China: treatment of Uyghurs “a crime against humanity”, says Amnesty

Published on : 06/10/2021 – 10:29 PM

Torture, mass imprisonment, persecution, internment in labor camps … The treatment inflicted by China on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities constitutes crimes against humanity, concludes an Amnesty International report published Thursday, June 10.

“The Chinese authorities have created a dystopian landscape of hell on a staggering scale in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement.

“Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities face crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations that threaten to erase their religious and cultural identities,” she added.

In a 160-page report, the NGO unveiled dozens of new testimonies from former detainees detailing the “extreme measures taken by the Chinese authorities since 2017 to uproot religious traditions, cultural practices and local languages” from Muslim minorities in the region. .

The report details the mass imprisonments since 2017, which would number in the hundreds of thousands, to which are added the internments in camps, which would reach the million.

“Forced labor”

The testimonies collected evoke the forced education inflicted in these camps, to force the victims to disavow Islam and abandon dialect and cultural practices, and to learn Mandarin and the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party.

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All the former detainees interviewed by the NGO tell of torture and ill-treatment, beatings, deprivation of sleep and food, electrocution.

Amnesty evokes the death of a detainee who remained tied for 72 hours in a special chair, in front of his fellow detainees.

“The Chinese government has made extraordinary efforts to cover up its violations of international human rights law in Xinjiang,” said Amnesty, whose secretary general called for the “immediate” dismantling of the camps and the establishment of a United Nations investigation.

The United States called “genocide” the treatment inflicted by Beijing on the Uyghurs, a qualifier that London refused to use.

According to foreign experts, more than a million Uyghurs, the main ethnic group in Xinjiang, are detained in re-education camps and some are subjected to “forced labor”.

Beijing disputes and claims that these are vocational training centers intended to distance them from terrorism and separatism, after numerous deadly attacks against civilians by Uyghurs.

With AFP