Beijing: The ugly face of Chinese repressions on Uyghur minorities in Xinjiang once again surfaced after an academician Andrian Zenz disclosed the disturbing realities of China’s minority policy.
The files disclosed by Zenz include a 2017 internal speech by Chen Ouranguo, a former Communist Party Secretary in Xinjiang, in which he is reportedly ordered guards in internment camps to shoot and kill anyone who tries to escape and directed officials in the region to “exercise firm control over religious believers,” reported The HK Post.
The files also consist of thousands of photos and official documents from China’s Xinjiang confirming the unscrupulous, harsh and violent treatment of Uyghur minorities in the country.
Although China has denied violation of human rights of the minorities in the country, the leaked photographs and internal documents sent to Zenz by an anonymous source who hacked into the official database in Xinjiang point to the contrary.
China has forced Uyghurs into mass internments
China has forced Uyghurs into mass internments notwithstanding its claim that the internments were voluntary. The leaked data vindicates allegations of Chinese authorities allegedly detaining over one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention centres and prisons in the region.
Earlier, it was alleged that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs as well as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities were forcibly held in camps for communist indoctrination and training.
The ghettoization and forceful detentions were started somewhere in the year 2015 when a senior Chinese communist official apparently noted that “a third” of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs were “polluted by religious extremist forces”, and needed to be “educated and reformed through concentrated force”.
Xinjiang, inhabited by ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities never seemed fully within the Communist Party’s grasp, according to many analysts. Since July 2009 and till 2016 there had been several instances of violent disputes between Uyghur and Han Chinese, reported The HK Post.
These violent reactions from Xinjiang Muslims were sparked by the Chinese government’s diktats coercing them to give up their ethnic identity to follow Chinese-type communism, efforts to change the demography of the region encroaching on living space as well as employment opportunities of Uyghurs.
Response of threats of extremism, terrorism, claims China
Instead of meeting the aspirations of the ethnic minorities and ensuring their human rights, Beijing maintained that its actions in Xinjiang were justified in response to the threats of extremism and terrorism.
It did not address the reasons for the agitation among Muslim ethnic minorities. On the contrary, it tried to promote their assimilation into the Han culture, often by force, reported The HK Post.
The latest documents reveal a 2018 internal speech apparently by Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi citing direct orders from President Xi Jinping to increase the capacity of detention facilities.
According to the documents, Chinese officials believed that two million people in Xinjiang alone had been “severely influenced by the infiltration of extremist religious thought”.
Follow on Twitter | Posted by Sameer Khan | 
