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.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS