fighters transiting from Southeast Asia to theatres in the Middle East. And according to the International Crisis Group, ISIS has gifted its fighters trips to Thailand for R&R. Unsurprisingly, Bangkok worries of repercussions if it continues to deport Uighurs to China. It also worries about the repercussions if it doesn’t.

    Malaysia is in a more enviable situation. Mahathir has nothing to lose and Anwar Ibrahim, the prime minister in-waiting, can hit the reset button on relations when he comes to office. Anwar, however, has already been outspoken on the issue and in September called for a dialogue with China. He went further, telling Bloomberg that Muslim governments were ”scared” to speak out against China.

    This needs to change.

    The US appears to be taking a lead. Last week, US Vice President Mike Pence said that the re-education camps are:

    A deliberate attempt by Beijing to strangle Uighur culture and stamp out the Muslim faith.

    Others, Marco Rubio and Chris Smith, are exploring the use of the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction those engaged in human rights abuses.

    That’s a good start. A broader based coalition is needed that can lessen the burden and absorb the force of China’s anger over greater international attention to the situation in Xinjiang. That is an important first step in building a strategy to support the Uighur and to help shed greater light in what is today one of the darkest corners of the world.

    https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/mahathir-uighur-nothing-wrong
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    A video lecture

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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update

    Letter from Kashgar

    Every Monday morning in this not exactly Chinese outpost of north west China, our glorious red flag is raised and we sing the national anthem. ‘Arise, you who refuse to be slaves! . . . Arise! Arise! Arise! / Millions of but one heart braving the enemy’s fire! / March on! March, march on!

    But we aren’t great marchers, and the only people ‘braving the enemy’s fire’ are a rag tag band of women clutching infants, and those young and old who haven’t yet been detained. They are herded together by an equally terrified assortment of petty officials waving video cameras and microphones trying to save their own necks.

    Temperatures are already rising even in the shade of the small square where the obligatory Monday morning reveille is held and todays rendering of the Chinese anthem takes three attempts before it passes muster. Satisfying the requirements of new laws on singing the national hymn is hard enough even when singing in your first language, but for the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghur people, more than 1 million of whom have been sent for re-education or simply disappeared, a rousing hymn to the motherland in a foreign tongue is a challenge.

    Being absent or even five minutes late for the flag raising ceremony can mean at best a few years in arbitrary detention or at worst incarceration of 18 to 20 years if there is other ‘incriminating’ evidence against you. Typically, more than 1000 people cram into the square of this ancient Silk Road city, and literally sing for their freedom.

    Following his success creating order and stability in Tibet, Chen Quanguo, our new governor, has swept through Xinjian province bringing in his wake surveillance, terror, paranoia and reform of many Uyghur people as he can through reeducation. His reign began in August 2016, and the relentless round up of doctors, road sweepers, high ranking officials, shopkeepers and academics shows no sign of abating.

    The Monday morning ritual of his quasi-Orwellian regime is a forum for speeches, self-criticisms, dissemination of the latest laws and information on how to avoid going to jail. Sometimes it takes the form of gentle encouragement to submit to universal health checks, billed as a gift from Beijing to ensure longevity and a pain free life. As the world knowns, this is a euphemism for DNA compilation, blood and tissue typing, iris scans and facial recognition.

    The reminders to destroy or surrender religious books and paraphernalia in Arabic script are fierce and unyielding. The latest banned authors are listed, with orders to hand in their works immediately. Terrible consequences await those who conceal religious literature, hold underground meetings – or worst of all – ‘indoctrinate’ children by keeping them out of school and educating them at home.

    All religious talk is banned and large parties at home for religious holidays are forbidden, as is giving tithes to the mosque. Every home is given a notebook in which to record the comings and goings of friends and neighbours. Snitches are rewarded handsomely.

    The meeting draws to an end, but not before a handful who have passed out from the heat have been taken to a nearby clinic to be resuscitated. Police at every corner of the square have been diverting mopeds and rubbish trucks for an hour. Groups of Han Chinese tourists wander by, taking selfies in front of the crowd but not understanding a word of the terrifying injunctions to knuckle down to Beijing that have been meted out behind them in Turkic. They pass by, smiling and waving to the ‘natives’, to continue their holidays oblivious.

    PE 1481





    Last edited by سيف الله; 11-07-2018 at 09:37 PM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

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    Blurb

    Deputy editor of 5Pillars, Dilly Hussain, delivered a lecture at the University of Oxford on the plight of the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang (occupied East Turkestan).

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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    Another update.



    More protests.





    Blurb

    Last edited by سيف الله; 12-21-2018 at 11:03 PM.
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    It is always sad to see people using their intelligence to do such bad things.
    Imagine how wonderful place if everyone used their energy and intelligence for good things instead!
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

    Salaam

    format_quote Originally Posted by Mandy View Post
    It is always sad to see people using their intelligence to do such bad things.
    Imagine how wonderful place if everyone used their energy and intelligence for good things instead!
    Something to pray for *sigh*

    Another update. Was written in The Mail on Sunday, 6th December 2009

    The Other Tibet - China's Ruthless Imperial Strategy in Sinkiang

    It is now nine years since I, together with my superb photographer colleague Richard Jones (since banned from China) , and by a brilliant translator and fixer whom I shall not name here, travelled to the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, and the troubled metropolis of Urumchi in China's far west. But recent news from this area - of re-education camps, round-ups of dissenters, railway closures and the most elaborate surveillance state yet to operate anywhere in the world, have prompted me to republish what still seems to me to be a highly relevant article. It is, incidentally, one of the articles now incorporated in my e-book 'Short Breaks in Mordor' which has recently been thoroughly revised and expanded and will very soon be published as a proper three-dimensional printed book.

    The streets of Old Kashgar were running with blood on the day I arrived, with slaughter on every street corner. I am relieved to say that on this occasion the blood was from the throats of hundreds of sheep being ritually slaughtered — the highlight of the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Adha as celebrated in this lovely old oasis on the Silk Road, which was already ancient when Marco Polo passed this way in the 13th century.

    But in this tense, racially divided and unhappy part of Peking’s hard-faced and increasingly muscular empire, human blood sometimes flows on these streets as well. And it may do so again, Heaven forbid. We do not really know how much killing there has been. Modern China has liberated money and trade, but not information. Locals talk in low voices about anything remotely political.

    This, however, is certain: last year, just before the Olympics, two Kashgar Muslims drove a truck into a group of jogging Chinese paramilitary troops, then attacked them with knives and home-made grenades, killing 17. The two were caught and later executed — probably shot in the head, still a common method of capital punishment in the People’s Republic.

    The anger follows aggressive colonisation. Ethnic Chinese people have come West in their millions in the past 30 years, encouraged by the state to settle and make the region their own. The locals fear their homeland is being snatched away from them before their eyes, by strangers who wish to change the place to suit them, rather than adapt to the customs of the country.

    What seem to have been race riots broke out in Sinkiang’s provincial capital Urumchi last July, with an official death count of 156, plus 800 injured, many, it is said, in horrific slashing attacks by inflamed Muslim mobs. Women were not spared.

    Ethnic Chinese retaliated soon afterwards, taking to the streets with iron bars and axes and looking for suitable candidates for gory vengeance. Rumours suggest that the real butcher’s bill was much higher than the published figure, around 2,000. Who can say?

    A few weeks ago, the authorities announced the executions of 12 more men for their part in the carnage — ten Muslims and two ethnic Chinese, to prove they are not wholly one-sided. Actually, the proportions may be more or less just.

    Any sane person must be appalled by such outbreaks of ancient bloodlust, and — as in Tibet last year — the cause of the local people is severely set back in the West by being linked to such cruel horrors. China’s response is understandable, if overdone.

    It is physically impossible to telephone abroad, or use the internet, throughout Sinkiang, China’s vast, western-most province, thanks to the official and unlikely Chinese belief that the trouble was fanned by exiles in the United States.

    In Kashgar and Urumchi, which are both in Sinkiang but 700 miles apart, squads of paramilitary riot police patrol or set up sudden road blocks — in many cases they are in full battle kit, and some wear uniforms of Cold War-era dark green.

    They are supposed to reassure, but mainly they remind people of recent trouble. I watched one group file silently down Urumchi’s Happiness Street, passing a desolate, darkened Muslim restaurant put out of business by fear.

    Even middle-class Muslims and ethnic Chinese are nowadays nervous of mixing with each other in public. One Muslim who tried to carry on seeing Chinese friends described to me how she was then shunned by her Muslim neighbours.

    A sort of apartheid, voluntary but bitter, is springing up in the enormous city. “When people who have lived alongside you for years suddenly turn on you, you cannot feel safe near them ever again,” said one Chinese resident.

    Both Urumchi and Kashgar are full of banners urging ethnic unity for the sake of the motherland. Military trucks are adorned with banners pledging troops will treat the people as if they were their parents, rather unconvincingly, given that they are armed with pump-action shotguns and long rubber clubs.

    In Kashgar’s main square, across the road from a colossal statue of Mao Tse-Tung, the riot squad exercise their tactics and manoeuvres, a sort of ballet of brutality, as people of both ethnic groups hurry by trying not to catch the eye of authority.

    Did I say main square? Not exactly. Kashgar is, in fact, two cities, the ethnic Chinese one, with its mobile phone stores, beer shops and Cantonese restaurants, and the Muslim one, inhabited by the Turkic Uighur people (pronounced ‘Wee-gur’), where men in fierce moustaches and fur hats consume quantities of mutton and tea, and you can buy your own sacrificial sheep for perhaps £50 (though a top-grade ram in good condition costs four times as much).

    It has two main squares. While the huge stone Mao waves jauntily on one, the other is dominated by the ancient Id Kah Mosque, done out in garish yellow but profoundly serious and sombre in the freezing early dawn of this most holy day.

    The riot squad are there too, tactfully to one side but bitterly out-of-place as the all-male worshippers, dark-clad and quiet, stream into the square, filling it and the neighbouring streets until the mosque and all the surrounding space are covered with men and boys kneeling on their individual prayer rugs. It is impossible to be unmoved as they make the solemn gestures of devotion that have been repeated here for more than 1,000 years. It is also hard not to wonder if this is not also a demonstration.

    The same feeling — will this explode? — springs urgently to mind later when, with the sun up and the air warming, a band climbs to the roof of the mosque and — matched by another perched above a nearby porch — begins to play the ancient dance music of the Uighurs. On the mosque steps are groups of beggars, dirty and squalid, displaying stumps. They are waiting for their grisly share — mandated under Islamic law — of the slaughtered sheep that are being butchered all around.

    Some are women, grotesquely veiled in the local style, even more restrictive than the Afghan burka. Their entire heads and faces are covered by a sort of brown wool shroud, through which they can presumably see where they are going, though they look horribly like walking corpses as they go about the streets.

    Some are old, some are young. But it is not universal. Modern China has had an impact. Many of the Uighur women wear headscarves in the carefree Iranian style, and strut about in high heels. It is startling enough to see a band on the roof of a mosque, as incongruous as a clown at a funeral. The music they make is even more strange and oddly disturbing. It is relentless, insistent and unsettling.

    One man blows a sort of trumpet, a mixture of tooting and buzzing that sounds a little like the old comb-and-lavatory-paper combination familiar to generations of British schoolboys before the days of Andrex. He is accompanied by two others wielding long, curved sticks to pound a relentless beat on two drums, one fast and one slow.

    Suddenly one of the fur-hatted men shouts something up to the band. The rhythm changes to a more urgent, yet more haunting tune and within 30 seconds half the men on the square are dancing. It is an old and seemingly simple dance, plainly learned in early childhood, and it feels both sad and angry.

    One group abruptly begins circling behind me and one of the dancers, in a kind of trance and indifferent to who or what is in his way, barges into me quite hard. It is nothing personal (I think) but this sight is definitely not intended to be picturesque or twee. I consider joining in for all of five seconds, and then decide that it would probably get me beaten up for disrespect.

    The dancers are mostly pretty unlovely, scruffily dressed and unsentimental. They do not smile. One has a mobile phone clamped to his ear as he moves. It is an affirmation of an ancient and warlike tradition.

    Later I learn that, 20 years ago or earlier, the whole square would have been dancing, that this culture is dying, or rather that it is being killed.

    For we are at the scene of a tragedy nearly as wretched as the similar destruction of Tibet’s even more ancient culture. In a few years, if the authorities 2,000 miles away in Peking have their way, Old Kashgar will have ceased to exist.

    I got there just in time. Great tracts of the city have already vanished under the bulldozer and the wrecking ball. Broken houses stand open to the sky, and there are large melancholy stretches of bulldozed mud, the size of football pitches.

    The loss is unbearable. This is a place so old that it has been invaded by both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, where many of the tiny houses, built of mud bricks, have secret tunnels beneath them, designed for the inhabitants to hide from murder, rape and plunder as various invaders passed through.

    It has in its time been Buddhist, Christian and is now Muslim. It stands in the midst of a great desert, ringed with vineyards and orchards planted before the birth of Christ. Yet it is about to vanish for ever.

    Guided by a helpful inhabitant, I penetrated into the heart of the maze of streets, whose claustrophobic chaos probably annoys the Chinese authorities as much as anything else. You could never get a tank down these narrow ways, nor even an armoured car, and a foot patrol would need to be very careful if it came this way in troubled times.

    After rounding five corners, I found myself in a narrow alley, partly roofed over. Three men have hold of a quivering black sheep. Another similar beast stands tethered close by, watching and smelling the fate it too will undergo in a few minutes.

    They turn its head towards Mecca and hold it down, its throat over a metal pan, as one produces a newly sharpened knife and hacks its throat open. Its head is almost completely off before it finally stops kicking and convulsing. A young boy watching the butchery ends up with streaks of gore on his cheeks.

    The sheep, steaming in the freezing air, is then expertly and neatly butchered, a process I will not describe in detail (especially the removal of the skin) but which ends with some rather skilful, intricate business with the entrails.

    “Every Uighur man knows how to do this,” a neighbour assures me. Several contradictory thoughts crowd into my mind. The first is a sort of envy at the honesty of all this. These are real men, who are prepared to kill the flesh they eat and to be splattered and smeared with blood as they do it. Whereas we prefer our meat neatly packaged in the supermarket chiller, barely recognisable as the animal it has come from, and think sentimentally about little lambs.

    The second is a Christian unease at what is obviously a sort of sacrifice, something which is supposed to have ended at the Crucifixion. The local name of the festival is ‘Corban’, from the Arabic word for sacrifice.

    It commemorates the Muslim belief that Ibrahim — the biblical Abraham — was preparing to sacrifice his son (they say it was Ishmael, the Bible says it was Isaac) when he found a ram trapped in a thicket and sacrificed that instead. Christians and Jews see the story as an instruction to end human sacrifice. Muslims seem to view it as permission to continue animal sacrifices.

    I must admit I have certainly been desensitised to brutality by what I have seen. Would it be easier, if I had slain a sheep in this way, for me to do the same to a human being? I am sure it would be.

    How many sheep had the fanatical killers of Ken Bigley or Daniel Pearl slaughtered and beheaded before they turned their knives on their fellow creatures?

    This thought seems most unfair to the smiling, proud, friendly Uighurs who have shown me such hospitality, invited me into their tiny one-room homes and spoken with sad regret of the imminent destruction of a way of life that has lasted for 2,000 years. “We don't want to go and live in blocks of flats,” one explained to me in poignant terms that many British city-dwellers would completely understand.

    “Here we are all together, we see and talk to our neighbours all the time in courtyards and lanes. We do not close our front doors, nor do we need to. But once we are in flats we will cease to be proper people. Once you live behind a locked door, much of your life has gone.” It is they who are being sacrificed to China’s unrelenting drive for modernity, and to the fervent, rather arrogant Chinese nationalism that has taken over from Maoist communism as the binding dogma of the state.

    Every city in the country seems destined to turn into a sort of Oriental Las Vegas, with monster six-lane streets lined with showy pillared hotels and fake marble shopping malls devoted to the worship of global brands, all surrounded by mile on mile of grubby, stained concrete blocks of flats. Much of Kashgar already looks like this. Despite loud protests from Chinese scholars and outsiders, the plan seems to be to destroy almost all of the ancient city, and to rebuild the houses with modern methods, a sort of Disney version of the real thing.

    Big signs everywhere in the old city refer to ‘dangerous’ buildings. This is because the pretext for this official vandalism is ‘protection against earthquakes’, though up-to-date Chinese buildings (especially schools) failed badly to stand up to earthquakes in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in 2008 and 2009.

    In one outlying portion of the city, you can see the sanitised, tourist version of it that Peking is planning — a ridiculous mini-Kashgar that you must pay to enter, its lanes neatly tiled, its houses labelled in English, its streets tidily signposted to avoid the enjoyable confusion of an unplanned town. No pools of sheep’s blood are to be found on its street corners.

    How sad it will be when this is all that is left. For this small ancient place is an extraordinarily valuable part of our planet, and of some importance even to us in Britain. Right up until 1949, we and the Soviet Union both maintained busy consulates here as we continued the Great Game, the old struggle by which Britain sought to keep Moscow’s prying hands away from our Indian Empire.

    Thanks to the completely artificial frontier between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ we often forget that one unbroken landmass stretches from Calais to Shanghai — a landmass we are much closer to than we used to be, whether we like it or not. If there is a border between Europe and Asia it is really here, not on the Urals. The word ‘Sinkiang’ means ‘New Frontier’, and China only recently established absolute power in this territory of desert, mountain and oil. That power is pretty much colonial.

    In Kashgar, the local language is closer by far to Turkish than to Chinese. The Afghan border is a day’s drive away, as are Pakistan and both halves of Kashmir. Iran is surprisingly close, along with the great bubble of oil and gas around the Caspian Basin. Not much more distant is the back door to Tibet, and a mysterious chunk of territory still angrily disputed between India and China. In Urumchi, you see Russian, Arabic and Chinese script jostling for supremacy on the shop signs.

    And here the astonishing jigsaw of ‘stans’ — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan — fits untidily together at the landlocked heart of the Eurasian landmass, each of them wooed for its oil or strategic position by both Moscow and Washington.

    China is keenly aware that until 1991, these were all subject provinces of an apparently mighty Kremlin in Moscow. Now they are all independent states, until Moscow regains its strength — or Peking gobbles them up. Peking cannot, will not contemplate such independence for Sinkiang, its Western outpost and also full of oil and gas.

    The mightiest symbol of this newly vigorous empire is the almost unbelievable 700-mile railway between Urumchi and Kashgar, completed ten years ago, most of it driven through desert as barren as the surface of Mars, or climbing laboriously through mountains, fenced against the camels that can be seen roaming untethered by the tracks. Even here, way beyond the back of beyond, the remotest place on Earth is bound tightly to the motherland with links of concrete and steel.

    The railway’s centralising, imperial purpose is clear above all from its suspicious attitude to the natives. Travellers from Kashgar are searched for knives and subjected to identity checks before they can board the train, a reflection of the Chinese prejudice against supposedly knife-wielding Uighur Muslims.

    Nobody but China builds railways like this anymore. As the world’s other empires evaporated, collapsed, died or weakened, China slowly woke to the realisation of its giant, almost limitless potential.

    So far we have tended to view this rebirth with wonder and a certain amount of admiration. As we learn more of its ruthlessness, its touchy sensitivity to criticism, its unashamed imperial purpose and its newly passionate national fervour, we might also begin to feel a little apprehension as well.

    China once bestrode Asia but turned its face away from the rest of the world. Soon it hopes to land its first man on the Moon and to sit as of right at every top table of power and diplomacy. It is immensely rich, in fact its growth outstrips anything we can imagine, yet it is not free, nor is it likely to be. The world has not seen such a power before.

    https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/10/the-other-tibet-chinas-riuthless-imperial-strategy-in-sinkiang-.html
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    Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China

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    Another update.

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