Officials from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region yesterday said that most of the people who were in the area’s controversial re-education centers have since left the facilities and signed “work contracts” with local companies.
The US government, human rights groups and independent analysts estimate that about 1 million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in Xinjiang’s heavily guarded internment camps, which the Chinese government calls vocational training centers. The region is home to Uighurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups.
Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir declined to give a figure for those he called “students” inside the centers during a news conference, but he defended the facilities as an effective and “pioneering” approach to counterterrorism.
“Most of the graduates from the vocational training centers have been reintegrated into society,” Zakir said. “More than 90 percent of the graduates have found satisfactory jobs with good incomes.”
Accounts of mistreatment in the camps were concocted by a few countries and media outlets, Xinjiang Vice Chairman Alken Tuniaz said.
Former detainees and their family members have said in interviews with Western journalists that the re-education centers resembled prisons where they were forced to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
They said that they were subject to repeated political indoctrination and often did not understand why they were being held in the facilities.
Traveling overseas, speaking to relatives abroad and growing a long beard are all acts that might land someone in detention, according to Uighurs and Kazakhs who have fled the region.
The centers protected people’s liberties by allowing them to “request time off” and “regularly go home,” Tuniaz said.
While the people inside the centers are not permitted to practice their religion during their “period of study,” they can resume activities related to their faith when they are at home, he added.
The officials yesterday did not address whether the program is voluntary or how often people are allowed to go home.
After international condemnation of and extensive reporting on the centers, China began organizing highly choreographed trips to Xinjiang for journalists and foreign officials. Earlier this month, UN envoys from 37 countries — including North Korea, Syria and several Muslim-majority states — signed a letter supporting the camps and commending China’s human rights record.
World Uyghur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit called Zakir a “political microphone” used by Beijing to spread its “deception.”
“Shohrat Zakir’s remarks completely distort the reality of the systematic persecution that Uighurs are suffering in China,” Raxit said.
The US Department of State coordinator for counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, said in a July interview with Radio Free Asia that the detentions of Muslims in Xinjiang had “nothing to do with terrorism” and was instead part of the CCP’s “war on religion.”
“It is trying to stamp out the ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious identities of the people,” Sales added.
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS